modern archeology

I'm teaching at Canterbury again this year and have been researching potential project sites combining coastal landscapes, transportation systems and technological obsolescence. Whilst trawling the area, I came across the arcane fragment of home movie footage embedded above of the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate.

As well as being a sort of Super 8 version of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards, the footage is notable for an eerie lack of people, as if in anticipation of the port's future demise. A vacant and overgrown concrete apron is now the only remaining sign of Ramsgate International Hoverport which closed in 1982. Google earth reveals the ruins as a strange prosthetic attachment sticking out of the curve of the bay.

Aside from the various buildings - now long gone - the port consisted of a large flat concrete shoreline, a sort of artificial beach onto the which the craft slid up before settling down on its billowing black shirts, like a large hen on a nest of eggs. In period photographs the hovercraft themselves still appear incredibly modern, alien objects in the late '60s landscape, especially compared to the Austin Maxis and Mini Clubmans that would have motored gently on and off them. Given the relative size of the hovercraft to the surrounding houses they look as if they could have just carried on past the port and inland, hoovering up the potato fields of Thanet as they went.

The word Hoverport suggests something faintly incredible too, as if tit were the ground itself that rose up and transported you somewhere exotic. Rather than Calais. The operators seemed to be aware of the ambiguous half boat/half plane character of their craft too, referring to "flights" instead of sailings and dressing the crew up as natty BOAC flight attendants. Fittingly enough high aviation fuel costs in the 1970's - combined with a susceptibility to bad weather - killed off most commercial hovercraft services. Wikipedia's entry on them concludes that "except for the Solent Ryde to Southsea crossing, hovercraft disappeared from the coastline of Britain", as if they were a species of rare bird.

Appropriately enough, the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay is now a nature reserve. It sits on a particularly sleepy stretch of the Isle of Thanet coast, just below the plateau of Manston Airport, another, almost, failed bit of infrastructure. For those of you of a hauntological bent there are more photographs and information available here, and here. From the last of these sites I have borrowed the lovely image below. There are also photographs of the port at various stages of dereliction here.

All Is Quiet

The following are some photos I took on a very, very cold New Years Day. For reasons that elude me now we drove around the coast of Kent, at one stage through a thick but brief blizzard of snow, stopping at Margate, Herne Bay and Whitstable. I particularly like Margate which has a vulgar charm all of its own, although I'm aware that aestheticising decay is the privilege of the over-privileged. My family were less impressed by its down-at-heel attractions though and urged me on to the more picturesque charms of Whitstable, where I couldn't find a single thing I wanted to photograph.

Winds buffeted the sandy beach, almost completely submerging the lido. No one went for a swim. Strangely, my wife, so insistent on her Christmas day dip, stayed in the car and kept her hat on.



The Lido Cliff Bar is an odd hybrid bungalow with its red tiles, marbleised walls and complete visual impenetrability. The sign is a bit small for my taste too. Still, it commanded the empty car park with a menacing aloofness.



"The life was cheap on bread and wine. And sharing meant no shame." Nice bendy helvetica.



I liked this mainly for the way that the top of the building doesn't fit the bottom, necessitating the excellently over-scaled black bracket to hold it up. I'm not optimistic for the fate of the upmarket flats though.



Many of the sea front shops and arcades were closed up, maybe for winter or maybe permanently, it was difficult to tell.



A night-time architecture of applied signs and lights in the day, in deep winter.



From the ruins of Snohetta's unbuilt giant pebble rises Sir David Chipperfield's vehicle of regeneration/gentrification the Turner Contemporary. The design is "restrained, quiet and thoughful" in a way that, for instance, Margate generally isn't.



As part of an off-site Turner Contemporary art project, Douglas Coupland has been commissioned to re-design the signage.



Half Classical, half Stalinist Realism Lido sign.



This had a pleasing elegance about it, like a low-code Californian case study house. Or is that just me?



There's an appealing way in which the Cliffs Pavilion is being consumed, or camouflaged, by the landscape here, like a large inhabited hedge.



The entrance to the Winter Gardens was rather lovely and offered the delights of Rock and Pop.



This beautiful stuccoed terrace contains one flat owned by a hard-line modernist tenant determined to express truth to materials.



I'm not holding my breath.



Their welcoming door policy may have had something to do with the club's demise.



The historic - and closed - Dreamland and its Grade 2 listed timber roller-coaster has been saved by a £3.7M grant. Read more about it here. Some good news at last.

And then we drove to Herne Bay where the pier has broken in half.

(with apologies to Infinite Thought, whose photo-essay blog post format is blatantly cribbed here.)

Thinking It Over and Over

Things are likely to be a little quiet around these parts for a while as an onerous work load (oh poor old me) takes its toll. I will at some point pop up in various places writing on topics as varied as the return of James Wines to the architectural consciousness, the geography of heavy metal and why suburbia isn't funny anymore, but for the moment all I can do is point you in the direction of some good writing elsewhere.

Entschwindet und Vergeht is superb as usual on the uses and abuses of the Crystal Palace and yer Owen Hatherley is terrific on the joys of dancing to the digital angles of electroclash. Also, check out his link to an intriguing and (to me) unknown lost monument in the excellently titled Iron, Glass and Failure post.

Slightly redundantly I will echo Murphy's endorsement of the Sesquipedalist's excellent series of photo's of the ruins of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia's St Peter's Seminary. Mockitecture has a convincingly Venturian post on decorated Brutalism, as well as a fine collection of photos of Burger King's Whopper from around the world. And I've been enjoying this site a lot recently. It slightly does my head in visually, but has a fabulous collection of interior photos ranging from Sol Le Witt's house to a collection of empty and desolately beautiful nightclub interiors, all velvet seats covered in cigarette burns and scuffed dancefloors.

The AOC have another new blog site for their latest teaching outpost, this year looking at the Thames Valley. I'll be spending a lot of time in the wilds of Kent myself, as the expansion of Lydd Airport into the otherwise silent marshes of Rainham is the setting for a project I'll be teaching at Canterbury architecture school this semester. In this - if not in all other senses - I'm not as glamorous as my colleague, who is teaching an Intermediate Unit at the AA this year entitled the Pop Vernacular Research Laboratory.

Also, when FAT make their much heralded return to Yale in the New Year, we will be bringing our students over to see the lovely East Kent coast (lucky them) where we will go on a booze cruise, draw sections through cross channel ferries, attempt to dissect the various dubious notions of Britishness bound up around the place and generally roll in the clover on the White Cliffs of Dover.

The photo at the top of this post shows the extraordinary infrastucture of Dover. Note the road into the harbour, which descends past Dover Castle before sweeping you over the edge of the cliff, around the town and down in a loop onto the bleak concrete forecourt of the terminal itself.

From there you can drive onto a boat full of nutters playing fruit machines on their way to France to buy inordinate quantities of cheap booze. Trundling the other way is an ever increasing number of container lorries full of washing machines, clothes and children's toys. Countless B&B's cater for asylum seekers and their tabloid mirror image, illegal immigrants. The town is a locus for national pride and - sorry to say - a bit of a shit hole. This is, in some senses, England.

Incidentally, while researching Dover I came across this.

(Image at the top of the post is via)