A Trip to NW3

Another brief wander was gone on.  This one was certainly not a drift, as it was guided by a certain Mr. Pevsner, whose guide to North London (not yet updated in the latest round of re-edits) was given to me by my father recently. Thus it was an opportunity to head up to a part of London (namely Hampstead) that I had spent very little time in at all, and deliberately see buildings, in this case modernist houses that I'll never ever ever have even the slightest glimmer of a fragment of a smithereen of a fleck of a hope of living in.

But to be honest, I simple wasn't prepared for the strangeness of the experience of the architectural experience of visiting one of the lesser known examples of the Camden avant-garde of the 1970s, the Branch Hill Estate, by the great Scottish Corbusian architects Benson and Forsyth.

It's certainly not easily found, the Branch Hill estate. Based upon the description of the perambulation from Pevsner, we had to descend from a pond (once used to wet the throats of tired horses) at the very top of the hill, passing through a meadow after the pavement vanished, and then deducing that the little hidden driveway beside a terrace was actually the route down. Then, nestled into hillside of pronounced slope, surrounded on all four sides by a thickness of trees, the tell-tale white render and black window frames became visible, the signature details of a Camden Council brutalist estate.

But I have to say that this was the very weirdest one I have ever encountered. Neave Brown on Alexandra Road is a fantastic abstraction of the density and massing of your typical 19th century estate housing, while Vincent Tabori's effort near Highgate Cemetery plays wonderful games with garden landscapes. But while those might both be formally more exciting, I've never encountered an estate arranged in such a strange fashion as this one.

 

Even Benson & Forsyth's work over at Maiden Lane (which like no other place in London allows you to imagine that you are in a city in continental Europe), is nowhere near as ridiculously set out as this. 

Because the Branch Hill Estate is arranged as a grid, a ruthless grid. Take a look at the map from the first image; apart from perhaps the Heygate Estate map, with its long black streaks, this is perhaps the most unique of all the layouts of housing estates in London. Each of the 21 blocks on the plot takes up what is basically a square. These are divided into 2 units each, meaning that this is a block of semi-detached houses, stretched out into a quilt, a mat, rather than a terrace. Each house is entered from the side, and linked in one direction by staircases, and then in the other direction by straight walkways.  

Flats are organised with 2 bedrooms at the lower level, with a large open plan kitchen/dining space, a living area and one more bedroom above. The lower bedrooms have a courtyard, albeit a small one, and most of these were highly verdant. But look at the images above; there are bridges that run across from the upper floor of each building...

... which lead onto the roof of the one below. So each house has a roof terrace which is set above the house below it on the slope. I, for one, think that this is a lovely gesture of communal spirit; assuming that the heavy concrete frame construction is adequate for sound insulation (and it should be, considering there are gardens placed above), then there's something incredibly touching about an estate of such apparent gridded rigidity actually harbouring a complex and ambiguous differentiation of property boundaries.

At the top of the hill there you can see the Branch Hill Lodge, which was an existing large house on the hill. This was bought by the council in 1965, and is now an old people's home. The grounds are what became the site of the council housing beneath. 

There's something hilariously incongruous about the design of the estate; the strange mediterranean hill-top impressions, the brick staircases, the high-grade concrete, the white paint everywhere, it's almost a joke to stumble upon this in such a seemingly Ennnnnnglish part of London. 

An abstraction, not of some Georgian or Victorian typology as found elsewhere in Camden, but a Sicilian hill village, misinterpreted and translated into a leafy suburb.

But there is something else about the estate, another slightly unsettling sensation, that is palpable as one walks around. If you believe people who claim that bad design can make you vulnerable to muggings, that a certain layout of buildings and open space necessarily lead to failed neighbourhoods (or vice versa, certain layouts and arrangements necessarily lead to vital, thriving neighbourhoods), and this includes supposed empiricists like Space Syntax, as well as anecdotalists like Jane Jacobs, then Branch Hill Estate just makes no sense at all. It should, by all accounts, be a stabber's paradise. Its narrow lanes, with blind corners every few meters and a plethora of possible escape routes for a ne'er-do-well, should be teeming with junkies and gangs. If you believe that spatial environment is everything, then this block should be the worst in the world; it breaks every single rule.  

But no, it's just lovely. Quiet as a mouse (although not completely, there were a few people passing by as we walked through), and with what one can see of the interiors appearing to be as seductive a living space as one can envisage, there isn't even the slightest hint that this place is anything other than a wonderful little secret village.

But, to slightly expand; there are probably a few counter-arguments that could be made to explain why this estate isn't a dump. On the one hand, it's in Hampstead, for God's sake. I've no idea what the figures are, but I'd be willing to bet that there may well not be a single unit in the Branch Hill Estate that remains under control of the local authority: that the right-to-buy open-plan modernist houses in Hampstead was too good an opportunity to ever miss. Wealthy neighbourhoods, by and large, have lower crime rates, whether the houses that make them up be made of concrete or of brick. 

