Holiday Reading

"You are from Kent?" she said, 'maybe you can answer me this. Why are old things so important in England?'*

My wife laughed when the book arrived. It seemed almost too right for me, as if someone had suddenly perfected one of those Amazon consumer profiles to an eerie, unnerving degree. There was that title for a start, the Elliot misquote that could be a description of a certain kind of blogospheric writing with its hyper-links, digital jump cuts and chance virtual encounters. 

More fundamentally there's the subject matter. Connecting Something With Nothing is an anthology of writing about the south east coast, a place we have spent the last five or six years exploring. A flick through the essays within it reveals familiar place names and obsessions: Pegwell Bay, New Romney and the Wantsum Channel, long-since silted up harbours, nuclear reactors, muddy estuaries and rusting neon signs. My kind of holiday destinations basically, the sort of places I drag my family to on bitingly cold new year mornings or rainy bank holiday weekends.

The contributors list offered up some  familiar  names too, names recalled from Twitter encounters and even in a couple of cases, Actual Real Life. All of which is to say that I was quite heavily predisposed to like this book, almost to the point where it could only disappoint, like an over anticipated night out.

Fortunately such perverse worries turned to nought. There are some great things in Connecting Nothing With Something.  Kit Caless' lyrical evocation of ordinary pleasures in un-lyical places is genuinely moving. I liked Salena Godon's bracing poems about teenage love affairs and filthy fishermen too,  as well as her suitably salty tale of teenage mayhem in 80s Hastings. Rowena McDonald recalls a more awkward adolescent experience in the Sussex town of Newhaven.

Adrian Self's contribution is both enigmatic and funny, a kind of miniaturised version of W G Sebald if he'd had a sense of humour. It takes the form of notes from an imagined audio-art project, a parodic psychogeographic derive that is more of an eventful walk around the block.

Owen Booth's short story is highly entertaining and faintly peculiar, a fictionalised account of a young Richard Burton's antics while filming Green Grow The Rushes in New Romney in the early 50s. I enjoyed this tale of illicit drinking, smuggling and sex so much I sought out the film on YouTube, which is considerably more enjoyable to watch if you've read Owen's short story first I imagine.

There is a similar tone to much of the writing here; memories of adolescent lives in burnt-out seaside towns that are still fresh. The voice is generally sophisticated, sceptical and aloof but also prone to nostalgia and an unspecific sense of loss. Many of the pieces suggest a rapprochement with places almost forgotten about over the last few years, places now indelibly linked with (recently lost) youth.

The Margate contributions coalesce around the role of teenage sub-cultures - skin-heads, punks, mods and rockers alongside its cheerier, cheesier reputation for cockney knees-ups and Chas'n'Dave. Iain Aitch - curator of Margate's Hidden Youth Culture History - contributes a good, short essay on Margate's recent half-hearted attempts regeneration while Gary Budden describes a personal revelation at the Turner Contemporary exhibition Nothing In the World But Youth.

Art and regeneration loom large too in these accounts, especially in the two gloomy but still grand towns that bookend the collection. Margate and Hastings are like mirror images of each other with their mysterious pier fires, shiny new contemporary art galleries and histories of drinking, drugging and escape.

The book and its contributors are more than aware of the contradictions, the dubious nature of the role of art in a regeneration industry seemingly fuelled by middle-class property speculation and cup-cakes. And yet, undeniably both towns have acquired two fine new public buildings after years of mostly shonky and careless development, buildings that draw day trippers and 'staycationers' in the best seaside tradition.

These conflicts have become intertwined so that it is now virtually impossible to separate artists and writers drawn to forgotten or overlooked places from the boosterist language of the regen. agencies that are themselves now confined to (New Labour) history. Iain Sinclair after all has a flat in Marine Court, Hastings' extraordinary cruise-liner like art deco block of flats. Psychogeography has become inseparable from the inevitable clean-up campaign that follows in its wake, property speculation on the back of obscure interests and arcane modernist fictions.



