Back of a napkin drawings

A napkin, covered in architectural drawings, purloined from the two young men sitting next to me in the Tinderbox coffee shop, Angel, once they had left. Much as they were complaining about the ridiculous design constraints on their various projects, I couldn't but envy the bubbling enthusiasm they had for their work.

Dalston Junction station, East London line

Bleak, isn't it. Modern, antiseptic, safety-first-handrailed to funnel us in and funnel us out more efficiently – quite accidentally a beautifully smooth edge to grind a skateboard on, but no doubt they’re developing facial-recognition CCTV that’ll call security as soon as that thought even crosses your mind.

Not exactly Stirling prize-nominated Westminster station – or the drama of Canary Wharf, or the Paolozzi mosaics at Tottenham Court Road… What happened, what changed? Westminster was barely a decade ago, and no doubt built by the same private finance initiative money. Is decent architecture is only for the elites – MPs in Westminster, bankers at Canary Wharf? I understand we weren’t going to get anything world-changing at dirty old Dalston Junction, but did it have to be quite as soulless as this?

There is a realism to it, perhaps we should commend that? That, as a commuter station, it faithfully reproduces the sucking grind of the daily haul into the office, the fluorescent-lit scan-in scan-out automation that would make you feel very small and anonymous if credit card-recharged Oyster travelcards and CCTV didn’t mean that TfL knows your every last personal detail. The station has no doubt been designed using some terribly clever traffic-flow simulation software that has lots of little blue dots going down to the platforms and little red dots coming back up… And it looks like the kind of space where you’ll feel like a little dot in a big system. That’s design integrity after a sort, right?

I’m sure they’ll add plenty of advertising by the time it’s finished – that’ll brighten the place up a treat.

This is orc country...

The white hand of Saruman?

Or just a kid and a visceral statement, I Am Here. This Is My City. The ur-point of the graffiti tag, legible in any culture - fuck your matte black building site hoardings, here is the human element...

Requiem

Leonard Street, EC2A.

This has also caught the eye of the Chaotic Semiotic, who posts the full text. The poem (if it wants to be seen as that?) is certainly worth a read, resonating like something somehow familiar, a "lesser-known Wilfred Owen". Yet after several reads I still can't untangle the mix of sentiment sympathetic to the military (if not to war) with Temple Ov Thee Psychick Youth spelling. Writing about finding a lost book, I called the city opaque. Here it goes further into the occult.

Still life with uncollected post & the lights left on

Last night's walk provided an apt case study for recent ideas about empty properties (see here and here) - albeit in a commercial rather than residential building. This shop, once Shoe Studio, sits - of all places - on Covent Garden itself, on the corner with James Street heading up to the tube. In terms of raw footfall, this site is surely as busy as Oxford Street. Yet, like much of Oxford Street, its landlord seems to have been struggling to attract quality retailers; the no-brand Shoe Studio went into administration in March 2009, and the shop has sat empty for eight months.

They left but failed to turn off the lights - with such irresponsibility is it any wonder the store failed? But, oh, what an aesthetic abandonment. The surfaces are so white and smooth yet the glass in the windows is dirtying slightly under the carbonate trails of the rain. Stripped of any saleable merchandise there is only the rectilinear calm of the shelving and its backlit glow into the night.

Are there ghosts here? Covent Garden has quite the history but this space is too antiseptic; without occupants you might call the shop disembodied but yet it never had a soul to lose. There's a sign on the windows promising 'new collection' but the doors are chained shut.





Related comment from Retail Week: Covent Garden's landlord has plans for rejuvenation (June 2009):

Many of the problems with the market stem from Covent Garden’s mass of smaller streets surrounding the main piazza and the dozens of landlords that have claimed a stake in the area since 1913 when the main estate was first sold off by the Duke of Bedford. Because there have been so many parties involved the retail offer has grown up relatively untamed, with a wide range of shops now occupying the streets.

Three years ago, Capco bought the Covent Garden Estate from Scottish Widows for £421m. Since then it has expanded its reach in the area to the point that the landlord now controls 750,000 sq ft of land around the market – which is most of Covent Garden. It is this huge dominance of the area, lacking since 1913, that gives Capco the opportunity to finally improve the offer. It has the luxury of being able to take a unified approach to planning the retail.

So Human: goodbye to the Waterloo footway poem

Posted 7 October 2009:



Update, 7 November 2009:

Apparently this poem - Eurydice by Sue Warren - is now gone, painted over by Network Rail last weekend. Read more at Time Out: they're calling it 'cultural vandalism'. As the artist says,

"This work was commissioned by the BFI and The Arts Council and, therefore, was installed using public money. Railtrack have defaced something they did not pay for without any consultation either with the BFI, the architect Bryan Avery or with me."

"...damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half-remembered moon..."

The urban jungle

Top of Brick Lane // side street off Kingsland Road.
September 2009

I Am Here (in a Haggerston council estate)

Back in May I went for a walk round the Regents Canal. The building below stood out: brightly marked as condemned a target for regeneration, yet nothing actually generating there - nothing, in fact, happening since April 2007. It is set for demolition in 2011, so what a strange four years for its remaining residents.



