modern archeology

I'm teaching at Canterbury again this year and have been researching potential project sites combining coastal landscapes, transportation systems and technological obsolescence. Whilst trawling the area, I came across the arcane fragment of home movie footage embedded above of the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate.

As well as being a sort of Super 8 version of Martin Parr's Boring Postcards, the footage is notable for an eerie lack of people, as if in anticipation of the port's future demise. A vacant and overgrown concrete apron is now the only remaining sign of Ramsgate International Hoverport which closed in 1982. Google earth reveals the ruins as a strange prosthetic attachment sticking out of the curve of the bay.

Aside from the various buildings - now long gone - the port consisted of a large flat concrete shoreline, a sort of artificial beach onto the which the craft slid up before settling down on its billowing black shirts, like a large hen on a nest of eggs. In period photographs the hovercraft themselves still appear incredibly modern, alien objects in the late '60s landscape, especially compared to the Austin Maxis and Mini Clubmans that would have motored gently on and off them. Given the relative size of the hovercraft to the surrounding houses they look as if they could have just carried on past the port and inland, hoovering up the potato fields of Thanet as they went.

The word Hoverport suggests something faintly incredible too, as if tit were the ground itself that rose up and transported you somewhere exotic. Rather than Calais. The operators seemed to be aware of the ambiguous half boat/half plane character of their craft too, referring to "flights" instead of sailings and dressing the crew up as natty BOAC flight attendants. Fittingly enough high aviation fuel costs in the 1970's - combined with a susceptibility to bad weather - killed off most commercial hovercraft services. Wikipedia's entry on them concludes that "except for the Solent Ryde to Southsea crossing, hovercraft disappeared from the coastline of Britain", as if they were a species of rare bird.

Appropriately enough, the former Hoverport at Pegwell Bay is now a nature reserve. It sits on a particularly sleepy stretch of the Isle of Thanet coast, just below the plateau of Manston Airport, another, almost, failed bit of infrastructure. For those of you of a hauntological bent there are more photographs and information available here, and here. From the last of these sites I have borrowed the lovely image below. There are also photographs of the port at various stages of dereliction here.

The Wrong Kind Of Everything

The second part of my recent post on hipster urbanism was meant to consist of a journey on the newly opened East London Line. Two things have slightly scuppered this. First off, Owen has already written a very good review of the line and its generally pretty uninspiring architecture at BD. If you haven't read it yet you should. A quick scroll down the comments section will also reveal a horribly familiar response from Chris Williamson of Weston Williamson - architects of some of the stations - which reads like the sort of thing I write to clients on a regular basis.

The second problem was that my journey was somewhat aborted when our train terminated unexpectedly at New Cross, rather than Crystal Palace which is where we were hoping to get to. Up to this point the missus and I been busy extolling the swift efficiency of the service and the unexpectedly pleasant trains, but we were rapidly plunged back into the usual abyss of London public transport despair. At New Cross no one knew why the trains had stopped or when they would start again or indeed what a train was and why everyone kept asking about them.

Anyway, I might post up the few photos I managed to take at some point soon. But I guess the point is, if you're going to do non hipster urbanism - i.e. ugly infrastructure - then it needs to work. Coming on the back of England's dismal performance against Algeria on Friday night it was tempting to see the whole weekend as an indictment of this countries all round shabby crapness. Which raises the question: are England playing PFI football? Partly to answer this I can be found moonlighting over at the excellent World Cup blog Minus The Shooting with an upbeat piece on our pathological addiction to national footballing failure. There may be more to come, unless I get substituted by the gaffers. I just hope I've been a credit to myself and put in the requisite 110%.

I have a short piece in the French magazine Dorade too, where I make some wholly expected choices in response to being asked to name my five favourite houses of all time, ever, in the whole wide world. Dorade describes itself as "an artistic periodical where mermaids admit to their slightly fishy odour" which is the sort of thing the Architects Journal should do more of I think. Dorade is available "in some shops in Paris and WH Smiths".

Finally, I'm off to Moscow for a few days so I probably won't be blogging, but if anyone has any places to recommend visiting I would love to hear about them....