Leeds: a caffeinated perambulation

Leeds gets coffee - there are some superb coffee shops, where you can get a Square Mile pourover whilst browsing Caffeine and toying with an aeropress.  Really lovely.

Leeds has beer, but doesn't get it - for some reason, craft beers are some kind of alternative (ie gothy, unwashed) experience. Brew Dog had a great range of unique bottled things, but is somehow aimed at punks (really? Is 1977 back in already?). Mr Foley's Cask Ale House has a similarly interesting selection, but the clientèle was decidedly beardy (is trampy back in already?).  The barman in the Brewey Tap was slightly embarrassed by their own micro-brewed pilsner, and was keen that I have an Amstell. Leeds, salute your unique brews! And perhaps market them to a larger, more hygienic demographic. 

The Picture House, incidentally, is really horrible.  You can tell that from the outside, and there's no need to go inside again [note to self].

The friendly / chippy nexus - Northern chums love to extol the uniformly warm-spirited wonders of the Northern soul, while observing that the average Southerner personally gouges the eyes from three kittens a day. Somehow the Northeners' self-proclaimed friendliness is powered by a loathing of the South, and particularly any la-di-dah Southern flâneur poncing about their cities with a Pevsner and an SLR.  

Keen to talk to a stranger, a Yorkshireman seems also keen to proselytise his view of the world.  I (aforementioned ponce, all espadrilles, manbag and words like flâneur) was advised in stern terms at no fewer than three separate establishments that I should not contemplate having milk in my filter coffee. Listen chaps, thanks for the recap of what you learned in barista school, but if I wish to adulterate my beverage (perhaps chilling a Beaujolais, or popping a Gewürztraminer next to the radiator for ten minutes before serving), I really should be allowed to. Perhaps I know what I'm doing, or at very least I know what I like.  

Got there in the end.

The shopping - In terms of presentation, the insanely handsome Arcades, the gleeful pomp of Corn Exchange (what a roof!), knock almost anywhere else into a cocked hat. Well done.  There is sadly no John Lewis, but there is the mother of all Marks and Sparks in the covered market, which makes up for it.

Lots and lots of this, plz.

Take note of how to do a roof properly, Leeds train station.

There's no-one in the Merrion Centre, and no reason to go there, but it's a fun romp in minty green and chromed metal.

It's probably illegal to say that The Light is a bit dull, but it's essentially just the Aspiration Village from Hammersmith's Westfield.  Yawn.  Trinity Leeds is likewise a copy-and-paste chunk of the same Westfield, although curiously open the the elements (thereby ignoring the wisdom of the Victorians who built the Arcades to keep out the Yorkshire sleet).  The unloved 80s Core is basically empty, although it does have some hoardings with fun CGI mock-ups including such copyright-safe stores as Hardy Ramsden's, Caffe Zero and Benny and Frankie's.  

The accent - the women all have the prophylactic vowels of Janice Battersby*. A horrible erection-defeating noise </misogyny>.  (*Yes, technically her accent is NW England, not NE, but there is no-one famous from Leeds, so it's impossible to cite an appropriate cultural reference).

The Universities - Chamberlain, Bon and Powell's Brutliast campus is wonderful. Its concrete is at once a superbly preserved piece of space-age past and yet still sci-fi futuristic. The smooth clean finish seems more accessible than the Barbican's bush-hammered concrete. Accessible visually, at least; it's still possible to be three feet horizontally and fifty feet vertically from where you want to be, with no idea how to get from one place to the other.

Still, the flying walkways are executed with such panache that they really make the UEA's skyways look like work of an upstart bumpkin in comparison (sorry, Denys).  

Viewed through the porthole of a passing Imperial cruiser.

The nearby Met Uni accommodation tower, pre-rusted and weathering beautifully, is a lovely exercise in Coreten steel too.  Easily the best new tower in Leeds.