That's what Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Lasse Johansson and Tristan Fennell thought too. They live there, and have been documenting the Haggerston estate in a programme they are calling FLAT (see http://haggerston-kingsland.blogspot.com/. This is what they did:

Boarded-up and half-empty housing estates have become familiar landmarks in the contemporary urban landscape. Their façades function as projection screens for collective fears and fantasies of troubled and dangerous environments that may lurk behind. This perception is all the more emphasized when rapid redevelopment encircles such estates with new luxury loft apartments and live–work spaces.

I Am Here intervenes in this dynamic of preconception and projection, replacing the 67 bright orange boards – which have covered the windows of empty flats in Samuel House since April 2007 – with large-scale photographs of residents on the estate.

"I am here", echoing the signs around the estate that inform you that "You are here". Perhaps critiquing this representation of 'here' as a geometric diagram, as if that's ever what being-in-place was really about. Claiming subjectivity, "I" - an assertion, an ownership, the right to the city - for all the people who aren't on the map bar a little red dot labelled "You".

I Love Hoxton

Hoxton High Street, where else?

Ornamented spaces

Jewellery students had taken over this disused shop on Camden High Street to show some of their degree work, these fascinating fabric-wrapped constructions and organic clustered shapes. We stepped downstairs to find, suddenly, the same forms garlanding the basement as used for the necklaces on dispay above -- oh the striking equivalency this suggests between rooms and bodies: they are both containers we inhabit, the spaces in and through which we live.

Two sides of sex in the city

Two excellent reasons to use my 'sex and the city' tag, and a demonstration of two of its extremes.



Who can say what kind of love is inscribed on this tree - an 'I love you' for someone particular; an injunction to all of us, the public, to love more; an expression of a wider love for the city or indeed for trees? I love how scrawled it is, and that it's not a pristine stencil - whatever kind of love it feels passionate. And then a wingéd phallus, erect and exhibitionist yet just silly enough with its little feathers that I find it cheeky rather than aggressively cocky. A comment perhaps on the wilful independence of sexual desire, lust flying free of any conscious intent.



Behind both, though, the same kind of libidinal urban energy - a statement, "I DESIRE". A Deleuzian desire, not one built out of Lacanian lack but rather a force, a drive.

The places regeneration leaves behind

Just an ordinary North London road, scruffy and shabby with newsagents and kebab shops. When I moved to the City I didn't like these places, so different to the pristine market town where I grew up. But it's home now.

Even before 2008 many shopfronts were battened down or whitewashed over: longer-term shifts in economic geography than recession drove businesses out. Flats on this road are starting to be visibly gentrified - I live in one such block and there's a decent (clearly architect-driven) refurb just round the corner. But there is little demand for business here any more, only corner shop chicken shop pizza place. The odd laundrette; still internet cafes, a reminder that the internet is not exactly the great leveller; many are still economically or culturally excluded. Little more. These are some of the shops shuttered and left behind:



Blackalls Fruiterers and Greengrocers, established over 100 years. Closed now, closed at least fifteen years if its phone number began not 0207 or 0171 but 071. And the tenant just pulled the shutters down and left - the landlord has not re-let the space, has not converted into a fried chicken emporium or poundstore or fought the council for reclassification as in-demand residential. Just left.



W. Plumb the butcher has a beautiful old-fashioned sign with even a little stained glass. Where did he go? How did he feel about closing the business, about giving up hope of becoming W. Plumb & Sons, or perhaps Daughters? I cannot imagine this road with a proper old-fashioned independent butcher on it - what was it like, did it have community that extended beyond council estate dwellers? (Do they still have community, or do I romanticise? I know we middle classes have lost it.) This has always been a working class area, my block of flats one of the few visible signs of gentrification - but for it now to have a proper family butchers like this would be such a posh thing: how Highgate, how Crouch End.



Perhaps a more recent casualty - or not: Sega's Dreamcast (2001) was a failure, and the Saturn (1995) not much better, so would this branding date back to Megadrive days (1991)? I spoke to the chap in North London Models - not a brothel, a model aircraft & toy car shop, a relic still going on no visible sales at all - who dated the loss of these shops to the early Nineties and, presumably, the recession then. Further down the road there was even a bank, the Natwest form now sitting above somebody's kitchen still visible under layers of paint. Was this area once a highstreet, a community, a functioning economy? A destination? Now it is just a road for transit through to other places.

Hoxton stencillist wisdom, Jan 2009

DON'T WRITE ON WALLS, WRITE EVERYWHERE - now there's a message for a cities blogger. The first part of that instruction is to be ignored, of course, if your glyph has the graphic purity of the tag below.

Holloway, May 2009

Who knows what the story is here?

Walk II: Regent's Canal east

So I went for a walk.



That map torn and battered, had it since the day I first moved here, guide and gospel to the city I at first struggled to like. Places I go most it gets tears, loses pages, each new friend and each new flat bequeathing rings on their pages, got to find that place again. But this low-tech doesn't work any more, Highbury, Lea Valley all changed but the drawings on the paper haven't - so time to draw back, write my own geographies on top of those already marked.



