It's A Small World

Recently I was invited to write something for a German publication called Die Planung - check out the website http://www.dieplanung.org/- set notionally in the future, 2036 to be precise. I wrote a number of bits and pieces which all hinged around various utopian communities, one of which was an art commune set up near where I was brought up. I recently visited it and took some photos too which I've included here with the short piece about the communitie's remains.....



1981

I’m lying in the long grass, eating Bombay Mix. I am eleven years old. I have never eaten Bombay Mix before. Around me are people, milling around; dancing, chatting, juggling, painting, cooking food. There are a lot of children. Mostly slightly scruffy, longhaired bare foot children. Various brightly painted shacks, Romany caravans, totem poles and odd bits of sculpture made from pieces of mechanical equipment lie around. There is a tent and inside it someone is showing a black and white movie. I don’t recognise it, maybe Brief Encounter or The Thirty Nine Steps. Something like that.

It is 1981. Longhaired hippy types are everywhere, old motorbikes lie around discarded, people stretch out in the sun and there is the smell of a bonfire. We are in a small clearing surrounded by tall trees. Through them I can see a cottage, painted in rainbow colours, the doors and windows wide open and music coming out. Beyond this is the road that leads up to the village where my parents live. The village is quiet and conservative with a church, a village hall, a primary school. It has some posh old houses and some new estates with shiny new cars parked outside and on the outlying roads are pink and yellow farm houses with thatched barns and mud covered Land Rovers and fruit trees and a river that winds towards the Blackwater estuary. It has a Lord Lieutenant and a Vicar and there are quiet old men in corduroy suits who collect the contributions in church and busy old women who organise things in the village hall and bored teenagers who hang out on the recreation ground smoking cigarettes and wait for the free bus to Asda. It hasn’t ever before seemed a likely place to start an alternative community. But now it has one: the Great Leighs’ Art Society, who have made their unconventional home in a quiet hollow of common land, a half acre hidden behind some trees, hardly noticeable from the road.



I spend the afternoon like this, wandering around the stalls selling homemade food that I have never seen before, listening to music, poking around the cabins and huts dotted amongst the trees. At some point towards the end of the day, as the sun starts to set, a crowd gathers around a large multicoloured boat-like object that sits at the entrance to the site. I remember it as something like a cross between a Mississippi steamboat and a giant fish. It has a mouth painted on its front with big teeth, a happy rather than scary expression, and large funnels coming out of the top. It has wheels and slowly this strange land bound sculpture starts to move. Lots of people are standing on it dancing and waving as the fish/boat/vehicle pulls out onto the little country road and starts its slow progress up to the village.

This is the highlight of the day, the finale, a moving piece of art puffing its optimistic way around a small Essex village, a utopian gesture of friendship to a sceptical audience. I don’t see the journey of the fish/boat/vehicle, I only imagine it, gaily chugging along, causing an impatient tailback of Ford Granadas and Vauxhall Cavaliers and bemused, slightly hostile onlookers. This is how I remember it: The Great Leighs’ Art Society Summer Solstice Party, 1981.

A year later the Society would be gone. Twenty-six years later the huts can still just about be seen; peeling coloured planks of wood in the undergrowth, stray pieces of rotten clothing draped over a branch, merging with the moss. They must have lasted about three or four years. Their little world, a village within a village, had a brief existence. Now the bits of brick foundations and bare bits of infrastructure are romantic ruins of a former civilisation. At that point in time, the countryside must have seemed the place to try and start something else, something different. It must have seemed like a benign, un-hostile place free of the harshness of the city. All utopias are representations, pictures of a better world. They need to remove themselves from the corroding atmosphere around them, and exist in their own distinct space, but still it seeps through.

Trolley Dolley

Thoughts on the 40th Anniversary of the Shopping Trolley

There are three things that everyone knows about shopping trolleys. One, a strangely large number of them end up in canals. Two, they are virtually impossible to steer. And three, people like to push each other around in them whilst drunk. None of these has anything to do with shopping.

The supermarket trolley was invented by Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Piggly-Wiggly supermarket in Oklahoma as a way of getting people to buy more food. And its true, they do. According to someone who found this out customers will buy an average of 7.2 items with a trolley for every 6. 2 they do with a basket, and they double sales of large items.

Goldman came up with the idea in June 1937, making the trolley 40 years old this month. That’s officially middle-aged. Unlike most middle-aged things though, they look pretty much the same as when they started out. The basic layout is ubiquitous and unchanging. There is a big basket on wheels. The basket is instantly recognisable for the graph like visual spacing of its metal bars, able to hold anything from a bar-b-q to a single tomato. There is a fold down plastic seat in which you can imprison a small child so that it looks like a particularly unwieldy purchase. The basket has a tubular plastic handle for pushing which you can also use to lean on when waiting to get clear access to the bread counter. The handle forms the single point of store branding. Otherwise they all look the same. When stored in the snake like chain gang of interlocked trolleys at the supermarket entrance, the repeated store logos form a strange nightmarish vision of shopping trips yet to come. The trolley is designed specifically for the task of navigating the serpentine route of supermarket aisles. The fact that the wheels all point in different directions reflects perfectly the fact that no one knows which way they want to go.