The train station of three halves - there's a rubbish late-60s airless box (compare with, say, the spacious, light-filled and contemporary station in Barking), a dirt-grey millennial thing with the roof of a B&Q warehouse, and yet also a magnificently-restored Art Deco hall on the side. It's pleasingly surreal to see a Moderne McDonald's (even if the font isn't quite Gill Sans).  

Beneath the station, the River Aire sloshes through a series of Victorian channels, the Dark Arches.  Fun for imagining you're on the way to a gin palace and about to be slain by Jack the Ripper.

Where's the grass? - Leeds appears to be home to about ten square feet of greenery, in Park Square.  Millennium Square is shaded green on the (rather helpful) street-side information maps, but is actually a gentle paved slope forming an informal rake of seats facing the jumbo TV mounted on the wall of the Carriage Works theatre.  Other than that, it's all buildings and tarmac.

Where's the rest? - there's a curious feeling that Leeds is only half there. The railway and river Aire cuts east-west, and the bypass describes a semi-circle to the north of that. But there's nothing much south of the river. Just some 'stunning-development' guff like Bridgewater Place (the 'Dalek' - a dire stab at being iconic; one imagines the name came first and the architect then came up with something to fit), and a (ho ho!) leaning-tower-of-Leeds effect made through fenestration.  And you thought English Post-Modernism died in 1989.  

Rubbish.

I am too annoyed with the joke to be able to like this.

Speaking of PoMo - Whilst I like PoMo as much as (realistically, more than) the next man, I really think that the worst possible place for playful architecture is somewhere from which you might get sent to prison.  Shame on you, Leeds Magistrates' Court, which has been made out of wooden blocks and coloured in by a child.  

What larks!  Only a PoMo morgue would be less tasteful.

Leeds would be a strong card in the pack of British Cities Top Trumps. It's one of the largest city in the UK (Bigness: 3) and had the good fortune to be spared the wrath of Luftwaffe bombs (Impervious to Nazis: 98).  It therefore got to decide what to do with its building stock, and it thankfully chose to retain a wonderful selection of Victorian civic buildings, mills and shopping streets (Proud heritage: 90).  The Arcades are glorious (Posh shopping: 88), and the University is architecturally world-class (Brutalism FTW: 92)

It inevitably feels so very much smaller than Birmingham, Manchester or London, each of which is bulging at the seams in comparison.  But, of course, Leeds can be smaller without becoming overcrowded, because of all those Northeners in London banging on about how much better things are back in Yorkshire.

Photoshopping Battersea Power Station

The above is a cameraphone snap (from the Building Centre) of a model of Nicholas Grimshaw's new London Bridge station.  Here, even the shiny-shiny Shard becomes neutrally white, a backdrop to the glinting silver concourse canopies.  And the Shard is there to suggest certain values (modernity, commerce, soi-disant iconism) that the model wishes to appropriate for the station.  The Shard also helps the viewer locate London Bridge within London (which is interestingly the inverse of how the Tube map operates).  The whole model is resolutely dirt-free (even those troublesome trains), pristine and futuristic. Note also that the station itself is shown as snaking along smooth curve of wood.  It has become a giant Brio set.  Simple, clean, wholesome.  Single-Varietal London Organic Bridge Station.

Photoshop'd shots of buildings are the scale model of the twentieth century.

Shame it's the twenty-first century.

A few propaganda Photoshops of the soon-to-be-immured-with-flats Battersea Power Station have emerged.

Reading this image similarly, distance in London is collapsed until the Battersea flats appear moments from the Eye, and but a gentle curve onwards to the Shard.  The bottom quarter or so is verdant parkland.  There're no people from this perspective. There's hardly a vehicle to be seen (perhaps a few toy-like London buses on Chelsea Bridge), and certainly no trains whatsoever rumbling their way within metres of those shiny glass curtain walls.  Whereas most of London is under a somewhat grey and troubled sky, blesséd Battersea sits is a pool of golden sun.

Separately, those new flats look just like what the Doozers were building in Fraggle Rock.