The estate's boarded up, condemned - but I've lived in worse places than that, those blocks last alright enough so what do they want to go knock it down for? Ah, the canalside got cleaned up no longer a rubbish dump but an amenity too good for social tenants. So knock it down, build it up, sell it to the middle classes at £500 a square foot. That's the capital.







[Skipping over Queen Mary university and all its Serious Architecture (as if in competition with London Met's Libeskind); capoeiristas in Mile End Park; an artic tern fishing in the canal; smell of salt air ahead of me unexpected and drawing me on]



Shiny yuppie stuff's back. Limehouse Basin a weird area committing the same residential-only zoning sins as NY. Nice, but too far from anwhere with there there, and nowhere to eat, so not actually nice at all. Wapping a slog along its cobble-lined uninhabited so-called High Street, luxury warehouse developments hogging the riverbank for theirs alone. We'll watch your BMWs in the basement garages flood when the Thames Barrier fails, just you wait...



Body aching just the sight of the water is refreshing; the sun after the cavernous closed-off streets a relief. The river is wide here, the birds and yachts maritime. I had not known this as my city before, and finding it has exhausted me.





But when she's this beautiful you forgive, don't you.

City, 1 April 09

Builders watching the bankers watching the protestors just out of shot at the Climate Camp on Bishopsgate, or perhaps this was Bank of England.

Financial Fools' Day aftermath

Aftermath of the anticapitalist (antiwar, Green, anti-Labour) protest march and rally; Hyde Park, 1st April 2009.

Please recycle?

Somers Town, 25 Sept 08

The City is not a hospitable place for hippies, mystics, and idealists - they graitate west towards smaller towns like Totnes and Stroud. A few pagan shops still exist round Seven Dials, and there's a fortune teller in Selfridges, but by and large the City is about power more concrete than cosmic. Bless these women's groups in the pictures above, then! It was a two-storey building with this sterile, masculinist steel and granite facade more suited to an accountancy or law firm - but there they were, working on dreams of freedom regardless of the difficulties outside.

Stoke Newington, 28 Sept 08

Watch your skin peel indeed - love this haunting intervention in the abandoned church in Stoke Newington's cemetery. The medium is fantastic: moss grown upon felt, we reckoned. Cheers to Caspar for the walk that morning and showing me around his neighbourhood - hope Berlin's treating you well these days!

New York, New York

Twelve days ago I went to New York for the first time. I didn't visit for the sake of the city at all - hell, I wish it didn't exist - oh, let's just say it separates me from someone, someone who's pretending for the moment that the City isn't the one true place to be. Nevertheless, this is enough of a someone that I would consider leaving my beloved City for his - so while I was there (and because I lack the money, and because I'm an anthropologist not a lousy tourist!) I was thinking about how NY operates as a place to live. A few comments on its urban space and architecture, to begin with:

The Bowery was one of the streets I liked the most, even as gentrification starts to go too far. (The less said about the hotel these days the better.) It let me take a satisfyingly evocative (cliched) photo, and still seemed to carry a few ghosts.



The Bowery hosts the New Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the very few bits of proper, committed new architecture I found in the city. (I didn't go even as north as Midtown, though, so I accept I may have missed a bit! Then again, no-one was trying to convince me that the Upper East Side was a happening place to see...) The rainbow 'Hell Yes' on its side didn't exactly 'fit' as such, but the building had a scale and a rhythm that worked well. I liked its texture, I liked its balanced imbalance, and it proided a fitting space for its gallery purpose.



One of the other rare bits of serious new architecture I saw in NY was Tschumi's Blue Building on the Lower East Side - I failed to get a decent picture, but thankfully the New York Times did. Apparently, "its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings." No no no! It's just a bog-standard tower block that happens to be wonky. It's a monolith of glass and steel that doesn't speak to any grittiness or disorder; it seeks to be a singular landmark rather than dispersed or multiple; it's blocky, aggressive, still fucking phallic. This longer review is more astute when it observes that the asymmetric form is all about maximising the square footage, i.e. capital-with-a-capital-C. If I gave a shit about the Lower East Side, perhaps I'd cry.

Oddly enough for America, New York's best buildings were its old ones, with their fragile rusty balconies and sense of speaking in harmony with their neighbours. I was surprised to find that the city had a facility for elegant decay, something I associate strongly with Mediterranean cities and perhaps Latin America. Paint peeled, graffiti layered on top of posters, the sidewalk fallen apart fit to break a leg... Unexpected, but quite beautiful in its anti-statist way. Sea air helps, too, I suppose. I'd thought Coney Island might have this quality but instead it was sadder than that, surrounded by housing estates and derelict land, an illustration of New York's segregation and deelopment rows. Shame. (Fucking enormous seagulls, too.)



Further commentary in another post regarding the 'suburbanisation' of New York and other suggestions as to why I didn't feel it was somewhere that worked very well. But as a teaser, I like this comment by Rocco Landesman, a Broadway producer:

But I think there has been a delibidinization of our city, I really do. ...In terms of public planning there’s been a kind of prudishness, a kind of social and political correctness that’s gone on.

Sex and the City, now there you go - and now that's such a topic for this blog, too!
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