Grim Prospect

This post is perhaps more in the line of English Buildings, but there are some odd coincidences that make me want to write briefly about this building. It's by Oliver Hill, architect of the recently refurbished Midland Hotel in Morecambe, and it is, or was, called the Prospect Inn. It is on the Isle of Thanet which is the bit of Kent that sticks out into the Straits of Dover starting at Whitstable and ending at Ramsgate and with mostly potatoe fields in between. The Prospect Inn sits next to a roundabout overlooking Manston Airport in a particularly bleak bit of landscape.

A few years ago I wrote a review of a book on pub design in which Hill's inn featured. Built in 1938 it is one of the very few pubs ever to be designed in a modernist style. I became vaguely obsessed with its plan, which is eccentric to say the least, especially the biomorphic toilets which stick out from the sides of the building like slightly floppy ears. They are also on opposite sides of the bar area and you need to go outside to get to them, suggesting a playful spatial joke on the courtship rituals of friday night drinking. It also featured some rather lovely floor graphics - long since gone - and a stripped back arts and crafts style fireplace which is still there.

After lying derelict for some years (you can see some pictures of it in this state on mark.ed's flickr site here) the Prospect Inn has been refurbished, mostly pretty horrendously and with a new Holiday Inn tacked onto the back. This has been designed in a sort of pre-fab industrial style with bull-nosed escape stair protrusions that it's just possible to imagine are intended to be sympathetic to Hill's design.



Early modernism in the UK was often associated with leisure uses but these were mostly of the slightly hairshirt, self-improving kind such as lidos and health centres, so the Prospect Inn was also rare for having a populist and hedonistic function. Not that you can imagine much in the way of hedonism happening on this bit of the Isle of Thanet, which is presumably why it closed down. Now the new hotel serves the expanding Kent International Airport.

Oddly Hill also designed an estate of modernist houses (see this fabulous flickr site) in Frinton-On-Sea, a slightly sinister village on the Essex coast that until five years ago didn't have a single pub, and which has a number of bizarre local bye-laws including one forbidding ice cream vans. I know this because as a child Frinton was the nearest bit of seaside to where I grew up so I spent a lot of childhood summer days there. Years later as an architecture tutor I set a spectacularly unsuccesful design project there based on the town's endless battle to keep out the modern world*. Somewhat shamefully, I was completely unaware of Hill's work there at the time.



Anyway, I realised the other day reading this book that I had passed the Prospect Inn a number of times and not realised. So, today I took some terrible photographs of it in the rain while my wife stared out at me from the car in disbelief and my ten day old son slept on in blissful ignorance of his father's nerdish behaviour.

Finally, here is a period picture (via) of the serpentine wall that is still there along the roadside, along with a beautiful pub sign which is a miniature version of the building, which sadly isn't.

* Frinton-On-Sea was recently the subject of a BBC documentary about the resident's extraordinary conservatism. Unless I dreamt it, which is possible, it is also the temporary home to a number of ex-Radio 1 DJ's. who are starting a digital radio station there in tribute to Radio Caroline, the 1960's pirate radio station which for a while broadcast from a marine fort just off the Isle of Thanet. The original Radio Caroline pirate ship was anchored off the Essex coast in the early '70's and, somewhat bizarelly, washed up on Frinton's beach. Perhaps the residents feared a counter cultural invasion and have stepped up their vigilence ever since.

The work of architecture in the age of reproduction.

The degree to which reconstructions of buildings is seen as either sentimental kitsch or authentic rebuilding depends largely on the perceived value of the original structure.

Last week I heard Jamie Foubert make an interesting presentation (at this event) regarding resurrected buildings. I was reminded of it in connection with the current, rather odd, campaign to reconstruct the Festival of Britain Skylon.

Resurrections of buildings can take a number of different forms. Sometimes they are the realisation of something that was never actually completed to start with, like Charles Rennie Macintosh’s House for an Art Lover, built some 90 years after he designed it.

Sometimes they are actually the original article but displaced from its original context, such as the reconstruction of London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Sometimes they are precise reconstructions of a building that was demolished such as Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona.

All these re-buildings raise interesting questions about authenticity. Are they all, to some extent, fakes? In art authenticity historically lies within the mark made by the author. Can a building, which is never the product of a single author and can take years, even decades, to construct ever be simply a fake?

For Modernism reconstruction is always a problematic act. Architecture, it assumes, should be an immutable product of its time. It derives its authenticity through its very newness. In his talk Foubert attempted to re-categorise his examples into authentic and in-authentic examples of reconstruction based on familiar modernist tropes: honesty of construction, appropriateness to function, proximity to original site etc.

So, the architects of the Barcelona Pavilion reconstruction would no doubt claim authenticity of detail and location to justify their recreation although, technically, Arizona’s London Bridge could make an equally legitimate claim. In this instance, dislocation in space is assumed to be more inauthentic than dislocation in time.

