Travertine Pollard Sadsmash in B flat

Sad news.  

The super and super-weird Egyptian PoMo Homebase on Warwick Road is to be knocked down and replaced with stunning-development unique-opportunity luxury flats.  

This compounds the sadness of the loss of Marco Polo House, the rather nice (and weird) bit of PoMo officery near Battersea Park, which was also designed by Ian Pollard in the 1980s.  This once-shiny travertine confection is likewise being erased to make way for asipration-penthouse-investment lifestyle-exuding sunset-skyview-vista Smeg-fridge-with-Lightning-connector apartments.  As you can see, the title of this blog basically wrote itself.

When I've remembered, I used my phone's camera to film the demolition, from the window of my commute.  The resulting montage captures the slow disembowlement of the building (along with the vagaries of English spring weather, and the background noise on trains).

There's a nice reflection of Battersea Power Station in the luxury windows of the final shot.

Sweet dreams.

This is England (the A232)

Hello, well done and thank you, dear Reader.  Welcome to your very own cut-out-and-keep guide to English domestic architecture.

Well, sort of.

Rather, perhaps, a tour of the humid, sordid joys of suburban housing. You, smart, sexy Reader, will certainly recognise that the spectrum of styles covered below is likely to surround you. A ubiquity of limited proliferation.  In order to demonstrate that these building types can be found pretty much anywhere, and not necessarily out of laziness, I have limited the exploration below to the corridor between East Croydon station and West Wickham, known with good cheer as the A232.

Empire

Our first era together. I shall be gentle and yet thorough, my soft, diaphanous Reader.

I'm using the term Empire to cover off a large swathe of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. Empire was when England was Great.  Has anyone ever described themselves as Great British?

In this particular instance, the area to the north-east of East Croydon station is largely Empire, presumably knocked-up to cater for the burgeoning middle-class clerks (sort of ur-yuppies) drawn to the area by the fast rail links to London Bridge and Victoria (the latter opening in the 1860s).

The above view is entirely typical.  Bay windows - some single storey, some double - with mullions decorated to look like Grecian columns.  Completely not-in-keeping, the bays often evoke a castle's turrets. Clearly, laudanum was freely available to all commuters (a sort of ur-Starbucks).

This late-period fantasy is wonderful and bonkers in absolutely equal measure.  A large lovely pile of large lovely nonsense, all hanging tiles and big windows, topped with terracotta gargoyles and, superbly, sporting a full-on fairytale tower.  Let it never be said that our forebears were overly restrained or uncomfortably buttoned-up.  This is a vulgar as vulgar can be, without perhaps the addition of some bass-relief of priapic nudity, or a tasty 400-point imprecation gouged into the walls.

An Englishman's home is his castle, hence the moat (garden), barbican and drawbridge (porch and path to the front door) and turret (turret).

Arts and Crafts and thence Tudorbethan

Proper Arts and Crafts stuff here. It's in part a rejection of the mass-produced nature of Victorian industry (in both senses), a return to a simpler, twee-er time. There's a lower, more cottagey feel, with somewhat-laboured the impression of craftsmanship in the twiddly details (look at those chimneys twist into the sky!). It's precisely the same impetus as that which fuels the current trend for Farmers' Markets: now that one can acquire a bewildering range of world goods from any given ringroad Omnimarket, the middle-classes are drawn towards new ways of displaying their wealth and excellent taste by buying purportedly traditional English things. Such as £8 quiches, drizzled with a tasty jus of organic, rustic, artisanal, seasonal, unpasturised, single-varietal, hand-made, sour-dough, free-range, locally-sourced, rare-breed epithets. It's a way of inventing a history, of faking old-money - of pretending to be of landed stock (or, at least, an honest farm owner). And this is terribly important to the Englishman or lady.

A later exercise in the same very-English pretence. A sizeable and immacuately-maintained bit of Tudorbethan, with crown green-perfect lawns and an in-keeping garage. It's even got a wishing well (!) in the curiously-generous front garden.

The style was also applied, somewhat surreally, to parades of shops. Here we have Ye Olde Wimpy (est 1928) on Wickham High Street.

