parade

A brief return to the once popular blogger's sport of pop song/architecture combinations, partly inspired by one of its inventors sending me this recently. This one is cheating a bit - but only a bit - because its urban associations are as much autobiographical as they are a definable presence within the song. I should add too that I was reminded of Hats - the album from which the song is taken - by a conversation on @owenhatherley's twitter feed.....

I used to listen to Hats during my last year of living at home with my parents and it accompanied me (via my extra large '80's style orange foam ear phones) on the way back from countless nights out in the spectacularly un-glamorous setting of Chelmsford, Essex. The parade of the title is a kind of provincial everywhere, summoning up images of late night high streets filled with Saturday night expectation. But it is also a very particular place, a street of shops and bars where I would hang out with friends in the months after finishing school, an odd, in-between period in life inflated with all the doomy grandeur of post adolescence.

One look at the official video (sadly un-embeddable) makes you realise the band may have had something more typically glamorous in mind than Moulsham Street*, but the slippage between aspirations of urban sophistication and the realities of (sub)urban life seems a very '80's theme. The Blue Nile never seemed to fit in anywhere particularly on the musical spectrum of the time though. The lush sophistication of their arrangements and the synthetic drum sound are a continuation of new romanticism to some extent - as is, perhaps, the faint hint of Americana (Tinseltown in the Rain!) - but the exquisite sense of melancholy isn't.

The whole of Hats seems infused with an attempt to summon up the ghosts of old nights out, a haunted echo of the thrills of urban life. The song titles - Let's Go Out Tonight, The Downtown Lights, From A Late Night Train, Saturday Night - communicate the kind of loneliness you can only feel when surrounded by lots of people having fun. They also seem to map out the spaces of an exhaustively familiar town, like the stations of some highly personal cross. It's unclear whether Paul Buchanan thinks that going out will save him, or his relationship, and offer some redemption, or whether this is all long since dead and he's merely remembering a distant, now unimaginable happiness.

On which triumphantly downbeat note I shall take my leave. At least for a while! This blog will be quiet for a couple of weeks now. I'm going on holiday. But not with Paul Buchanan. Expect to see the now standard issue holiday post featuring giant plastic ice cream cones, empty hover ports, abandoned nuclear reactors and seaside parades when I get back. Ta da.

* Strangely enough, I found myself defending another, earlier, teenage hangout this week with an old friend from school. The roof of Chelmsford's multi-storey car park was a great place from which to watch the cricket at Essex County Cricket ground as well as drop small, anti-social missiles on passers by below. Not that I'm recommending either, mind....

All Is Quiet

The following are some photos I took on a very, very cold New Years Day. For reasons that elude me now we drove around the coast of Kent, at one stage through a thick but brief blizzard of snow, stopping at Margate, Herne Bay and Whitstable. I particularly like Margate which has a vulgar charm all of its own, although I'm aware that aestheticising decay is the privilege of the over-privileged. My family were less impressed by its down-at-heel attractions though and urged me on to the more picturesque charms of Whitstable, where I couldn't find a single thing I wanted to photograph.

Winds buffeted the sandy beach, almost completely submerging the lido. No one went for a swim. Strangely, my wife, so insistent on her Christmas day dip, stayed in the car and kept her hat on.



The Lido Cliff Bar is an odd hybrid bungalow with its red tiles, marbleised walls and complete visual impenetrability. The sign is a bit small for my taste too. Still, it commanded the empty car park with a menacing aloofness.



"The life was cheap on bread and wine. And sharing meant no shame." Nice bendy helvetica.



I liked this mainly for the way that the top of the building doesn't fit the bottom, necessitating the excellently over-scaled black bracket to hold it up. I'm not optimistic for the fate of the upmarket flats though.



Many of the sea front shops and arcades were closed up, maybe for winter or maybe permanently, it was difficult to tell.



A night-time architecture of applied signs and lights in the day, in deep winter.



From the ruins of Snohetta's unbuilt giant pebble rises Sir David Chipperfield's vehicle of regeneration/gentrification the Turner Contemporary. The design is "restrained, quiet and thoughful" in a way that, for instance, Margate generally isn't.



As part of an off-site Turner Contemporary art project, Douglas Coupland has been commissioned to re-design the signage.



Half Classical, half Stalinist Realism Lido sign.



This had a pleasing elegance about it, like a low-code Californian case study house. Or is that just me?



