A brief visit to Park Hill

I recently had occasion to visit Sheffield again, albeit just an overnight stay. I was giving a talk up at the University's Arts Tower, a fantastically refined Miesian block, famous for its paternoster lift, which was unfortunately out of action on the day I was there. After arriving on the train up from London, however, I had a few hours to kill before depositing myself at the hotel, so I decided to take my first trip up to Park Hill.

I probably don't need to explain this to you, but Park Hill is one of the UK's most experimental developments of public housing. Built from 1957-61, and listed Grade II in 1998, it was designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who had been students of Alison and Peter Smithson at the AA. It is perhaps best known as the most significant built example of the concept of 'Streets in the Sky'.

The design for Park Hill was essentially based upon the Smithsons' losing competition entry for the Golden Lane estate in London (which ended up launching the career of Chamberlain, Powell and Bonn, how about that for a counterfactual!), and was an attempt to recreate the positive aspects of working class communities while getting rid of the sufferings caused by the old back-to-back slums in which tenants had previously lived.

"The vital relationship between the house and the street survives, children run about, (the street is comparatively quiet), people stop and talk, dismantled vehicles are parked: in the back gardens are pigeons and ferrets and the shops are round the corner: you know the milkman, you are outside your house in your street." - Alison and Peter Smithson, An Urban Project

"The old houses, built during the nineteenth century, were in narrow streets, and the new homes that have replaced them, within the multi-storey buildings, have a system of access by means of 10-foot-wide street decks. These street-decks, open to the air and named after the demolished streets, run through the whole length of the buildings, often for over half a mile. As only specially designed electric trolleys for delivering milk and bread are allowed on these street-decks, they are virtually traffic-free. They have proved to be a useful meeting-place for mothers outside their front doors and a place where children can play in safety close to their homes." - Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Planning for Play, 1968

You get the picture; but now is not the time to dwell on the history of Park Hill, a long and fraught story of institutional neglect and the caprices of 'official' taste. Many others have written comprehensively on the subject; it is very much a cause célèbre in architectural circles. Like with most of the things I write in my own time these days, this is just an occasion to ruminate on my visit and its impressions. 

A defining feature of Park Hill is the way that it utilises the landscape. Unlike similar (and now demolished) blocks in Sheffield such as the Hyde Park or Kelvin flats, which were massively high and long slab blocks, at one end of the Park Hill complex the buildings are only four storeys (two flats) high, more or less matching the Victorian houses that face them across the street. When I arrived, only a very small cluster of flats were still occupied, their balconies full of plants and clutter, decidedly lived-in. A corner was turned, and the entire estate had been boarded up.   

The perforated steel panels instantly reminded me of the large estates in Glasgow that would stand empty for many years in places like Ruchill and Sighthill, waiting for the very last tenants to be moved out, mile after mile of hazy grey panels sealing the gaps in buildings waiting to be taken down. The difference however was that most of the Glasgow estates that I saw emptied and demolished in my time there were in a decidedly vernacular mode, all pebbledash and pitched roofs, but the less modern aesthetic didn't stop them from falling into the same state of neglect and decay that brutalism did. Indeed, every time I visit Glasgow I'm always shocked by the persistence of large areas which still have their streets, pavements and street-lamps, but no buildings occupying them - ghost neighbourhoods (here's just one example).

But one thing about Park Hill that's hard to get one's head around from drawings and photos is the way that the coiled up arrangement of blocks creates a varied set of spaces in between; not far from an Oxonian 'quad', or perhaps even a Great Estates' garden. The landscaping is certainly rudimentary and pretty neglected, but there's no sense of the windswept cliche of housing blocks set in pointlessly expansive greenery. 

Actually, it's being kind to describe the landscaping as rudimentary. It's often said that in photographs, modernist architecture looks totally incongruous when set beside its contemporary vehicles; the Citroens that pop up in the foreground of images of Le Corbusier's early villas seem to belong to another era than that of the crisp and futuristic buildings they are parked beside. There are many reasons for this; one of which is the way in which the bespoke, immobile objects of early modernist architecture deliberately disseminated themselves through media; the use of white stucco over standard brick panels creating a near abstract effect in black and white, but more than that there is something about the very formal language of modernism that still seems futuristic; wibbly neo-organicism aside there has been no new architecture since modernism -especially not of the quotidian sort- that genuinely has a visual stake in the future. 

