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....

Essex Dogs

"I was born below sea level. That profoundly affects the consciousness". Wilco Johnson.

Recently I've watched both the Ian Dury biopic Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll and Julien Temple's film Oil City Confidential, about '70's Pub Rock band Dr Feelgood. Neither Feelgood nor Dury's band The Blockheads meant much to me at the time. I was too young for their late '70's heyday for a start. Feelgood were a classic 'older brother band', hairy, sweaty guys whose grinning geezer logo my own elder brother spent his free time drawing on the walls of his bedroom. Ian Dury enjoyed some notoriety in the playground, mainly for the rudeness of his lyrics, but I never cared much for the music.



Both Dury and Dr Feelgood came from Essex though, which gave them a grim credibility for anyone, like me, who's also from that much denigrated county. And they couldn't really have come from anywhere else. Despite its global reach pop music has a specific relationship to it's physical context: heavy metal from the black country, for instance, or dubstep from the bedrooms of south London. There are both obvious and opaque reasons behind these origins, a dense correlation of coincidences that lead to the momentum of a scene.

If Essex ever had a scene it was in the generally uncelebrated Pub Rock movement. Both Ian Dury's Blockheads and Dr Feelgood grew out of Pub Rock. But their differences also reflect the areas they grew up in. Dury was from suburban Essex and his music is full of caustic social observation and character studies. It seems to mimic the chatter and gossip of Hornchurch or Harrow, where he grew up. While Dury revels in the kitchen sink realism of Billericay Dickie ("Had a love affair with Nina, in the back of my Cortina"), Feelgood attempted to reinvent their surroundings. For them the bleak industrial landscape of Canvey Island, with its petro-chemical plants, mudflats and bungalows was analogous to the deep south of America. They re-named it Oil City and placed it in the Thames Delta, a mythological landscape of their own imagination.



"On Canvey Island, 1953. Many lives were lost. With the records of a football team"

Canvey Island, British Sea Power

Canvey Island is a very strange place. It is an artificial island for a start, reclaimed from the North Sea by Dutch engineers in the 17th Century. It lies below sea level and its few shallow hills are artificial too, the result of the Roman salt industry. In 1953 it flooded killing 58 people. This disaster forms the opening of Julien Temple's film. Its star is undoubtedly the bizarre but brilliant guitarist Wilco Johnson. Johnson's name is itself a piece of wish fulfillment, a derivation of the considerably more English sounding John Wilkinson. Today, Johnson is a shaven headed Essex seer with a miniature observatory rigged up on the roof of his house which beams images of the stars onto a television in his living room.

Johnson was always the romantic, slightly otherworldly figure in a band that otherwise looked like a bunch of minor villains from The Sweeney. Their music though was a kind of industrialised blues, transformed by Johnson's propulsive, almost motorik, guitar playing. Rather than the epic rhythms of the autobahn though, this is the sound of souped up Escorts tearing up the A13, or revving their way along Southend's seafront.



If you're looking for a thrill that's new Take in Fords, Dartford Tunnel and the river too Go Motorin' on the A13

Billy Bragg, A13 Trunk Road to the Sea.

The A13 - celebrated by that other Essex Boy Billy Bragg - starts off as Commercial Street in east London, passes through Barking and Dagenham and eventually peters out in the sand banks of Shoeburyness. Along the way it takes in the epic industrial landscape of the Ford Motor Works This is where Ian Dury's Billericay Dickie might have worked and where his beloved Cortina would have been made.

Feelgood were considered Essex geezers through and through. They looked like gangsters after a minor heist gone wrong, with Lee Brilleaux's filthy white suit and Wilco Johnson's machine gun guitar technique. But they were something else too. Johnson's elegant glide/strut across the stage and otherworldly stare made them far more exotic. And the music, both brutishly straightforward and highly tuned, made them as devastatingly effective as a homemade hot rod. No wonder everyone from Clem Burke to Joe Strummer admired them so much.



"I'm going down by the jetty.
Tonight the tide is high.
It's tankers in the channel laying
Flames up in the sky.

The air is full of poison
The sea is slick with grease
Somewhere in this hell on earth
I'll surely get some peace."

Dr Feelgood, Down By The Jetty Blues

Ian Dury suffered from polio, which is a water borne disease. Dury contracted it whilst swimming on a family holiday in Southend. Here the metaphors of dirt and disease behind Dr Feelgood's take on the Essex coast suddenly acquire a hideous literalness. Canvey, like Southend, was once a hugely popular seaside resort. The press shots for Oil City Confidential show the remaining members of the band posed in front of Canvey Island's Labworth Cafe, designed by Ove Arup in the fashionable seaside moderne style of the 1930's.

Seaside moderne was associated with the health giving properties of sea air and salt water, part of the rhetoric of early modernism. Here, though, it's clean white lines and optimistic curves can hardly disguise the polluted and industrialised environment in which it sits. Labworth Cafe is a pertinent object in Canvey's mythology, symbolic of a brief moment of modernity that merely exaggerates its presen isolation from the rest of the world. At one point in Temple's film, Johnson refers to Kent - visible from the shores of Canvey - as a kind of mythical, far-away land of exotic fruits. Essex continually casts itself as a poor cousin, a charmless and unlovely place with Canvey as its most remote outpost.

A shot of Dr Feelgood during their post Wilco Johnson, vaguely New Wave phase shows them scrubbed up and dressed in dandyish blazers in front of the Labworth Cafe. It's an untypical picture, with the two band members at the back looking comically uncomfortable with their new look. It suggests though that exotic flowers sometimes grow from Essex's bleak but occasionally beautiful landscape.

To The Birds

(Ron Onions' Pigeon Loft, Albany)

I've always loved allotments and, in particular, the little sheds that are built on them. These are artful assemblages of as-found building components; old doors, windows and timber panels lashed together to make hybridised, miniature houses.


(Joe Bridges's Racing Loft, Timsbury, UK)

The same strain of home made ad-hocism exists in the world of the pigeon loft only with the added interest of the obsessive pigeon fancier thrown in. The photographs accompanying this post are taken from here - a South Western Australian pigeon fancier's (who knew?) website, cataloguing lofts from around the world.


(Graham Britton's Garden Loft, Newborough, UK.)

They are a lovely collection, a group of miniature buildings ranging from the almost Miesian simplicity of the one at the top of this post (owned by the fabulously named Ron Onions) through Mittel European style chalets to the (slightly decrepit) LA poolhouse style loft below.


(Fred Thompson's Poolside Loft, Western Aust.)

There is a strong sense that the lofts are far more expansive and luxurious than required. They are clearly an expression of the owners obsessive love of racing pigeons and the dedication it takes to train them. In the world of the pigeon fancier the birds are the 'talent' and these lofts are their Bel Air mansions. They're a far cry from the terrace rooftop lofts of the Northern England stereotype anyway, and the term loft is a bit of a misnomer. These are houses in their own right.


(Advanced Pigeon Loft diagram, Via)

The site also contains detail of each fancier's dietary and training regime should you be interested. Each one has a personal profile offering an insight into a remarkable world of obsessive feeding patterns and slightly obscene sounding terminology ("widowhood cocks"). Like most hobbies it is a sort of parallel universe, one where humans build houses for birds to live in that are quite probably a lot nicer than their own.

(Joe Baker's Racing Loft, Hereford, UK)

Sunburst and Snowblind

I Like has a short post on this lovely looking book of the sunburst motif, associated with art deco and a certain kind of 1920/30's suburbia. The sun burst was used in all sorts of places and at all scales, appearing on windows, fire places, gates and fences.

Like a lot of decorative architectural motifs it was briefly rediscovered in early post modernism, most notably in the work of Charles Moore and Venturi Scott Brown. VSBA's Abraham's House, something of a lost project in their canon, goes ga ga for the sunburst motif, extruding it through the facade and into the interior so that it becomes both decorative and structural.


(VSBA's Abraham's House)

We had a bash at it too in what we refer to now as our Sunshine Deserts meets Soviet realism moment*. There's a touch of Foghorn Leghorn in there too. It didn't make it into the final building unfortunately when the barrel vault behind it disappeared. One to be revived though.


(FAT, Image of the park including early iteration of the Hoogvliet Villa)

* Incidentally the original building used for this been tracked down by someone and photographed here.

Avenue: Notes Towards A Spatial Theory of Suburbia

How does one look seriously at the suburbs? How does one get past the lazy assumptions to understand what makes them work, as well as what doesn't?

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took their students to study America's Levitown suburb they had to develop new methods to describe its spaces. The traditional tools of architectural representation - plans, sections and models - were supplanted by photography, film, cartoons and collections of artifacts and ephemera.

The Venturi's study was predominantly, though not exclusively, sign based rather than spatial. Their interest was in the signs and symbols of the American suburb rather than its spatial organisation. This still remains its least analysed and understood aspect from an architectural point of view. Beyond such pejorative descriptions as 'sprawl' there is no serious spatial vocabulary for suburbia.

Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to traditional forms of architectural analysis. The qualities denigrated by architects and urbanists - its formlessness and lack of spatial hierarchy - require different modes of representation. Equally the same traditional tools are instrumental in establishing the counter claims of urbanism. Or, put another way, architecture's representational and analytical tools are better at describing the positive qualities of urban because that's what they have been developed to do.

The ubiquity of the representational devices employed by architects blinds us to their partiality. The figure-ground drawing for instance has been vital in establishing how we think about the city and, in particular, the relationship between private and public space. Possibly the most influential figure-ground plan ever was Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome. Nolli's plan represents enclosed public spaces as equivalent to open civic spaces, illustrating them as white positive ground against the black figure of buildings. This technique gives the piazzas, colonnades and courtyards a compelling physicality, suggesting the convivial, communal qualities of internal rooms but on a much larger scale.



Following Nolli, the external spaces of the city are conceived as urban living rooms fostering civic qualities through the physical proximity of bodies in space. By contrast suburbia's fragmented spaces are seen as encouraging social atomisation through physical dispersal. But if the city is made of up of certain typological components - streets, squares and colonnades - then what are the suburban equivalents? The avenue, the parade and the cul-de-sac? What kinds of social spaces do these create? What civic qualities do they possess?

To begin to find out one might have to look beyond architectural representation to other art forms. Pop music in particular has a vital relationship to suburbia. Frequently this is antagonistic - a railing against suburbia's political and social conservatism - as in goth, grunge or metal. The relationship is more ambiguously affectionate in the case of the English literary pop tradition of The Kinks, Small Faces and the Beatles through to The Jam, Blur and Pulp. The fact that pop is often an escape - both literal and metaphorical - from suburbia, means that this portrayal is inevitably double edged, describing this landscape with a mixture of affectionate observation and caustic commentary.

Equally the endless suburbs of somewhere like LA have have been a key subject matter from the surf pop of the '50's and '60's through the denim rock of Laurel Canyon's decadent suburbs in the 1970's to the G Funk and west coast rap of Dr Dre and Death Row records. With Dr Dre the music's languid affluence and smooth sense of unease acts as a darkly satirical ramping up of the familiar cliches of suburban one-upmanship. The video for Still Dre even works as a satire of '50's LA pop with Dre and Snoop Dog cruising the suburban streets in retro Cadillacs on the way to the beach.



Whilst Pulp are in many ways a quintessentially urban band - and the very particular urbanism of Sheffield at that - they also brilliantly evoke an edge of the city feeling too. Jarvis' tales of adult affairs and formative sexual experiences gone wrong exist within the social mores of close knit suburban communities. David's Last Summer combines both an affectionate homage to suburban childhood and the corresponding desire to escape. Its spoken word vocal bids suburban teenage life a fond farewell, although it remains ambiguous as to whether this is as a result of growing up and moving on or something more tragic. Its evocation of the teenage house parties and exquisitely endless summers on the cusp of adulthood is hard to beat.

Walking to parties whilst it's still light outside.

Peter was upset at first but now he's in the garden talking to somebody Polish.
Why don't we set up a tent and spend the night out there?
And we can pretend that we're somewhere foreign but we'll still be able to use the fridge if we get hungry
or too hot.



These are also the spaces described by the paintings of George Shaw. Shaw paints suburbia but he also gets to the heart of its more ambiguous and difficult to define spaces; left over places, ends of terraces, undeveloped land. These places exist on the margins of suburbia where development has (temporarily) stopped and become a temporary home to all sorts of improper activities. Ignored by most people, these are public spaces for (mostly) minor acts of transgression. It is also the same dead space of Pulp's song Reservoir, which captures the unpleasant goings-on of unpopulated bits of suburban infrastructure.

But the 'proper' spaces of suburbia also lend themselves to reinterpretation. The suburban cul-de-sac is a public space as well as a piece of pragmatic development. Perhaps because of their social and economic exclusivity these spaces become home to street parties and events as well as informal meetings. The drawing below (by my colleague Sean Griffiths) is of the street where he grew up and describes the impromptu football matches that were played on it. The 'pitch' is distorted by circumstance so that the house gates becomes the goal-mouth, stretching and rotating the familiar layout. Here, ironically, is the classic figure ground plan of the city but adapted to show things that are usually left out such as activity and event.


Perhaps this is where suburban place differs from urban space. It is repetitive and formally unexciting. The architecture isn't challenging or formally inventive in the way that architects want it to be. It's what happens in it that's interesting though. This activity requires an expanded version of traditional architectural drawing to capture, one that describes places rather than buildings and content rather than form.

The Fall and Rise of the Suburban Sit Com

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was one of the darkest sit-coms ever to appear on British TV. Whilst its new remake has a depressing pointlessness to it, the original still has a strange and surreal brilliance. Watch an episode

of it today and it is clearly still very funny. It also serves as a fascinating document about the suburban landscape, which it captures in a way that is both visual and structural.

Like suburbia the shows structure was deliberately repetitive and predictable. Each episode would begin with a sequence where Reggie would leave his house and walk through the suburban streets to the train station. This walk was almost identical each time except for minor comic deviations that arrived - like the landmarks of the route that he would take - right on cue. A large part of the humour came from the slightly heart breaking predictability of this routine. Locked into the same pattern day in day out, Reggie's minor transgressions became ever more bizarre and desperate.

The estate that Reginald Perrin lived on with its streets named hopefully after famous English poets, and the vaguely deco red brick office of the fabulously dowdy Sunshine Deserts where he worked, are all depicted with deadpan pathos. Although seemingly the same each week they actually change to give a series of clues as to the character's mental deterioration. The interiors are equally repetitive and loaded with painful over-familiarity, from the minor victories against his fellow commuters in the morning train carriage to his attempts to avoid sitting in his bosses farting chairs.

Perrin's rejection of suburbia is complex and never entirely resolved one way or the other. After faking a suicide driven by his desperate boredom he starts a new life as an entrepreneur selling useless products. His Grot Shops are a huge success though and he ends up rejecting this new enterprise too. Its success has rendered it as hollow and emptily aspirational as his previous life. Following this he and his wife set up a therapy centre cum commune in their original house.

This invasion of the family home is quite significant and genuinely alters its relationship to the suburban context. The vaguely hippy, counter cultural ideas behind the commune completely transform the classic sit-com family house. In this sense the show's theme was very similar to that of The Goode Life, another 1970's sit com based around a rejection of suburban life. In this show Tom and Barbara Goode - two well to do suburbanites - decide to quit their jobs and attempt to live self-sufficiently. Their experiment transforms the immaculate lawn of the suburban home into a miniature working farm. Like Reggie Perrin though, they are not natural rebels and most of the humour comes from their obvious suppressed longing to return to the comforts of their former lifestyle.

In one of the most telling episodes a genuine hippie comes on a pilgrimage to visit Tom and Barbara's experiment in sustainability. But he has fundamentally misjudged their radicalism and they are bewildered by this hardcore acolyte. Clearly their rejection of suburban norms is partial at best and any wholesale embracing of a plausible alternative lifestyle is played for nervous laughs.

Similarly Reggie Perrin's daydreams about romantic trysts with his secretary usually involve the two of them making out on his office desk in the middle of a meadow. His escape fantasies are ultimately puerile and absurd and never really allow him to escape all that far at all.

Both Reginald Perrin and The Goode Life were made in the 1970's and early '80's and mined the incompatibility of suburbia's ultra conformity with the ideas thrown up by the late '60's. The interesting thing from an architectural point of view though is how the uniformity and spatial repetition of suburbia becomes part of the joke. To some extent most sit-coms rely on a small number of locations where the spatial arrangement becomes important in establishing strict routines for the characters. The importance of this spatial choreography is captured amusingly in Dan Meth's diagrams of sit com houses.

These set arrangements are vital in establishing the routine against which the action unfolds. The difference in Reggie Perrin - and one of the reasons why it is still such a brilliant piece of satire - is the way that this familiarity is subtly altered as the series progresses. The letters on the Sunshine Deserts factory slowly fall off. The grim routine of entering his bosses office becomes an elaborate game. After his suicide Reggie returns in disguise and proceeds to live an almost identical life to his previous one. Any attempt to move on or affect meaningful change seems doomed to failure. Unlike the characters in most sit-coms Perrin tries desperately to escape his situation. In some ways he rebels against the structure of the situation comedy itself.

The most telling example of this is in the titling of the episodes. These are fractionally different each week and take the form of Reggie's excuse for being late when he arrives in the office each day. The excuses become ever more absurd as the series goes on but ultimately remain utterly rooted in routine. Their flights of fantasy only serve to reinforce his total inability to escape. In their repetition lies an acute satire of suburbia itself. Always the same but obsessed by minute displays of individuality and difference.

Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties, Hampton Wick."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, signal failure at Vauxhall."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff shortages, Nine Elms."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, derailment of container truck, Raynes Park."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, seasonal manpower shortages, Clapham Junction."
Ep.2 "Eleven minutes late, defective junction box, New Malden."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, overheated axle at Berrylands."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, defective axle at Wandsworth."
Ep.5 "Eleven minutes late, somebody had stolen the lines at Surbiton."
Ep.6 "Twenty-two minutes late, black ice at Norbiton."
Ep.7 "Twenty-two minutes late, obstacles on the line at Berrylands."
Ep.8 "Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden."
Ep.9 "Twenty-two minutes late, fed up by train delays, came by bike. Slow puncture at Peckham."
Ep.10 "Twenty-two minutes late, escaped puma, Chessington North."

I Love The Sound Of Raking Grass

View of the Tower of London from the air, 1945 (English Heritage -NMR Archives)

The BBC’s Britain From Above is currently viewable on iplayer. Last weeks short film charted London’s development since the second world war via aerial photography. At the end of the war the RAF undertook an extensive photographic survey of the capital and this is used as the jumping off point for an analysis of how the city has changed (or not as it turns out) since then.

The remarkable thing about London is how the various visionary proposals for rebuilding its bomb damaged areas failed to transform its ancient street pattern. Plans to redesign large chunks of it, such as Abercrombie’s plan for London as a network of parks, simply never happened. The isolated pockets of post-war housing have failed to impact at the scale of the aerial survey.



Abercrombie, Park System of London (via London Landscape web)

Also interesting in the immediately post war film footage is the presence of inner city allotments that sprang up on bomb-sites in the wake of food shortages and rationing. These parasitic community gardens are particularly provocative in relation to contemporary thinking about sustainable communities and ideas of localised food production and small-scale agriculture.

Allotments colonising the inner city is a kind of reverse urbanism, suggesting a merging of country and city rather than the rigid divide (both conceptually and literally) of planners such as the Urban Task Force. The foundation of much of the protesting against London’s expansion and the various Eco villages is based on two principles: Increased densification of the inner city, and the maintenance of the green belt. This in turn is based on a highly architectural desire to distinguish city and non-city, or figure and ground, and preserve the distinction between city, suburb and country. Sprawl, especially suburban sprawl is the enemy. This is often as much a conceptual problem as a literal one, almost as if the all important civitas of the city could leak out and disappear into the water table unless carefully hemmed in.



A looser definition of the city and non-city, or a merging of the two, might allow for new types of spaces, which in turn might alter relationships between people, infrastructure and travel. Allotments in the inner city have a corollary with opera houses in the suburbs, a scenario which could, perversely, allow more sustainable community based activities to grow.

Perhaps too there is an answer here to the problem of hipster urbanism, ‘regeneration’ which is actually a kind of class cleansing. In this, the city merely becomes a fashionistas playground and part time home for the super rich. The hip aura of somewhere like Hoxton (or wherever, scene watching pedants!) relies on its status as the ultimate in urban edginess, an anti-suburbia. Remove the distinction and……