Moderne (-ish)

There's not a lot of Moderne along this route. Perhaps this suburban setup of Zone 5 appealed more to larger families, who preferred the more traditional stylings of Tudorbethan built at much the same time. But here is an example of a building, four single-floor maisonettes by the look of things, with a nod towards fashionable Moderne. The original central windows would have been sexy curved sun-trap windows (sadly now angular UPVC), with horizontal glazing bars and just a few vertical member. The clean white horizontal band is a sort of go-faster stripe to pair with the streamlined windows. But, other than those, it's a largely conventional building with hipped roof and unrendered brick. A safe version of the future, still recognisably English.

Episode IV: A New Hope

The aftermath of the war gave architects the opportunity to try new things. Or, rather, it gave them time to think about what new things they'd want to build once the post-war building regulations were relaxed. Once they were, in 1954, we were treated to an optimistic compromise - a new way of living, but on the cheap (cf the valiant efforts of all the New Towns to build a new world on a budget).

This is a rather pleasant little block.  Notice that the weight is not being taken by the road-facing walls.  This 'free elevation' means you can do what you want with the outside: in this instance, have windows that run along the entire front and side of the building, including that rather sexy unsupported corner. There doesn't seem to be a chimney stack either, suggesting that the building came with some sort of space-age heating system, like an asbestos-lined CFC-burner, emitting infra-red heat and ionising radiation in equal measure.

Further rule-breaking.  The jaunty roof-line emphasises the buzz-saw frontage that affords each shop a few more square-footage of glass in which to display its wares.  Groovy.

Another demonstration of what was once state-of-the-art engineering.  Building-width strips of windows and huge panes of glass in the stairwells allow as much light in as the English climate permits us.  It looks like the office space at the top is deserted.  Frankly, I'm still impressed that the whole central section of that block can be supported on so few slim columns.  Note, however, that these buildings are deeply unfashionable and can therefore only attract cheapy tenants, like Iceland and The Original Factory Shop - compare with mummy-friendly M&S, which likes to take up new-builds (see below) or fashionably stylish buildings like Art Deco ex-cinemas.

Comforting stodge: vernacular (and PoMo)

Oh dear.  After all that scary optimism, we slid back into making things look a bit like old things. Here're some retirement flats in the style of a row of thatched cottages. Small windows, and an upstairs you can't stand up in properly. Genius. 

This, however, rather superbly bridges the gap between fashionable retro and 80s fashions - the blue-frame square-pane glazing to the left meets an Olde timber-clad gable (enlivened by the jazzy yellow chevron announcing the then-exciting thrill of Sunday opening).

The ground floor of this Sainsbury's also emulates the roof line of thatched cottages, but tops it with some dead-eyed nuclear bunker / gun-slit combo.  Happy shopping, comrades.

Part of PoMo's schtick was re-introducing Classical forms after all that New Hope stuff. These mock-Georgian terraces (we're back to vertical windows again) are decorated with wire-frame triumphal arches for some reason. Perhaps you can grow strawberries up them. The top gable window sort-of describes a split pediment.  Japes.

I think this is much newer, but the mindset is the same. A freakishly overgrown corner tower (topped with a rustic weather-vane) in a Venetian style (why not?), with an adjunct archway in render.  But this is of course quite consistent with English architecture - it's more important that the building borrows old forms, than that they necessarily make any sense together.

My argumentation here, which is essentially a unifying philosophy for much of English domestic architecture, has limits. Take a look at the pair of terraces below. On the left is a row of bargain-basement Victorian houses.  They are of meagre proportions, and come with just a pair of simple windows (no light-gathering bay windows here) and not even a single terracotta gargoyle.  The front garden is just a slither of space, keeping the passing pedestrian literally at arm's length.

Demonstrating face-hurting stupidity, the designer of the new-builds to the right chose to clone these impoverished hundred-year-old originals, despite the old ones being of zero architectural merit.   Even then, the clones' windows are somehow even pokier.  This is the sort of lazy crap that makes me want to dismember the architects' pets (and possibly those of the current residents, as a warning to those who support the market for this retrophiliac cack).

There is now at least somewhere to put the bins.  Hoorah for progress.

After Post-Modernism

What's not to like here?  Perhaps a roof-line to induce sea-sickness, the already-faded wood cladding, and the grimy porridge-beige render.  And such sophisticated details as the high-visibility guttering downpipies (see how it crunches awkwardly over the corner of that twee porch).  And nowhere to put the bins other than the front garden.  And the tartrazine-orange front doors.  Oh, and the bloody coaching lamps.  Come, friendly bombs and fall on the A232.