This disjunction also seems to apply to the landscape around the buildings; while the housing itself looks tired and in need of love, it is still recognisably experimental and forward looking, whereas much of the cheap paving, walkways, benches and so on smacks of genuine neglect and cheapness.

"toddlers play on them; teens mend bikes, keep dates, swap gossip on them, teds occasionally brawl; heroic grans sit, legs akimbo, at the street-deck door" - Reyner Banham, The Vertical Community

Passageways (admittedly perhaps once intimidating at night) link the insides and outsides of the unravelled quadrants; here I am standing on the street at the periphery, with the balconies facing out, to the other, inner, side is the decking. The sense of 'relief', or depth, is one of the most important formal effects that the design has going for it; enlivening what might be an unremittingly blank surface. Consider here the logic of the exposed concrete grid (in almost square proportion), with the alternations of panel, balcony and recess. Now think of the contemporary method - frame to the inside, homogenous skin of curtain wall panels (usually arranged in some kind of half-hearted irregular pattern), with occasional coloured balconies pinned to the outside. While the contemporary mode is a more advanced form of construction, it invariably suffers from being caught between the very arbitrary flimsiness of its skin, leading to the confused plethora of materials one sees on 'Cabe-ist' flats everywhere, and the old architectural will-to-solidity.

And there is something intensely satisfying about the way the building gradually rears up as you descend the hill, the datum line of the roof carrying on regardless of the landscape, while new decks peel off from the ground level as it winds its way down. 

And here, here are walkways, those over-invested symbols of urban decay, of blight, of getting mugged  by feral youths, of drugs, of being able to cross the road without going downstairs...

Park Hill benefits greatly from its grid, which keeps the infill in order, without caprice. In its very repetitiveness the building definitely has something of the best character of 18th century housing; those Georgian Terraces that everyone goes on about. The repeating grid, the voids dropping back every three floors (that maisonette vertical rhythm I've talked about in posts before), the minor differentiation of the window panels (nothing like the shuddering banality of the barcode facade, the half-witted curtain wall technique still utilised today), all spread over such a large area, it all combines to create a very noble sense of structure and order; but order not of the type imposed from above, an egalitarian order of equal units.   

The only things breaking the line of the roof are the ubiquitous towers holding the lift machinery.

But you have to draw a line somewhere; this walkway is basically inept. Leading down from the second last closed quad towards the tallest blocks at the bottom, it is also the main route down to the train station and the city beyond. When this was in use it must have been a most intimidating passage; a good hundred meters into a blind spot, with only one way back up. Just picture coming round the corner in the dark to find the local gang hanging around there; if I picture it like Glasgow, then you'd run the risk of at least being given cheek, and, if it was the wrong night, something worse. This kind of thing happens anywhere - certainly most of the violence I encountered when I lived in Glasgow was in 'nice' areas where both me and my assailants were far from home, but I can't imagine a rat run like that being a particularly safe route. That said; the level of surveillance from flats is incredible; there'd be very little chance of getting away with anything without being seen.

This football pitch is about 1/2 size, and at a pronounced diagonal gradient. It must have made for some rather bizarre games in its time.

The way in which Park Hill unravels as it comes closer to the bottom of the hill is masterful. The higher the buildings get, the further they stand apart from each other, modifying their character from courtyard blocks to larger slabs at the bottom of the hill. It's easy to imagine this kind of arrangement being devised by some kind of parametric device, creating a reciprocal relationship between height and distance, ending up with a seemingly random but actually thoroughly considered arrangement of the blocks.

And a first glimpse of the 'problem'.

At times the upper parts of Park Hill began to resemble the 'ruin porn' of places such as Gunkanjima and Pripyat, silence, unchecked growth, the air heavy with the absence of people, the sublime tranquility of a megastructure in the woods. I've often wondered if it would be possible to bring this kind of sensation into architecture that we create now; this is definitely part of the purpose of studies of 'abstracted ruination' that I've conducted into iron & glass culture. Viz, iron & glass seemed to create an environment in which concepts of 'nature' and 'structure' were put into dialectical tension; from studying these built artifacts perhaps we can sense a way of bringing 'nature' into current design processes in ways which are not trite or superficial. Who knows if it's possible, it's certainly not happening at the moment. 

