Places To Visit

Primrose Hill, Staten Island, Chalk Farm, Massif Central, Gospel Oak, Sao Paolo, Boston Manor, Costa Rica, Arnos Grove, San Clemente, Tufnell Park……..(St Etienne, Girl Vii)

After the hectoring and bad humour comes something a little more…..positive.

I came across a short article in this week’s Time Out where artist Richard Dedomenici proposes a new London tube line based on places of cultural interest in South London. The idea of an underground line that describes a personal journey reminded me both of St Etienne’s song Girl vii and Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Both subvert the over-familiarity of the tube map with unexpected associations. Girl vii conflates a series of exotic destinations with quotidian London tube stops. Patterson’s work completely erases the names of tube stops and replaces them with those of famous people – philosophers, engineers, Saints - giving each line its own genre so that the Northern line becomes Film Actors, the Victorian line Italian painters and the Jubliee line footballers. The seeming flippancy of this gesture slowly gives way to a deeper appreciation both of its inherent humour and of its taxonomic randomness. Green Park station for instance represents a convergence of all three lines mentioned above and becomes renamed, somewhat surreally, Gary Lineker.

In a larger sense the relationship of personal experience to maps is interesting because it calls into question the maps claims to impartiality and ultimately truth. Maps always seek authority and claim to be correct although, like the Tube map, they may only be ‘right’ in a graphic rather than geo-graphic sense. They are always partial, seen from one perspective, or one view. The Culture Tube is only slightly more partial than, say, the East London Line extension currently being built, but in a sense the whole tube map can be personalised to reflect our experience of London. There are some stations I may never go to while others are overloaded with sentimental value. If I were to draw the tube map from memory it would be grossly impartial and inaccurate, leaving off numerous stops and emphasising others, making strange connections between places and collapsing distances between different areas of London.


St Etienne’s song suggests that, like the Situationists map of Paris or Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, we remake the city in our head every day. Walking, travelling and using the city are creative acts. To take the tube to Marble Arch to work is different than to take it to walk through Hyde Park on a summers day. Peter Cook once asked: “If it’s raining on Oxford Street do you notice the buildings or the rain?”. Sometime experience is more cultural than physical, more about interpretation than infrastructure.

More than that it might be a way to design infrastructure, utilising the undermining of authorial intent - Barthe's Death of the Author - or the claims to authority of technocratic processes, to create something more more arbitrary, stranger, less known.

The End Of The Pier

Piers, generally, are meant to be fun. Buildings devoted entirely to pleasure are rare in architecture. Consequently piers tend to abandon the decorum and restraint of other buildings, lapsing happily into gaudy bad taste and excess. They are often a riot of decoration, ornamentation and whimsy.

Their pointlessness is part of the enjoyment. They aren’t bridges or boats, taking us somewhere or doing something useful. They lead, literally speaking, knowhere. But the journey is full of flashing lights and music and the promise of illicit thrills, like a good night out.

Deal Pier is different. It doesn’t look like a good night out, more like a bad morning after. Built in the 1950’s after the previous Victorian structure was demolished after being hit by a boat, it is a triumph of dry municipal integrity. It looks like a piece of the M1 that has washed up on the shores of East Kent. Inelegant concrete columns march pragmatically out to sea, leading to three tiers of timber slatted decking, although the lowest one remains terminally underwater due to a miscalculation of sea levels.

The entrance makes an attempt at cheeriness with a nautical sculpture and some restrained if slightly camp bits of decoration. Two shops sit either side of the entrance summoning up the general all round lack of cheap thrills on offer: a fishing tackle shop and a kiosk selling Toby Jug Collectibles. Once onto the pier a series of pre-cast concrete bays offer slightly desultory shelter. They look like so many suburban bus stops on a route to knowhere. Men in waterproof suits line the edges monitoring impressive batteries of expensive fishing rods and vast multi-tiered boxes of equipment, generally failing to catch anything.

At the end of the pier there used to be a café, a fabulously dispiriting place clad in nautical blue tiles and with a mock tudor interior. This café has just been demolished and a new one is being built, designed by Niall Maclaughlin. It looks a bit more fun than the old one it has to be said.

For all that I like Deal pier. There is something poignant about its commitment to fulfilling such an exuberant brief in such an earnestly joyless way. It seems to sum up a certain austere 1950’s commitment to doing the right thing. Fun on a ration book you might say.

There is a scene at the end of the film The Remains of The Day, set around the same time, where the characters played by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson meet up, years after the moment when they might have started a relationship or found some happiness together. They take a walk along a windswept pier and sit in one of the shelters along its length to reminisce. It’s easy to laugh at this uptight, typically nostalgic bit of British filmaking, but actually it’s a scene of almost unbearable minor key misery.

The pier is the perfect setting for the scene because it both summons up how far removed the characters are from any sense of spontaneity or fun, and yet is somehow slightly desolate in itself. Piers claim to offer thrills and excitement but they are also flimsy, wind battered structures standing in choppy grey waters. They are triumphs of hope over reality, a futile gesture of extending ‘all the fun’ of the seaside out as far as it can go.

Bizarrely, Deal pier is exactly the same length as The Titanic, a fact commemorated by a notice nearby, which is appropriate given its slightly disastrous history. Today’s version is the third iteration to be built. All the others fell down. It is, apparently, the only functioning leisure pier in Kent. Mind you, its function has always been fairly tangential. It is an enjoyably pointless piece of infrastructure made more poignant by its adoption of a functionalist language; an oxymoronic example of no-nonsense whimsy.

The Arcades Project

Via here, a strange and intriguingly obsessive piece of nostalgia recreating the sounds of 1980's video game arcades. The length of each recording seems to be in real time, mirroring the black hole of time actually spent in the arcade. In fact, the author has recorded playing each game in full, then overlaid them and added the sounds of the coins going into the slots and other precisely observed ambient effects.

Small but significant shifts in age and game development are picked up between the 1981 and 1983 recordings. The screechy planet splintering sounds of Asteroids giving way to the sing song bleeps of Donkey Kong for example. The whole thing is kinda like those recordings of rare birds made by twitchers, or a digitally obsessed Nicholson Baker, and strangely poignant for a certain period of time wasting in life.