And, of course, after Post-Modernism comes good old-fashioned Modernism.  Here, M&S pretends to be in 1920s Germany.

Whimsy

What is more English than daft, aspirational excess?  Here, a tiny bungalow with full-on pedimented arch.  And net curtains.  And partially off-street parking.  Win.

Bexhill

Inspired by Michael Portillo (and who isn't?), I've taken to looking up places I'm about to visit in my copy of Bradshaw's Railway Guidebook.  This book was published in 1866, and is a bafflingly-thorough, somewhat didactic, guide to the places Victorians could reach on their new shiny-shiny railway, telling them where to stay and what to see - and it's £2.39 on Kindle.  Whilst I'm probably destroying the British book industry single-handedly by using Amazon's instant-gratification, it is amazing to be able to access this sort of text so cheaply, and use search to find the specific entry to easily.  

Bexhill, then just a village, only justifies a few lines of Bradshaw's text, but it gets a reassuringly English thumbs up:

'Many people prefer the retirement of Bexhill, with its fine bracing air, to the excitement and bustle of the neighbouring towns'

Read: those with taste will like it here.

Leaving the station, built with wide platforms to hold the summer day-trippers, a rather restrained selection of chippies and offies is interspersed with slightly-twee artists' galleries leads down to the pebble seafront.

A row of chalets illustrate the nexus at which random-crap flotsam meets middle-class low-skill improvements - a higgledy, lumpen mess of styles and materials, on generous plots with beautiful sea-views. Probably insanely expensive.

Flavella chic. 

This leads to the really very nice set-piece of colonnades [oh, that's how it's spelt], from 1911.

Despite a recent refurb, it's already a bit tired-looking.  Interesting also to think that, were this building 75 years newer, it would be dismissed as a wafer-thin PoMo nonsense and knocked down immediately. Thankfully, we're allowed to like building that are old enough, so this gets to stay.

Behind the colonnade is the simply super 30s wonder of the De La Warr Pavilion, a Modernist steamliner run aground in Sussex.  Lovely.

Inside, there's the famous sexy spiral staircase with a somewhat space-age Dalek eye-stalk light installation. There's also a (strangely affordable) café bar, from which you can sip a beer and pretend you're out at sea.   Lovely.

On the other side of the building, an equally lovely 180-degree glass staircase cantilevers out in a lovely way. Lovely.

From the window of which, you can see some new-build flats doing a half-arsed impression of the Pavilion and its wraparound fenestration.  How strange that it's quite normal to design new buildings to ape the curves of 80-year-old Modernism.

Meh.

Along the sea front are dotted some interesting and angular shelters.  And old man shuffling past tutted his clichéd disapproval at this 'modern rubbish'.  He was a touch younger than the Pavilion.

Those as puerile as I may be blessed with similar memories of geography video at school which began with a wildly bearded man proudly announcing "I'm standing here on this sizeable groyne..."

Addendum to Brum

A few bonus thoughts on the Spaghetti Junction entry:

Scale:  A chum has pointed out the disparity between Spaghetti Junction's hugeness, and Manchester's rather more restrained interaction with the M6 (say, here, where it meets the M62, and looks from the sky like an angry Grimace-of-McDonald's fame).  Such wonderful big-tech hubris from Brum's '60s civic planners.

'Lextric:  My vaguely throwaway references to Doctor Who were perhaps more apposite than I had initially thought.  In the Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks in 1963, they were (narratorially) powered by static electricity supplied through the floors of their city - hence they needed ramps and couldn't go up or down stairs.  Daleks are, essentially, bumper cars.  Bumper cars with death rays - Daleks being the early epitome of road rage. Perhaps the Dalek design tapped into some sixties fear of a wholly car-dependent way of living, of becoming trapped within a one-man vehicle. Spaghetti Junction is one manifestation of this nightmarish fantasy: a post-nuclear complex cleansed of human life, an intimidating step-free realm in which ramps allow space-age vehicles to ascend and dip between levels.  We've built part of the Dalek city on Earth - and afforded the invasion fleet a route to reach Brum city centre from the motorway.

Spaghetti Junction

The Dalek city

Pundom:  There's probably a joke to be made about Gravelly Hill / Aston / Aston Villa, and whether Aston is viler than Gravelly Hill.  But perhaps it's not a good one.