While other prosaic products like washing powder or biscuits go through almost constant minor and largely pointless innovations, developing ever more baroque permutations, the shopping trolley continues in its clattery, crude, hard to steer form. The reason for this flat development curve is that nobody actually buys them. As a product with no consumer purchase potential there is virtually no point in re-invention. These days, the desire for new markets is the only reason anyone does anything at all. Everyone owns a mobile phone or a razor. The only way to get us to buy another one is to improve it. Offer new functions, more blades, better deals, 3 mega-pixel cameras, improved smoothness, celebrity endorsement. No one ever buys a shopping trolley so what’s the point?

The shopping trolley is an utterly generic form of design, barely existing on our visual horizon. It has proved strangely fixed as a design statement, seemingly un-improvable and immune to the vagaries of fashion or style. I can only think of two innovations: One is the shallow, half depth model. This is apparently to attract male shoppers who generally shun trolleys, preferring instead the unmistakably macho appeal of the hand basket. The other is the electronic front wheel that locks when you try to escape the perimeter of the store car-park.

Without anyone working feverishly to try and sell us a new one, shopping trolleys will languish forever with their ugly styling and wheels that point the wrong way. If supermarkets stopped offering them to us and we had to buy our own, we would be immediately deluged by a baffling variety of new styles and credit opportunities to pay for them. So, perhaps, in a world gone consumption crazy, we should cherish a product immune from marketing. Immune, in a way, from design.

In the year 25/25

Seems a bit unfair, I mean I don't have anything personal against the design musuem but, another month, another crap exhibition.......

25/25 is an exhibition celebrating twenty five years of the Design Museum. In it, twenty five designers have been invited to choose their favourite designs from that period. Visiting it is like reading one of those ‘Books of the Year ’ lists beloved of Sunday supplements. You know exactly who they’re going to ask and exactly what they’re going to choose. So, for Melvin Bragg, Julian Barnes and Jeanette Winterston substitute Terence Conran, Paul Smith and Ilsa Crawford.

Like the tendency for writers to choose their friend’s books, this exhibition is an exercise in self celebration. For example, Paul Smith chooses the graphic identity of the Lloyds building designed by Richard Rogers, who in turn chooses Issey Miyake’s A-Poc fabric. Hoover hero James Dyson selects Richard Sapper’s whistling kettle, while Dyson’s own DC02 vacuum cleaner is nominated by John Maeda. Philippe Starck’s Jim Nature TV appears courtesy of Konstantin Grcic, while Stefano Giovannoni returns the compliment by selecting Grcic’s Chair One. Jonathon Ive gets two nominations (for the Imac and the Ipod). Of the younger designers, the Bouroullec brothers’ choose Enzo Mari’s cheesegrater, Maarten Baas selects Ron Arad’s Big Easy metal armchair and Gill Hicks goes for Trevor Bayliss’ Clockwork Radio. Suffice to say, no one chooses Pop Tarts, leg warmers or anything from Ikea. I started to wonder: are there really this few designers of note in the world, and this few products worth celebrating?

The answer of course is no, What’s being celebrated here is a very narrow definition of design based around an equally narrow idea of good taste. Its not that there is anything wrong with the choices just that they are utterly predictable and devoid of any sense of surprise. This is a shame because the origins of the Design Museum were less predictable and more iconoclastic. It’s probably the fate of most cultural innovations to become the new orthodoxy, but the Design Museum seems to have ended up creating its own officially sanctioned canon. All of which is a long way from its more itinerant beginnings as the Boilerhouse project, started up by Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Strange as it may seem now, it was a genuinely radical move to incorporate commercial and contemporary design into the halls of the V&A at that time. Conran and Bayley then moved the project to its current curiously retro home near Tower Bridge. I’ve always found it odd that they chose a pastiche of 1930’s Modernism for the home of contemporary design but its preserved-in-aspic feel has become increasingly appropriate.

The recent history of the museum has been fractious. It has just appointed Deyan Sudjiic as its new director to replace the controversial Alice Rawsthorne. She enraged trustees Terence Conran and James Dyson by flouting the orthodoxies of good design in putting on a show about flower arranger Constance Spry, amongst other heresies. Like Stephen Bayley, she is conspicuous by her absence from this exhibition’s potted history.

25/25 might be seen therefore as a moment of quiet celebration by the victorious Conran and Dyson; good sense and good taste restored. It remains to be seen how orthodox an approach Sudjiic will take. Let’s hope he steers it away from the narrow clique represented by this exhibition.