Ruthless Infrastructure

I hesitated to put these pictures up because on the day we visited Dover Harbour I forgot my camera. Again. But the place was so fascinating that I took these ones on my phone and thought they might be of interest anyway. I hope you can forgive the fuzziness and appreciate the oddness....

If you came this way, taking the route you would be likely to take, and you wanted to stay, then you might stay here, at the first hotel on the road out of Dover harbour. It's a fabulous creation, a pastel stuccoed Regency villa, overgrown with ivy and sitting immediately below the white cliffs. A second world war pillbox hovers on the edge of the cliff and, sandwiched between the candy striped entrance columns in an agreeably surreal way, is a K6 phone box*.

An utterly unprepossessing border control point. A suitable symbol for the bureaucracy obsessed, cheap as chips, PFI funded, project managed miserableness of contemporary Britain. I like the custard yellow coloured anti-car bomb concrete barriers though and the thoroughly un-heroic Union Jack half hidden behind the column.

A fabulous collapsed geographic representation of Great Britain in ceramic tile used to welcome passengers arriving in the UK from the ferries on foot. The single brown seat represents the irrepressible spirit of British individualism.

The deserted baggage hall, now no longer in use due to the decline of foot traffic following the Eurostar's arrival. The B stands for Ballardian.

The harbour does have some really formidable infrastructure. The concrete column supports Jubilee Way, an elegantly spiralling elevated road that cuts through the white cliffs and deposits container trucks and booze cruisers onto the concrete apron of the East Harbour itself. The harbour is run as a trust and therefore doesn't need to apply for planning permission for development within its boundaries. It's covered in random and mysterious sheds containing giant x-ray machines and places where lorries are stripped to pieces and searched.

Jubilee Way emerges from between the chalk to fly over the green chain link fence that snakes across the harbour demarcating the Restricted and Secure Zones. Vehicles theoretically leave the UK briefly as a result before circling back round like landing aircraft. Watching this and the movements of the ships from the harbour control tower was a strangely hypnotic experience. I could have stayed all day.

For some reason the pixels on this picture are starting to break up. It sums up the harbour though which is a weird mix of container lorries continuously trailing on and off the ferries, vast graphics alternately telling you which lane to be in and and how exciting it is to be in the UK, ruthless infrastructure and crumbling chalk cliffs. £80 Billion pounds worth of goods come through Dover each year and this is set to increase with the massive new development of the West Harbour.

The lorries roll on and roll off, snaking through the town on the way to the M20. Not much stops there. The harbour is both the reason for Dover's continued existence and an autonomous entity developing according to its own internal logic. It is also tied symbiotically to Calais across a highly congested piece of water, so that the two are like twins developing together at exactly the same rate.

* There's a thorough description here of the evolution of the K series phone box. Personally my favourite is the K8, which is the Trimphone of public telephone facilities.

Carry on England

Travel Chaos (TM) has blighted our trip to the states, stranding myself and my colleagues in Richard Rogers' schmantzy new Terminal 5 for what seemed like decades. We ended up doing our studio presentation via skype, not made any easier by our determination to show a clip of the final sequence of Quadrophenia in the middle of it. The presentation was not without its more amusing incidents either, which I've already mentioned on Twitter.

Anyway, in tribute to a turbulent (in the wrong way) couple of days full of plucky British phlegm here's a fabulously historically confused video of Ultravox singing Reap The Wild Wind, courtesy of Enrique at A456. It features Midge Ure and co dressed as second world war airmen driving a post-war jeep around the white cliffs, accompanied by some first world war flying machines and dodgy video effects.

From an age when the more ludicrous the premise the better for music videos. Dreadful song, mind.

Vampire Weekend

I will be donning the v-neck and knitted tie combo again this week as our design studio at Yale starts on Thursday. I will be off to New Haven roughly once a month from now until May. This will hopefully result in posts on Louis Kahn, VSBA and Paul Rudolph, amongst others, all of whom have buildings in and around New Haven, as well as the fabulously Hogwartian campus itself. Rudolph's car park, in particular, is a beautiful thing, surely the best multi-storey in the world.

This weekend though we're off to the woods of New Canaan to visit Philip Johnson's Glass House, a building brilliantly deconstructed by Jeff Wall in his essay Dan Graham's Kammerspiel, and one I've long wanted to visit. The photo above captures Johnson's spectral, vampire-like presence on post-war American art and culture, seemingly connected to every one from Mies van der Rohe to Andy Warhol.

The focus of the studio - which has been plugged here before - is on Dover, looking specifically at the town's status as a gateway to the UK, with all the contradictions and conflicts that that implies. We have a studio blog here which will be added to as the term progresses.