Cliff:  And finally, some amazing footage of Spaghetti Junction when it was newish, featuring Cliff Richard in a hovercraft.  Skip to 45:00 for that, and some dreadful guitar/nose-flute noise.

Space Age Birmingham: Looking Up

The plan had been simple. Get the train from New Street to Gravelly Hill, have a look at one of the most amazing feats of applied concrete in the world, get the train back from Aston, have a coffee.

The concrete in question being Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham's ZOMG-scaled Mario Kart track, which weaves the arterial Aston Expressway (an alien nomenclature, sounding more like a corner shop than a road in England) with orbital M6, on its happy way to Walsall.

For those not familiar with the Junction, some Wikipedia stats add flavour. 30 acres of fun where 18 roads intermingle in the air, propped up by almost 600 columns. It forms part of Brum's pre-70s-oil-crisis efforts to embrace the motorcar wholesale and enable the speed that the future traveller will demand. Our past future, of course, us back then.

As one might imagine, the houses lining the road from Gravelly Hill station to Spaghetti Junction are less desirable than they were before someone poured quite so much concrete. Once-pleasant Victorian confections, with parti-coloured brickwork and generous front gardens, these houses are now unsaleably blighted by the knot of carriageways tangling together at the bottom of the hill. One house, patched up with unpainted plywood, had a couple of smashed-up hearses on its drive, scattered with soiled clothes. A dirty protest, or perhaps a sacrifice to some pagan poo-god.

Reaching the bottom of the first slip-road, I was surprised to find that provisions had actually been made for the pedestrian to exist underneath the network of roads, this realm of cars. Entering through a subway of Croydon-underpass mosaic tiling, the explorer finds himself in a large sunken space, a walled garden with a forest of concrete pillars like petrified trees. It's deserted, and frankly very weird. Although not really any weirder than the sort of person who goes down there and finds it.

There is something powerfully over-the-top about the size of the soaring curves and improbably mass of all that concrete on such tall, slim columns. The Scalextric set of every boy's dreams. It'd make a mega Rainbow Road.  It's not as loud as you might imagine, despite the hundreds of cars and lorries overhead. Presumably the sound bounces upwards and outwards, and contributes further to Gravelly Hill's grimness.

Although it's not fashionable to see it any more, the Junction is magnificently sculptural. The loops and arcs and inclines take functional roads and make them into something inscrutable, something awe-inspiring. The structural similarities with Stonehenge are perhaps not accidental.  The scale is insane. Like the fearful experience of a penitent serf gazing heavenwards in a cathedral, it's dizzying to stare up at this mystery in the sky. From underneath, it's impossible to work out which roads lead where, as they split and merge in the air. Appropriately, the junction can really only be comprehended in aerial shots; a deity-eye view of something man-made and yet so inhumanly-sized. It's another piece of our space-age future, which has since become dirty and disliked. But the ambition! How incredibly different to the Victorian high-street, or simple ring road of a New Town like Basildon.

Pressing further onwards, the landscape takes on a industrial wasteland / Doctor Who outside broadcast / dystopia-on-the-cheap feel. The spaces under the roads, voids really, are unlit and a bit scary. A network of canals appears to consist of 80% traffic cones, 20% lurid green water. The only way to escape the Cyberman invasion force would be to swim for it, and hope the underwater cones aren't secretly Autons </geek>.

There is apparently a cycle route running through this double-complex of canals and roads, although I wouldn't advise using it as the paths are slippy and the dark is full of Daleks.

I took a snap of a wonderfully passive-aggressive sign for passing barges. Actually, I think you'll find that people like you shouldn't collide with our wall, please. Thankyou.

There's also a canal sign that some patriotic soul has un-metric'd from kilometres to miles. Take that, EU Commission! Wonder what BCN stands for. I imagine it's just short for Bacon.

There are a couple of plaques down there in the gloom. One (sans serif, brushed aluminium) celebrates the physics-defying feat above, the other (serif CAPS, picture of cottagey house) harking back to a rather more twee time when the canals were the engineering masterpiece of their time. Somehow strange that it's socially more acceptable to have a romantic view of waterways than roadways. Perhaps it's because the roads still hold some utility, and we struggle to enjoy things until entropy has begun weathering them to dust. Ruin Theory still runs deep within our collective consciousness. What will future archaeologists make of Spaghetti Junction?