So, just in case you didn't already know; 'arty' regeneration experts Urban Splash teamed up with English Heritage and got involved in Park Hill, agreeing to renovate it, before selling off the new flats, studios, shops etc that they would create. Except they ran out of money to do it, so not only have they only renovated the bottom block of the complex but they required a bailout of public money to do so. While in Sheffield I heard that they were having severe trouble selling any of the flats in the current economic tumult (which would seem to be verified by the total transparency of the block here, suggesting no furniture inside, no inhabitation). So what has basically happened is that the complex has been gutted, emptied, the tenants moved out, state money has gone into the renovation of the block, which has been spent on converting the building for the classes with economic power to buy property, which they seem to be failing to do. Now call me a communist, but surely if the state was going to spend all this money on economically futile regeneration, they could have easily refurbished the blocks for the original tenants? This is just yet another example of the state guaranteeing private enterprise, when the same money it pisses into the pockets of developers could have been spent on the people from whom it comes, and for whose benefit it is supposed to be spent in the first place. 

ESTATE PUBS.

Some of the most interesting aspects of housing estates in Britain are their pubs; frequently, the cliche of the all consuming, all cleansing modernist aesthetic falls to pieces when one walks into the pubs on the ground floor of tower blocks, and everything inside is leather, ale, old black and white photographs of the neighbourhood when it was still a slum, mock-victorian wallpaper. The sign above refers to 'the Link', one of a number of pubs built as part of the Park Hill complex, now long shut.

One wonders if part of the Urban Splash plan was to hipster-ify the pubs. I must say that throughout the East End of London, which is of course the current mother lode of gentrification, I don't know of any estate pubs that have been requisitioned by the affluent and fashionable. In fact; in some places it would seem that the only pubs preserving their working class East London constituency are the estate pubs. I wonder if there's a correlation?

You might have noticed that the weather has been pretty strange of late. I've been having some problems recently that have merited my immediate attention, to the extent that I've been finding it difficult to even open my eyes and look at the latest news on this front. When I am more lucid I think to myself; "Consider the cultural and technological change between 1900 and 2000, and think what might be different in 100 years time; yes, the challenges are the biggest we've ever faced as a culture, and the outlook the gloomiest it's perhaps ever been, but there's no real way of predicting exactly how it will unfold, and if the dialectic of history is anything to go by, the future will be both increasingly wonderful and increasingly horrible, as it certainly was in the last century; you cannot know for sure." 

That's my optimistic voice.

Nevertheless, as I approached the bottom of the complex, the scene had a John Martin-esque quality.

THE GREAT DAY OF HIS WRATH

You must have noticed recently the overwhelming trend in landscape design for a studied wildness. Like a open space equivalent of pre-stressed jeans, every patch of land from the High Line in New York to the Olympic Park has been sown with the intention of making it look like a nonchalant rustic meadow. It's nice, don't get me wrong, but it has the same sense of herd-following that you get in more gullible fashion circles. Here's one; the rough land around the main site for the Park Hill regeneration has been sown with poppies, to match the red panels at the bottom. Oooh, isn't that nice?

There are definitely positive aspects to the refurbishment; the inversion of the glazing to panel ratio (2:1 from 1:2) is an improvement in line with contemporary tastes, while the new escape staircase is an exciting and attractive insertion. The inside of the flats looks great, again in line with a new taste for the rugged exposure of beams and so on, and it has to be said that the concrete, now repaired, looks lovely. 

However, it's easy to see that a lot of the depth of the facade has been lost or incoherently altered, and the inherently disposable character of curtain wall panels detracting from the force of the building. Furthermore, the colours are simply ghastly, jokey and frivolous in the worst kind of Blairite fashion, a distasteful Cool Britannia vibe. Would it be too much to ask that someone, client or architect, had suggested a more sensible colour scheme than this? I mean, those panels all come from a catalogue, they all cost the same, so there is no economic excuse for not thinking more about it. They obviously are meant to evoke the differently shaded brick, fine, but why does it have to be so brash? The building deserves better than childish jollity; it would look sufficiently 'contemporary' with a less saturated pallete, perhaps greener, greyer, more dignified. It could still be fashionable. 

And here is where the two worlds meet. It's unclear what the future will hold for Park Hill. If I remember correctly Urban Splash's original masterplan for the site involved actually increasing the density on the site by building more blocks at the top of the hill; obviously this is unlikely to happen any time soon, so the future is unclear. It's also not clear whether the listing will protect the parts of the complex that have been decanted, or whether their dilapidated state will provide an excuse for full demolition. In all, it seems a bit of a joke that thousands of people were gotten rid of, millions spent on doing up part of the building which they can't sell, leaving most of the thing unoccupied.