There's an appealing way in which the Cliffs Pavilion is being consumed, or camouflaged, by the landscape here, like a large inhabited hedge.



The entrance to the Winter Gardens was rather lovely and offered the delights of Rock and Pop.



This beautiful stuccoed terrace contains one flat owned by a hard-line modernist tenant determined to express truth to materials.



I'm not holding my breath.



Their welcoming door policy may have had something to do with the club's demise.



The historic - and closed - Dreamland and its Grade 2 listed timber roller-coaster has been saved by a £3.7M grant. Read more about it here. Some good news at last.

And then we drove to Herne Bay where the pier has broken in half.

(with apologies to Infinite Thought, whose photo-essay blog post format is blatantly cribbed here.)

Marine Style

Image of Marine Court, Hastings via

The modern movement was obsessed with maritime imagery from Le Corbusier’s Towards A New Architecture onwards. The 1920's ocean liner lingers on in the architectural imagination as a perfect symbol of modernity; a machine of transportation as well of habitation, divorced from context, floating free of history.

The aesthetic of strip windows, streamlined white balconies, sun decks and terraces defined early modernism in the UK in particular. It brought together a confluence of ideas: a belief in the recuperative properties of fresh air, an early modernist interest in health and efficiency promoted through architecture, the loveliness of the ocean liner and a certain freedom of expression associated with the seaside .

The marine style still retains a strong grip on architect’s imaginations, wheeled out the moment they get a whiff of a site near the sea. There is also a certain architectural fascination with boats generally, a slightly boy-scoutish interest in knots and joints and the way things go together, exemplified by the high tech school.

I was thinking about all this while spending a week at the Great British Seaside. All along the coast are outposts of ocean liner modernism. Two of them - the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and Marine Court (top) in Hastings - are virtually next door to each other but there are numerous others such as Oliver Hill's Midland Hotel in Morecombe, the same architect's Frinton Park Estate in Essex and Joseph Emberton's casino in Blackpool.

Marine Court is an extraordinary building, already well described very well over at Nothing to See Here and Infinite Thought. It was designed in 1936 and very obviously based on an actual ship, the Queen Mary liner. This gives it a slightly surreal literalness as an object, more like a vast public sculpture than a block of flats.



Its current state of dilapidation only adds to the allure, making it appear as if it might have been recently raised from the sea bed. A bit like Hastings itself which has an impressive and unlikely scale to it that dwarfs the little seaside towns that come before and after it along the south east coast.

As Infinite Thought notes, Marine Court is home to psycho-geographer and Audi enthusiast Iain Sinclair. Sinclair also made a short film about it called Marine Court Rendezvous, and described it as being like the hotel from The Shining, full of endless corridors and strange empty apartments. Externally it is also now marooned over charity shops and boarded up restaurants, capturing a peculiarly seaside mix of glamorous aspiration and grim reality.



The De La Warr Pavilion is far better known than Marine Court, having been designed by Erich Mendlesohn with Serge Chermayeff. There is something slightly overstated about its status amongst architects in this country. It's elegant for sure, but less interesting than Mendlesohn's bizarre Einstein Tower in Potsdam, or his fabulous hat factory. A large part of its impact comes from its sheer incongruity. It appears strangely dislocated from its surroundings, like finding a Brancuzi in your Grandmother's living room. What is lovely is the way that the sun deck works, filling up with people in the late afternoon sun when we there, like an Edward Hopper painting come to life.

Both Marine Court and the De-La-Warr look, appropriately enough, as though they might let slip their moorings and drift off at any moment. There is a sense that both these buildings still represent travel and a kind of chic continental glamour, which says a lot more about us than them. Unlike their surroundings they appear to be straining to be part of a European intellectual milieu. This is a major part of their appeal, acting as emblems of a failed future for people who despair of Britain's isolationist tendencies and ingrained philistinism.



The sense of dislocation goes the other way too though. The most radical early modernist buildings in the UK were designed by émigré architects such as Mendelsohn, Gropius and Lubetkin. These were buildings of exile, designed by people who for the most part were only passing through, briefly setting up offices before moving on to the US where modernism would take a very different path.

In a recent post I described the coastal fortifications that occur along the same stretch of coast. Buildings like the De La Warr pavilion are the mirror image of those, a strangely optimistic outcome of the same conflict. Staring out to sea hopefully, its heavily glazed facade and sweeping sun deck couldn't be more different to the slit windows and immense walls of the pillboxes and gun emplacements that are the other architectural remnant of the same period.