I should say at this point that I'm a part of the problem.  A DFL (Down From Londoner) if ever there was one. My wife and I bought a house in Deal a few years ago. Spending time there is partly about escape and partly about a nostalgia of our own. My father spent his childhood in Deal and my wife was brought up by the sea, so for both of us it connects back to something for sure.

The seaside represents a place where the usual rules don't apply, a holiday from normal life. But the British seaside is indelibly and unavoidably about the past. The stories in Connecting Nothing With Something situate themselves in this illusory and highly ambiguous space. For people born there - and most of the writers in this anthology were - the coast is somewhere to escape from rather than to, small towns with big social problems and only one direction out. Or two if you are feeling particularly bleak. But then, as the stories also make clear, such places drag us back too, exerting a powerfully nostalgic pull. Like boats borne back ceaselessly against the tide, as someone once said.



* Taken from Old but Somehow New, by Kit Caless.

Connecting Nothing With Something: A Coastal Anthology is available from Influx Press here.

Slim Slow Slider

Well, this quick-fire blog post thing didn't work too well. And the Richard Rogers post will have to wait until after I have visited the RA exhibition, which, incidentally, I will be reviewing for Icon. So here's another short post instead on the architecture of the Square Mile....

This is a bit of an oddity really, but well worth checking out if you are in this particular neck of the woods*. St Mary at Hill not only has a pleasingly strange street name but is home to a very peculiar collection of buildings. Three in particular stand out because of the way in which they interact and integrate with each other. 

The short, shallow hill is dominated by St Mary at Hill itself (herself?), an originally medieval church rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Its official address is Lovat Lane, but the real frontage - if you could call it that - is on St Mary at Hill. The facade is deeply strange, featuring a blocked-up Venetian window, a broken pediment and a very large, hand painted sign bearing the churches name. 

Odder still is the entrance which is through an unsung opening in a very mannered, late-Victorian structure off to one side. This building has a completely asymmetrically grouped array of windows which can be only partially explained by the fact that it abuts the church and effectively hides the courtyard behind.

The archway leads to this courtyard and the entrance to the church itself, which features a collection of circular openings of diminishing scales. This intersects with the main entrance from Lovat Lane and the cleverness of Wren's arrangement - which effectively buries the church amongst its neighbours - becomes clear.

To the left of the church is another opening marked appealingly enough by a small, slightly sinister skull and cross bones hovering in its pedimented doorway. This leads to a stepped passageway that appears to lead off to Lovat Lane but which was gated on the day I visited. 

The cream stucco of the church frontage spreads across this adjacent building as if to claim a bit of it for itself, with the result that the spaces behind the facades of these seemingly discrete buildings slide into each other ambiguously. No great shakes perhaps, but there's some, y'know, complexity and contradiction going on here for the mannerist geeks amongst us. 

Inside, there is a rather beautiful and not very mannered at all Wren interior. 

What's this?

When I've been thinking about it all, my ambitions for this blog of late have revolved around an ambitious photo essay about the city of London, a kind of off-the-cuff, shoot-from-the-hip, don't-bother-doing-any-research Pevsner meets Nairn rip-off. The fact that Pevsner has already met Nairn in the form of their jointly authored guides to Surrey and Sussex (of which more, hopefully, later*), is but one barrier to this enterprise. Another is having, y'know, a job and a family and all that. So the project has limped along as a vague ambition and a growing collection of iphone snapshots for some time now.

In order to make something happen and to help get back to an idea of blogging that is enjoyable, incidental and relatively low-maintenance, I've decided to just post photos of buildings that I pass in the City more or less one-by-one in the hope that it might all add up to something more substantial. A week-by-week, cut-out and keep photo-essay by default**.