On the other hand, it's isolated. Being so very very cut off from the outside means that there's probably almost no through traffic, whether vehicular or pedestrian. This I have mixed feelings about; this estate may be high density and it may be unashamedly modern, but in urbanistic terms it probably has most in common with your suburban cul-de-sac. It may be hypocritical, but I'm tempted to look the other way on this one.

Now I'm perfectly happy to accept that were this estate to have been built in a down-on-its-luck area in South London in the 1970s, then its fate may well have been very different (Maiden Lane was pretty notorious, from what I have heard). But the only thing that this proves is the tautological point that nice areas tend to be nice, no matter what the style of their buildings. Let us not throw the proverbial babies out with the bathwater here, but at the end of the day, the social performance of a neighbourhood is mostly due to its economic fortunes. Ignore these in favour of some panacea based on how many small shops there are or how few blind corners there are to hide behind, and you're basically trying to sell us snake oil.

 

(Just too lush, too gorgeous!)

But perhaps I should make a further economic point here, one that concerns the project for modernist housing in general. We have to admit that the Branch Hill Estate was a financial mess during construction; problems on site and the complicated nature of the design meant that the budget was subject to massive over-runs. A familiar story, especially for Camden Council estates, but with Branch Hill and others now listed buildings, with people like me traipsing around staring at them hungrily, we must ask what the significance of this is. When you look at the mass-housing buildings from the heroic post-war period, one rule of thumb seems to be glaringly obvious; the buildings that have survived to the present day were frequently the ones with bespoke designs, while those most swiftly removed are frequently the system-built, pre-fab panel construction buildings. Obviously there are exceptions to this (in Glasgow, Basil Spence's Hutchesontown flats are long demolished but the Red Road Flats are only just going down), but a general rule seems to be that if you build it properly, if you spend the money on it in the first place, then it's worth keeping. Indeed; this is the same for every generation of building; we love our Georgian terraces because the slums were pulled down, we love our Glasgow tenements because the single-ends were torn down. Now; we love our Balfron Tower at least partly because the Freemasons Estate was torn down.

Does this mean that a lesson to be drawn is that architects should attempt to spend as much as they possibly can, that budgets are irrelevant to the task at hand? Of course not. Architects need no extra help in rendering themselves redundant to the modern construction industry. But perhaps the lesson here is that there might just be a secondary economic effect involved in successful estates, that it is not quite enough to have wealthy residents, but that if it's designed thoughtfully, and built properly, then it will be worth it in the long run.

And to tell you the truth, it was somewhat agonising walking around the Branch Hill Estate, with its beautiful woodland, its seclusion, its large open interiors, its massive roof terraces, its large windows and narrow alleys, its all important sense of adventure, experiment and of course modernity.

Because one had to drift away...

Oh! The Huge Vanity!

A double dose of me talking bolognese. The video above is me giving a lecture in Zagreb, about a year and a half ago. It is regarding monuments and olympic architecture, with a special focus on (you've guessed it) the ArseOrbit. Below is a little interview they conducted with me the next day.

Chopin - Prélude No.21 in B flat, op.28

Another prélude; this time the slinky and oceanic No.21.

This is the ninth I've 'finished'. I think the transcriptions themselves are alright, but obviously my technique isn't really up to scratch for some of them, and it's doubtful whether any of the super-difficult ones (no.5, no8, no.16 (!!!), no.24) will ever be possible for me to play. I'll keep going though, see how far I can get.



Hope these are enjoyable in some way.

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.

Some announcements...

First off, how bloody strange is this?

I haven't the foggiest idea how on earth this occurred, and what it means...  For example, one could begin with the fact that even within my tiny little field, I can think of a great many people in my age bracket with far more influence than I... Furthermore, they seem to have gotten hold of an old cv of mine and them hyperbolically amplified the achievements (guest critic becomes visiting professor etc)... but then, hang on, what the hell have I got in common with billionaire russian teenagers who own 20 galleries and all that milieu? The mind boggles.

I can only surmise that this is an in-joke played on me by someone who knows me personally, but I can't for one second think who it might be, and I don't particularly care to find out.



Nothing Will Be Restrained - A Short History of the Tower from Simolab-Creative AV on Vimeo.

Anyway; as if one film with me pontificating about the Orbit wasn't enough, here's another. This one might be of interest to you because it's got Kapoor and Balmond talking bolognese about the bloody thing, and they manage to hang themselves without me or anyone else needing to be too harsh about it. Note also my incessant, compulsive need to compare everything to exhibition palaces and train stations...

Raining in Neukölln.

I was recently in Berlin after an old friend's wedding (see what I was telling you about yesterday?), and found myself, after returning from a long long weekend, lying in a friend's flat in Neukölln listening to the rain absolutely hammering against the windows. I made a short recording out on the terrace proper, and about a month later I've made a little sonic something out of it.

It's pretty simple, perhaps sketch-like, but I've gone for a decidedly Germanic style, both in terms of rhythm and also in terms of the suggested harmonies.

The Greenock Cut

I'm not quite sure what I'm driving at here, and I certainly won't be able to convey the feeling to you with these rubbish, over-saturated iPhone photographs, but I want to discuss a strange sensation I felt recently when visiting a building.

