Phil Cohen 1943-2024
Professor Phil Cohen, radical activist, cultural theorist, memoirist, poet and urban ethnographer, has died aged 81.
‘When I first met Phil Cohen,’ recalls Dr Toby Butler, ‘he was professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Fizzing with ideas, he drew together an astonishing array of artists, academics and policy professionals to work on cultural projects and research across East London.’ Thus Phil Cohen dragged the University into real life.
The area around the University of East London (UEL) became the epicentre of urban regeneration after London won the bid to host the XXXth Olympiad. Professor Cohen managed to gain access to the Olympics construction site, and would turn up at dawn to record snatched interviews with workers coming off shift. His ethnographic study of London 2012, literally from the ground up, remains the definitive account. This combination of being at the centre of things and training a keen eye on people’s everyday experience, was characteristic of his whole career as a public intellectual.
Born in 1943, Phil Cohen was an exhibitioner at Cambridge University but ran away to sea before completing his degree. He soon gravitated towards London’s counterculture while also inhabiting the British Museum reading room as his ‘second home’. He was involved in the Situationist movement and assisted conceptual artist John Latham in several unsuccessful provocations: they set light to a carefully constructed tower of books outside London University’s Senate House, but it was a blustery day and the tower toppled over. At the Wholly Communion poetry festival at the Albert Hall in 1965, they devised a silent ballet which, unbeknown to the organisers, would involve the sudden appearance of John Latham dressed as the Encylopaedia Britannica with a friend dressed as Webster’s Dictionary. Both were armed with garden shears and they were supposed to hack away at each other’s costumes until one of them was ‘unbooked’. Phil’s job was to ring a hand bell at a suitable pause in the poetry recital, to signal to the protagonists to jump up on stage and start the battle. But as a poetry lover, he found it impossible to interrupt, and since it was a stifling summer evening, after an hour with no signal the Encyclopedia Britannica collapsed and was carried out on a stretcher.
In 1969 Phil gained notoriety as ‘Dr John’, spokesperson for the ‘Hippdydilly’ squat at 144 Piccadilly, the former home of the Queen Mother. He took an interest in the workings of moral panics after the squatters were vilified as ‘scroungers and hell raisers’. Phil became a youth worker and helped to establish Street Aid, a legal advice and self-help organisation for homeless young people. He was involved in turning a derelict pub in King’s Cross into a cultural centre for local youth; this work was the basis for Knuckle Sandwich (1978), which Phil co-wrote with David Robins.
In 1972 Phil had written a paper entitled ‘Sub-cultural Conflict and Working Class Community’ in which he argued that subcultures offered magical resolution of social conflict. This prompted a fruitful dialogue with sociologists Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige. Phil joined the Sociological Research Unit at the Institute of Education to carry out research into youth cultures and young people’s transitions into work and adulthood, culminating in Rethinking the Youth Question(1986). Phil also produced educational materials for this age group, including the anti-racist film ‘Playgrounds of Prejudice’ which notably does not talk down to its intended audience, even if they hold racist views.
In 1992 Phil moved to the University of East London to set up the Centre for New Ethnicities Research which focused on racism and identity. From 2000 to 2007, Phil directed the London East Research Institute (LERI), which led and coordinated all UEL’s research into urban regeneration. Apart from research papers and conferences, LERI produced a series of academic books beginning with London’s Turning: the making of the Thames Gateway (2008). But Phil’s continuous engagement with local communities also included non-academic outputs such as Groundbreakers, an online map and trail in the Olympic Park. On leaving UEL, in 2013 Phil developed this area of work by setting up the Livingmaps Network along with graphic artist John Wallett.
The premise of the Livingmaps Network (LmN) is that when people are able to redraw the map of where they live, this will help them to regain the terrain. Accordingly, LmN was set up to facilitate collaboration between artists, activists and academics, serving local communities as a ‘counter-punch’ to official cartography. Current director Mike Duggan remembers Phil’s foundational contribution as that of ‘an artisan weaver, thoughtfully stitching people and ideas together.’
In recent years Phil published a series of books with John Wallett’s Eyeglass imprint, based in Wivenhoe. He collaborated with photographers and artists, and the scope of his own published writing, while retaining its analytical component, widened to include autobiographical and imaginative elements. ‘He tacked and traced ways between recorded memoir and imaginary histories’, observes John Wallett. A second volume of recent essays, Waypoints 2, will be published posthumously.
Phil Cohen’s father, the son of a Russian Jewish revolutionary, was born in Glasgow’s Gorbals but became a successful London doctor. His privately educated son commuted to St Paul’s School from the family home in Bloomsbury. As Phil’s father was left-wing, so his mother was conservative. The young Phil Cohen was no stranger to disputation.
Having dropped out of Cambridge, in 1969 Phil met the theatre director Pam Brighton. Theirs was a whirlwind romance and a son, Ned, was born in 1970; but they separated not long afterwards. In the late 1970s Phil discovered an abandoned beach chalet in Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, and this became an enchanted refuge. In 1980 he met his lifelong partner Jean McNeil, a landscape painter. In 1988 they adopted Stephen Thomson, aged 8, and the chalet became a happy place not only for Ned and his friends and for Jean’s nephew Dylan, but also for Stephen. Sailing, cycling excursions, team games – Phil was a Pied Piper leading a gaggle of children and young people onto the next expedition. Later, when Phil and Jean moved to Wivenhoe, Essex, they invited many friends to share their picnics and sailing parties.
Jean says that, ‘For Phil life and work were enmeshed and every experience was grist to his mill: the adoption of our son, living with a landscape painter, the objects of everyday life, his dreams, his imagined future for young people. Writing was his very life.’
Phil’s son Stephen pre-deceased him. He is survived by his partner Jean, son Ned, and four grandchildren – and generations of researchers who take after him.