But what it seems to come down to in the end is a question of maintenance. It's often remarked that when Park Hill was initially inhabited it was chock full of cutting edge technology, such as the waste disposal system or the communal heating, and these kinds of facilities would eventually be very common in the construction of housing estates all over the country. These were great improvements over the slums people were moving out of, but as improvements they would be accompanied by an extra layer of infrastructural management. For example; if you own a house, then any repairs and maintenance is your responsibility alone. If you rent; your landlord should be the one who takes care of things, although we all know how difficult that can actually be. But in the cases of large, tightly connected and mechanically linked social housing complexes, the local authority was responsible, putting the buildings at greater risk from larger political and economic movements. In the case of British mass social housing, the economic crises of the 1970s followed by the all-out assault on local government from the Thatcher regime onwards created the perfect conditions for the decline and decay of the country's massed housing. So what it boils down to is not aesthetics, not the 'dehumanising' effects of large housing, but simply the question of whether we are prepared as a culture to support the communal project of housing; are we prepared to make the political effort to encourage living together? In recent history, we have not been.

I LOVE YOU WILL YOU MARRY ME.

It's not the worst thing in the world, really, for Urban Splash to recuperate the famous graffiti on the walkway as part of their marketing. Branding is rarely subtle, or sensitive, and one can understand utilising the iconic message as a way of underlining the fact that Park Hill can be a place of community, of emotional warmth, rather than the inhuman monstrosity it is frequently seen as. However, of course, life is never as neat as the images of life from branding. The slogan co-opted by Urban Splash (and the neon sign placed above the words themselves) ignore the beginning of the message: "Clare Middleton I love you will you marry me?" Upon seeing the message, Clare apparently said yes, but things didn't work out and the couple never got married, and then Clare died very young in 2007.

Tell It Like It Is

"At the time, I suggested that their purpose had been overlooked: psychogeography and the dérive were conceived, in a more politically ambitious period, as preliminaries to the production of new, revolutionary spaces; in the 1990s they seemed more likely to be preliminary to the production of literature and other works, and to gentrification, the discovery of previously overlooked value in dilapidated spaces and neighbourhoods."

- Patrick Keiller, Imaging

Criticism as a Substitute for Nostalgia

Appropriately enough, in amongst all this talk of nostalgia, and the palpably terrified condescension of self-styled gatekeepers pouring forth on the most imbecilic notions of ‘the Future’, there was a rare, rare, screening of Patrick Keiller’s quasi-documentary ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ at Birkbeck the other night.

‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ is jokingly referred to as Keiller’s ‘New Labour’ film, but for good reason. One of the most memorable themes of the two ‘Robinson’ films is the political despair that runs through them, as the post-Thatcher Tory government slowly grinds to a halt; in London (1992), John Major’s election victory is watched from the shadows, Robinson spitting out invective, decrying the English middle classes who voted Tory “because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so”. By the time Robinson in Space (1997) was made, things were changing, signs of Tory defeat are apparent, and Tony Blair’s name makes a cameo on a plaque on the outside of a travel lodge, a pertinent ghost of the future, but his time had not yet come. Bearing this in mind, it is only natural that a film commissioned soon after the election of 1997 might have a different political tone to it, the despondency taking a back seat to something more open to possibility, and although critical, the film is not despairing.

The film is not a ‘Robinson’ film, although it shares certain aspects of method with them. The camera is still mostly stationary, and the narrator is invisible (although this time voiced by Tilda Swinton), but the major difference is that it is a documentary; an experimental one, true, but a television documentary, with interviews, advert breaks and archive footage interspersed with the quasi-narrative elements. Keiller himself seems somewhat unhappy with the result, explaining to us the pressure he was put under to make a ‘Robinson’-esque film, rather than a purely didactic work, but it does not suffer unduly as a result. All three films are structured around single problems; London deals with ‘the problem of London’, the answer being that it is the first city to have disappeared; Robinson in Space poses ‘the problem of England’, coming to the conclusion, brilliantly stated by Keiller at the screening, that ‘British capitalism works, but is horrible’, and in the case of ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’, ‘why does the production of housing never get modernised?’, a more specific and, perhaps, a more academic problem than the first two.