A further shot is awash with happier, more productive Photoshop People busily having a simply super time in the little riverside park on the north side of the Power Station.

Zooming in reveals the sort-of charming clumsiness in the image manipulation, a dollop of glue on an architectural model.

Everyone's a bit ugly, and, more menacingly, no-one is old.  Apparently the future will be like a scene from Logan's Run.

Can't wait.  And helpfully, we don't have to.  One can apparently access a Pop Up Park in the grounds of the Power Station this summer.

Stupid name.  Single-Varietal Pop Up Organic Park is much better.

Foreign: Prague

A caveat: the only camera I had with me was the poxy little thing on my phone.  Hence the largely crap quality, despite the valiant efforts of Photoshop retouching.  Some of the pics therefore have an (almost appropriate) Impressionist smudginess.

I thought I was starting to get bored of the Art Nouveau curvy bling in Prague.  It's everywhere, and amazingly well-preserved.  The Praguish take of Nouveau is less twiddly and organic than Mackintosh's Scottish version, edging towards the geometry of later Deco (which I much prefer).  Nonetheless, I found myself getting punch-drunk from the relentless loveliness.

One of approximately 100,000 Art Nouveau restaurants in Prague.
Beautiful (and authentic) mirrors, chandeliers,
mosaic-tiled walls, windows, frescos... yawn.

I had two hours to kill before the flight back to Blighty.  I'd ticked off a few of the Tourist Must Sees, despite find the whole idea irritatingly crypto-fascist (100 Things You Must Do Or We Will Hurt The Kitten), and rather at-odds with my postmodern psychogeographical 'as found' tourism (ie toddling around somewhat randomly and seeing what I find).  I decided to indulge my particularly gimpy side and have quick spin on the Soviet-built Metro system, and was pleased to find that a 90-minute metro ticket is just 32 Czech Koruna (about a bargainous quid).

I entered at Náměstí Republiky station, which is perhaps the beigest and most 80s-caravan-like station I have ever seen, full of dank browns and orangey laminate wood panels.

Apparently modelled on an MB Games' Simon Says

The camera's white balance insisted on 'correcting' this shot to 

something less brown, but Photoshop has done me proud here.

Rather lovely brown-glass bricks, 

and a yellow block to tell you which line you're on.

Thankfully less brown, the adjacent Muzeum station appears to have  been made from the shells of multicolour Daleks.

I'd asked the hotel receptionist about the main train station, thinking that I might come across the sort of collosal escalators and blast doors that you find on the Kiev metro in the Ukraine (which was designed to double as a fall-out shelter in the event of nuclear war...).  Instead, I emerged at Hlavní Nádraží into a startlingly vibrant red-plastic-and-polished-aluminium bafflement.

Somehow like being in a toaster.

This part of the station had recently been refurbished, and now sports slightly-hypnotic banded flooring.

Scalextricky.

Curtain walling and leaks.

A small sign above an escalator pointed to the 'historical building of the station'.  I was hoping for some cosmic Soviet concrete installation.  But, gosh, I found something rather different: an astounding and semi-derelict Art Nouveau half-coupla, packed with statues, stained glass and flaking frescoes.

but where teh concretes?  :(

Some sculpture porn 

(from my private collection at www.gregs_posh_grot.com)

The defunct station clock, and a hint of the 

lovely stained glass over the main entrance.

The platforms are most easily accessed via the underground walkways from the Very Red station.  But popping through the Nouveau's doors leads to a poignant collection of bronze figures, commemorating Sir Nicholas Winton's rescue of over six hundred Czechoslovakian children just before the outbreak of WWII.

This magnificent old building is apparently due for refurbishment by 2013.  Which I think gives me a lovely reason to plan to go back.

Very Good Things About London: #4 Happy New Year

The fireworks, from Lambeth Bridge (the best bridge in London), as taken by me.

Very Good Things about London: #3 Fireworks and the Thames

Not very controversial this one.

Cold air, bright lights, the glittering reflections on the water.  Win.