I was back up in Glasgow, having been at a wedding looking out over Loch Lomond a few days previously. I am at that particular stage of life, when a particular conjunction of age, class and education means that I am currently surrounded by weddings. Indeed, it's not just my friends - I have lived in the same neighbourhood for four years now and cannot help but note that the inhabitants have gone from carrying their hangovers around with them to carrying their lovely little babies instead, albeit equally sleeplessly...
As part of my time up there there was the opportunity to go out down the Firth of Clyde, seeing Port Glasgow and Greenock, two very sad, neglected towns that still dwell in the shadow of their Victorian grandeur, with some undeniably exciting 19th century buildings amongst the boarded up council semis that climb the hills by the water. In a brief swoon of imagination it seemed like it might be possible to create a bohemian enclave there for those of us who are sick of London and its poisonous wealth, but of course we all know where that kind of thinking leads.

Up in the hills above the Firth is a remarkable bit of early 19th century infrastructure called the Greenock Cut. This was a narrow canal winding its way around a hillside down from an elevated Loch, connected to all manner of secondary reservoirs, eventually cascading down towards sea level and thus powering the mills and factories of Greenock below. Although the power it generated was nothing like what steam or combustion engines would do relatively soon afterwards, it was a fascinating example of what we now call 'sustainable' infrastructure.

For many years it lay abandoned, but it received some millenium money and was cleaned up and now functions as a charming walking path. But it's not this I really wanted to mention here.
There's a condition I've mentioned on a number of occasions, which you might call 'the space too big', or something perhaps a bit more eloquent than that. In the book I discuss it with regard to the sensation of visiting Crystal Palace Park without the Palace, the overwhelming sense of a space constructed too large for the events using it. It's something I go on about a lot, actually. But on this trip I experienced a similar feeling from a very small building.

This is the Greenock Cut Visitor's Centre. An unremarkable building, one must admit, a design in what you might call Rural Scots Quotidian; cheap, sturdy, unostentatious. There's a lot of these buildings all over the country, especially the highlands, from public toilets to village halls and so on.

The teenage girl who was working in the shop that day looked at us as if we were the first people she had seen in a long time. At one side of the room (to the left of this image) were the usual assortments of ridiculous toys and sweets, none of which you've seen before, which call to mind small dilapidated factories on the outskirts of Midlands towns, churning out little plastic alligators and so on, last little traces of (non-military) manufacturing in the UK. Next to the door was a visitor's book that seemed to have been signed at a frequency of about once a week. 

In a room off from the gift shop was the exhibition proper. This was a snaking maze of panels, with illustrations of men and women in 19th century clothing explaining the story of the Cut, how it functioned and how it effected them. There were a number of three dimensional displays, including my favourite, in which LEDs embedded in a relief map of the area lit up with the flicking of a small steel switch - the lights depicting the Cut itself coming on one after the other in sequence. For an exhibition that supposedly had been completed within the previous ten years it was remarkably dated, but in what felt a rather pleasant nostalgic fashion, as it brought back fragments, grainy memories of all manner of small exhibitions that I had been ushered around as a child.

But it wasn't just the displays that induced nostalgia; look at the ceiling. Nobody in their right mind would specify a tongue-and-groove timber panelled ceiling any more, but they were once incredibly common. Inside and frequently adorning the undercroft of a building, you could find them from at least the 1960s through to perhaps the beginning of the 1990s, by which time they were beyond the pale. They were particularly common in Scotland; and everyone from shop-fitters all the way to Gillespie Kidd & Coia would specify that kind of ceiling in their buildings. It just goes to show that a detail, a material can conjure up a certain time period in a very involuntary way, that simple architectural devices can be powerfully evocative in a very personal, perhaps emotional manner, and that the slowly changing fashions for space can, even when of a low quality, still be used as a temporal signpost.

 

And then there was an educational room, which I suppose plays host to school groups during term time,  a flurry of activity in a short period, but at this point empty, with the small windows casting a thoroughly wan light into the room. Even the fish in their tank looked lonely.

The door to the office was open. It seemed that perhaps there was room for a staff of perhaps two curators. There was a large board for notes, and some attractive plan-chests, as well as a rather quaint but charming old fuzzy green carpet. One wondered what the career route to working in this near-empty building by the side of a loch was: someone in there must have been a historian, and perhaps the other was a conservationist or some such, as much of the information shown around the building was wildlife-related. What kind of research would they do? Did they ever have to edit or re-curate the exhibition? There was something eerie about the building, silent, quiet, a design that seemed out of time, with little to do. There's always something melancholic about a building from which activity seems to have fled, even in the most humdrum of spaces.

Some Préludes

I finished transcribing a few more Chopin préludes recently; here they are:



So that's 8 out of the 24...

PEDANTRY

This has been really annoying me.

You know that this...

... is "The Tallest Building in Europe"?

Well this...

... is a good 20m taller, and is in Yorkshire.

So do shut up.