The narrator travels around the UK interviewing various luminaries, including Martin Pawley, James Dyson, Doreen Massey and Cedric Price, with whose help she attempts to understand why Britain has the oldest and most run down housing stock in the advanced capitalist world, and why the housing economy produces so slowly and in such an outmoded fashion compared with other consumable objects. Keiller shows us footage of Bucky Fuller, Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys, representing avant garde approaches to the question of housing, and he visits faux-villages, Richard Rogers houses, prefabs and (surprisingly briefly) the architecture of Goldfinger and Neave Brown. Pawley answers the question of housing quickly and succinctly; using the remarkable and prescient metaphor of a bank note; an object made from the most banal of materials, and yet encrusted in detail; its symbolic value graphically reinforced with ideologically loaded imagery. What is the point of accelerating and modernising the production of houses when they are the locus of so many of our desires for permanence, the physical manifestation of much of our shadowy, spectral wealth (and even more ideologically, the place where our only valuable social institution (the family) resides)? It would not suit either the providers of houses, nor the consumers of them.

Keiller’s investigation often returns to questions of nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, with the former being associated with radicality and modernity (Massey suggests that the housing world will not change unless domesticity is revolutionised) and the latter with oppression and reaction. This argument is all very situationist, Constant’s New Babylon being a perfect example, but I’m unconvinced by it, perhaps partly because of the demeaning of the concept of nomadism over the last decades, becoming as much a signifier of the contemporary international jet-set bourgeoisie or the insecurity of work as the urban radical, uncovering the beach beneath the stones (be careful what you demand of capitalism, for it may grant your wish, but never in the way it was asked, Virno is good on this). Having said that, Keiller successfully manages to refrain from obvious politico-aesthetic judgements; this is not a polemic for the egalitarian value of fair-faced concrete, in fact it is disparaging of attempts to revolutionise domestic architecture with ‘wet’ construction. What is dealt with strongly is the economic structures and systems of the housing market, and it is this that sets Keiller the documentarian apart from Jonathan Meades; ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’ covers territory that Meades has often dealt with, such as the origins of the reactionary traditionalist aesthetic in the socialism of William Morris and the garden city movement, but of these two idiosyncratic critics, Keiller is the one more prone to take on the numbers of a situation.

One thing that Keiller appears to approve of in this film is the functionalism of the figures he draws from. Throughout the film, ‘modernisation’ seems to stand for the kind of technological modernity exemplified by Bucky Fuller, or Archigram, a notion of progress whereby aristocratic technologists will identify the material and functional problem, solve it, and thus the problem will no longer exist. Modern architecture is plagued by this ‘Solutionism’, a wilful simplicity of understanding, a naïve optimism that every suffering in the world is merely waiting for a tool to be invented to fix it. It ends up in question begging, such as when Archigram ask; we can build aeroplanes, cinemas that travel at 500 miles an hour in the sky, why don’t offices do the same? Or when they decide that a society of electronics and informational networks requires an architecture that reflects this; is it too much to ask of architectural theorists that they have ideas more nuanced than attempting to embody the ‘spirit of the age’? How does a figure like Richard Rogers go from the complexity of Lloyds, or the valuable attempt at radicality that is the Pompidou, to Chiswick Park, whose main architectural USP is that the stairs are on the outside, thus optimising the net-to-gross? ‘Solutionism’ is a functional way that architects can continue working, a symbolic narrative that excuses them from asking any difficult questions. Keiller is obviously not a wholehearted subscriber to this attitude, but the cautious optimism of the particular period that the film was made means that the claws were kept retracted, when knowing what we know now…

And this brings me to perhaps the main problem I had with ‘the Dilapidated Dwelling’. Failure, or the lack thereof. One of the greatest aspects of the Robinson films is the attempt they make at outlining and describing an architectural melancholy; the disembodied narratives are played out against the unique urban landscape that Keiller’s camera captures so well, the viewers gaze is unmediated by significant bodies. “You and I are deeply disillusioned people”, Robinson tells the narrator after they visit the haunts of Robert Burton, and he might as well be talking to us. The lack of corporeality, the materialism of the narratives, the disconnection as well as the incessant focus on the political, rather than any emotionally introspected lugubriousness mean that the Keillerian melancholy is not that of the simple idea of haunting, spaces of individual memory tied to space; rather they begin to abstract this melancholy into something universal, a glimpse of what you might call architectural failure. It is this quality that the structure of the documentary sadly lacks, but then at the same time the aesthetic, the Keillerian picturesque, which contributes so much to the other films is here amplified by the use of video rather than film stock. Where film bestows a certain cinematic heroism to the mundane images of the Robinson films, video removes the last hint of conventional aesthetical pleasures; it takes Keiller’s quotidian romanticism and amplifies it, lending an almost unbearable poignancy to even the most boring of images.

So, anyway; not his best, but still brilliant.

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.