The Village That Died For Derbyshire

This photograph is taken from a BBC film about Ladybower reservoir made in the 1960's and on show here. The reservoir was formed in 1943 by flooding the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, including the two villages of Derwent and Ashopton. The church spire of Derwent could be seen when the water level was low. Unfortunately it was later demolished destroying the fabulous surreality of it looming out of the water.

It's a disquieting picture, an eerie combination of utilitarian infrastructure and apocalyptic imagery. It has the absurd quality of a fake, like those photographs of fairies and ghosts beloved of the Victorians. Perhaps it even is a fake, although the church tower was genuinely there.

A number of villages were flooded as a result of the need for water supply in cities likes Derby and Sheffield and Ladybower is one of three in the Derwent Valley alone. As a child I remember a story of one near the village where my parents lived when they were first married which had subsequently been drained leaving the remains of the village once more visible.

This process was like a 20th century version of emparking, the removal of unsightly villages by 18th century landowners as they sought to sculpt the countryside around their houses into three dimensional versions of classical paintings. The remains of these abandoned villages were co-opted into this vision as romantic grottos and ruined cottages.

At Ladybower though the reason behind these dramatic spatial transformations of landscape was ostensibly benevolent although its results were no less violent. Indeed, in a strange reversal of this history the stately home of Derwent Hall was also flooded. Its remains are still visible during low water levels so that it has become its own romantic ruin.



The resulting reservoirs are a hybrid of nature and machine, hugely impressive feats of engineering disguised as natural lakes, their water towers and viaducts rendered as medieval castles and Palladian bridges. The same surreal mix of futurism and picturesque fantasy that occurred in Victorian structures like Tower Bridge and in the science fiction fantasies of Jules Verne.

Looking at early photographs of the reservoir infrastructure, the elegant gates and stone balustrades are like the entrance to the landscaped garden of a stately home. But the home itself is no longer there and lies in fact in ruins on the water bed. The landscape and its villages has been dramatically reconfugured not as a result of the aesthetics of 18th century painting but the abstract dynamics of 20th water supply.

Picture above taken from the Francis Frith archive

paper wraps stone

I would like to bring to your attention a stylish demolition of Primal Scream's new album in excellent on line music magazine The Quietus by Chris Roberts. "The Scream" are not the most unlikely of targets perhaps and they are certainly ripe for it but Roberts manages the task with flair and elan. The line about putting a damp cloth over your intellect is particularly fine. As is his dismissal of CSS, although I actually quite like them. I'll find it more difficult to do so now though, which is the kind of perversity I take much pleasure in.

Worryingly, I haven't enjoyed reading any music criticism so much for ages. Worrying, because along with Taylor Parkes' new Fall album review, The Quietus seems to have resuscitated the entire staff of Melody Maker from 1990. They all disappeared and now they have returned en masse like veterans from a twenty year tour of duty in the Astoria. Where have they been? How did they survive? Did they all live together, like The Monkees?*

What does this say about me? That I have atrophied into the kind of man who has no sense of curiosity about the world? That I'm looking in the wrong places? Well, there is Wire and, indeed, Mire**, but I'm not sure I enjoy them in quite the same way. I feel improved, educated, more in the know, sometimes invigorated, often inspired to go and buy something. But not quite as thrilled and not quite as uplifted as by Chris Robert's delightfully rude review of Primal Scream. I had to go back and re-read it. It's still very good.

Is the enjoyment of music linked to the enjoyment of criticism? It is for me. Somehow the critical discourse around gives it meaning and a way in that I know many people would find oddy slavish to some over intellectualised form of predetermination. Actually, it's the same with architecture. In here, a great deal of what we do stems from outrage at what everyone else is doing. That is from a primarily critical impulse (the results of which probably have a similar reaction on everyone else). For me personally words and criticism precedes creativity (horrible self aggrandising word I know). But, words, perversely, are somehow important in forming things. In the anti-intellectual climate of contemporary architecture, criticism is mostly seen as a destructive thing, a necessary evil at best. Too much theory is supposed to limit creativity. In as much as I can lay claim to any creativity, I would say that, for me, the opposite has always been true

*Apart from Simon Price, who I see at every concert I ever go to. He's a very noticeable sort of fellow that Simon Price, although it might also have something to do with my wife dragging me to an awful lot of Brett Anderson concerts.

** Actually, while writing this I have been reading the Mire again and it's actually very good.

Museums of the World – No 1 In An Occasional Series

The Cuban Museum of the Revolution weaves its way in and around the former Presidential Palace in downtown Havana. It is a curious mixture of hectoring monument and modest local museum. The exhibits are a little forlorn: slightly dog eared wax works, patchy Hornby style models illustrating strategic military campaigns, curling photographs, assorted memorabilia.

Every conceivable detail of the revolutionary struggle (Che Guevara’s pyjamas, avacado production statistics from 1976) is included almost without discrimination, certainly without regard for entertainment value. The text is bracingly partisan and inscrutably detailed. All of it is contained in utilitarian vitrines within the beaux arts interiors of the palace which, ironically, dominates the exhibit it houses.

The friendship between Che Guevara and Fidel Castro is sentimentally told and retold throughout the museum, the bonhomie and mutual respect built up to saccharine proportions. The two are endlessly photographed embracing, sharing a joke on the ramparts, leaning over battle strategy diagrams, chomping cigars.

Outside the palace a 1960’s honeycomb structure shelters various revolutionary vehicles: an armoured car made from agricultural equipment, the fuselage of a US U2 plane shot down (allegedly by Castro himself of course) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Inside a glass box at the centre of the pavilion is Granma, the famous boat in which Fidel and 100 others travelled from Mexico to Cuba to kickstart the revolution in 1956.

I love museums. The more down at heel the better too. I've no time for sophisticated animatronics or interactive screens. I prefer musty exhibits mouldering under glass. The Museum of the Revolution’s incomprehensible diagrams of long forgotten battles and modest mementos have an eerie poignancy. In its own indifference to entertainment and its belligerant self-belief it is an exhibit in itself.