In the dark, there are further engineering works ongoing, presumably to sure-up parts of the concrete above. I found myself trapped somewhere between canals, concrete, rivers, railways and fences, and eventually had to concede defeat and double back to the drizzly gloom of Gravelly Hill.

Aston may be lovely. I do not know.

My Secret PoMo Shame

Look, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

You shouldn't blame yourself.  It's not your fault.  No, really.

It's me.  I'm different.  I've changed.

I've realised that I quite like PoMo.  And by PoMo, I mean the lowest-brow version of Post-Modern architecture, the type that found its way onto British high streets and bypasses throughout my youth.

Chatham's Pentagon, which was not narrowly missed by one of the hijacked jets on 9/11

Exhibit A, below,  is Marco Polo House (1987).  You may know this better as the QVC building, next to Battersea Park. It's by Ian Pollard, who I'd never heard of either.

It is shortly to be knocked down and replaced with another lump of 'luxury' flats within flobbing distance of the trains thundering to and from Victoria.  Lucky residents-to-be, stroking their iPad Airs and rattling with delight in their Smeg-fridged studios.

And what a shame for London to lose this.  Vertical slices of black-glass Miesian minimalism, interspersed for no apparent reason with heavy slabs of banded travertine Baroque.  It looks like some fantastical Lego set, built for real for adults to play in.  I find the building really very endearing.  I'm also surprised to see that marble apparently goes manky with age, foxing in the sunlight like a copy of the Beano on the back seat of a Ford Orion.

The slim volume Postmodern Architecture in London also enjoys Marco Polo House, broadsiding it as having 'the design integrity of a car-showroom'.  The book continues that it 'is often regarded as the most vulgar building in London'.  Top stuff!  And quite an achievement to be considered the most vulgar in a city replete with insane Victorian whimsy, and dreadful cash-in crap proclaiming themselves to be new-build luxury flats.

An massively-enjoyable bit of Victorian kitsch in Streatham, 

desperately pretending not to be a pumping station.

Pollard also built an early Homebase, up on Warwick Road near Earl's Court, in '88.

Homebases are so often big sheds.  Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders.  It's impossible to look at Godalming's Homebase without humming Jerusalem.  Don't worry, I'm just a oast-house, fibs the Bromley-by-Bow's Tesco as the traffic roars from the Blackwall Tunnel.

Pollard's building, however, really is special stuff.

Demarking the edge of the carpark, essentially a fence, is a colonnade of Egyptian columns.  It's unclear if this is borrowing from antiquity, or Temple Mills in Leeds.  Is it important to know which?

There are etchings and glyphs on the Homebase walls, some picked out in gold.

One of the figures is, charmingly, sitting on the fire escape.  The sharp comic-book boundary with the banded stonework does not permit any pretence that this is any real Egyptian artefact, uncovered in a London carpark.  Nope, this is unapologetically fake.  The Egyptian style was an unrealistic representation of the human form; this is an unrealistic representation of the Egyptian style.

When the Georgians and Victorians aped the forms of Greek or Gothic buildings, they did so in part because they felt those forms were the aesthetic zenith and, in some confused quasi-moral delusion, how buildings ought to look.  Pollard here is borrowing the Egyptian style not because it's the best style ever, and not even because it best suits the demands of the 80s DIY-enthusiast.  Rather, because he can.  Egypt in West London?  Why not?

Which leads to the cheekiest bit of pillaging - this curvy glass undulation along the side.

Which, as of course you'll know, is nicked directly and completely from James Stirling's art gallery in Stuttgart.  Again, why not?  On one side of the building, Egyptian art; on the other, art gallery.  We are used to architects stealing from the ancient past for their new buildings.  Pollard, with admirable honesty, steals from both his ancient forebears and his modern contemporaries.  Or, even, Post-Modern contemporaries.

Pollard's Homebase, gaudy as it is, has far more integrity than Quinlan Terry's waver-thin Georgian shams (such as Richmond Riverside, which was being built at the same time).  Pollard is faking it, proudly producing a collage of nonsense for West Londoners in need of some emulsion and rawl plugs.  Which I prefer infinitely to the saccharine pillock-pleasing crap of HRH Chaz's Poundbury in Dorset.

Please don't knock this one down.  It's one of the most delightful, weird buildings I know.