Why the City? Well, partly because I have recently moved there and therefore spend a lot of my weekends wandering its enjoyably deserted streets and squares. And partly, because as a friend observed to me the other day, the City is what architecture does. Architecture is ultimately the expression of institutionalised power (whether public, private, benign or despotic) and there are few institutions as powerful historically as the City of London. No wonder then that it is home to so many extraordinary buildings by so many famous architects; Wren, Hawksmoor, Soane, Lutyens, Berlage, Stirling, Rogers, Foster and Koolhaas as well as almost home to Mies van der Rohe.

Alongside these there are many oddities, one-offs and eccentricities as well as numerous lumps of unremarkable corporate power, some of which are going up as I speak. The City, unbearable in so many ways, is a very pleasant place at the weekends especially on summer days when its deep streets and alley ways provide shade and its little parks and church yards are nearly empty. 

As a consequence of recent wanderings, I've been reading various architectural guides to the City's architecture, not just Pevsner and Nairn, but Christopher Woodward and Ed Jones and one or two others as well. So, in an informal way the posts will hopefully comment on previous comments by more illustrious commentators whilst allowing me to be more partial,  biased and badly informed than any of them. 

I'll start with this strange collection and the building at the centre of it all. McMorran and Whiby's Wood Street Police Station sits surrounded by a jostle of taller later buildings by Richard Rogers, Terry Farrell and Eric Parry and one much earlier one, the tower of  St Alban's by Christopher Wren. 

McMorran and Whitby were architects so out of step with their time that their buildings only started to make any kind of sense several decades after they were finished. Wood Street Police Station, built in the mid-1960's - and featured in The Jokers, one of that decades classic caper movies starring Oliver Reed and Michael Crawford - was described by the architects' biographer Edward Dennison as "an Italian palazzo in the heart of London serving the needs of a nuclear age". And it is fair to say it is pretty peculiar. It employs a stripped-down classicism but with exaggerated rustication and all manner of mannerist twists in the form of blank windows, sculptureless niches and giant, mysterious chimneys. It has a miniature stone high-rise at the top and a deep basement containing a nuclear fall-out shelter at the bottom. 

As naive as it is to equate classicism with fascism, Wood Street has an unmistakeable whiff of Mussolini's EUR about it. Like the work of Aldo Rossi, the deep shadows of its openings seem to deny occupation, as if the building is a hollowed-out shell. The blank muteness of the facade gives it the air of a mausoleum. Or more appropriately, a place of incarceration, which it in fact is, albeit temporarily. Perhaps this is what Nairn meant when he correctly described it as "creepy".

Woodward and Jones are predictably sympathetic to its mid-20th century attempt at classicism, but also sniffy about the lack of 'proper' stone detailing. It's sooty moustache-like stains around the parapet and windows are - like the nearby Barbican's - part of its appeal for me, Someone should write something about how British buildings are meant to be stained and musty, But much of the rhetoric around the correctness of classicism is that it suits the climate of this county better than (Mediterranean inspired) modernism. So a mid-twentieth century neo-classical building that wilfully omits coping stones and projecting lintels manages to offend all parties.

Whatever, it's a fabulous building; strange, compelling and deeply ambiguous. Its present state, marooned by high-rises and hanging off the edge of London Wall, only increases its more peculiar characteristics which is also perhaps unfair. As in their other buildings, particularly their very decent council housing in Holloway, McMorran and Whiby attempted a humane, robust updating of classical elements for a very different era and construction industry. It is only other people who found this intrinsically unnerving. 

Talking of which, just opposite the police station and is if keeping an eye on it is a little bright red sentry post of a service duct by Richard Rogers, part of his London Wall building. It is a diminutive and vaguely comic throwback to his Pompidou days, a self-conscious homage to his younger self. More about that to come........

* Having read these lately with the zeal of the recent convert, I am now officially a huge fan of Nairn. A post on the odd pairing of him and Pevsner is therefore highly likely.

** Speaking of which, an old photo-essay of mine on the architecture of Tayler and Green will shortly be appearing in Volume magazine, along with others by pioneers of the format Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy.