Thamesmead

Another journey we went on.

'To see oneself as if from the outside, to see oneself, as it were, in a romance' is how Keiller's Robinson phrases it, as we watch an inflatable Ronald Macdonald buckling up with laughter in the wind. Proverbially, we are living in interesting times, and yet it's as lugubrious an affair as it ever was.
We went east for this one. A long journey on the DLR takes one out through the recognisable urban landscape of zones 1 and 2, the odd forlorn grey church or Passmore Edwards philanthropic effort stands forlornly in amongst quotidian yellow terraces and post war blocks, all of which stare uncomfortably at the glistening Wharf, and the Blair-box post urban dwelling units, all mediocrity and lack of spirit, each made out of a hundred different materials, all of them cheap, all of them nasty.
Eventually though East London becomes something completely different. As the DLR proceeds along its raised path, it moves into the areas south of the Olympic joke; Silvertown, North Woolwich. Space opens out here, there are gaps between objects, factories, wastelands, sewage, the occasional outcrop of Victorian dock-worker housing. This is neither the inner London of familiar neighbourhoods, with their individual characters and attractions, but neither is it the seemingly interminable suburban London of small, identical centres surrounded by seemingly infinite stretches of disconcertingly banal houses. There is no topography out here, it is uncannily flat, and the sky seems larger, more oppressive.

You get out at Woolich Arsenal, make your way up the escalator through a terrible parody of eighties public art that might have once adorned a cocktail bar full of braying brokers. In this case the one who should know better is Michael Craig-Martin.

The first point of call, as it should be, is a caff, in this case a rather cavernous effort on Hare street. Just us at first, followed by a handful of yout' and then an elderly couple. The street itself looks rather upset, empty. We discuss the potentials of genuine Raskolnikoff-style loft-living in a dilapidated building across the street, and the appropriateness of a pound shop with a shrub growing energetically from its sign. After some food, coffee and a charitable donation of superglue from the proprietor, we're off, the route being from Woolwich, along the river to Thamesmead.



Woolwich Arsenal has military pedigree. This now manifests itself as a heritage museum, luxury flats in vintage buildings and strange old men wandering around in fatigues, looking rather camp. Not far away from us, a couple of these old queens were beseeching some young boys to 'MARCH!'. Inside the building they have a section of the Iraqi Supergun.



Gormley is the sum of all the public art ever created. It has something to say about the individual and corporeality, maybe. It's the art equivalent of a half-arsed fireworks display; ooh, aah, that's nice.



A coded message that we were entering sovereign territory. The logo has a sinister simplicity to it, easily carved into flesh with a blade.



There was barely anybody around. The whole day had the feeling of that strange over-provision of space that excites the hauntological imagination so; spaces built for ceremonies that there are no longer enough people to take part in. Rattling around in the old place when the kids have gone. There'll be a lot of this feeling soon.



Where old bikes come to die.



The Keillerian Picturesque.
A flat in the buildings to the right of the photo went on the market a year ago at £285,000. You can get one now for £120,000.



The charming prospect from a Negative-Equity Ghetto. While we passed, there were children playing nearby, the most spirited moment of the day at that point.



More anti-picturesque urbanism. This was parked in front of a square of eco-houses, all wooden framed windows, passive solar gain windows and ventilation towers. It must have taken quite a maneuver to get that into the bush in such an impressive fashion.



Everybody needs something to take the edge off it.



It's hard to quite see how a vicious monster is going to make children more likely to enjoy reading.



This mammoth warehouse was completely empty, not yet finished. And what a time to be finishing off! There's been much nonsensical chat about empty Woolworths and high street space being turned into art-space, but to find the closest equivalent to the to the riverside warehouses or the dead factories of previous generations, surely this is the unfortunate answer - gargantuan blairite distribution sheds?



The plastic sheathe containing this planning notice had filled up with water like a bureaucratic colostomy bag.



What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be.



grim.



Where were you in '92?



We found the last remaining vestige of the snow in Britain.



This is the Ridgeway, a quasi-rural path covering Bazalgette's Southern Outfall Sewer, its blankness punctuated by the ubiquitous surveillance.



A badge of honour, apparently.





Beneath the Ridgeway there is a road whose only users were learner drivers, interminably going back and forth.



The right-to-buy in action.



Oh Corbu!



It seems that Thamesmead is losing walkways...



In fact, Thamesmead appears to be losing rather a lot of itself. This was once the health centre.





Like something from Pynchon, there appeared to be a conspiracy involving the post.



It looks like there's been nothing to report for a long time.




Except that romance can occur anywhere.



Nobody receives any messages here.



Canaletto.





At the other side of the lake, horses roam freely.



What's all this about a new way?



We needed to rest, so we popped in for a little bit of milk-plus. Just to take the edge off of things. Although inside the bar certain unfortunate truths about East London became clear; that we were a long way from Kinsgland Road.





Welly welly welly well!




There was a demon spectre at the window here.





Note that on the wall of this community centre, the artist has depicted various different phases in the housing history of the area; The Brutalism, and the two methods in which it has been exorcised; Thatcherite reaction and Blairite apologetic eclecticism.



Nearing the end of the journey, awaiting our train back to Kansas, we were confronted with this poster, two unseemly characters who have been living on the walls for the last year or so, smugly staring at each other in satiated consumptive bliss. Laura depicted them at her last exhibition; they're probably estate agents.



And then, we left, to be injected back into the familiar city.

Wandering the Wharf

In honour of the current immaterial turmoil, we went a-wandering, looking for material evidence. We were accompanied by Lady Vergeht and the textual ghost of a certain Mr. Pevsner. Our journey began on the new 135 bus route, which links Crossharbour and Old Street, and conveniently passes E&V HQ (oh, where you three years ago, oh great five minute shordeditch-doorstep link?).


The square in which this fellow sits was a good four degrees colder than its surroundings; perhaps his mood had affected the microclimate. Below his face there runs a channel, totally dry upon our visit. It is conceivable that he has cried himself out. (Also note the Neo-Classicism, the defining cultural motif of the entire area).


Day in, day out, he stares at this glass wall, until either it or he goes.


This chap has been trapped in a forcefield created by the overwhelming symmetry of the Beaux-Arts planning of the area. SOM employ corporate magicians to generate conservative ley-lines.


This totem is where the dark energy of the area emanates from. The use of stainless steel cladding is supposed to be a nod to British Hi-Tech, despite the crassness of the Pomo form. Note Pelli's buildings for the WTC in New York. It must be said that perhaps it was the best decision - pink marble would have been a sickening sight, almost too much to take. This is also, of course, Robinson's memorial to Rimbaud.


Lynn Chadwick contradicted our sexual assumptions, by revealing himself to have been a man. His figures refuse to face either the totem, or the vacuous Louis Sullivan pastiches in the background.


This abandoned cafe gave a tantalising suggestion of what may one day become of the wharf, inshallah.


The end of history.


This is the infamous Slug & Lettuce, home to braying hordes every Friday evening, recently scene of much deserved consternation, though probably not nearly enough revelation.


The only thing even remotely interesting about this sculpture is its asymmetry and off-axis positioning. It seems to act as a transgressive supplement, the breaking of the rule that allows the rule to function ever more efficiently. Otherwise it is another boring example of both a maker of small objects making a large small object, and the mistaken conflation of structural daring with sculptural content.


Outside the Foster & Partner's HSBC building, a piece of architecture remarkable in its seemingly infinite dullness, a pair of lions sit, identical to those that guard the building's Hong Kong counterpart. This one is off limits - perhaps it has sensed weakness amongst the passing bankers and has made moves to pick them off? Or maybe a despairing broker tried to feed themselves to it?


Another Neo-Classical object, this centaur wonders why it was considered witty to create him without arms, as if they had fallen off in a non-existent period following antiquity, when he was made of marble.


25 Bank street, until last week home of Lehman Brothers, sat silently and opaquely in the cold sun. There were no stains on the ground, no signs of violence. The Barcelona chairs still sat in the lobby, waiting...


And we waited a while too, but nobody jumped (it was the weekend, after all).


At first glance we thought this represented a moebius band, but it has two 'faces'. The dedication plaque in the centre reads; "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."


On the 9th of February, 1996 the IRA exploded a bomb at this exact location, killing two newsagents, who had not been evacuated in time, and causing £85 million worth of damage.




The following building will be explained in the words of its architect; John Outram.

My proposal is that Architecture can not be derived from 'dwelling' in any banal, roses-round-the-door, 'domestic' sense. To make such a reduction is a mark of what J.P.Sartre characterised as "l'homme, moyen, sensuel". Architecture is the diametric opposite of such well-upholstered, 19C, flaccidities. It is, instead, the making ourselves 'at-home' in the Kosmos. Architecture, and its only 'serious' purpose on a scale larger than the single project, is to build a general, large and civic lifespace that sets us, paltry humans, 'comfortably' situated within the Cosmos.

The source of the 'river of time and space' rises in its characteristic icon of a cave set within two mountains. This is the circular fan situated between two halves of the pediment - that have been deliberately split to register their division. From here the river flows downwards -registered by the blue (watery) bricks split by strips of lighter yellow. This river flows between the giant trees of the forest (nave) embodied by the main capitals with their foliate capitals. The forest, in its turn, is flanked by the enclosing 'battered' walls of sedimented brick which embody the 'mountains' that finally define the Vallery of Community, that is the ultimate spatial figure of the Architectural medium - equivalent to the dominating Vitruvian function of 'Commoditas'.

Having 'tumbled' down its 'valley' the 'river of space' passes under the 'gateway' to the Valley - embodied by the exaggerated white masonry surrounding the dark green entrance door. From there it flows outwards, towards the gate to Stewart Street, or the river Thames on the side of the 'levee'. It was not practical to inscribe the figure of the 'delta' which lies outside the 'gateway-door into the building'. Nor could either the street, or the River, be inscribed with the figure of infinity with which one may recall their 'bounding' identity as the 'death of the valley of community' by dispersion into the Ocean

We confined our work on the Vitruvian dimension of 'Venustas' - or the 'conceptual environment', on the outside. Even so, when the structure, whose iconography we have so engineered, is merely a large shed whose sole physical purpose is to pump dirty water from storm overflow sewers back up into the river Thames. One may well ask "What, then, is the legitimacy of our 'display'?

A simple answer, not entirely without weight in a 'free country' is that Ted Hollamby, Chief Architect-Planner of the LDDC, sole authority at that early time of its development, wanted it. Prime Minister Thatcher, with her drive to suppress all forms of 'government' decreed that the LDDC would only build infrastructures - roads, sewers and so on. It would not be allowed to 'express' its suspect 'liberal' and by implication Socialistic, culture by building anything above ground. The Isle of Dogs would be a monument to the ethic of 'commercialisation'. The three Pumping Stations were Ted Hollamby's only chance to introduce some 'quality'to the gruesome diet of British Developer's Drivel that marked the early years of Docklands.

There are still hints of a past here, it pays to leave artifacts of previous modes of production, to leave material relics.


We quenched our thirsts in a pub that has gigantic yellow skylons sticking from its roof. It was populated by a strange mix of local red-faced eastenders and two meter tall russian girls who had arrived by speedboat.


An incitement to occupy.


And finally, the walk ended at Robin Hood Gardens, looking strangely dignified in the setting sun.


The estate suffers most from its location. It is flanked to the east, south and west by busy roads, and thus has been hidden behind sound barriers that remind one of Virilio's bunker. But whereas a church has an eschatological link to military outposts, a home doesn't wish to speak 'war'.


As we passed, we surmised that there was a hybrid game of football/tennis going on in the sunken games pit, judging from the balls that flew above the parapet. Perhaps it was a spontaneous counter-unique sport to Eton fives?


The visual language of RHG is interesting, for representing a definite attempt to speak Modernism with a post-Corbusian dialect. The five points do not exist here, and there are no formal references to purism. Whereas most 'Brutalism' speaks fluent Corbu, from bullhorn profiles to shallow concrete vaults to ondulatoires and so on, we have here something not more, nor less ordered, but differently organised.


An atlas ought to be compiled of all the estate maps of London.


The buildings seemed casually indifferent to their uncertain fate.


A typical conversation runs as follows:

A: Modern Architecture is ugly.
B: Why is Modern Architecture ugly?
A: Because concrete is a horrible material.
B: Why is concrete a horrible material?
A: Because it is grey.
B: (Kills self).

And then home, as the sun finally set on what may well have been the last day of the 'summer'.