This dislocation in time has another effect, which is to enshrine the buildings perceived meaning within that of a particular era. The Skylon, for instance, is still synonymous with the Festival of Britain and the post war Labour government that sponsored it. Reconstructing the Skylon, it is suggested here, is inappropriate because its absence is a more eloquent testament to the reasons it was removed. It's political meaning would be effaced through reconstruction.

Reconstructions are also interesting then because it is in their absence, rather than their presence, that buildings seem to gain a purity of meaning. Jonathon Hill has argued that the Barcelona Pavilion achieved its iconic status precisely because it was dismantled. This is not simply because it became more poignant but because it could only be experienced through the rarified medium of photographs and architectural history. It was never sullied through (mis)use. To connect back to the bastardised Walter Benjamin title of this post, it retained its aura. Buildings that disappear are like rock stars that die young: they leave a beautiful corpse. They never grow fat or old or lose their edge.

Free from contamination by the present, the Skylon still represents the possibilities of British Modernism and post war socialism. Whether you want to recreate it - re-released and digitally re-mastered – or celebrate its absence, Skylon’s meaning seems clearer than if it were still here today.

Modernism: A Potted History

In Memoriam: Momoluku Ando (March 5th 1910 - January 5th 2007)

Momoluku Ando - who died at the beginning of January this year - bequeathed the world one of its most incredible products: the Pot Noodle. Could there be a better icon of mass-produced, instant, transportable, lightweight, efficient, international modernity than the Pot Noodle? Forget the Futurist’s Cook Book, this is food as Modernists dreamt the world could be.

Despite its staggering success the Pot Noodle occupies a problematic place in our food culture. In fact, for most people, it is doubtful whether they would actually class it as a food at all. Pot Noodle is most definitely a PRODUCT and, these days food's cultural value lies in its claims to naturalness. Current attitudes to food mirror our mixed up attitude to modernity in general. Food consumption is currently subject to more sentimentalism, pseudo-regionalism and sheer perversity than even architecture. It is no coincidence that Prince Charles’ twin areas of industry over the last twenty years have been in these two fields. His combination of a misty eyed veneration of olde England, deep political conservatism, sentimental love of the land and anti-scientific belief systems have given us both Poundbury and Duchy Originals: his recently built village and organic food range respectively.

If Duchy Originals hail from the same source as Poundbury then where do Pot Noodles come from? Tokyo? Milton Keynes? Well, Wales actually but like Milton Keynes they are derided and denigrated by all right thinking people, symbolic of a wasteful, over packaged, over sanitised, lazy and nutritionally under-nourished culture, removed from food production, lost to the land, indifferent to the changing seasons. They are the ultimate enemy of the Slow Food movement, the Room 101 of TV chefs. Duchy Originals are self-consciously conservative, evoking images of localised cottage farming industry. Organic, authentic and original. The associations with monarchy may rankle but the Duchy bacon and biscuits on our supermarket shelves are a favourite of urban foodies. And this is another paradox of our complex culture. Recently, our retail landscape has inverted itself. Gentrified parts of East London are now full of specialist cheese emporiums, retro sweet shops and down to earth farmers markets. Urbanites, decked in Japanese denim and plugged into Californian software, amble about picking the greenfly off Bramlies and the mud off Maris Pipers. Farmer’s stalls fill up vacant plots of inner London like a cross between Archigram’s Instant City and the Archers. It’s like….well, actually it’s so complicated, so perversely tortuous in its lack of logic that it’s hard to say what it's like. Who would have thought the city would end up looking like this? Certainly not the Futurists and, probably, not the inventor of Pot Noodles either. Meanwhile, out in the sticks, everyone is off to Tesco.

In a land of Nigel and Nigella, modern convenience food appears doomed. Except it isn’t. Pot Noodle's manufacturer's Unilever sell 4 Pot Noodles every second. Their slick and funny marketing campaign plays relentlessly on the negative connotations of Pot Noodles, constantly referring to its unnaturalness and slobby lack of sophistication. They recently brought out a super hot curry version called Bombay Bad Boy and a more upmarket one called Posh Noodle. And just look at that Bombay Bad Boy packing. It’s black with flames on it. When did anyone try and sell food in packaging that looked like a hot rod? No tasteful use of tartan, no retro packaging, no “I’m home made, I must be good for you” schtick. Pot Noodle flaunts its in-authenticity, it's status as a product, something made in a factory and boxed in its millions. It's latest advertising campaign pokes yet more fun at our longing for natural products by suggesting that the noodles are mined in Wales.

A vegetarian friend of mine at University existed for some time solely on Chicken Pot Noodles. He did this because Chicken Pot Noodles were: A, amazingly cheap and; B, contained absolutely no chicken. Momoluku Ando’s product got my friend through some difficult times. Now, he probably has nothing to with it and gets his vegetables delivered by Able & Cole. This, though, is our contemporary version of modernity. This is where we went in the century of Modernism that Ando lived through. A society complex enough to embrace the giddying effects of digital technology and to also want its vegetables seasonal and with the mud still on. And, to eat 175 million Pot Noodles a year on the sly.