Growth Point Blank

More rambling Dover based research. The following is a rough and ready photo-essay, or a series of outtakes from a more serious study. All seaside towns look bleak in winter, Dover especially so as it is fabulously exposed and the front relatively depopulated. The weather was awful which didn't help and my wife and son looked increasingly pained as we traipsed around so I didn't make it as far as the harbour proper, which will be the subject of a study in its own right.

This rather nice '50's mega-residential block runs along the front (soon to have a re-working courtesy of Tonkin-Lui architects) and seems to have its own micro-climate with palm trees and fronds filling its communal garden. It suggests a more genteel kind of seaside town than the rest of Dover which is a fairly bizarre mix of brutalist infrastructure and stunning geography.

I like a map and a map that's also an object is best of all. This is a mosaic that sits on the seafront where there is a seemingly interminable supply of public art. The recent Cultural Strategy for Dover includes, apparently, a suggested five year moratorium on any new public art. This should perhaps be extended nationwide.

Below the cliffs and facing the seafront, the lovely Premier Inn spreads its welcoming arms out to greet visitors from far and wide. There is a very particular and thoroughly contemporary form of meanness to this building, which appears to have been not so much designed as assembled from the kind of cheap products featured in the building material brochures that plop through architect's post boxes with a free pencil. Bad British architecture indeed.

For a seaside town there is very little seaside. What there is is dominated by the harbour and ferries which come and go endlessly. Consequently, the usual beach frivolities seem slightly out place. A few years ago I went swimming off the coast of Calais and the sight of vast cargo boats passing as I bobbed around in the water was mildly terrifying, as if the sea were not meant to contain both at the same time.

Memorials dot the beach front including this one which records a piece of armour plating presented by the French army, set in a pleasingly robust piece of stripped classicism.

In contrast to the Premier Inn, the County Hotel, while no doubt a thoroughly unpopular local eyesore, seems to have a certain aloof dignity. People often say that Modernism as an architectural language was fine in the hands of the 'masters' but deeply banal when done by run of the mill architects. Then again, at least it was a language, a way of designing buildings that had an overriding aesthetic intent (not to mention a social one) rather than being the random outcome of bottom line cheapskate-ism. Incidentally, after Caruso St John's employment of the concrete and gold mullions of corporate brutalism is bronze tinted glazing next up for recuperation?

The County Hotel towers over Townwall Street (or the A20 as it's also known) which cuts the seafront off from the town centre. Moving between the two is via the inevitable underpass which is the usual essay in municipal railings, labyrinthine spatial complexities and counter-intuitive directional signage. Then again it's too easy to blame them - like those infernal streets in the sky - for everything that's supposedly wrong with our cities. Who knows, in a hundred years time, there may be heritage groups campaigning for their reinstatement.

Having said that, the road seems to have brought a pox on all the houses that border it. Many of the buildings along it are empty or partially demolished or in the process of becoming both. Dover has "Growth Point" status which means that it plans to build over 500 homes a year and has a government grant to aid it doing so. The area around the A20 also forms part of the Dover Town Investment Zone which is a mixed use redevelopment of the town centre.

At present the relationship between the town centre and the seafront is relatively, erm, uncelebrated. It also shares equal billing with the factory outlet shopping centre. For a seaside town and an important harbour there is remarkably little evidence of the fact when you are in the town.

The most recent myth about Dover is that it is 'home' to large numbers of asylum seekers housed in its legions of B&B's. This is no longer true - if it ever was - partly because the tensions arising from such reporting meant that a policy of 'dispersal' is now followed. There is evidence though of relatively recent arrivals (from the 1990's) who have now settled in Dover. Polish and Hungarian restaurants are dotted around the town.

Another Dover - one involving myths of English military resistance - is never far from view, however incongruous. Two ladies dressed as jolly WREN's were belting out Andrew Sister's numbers from the back of a truck when I was there to a group of shoppers and Ugg booted teenagers. Someone handed around free mince pies.

This is as close to the harbour as I got. The Dover Harbour Board is a separate autonomous entity, able to grant itself planning permission for buildings and development within its remit. This is in itself quite interesting, another kind of fiefdom within the town. The board is planning a major expansion and a new marina. Somewhere within the present harbour is the old Victorian railway station, sitting amongst the check-points, car parks and snaking lines of container lorries crawling off the boats.

UPDATE: The building described above as the County Hotel is scheduled for demolition as part of a new development for an Asda supermarket. It's not actually the County Hotel either, which is next door, although the two appear to be physically connected. It is an empty office block which sits on the site of the former Grand Hotel, a vast Victorian palace of a building destroyed by bombing in the second world war.