The OXO Tower and the Eye,

September 2011.

Battersea Power Station,

November 2010.

Tate Modern,

November 2010.

Milton Keynes

Nostalgesia

Having grown up near the New Town of Basildon, I was totally unpeturbed to be introduced as an 8-year-old to the gleaming parallels of Milton Keynes' indoor shopping centre, surrounded by acres of car parking.  This is quite clearly The Future.  And this is all Quite Normal.  Why on earth would anyone want to shop on a High Street?

Random Milton Keynes memories leap up at me.  Paying £1.50 to use my first ever ATM, simply for the adult thrill of withdrawing money without a paying-in book (remember those...?).  The joy of the Christmas lights display (probably in October).  Being mocked in a guitar shop (thankfully now closed) because I didn't know everything in the world there is to know about guitars ("Dave!  Dave!  This one here doesn't even know if he wants humbuckers or single-coils!").  A Sixth Form leavers' dinner at a Mexican diner with some girls from the High School (girls who gave the grossly misleading impression that all women are aloof, confusing, exclusive and self-absorbed.  And mental).  The X5 coach, which took three-and-a-half-hours to crawl from Oxford to Cambridge via a selection of ringroad Tescos, circling Milton Keynes for the best part of an hour as it tried to find the train station, the shopping centre and the coach park.  And had no toilet.

It's not the place's fault.

The early Milton Keynes had a few 'iconic' features.  The concrete cows, for example.  Those ruminating on an approach road are apparently clones, with the real ones now standing in the very middle of the newest extension of the shopping centre ('Midsummer Place' - bless).  It seems strange to attempt to sum up the glass-and-underpass New Town with the unhappy mix of bucolic pasture and flatly industrial building material.  Mixed emotions.  Great to see them up close.  But they are actually crap and lumpy.

Hey, who're you calling crap civic art?

The 1979 spaceship futurism of the Point is still there.  The entrance to the cinema used to be through the improbable mirrored-glass stacked-box ziggurat.  However, the route through is now boarded up, and the ziggurat is occupied by Gala Bingo, Connexions (that achingly urban spelling that just reminds me of Nottingham ruralite DH Lawrence - he uses it six times in the first chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover alone) and a YMCA charity shop.  We're all used to seeing bits of Victorian high street occupied by charity shops, but it is quite a shock to see these vintage-and-tat places in starkly modern buildings.

The red neon strips that described the pyramid shape

at night have sadly been removed.

I've spotted a few echoes of the Point around the town.  I wonder what the building's future is.

Like the Point, Milton Keynes' Bus Station, a strange travertine fantasy, is occupied by a 'vintage' shop, again incongruous in the brushed aluminium and marble futurism.  The building seems otherwise disused.

Precycle, recycle, decycle.

A scary waiting room / re-education centre

Day tripping

Arriving at the train station is somewhat unnerving.  You're clearly not supposed to.  A three-sided mirrored-glass court creates a vast, empty plaza reflecting nothingness.  The (unsignposted) shops are a brisk 15 minute walk away.  The John Lewis end is probably nearer 30. 

Oh hai.

It would appear that Milton Keynes, inside and out, has been almost entirely styled using the palette of the British seaside in winter - the Albion neutrals of verdigris sea, soft cool sand, slate-silver sky, and the saturated greens of marine vegetation.  And the glass.  The buildings efface themselves into reflections of the sky, of each other.  They wonderfully prefigure the Shard, the epic Ode to Invisibility currently being built near London Bridge.

Blanc.

Those triple-height ceilings like to collect children's 

lost helium balloons.  I can share their pain.

Modern Milton Keynes has been slightly painfully Branded.  Embarrassed by the Tellytubby utopia of tree-lined roads, lakes, fields and graffiti-free underpasses, the place has aped some urban text-speak.  The thecentre:mk (all one word and all lower case!  Yay!) is the theshopping centre (whereas MK Central, of course, is the thetrain station.  Lucky there are no tourists to confuse).  The indoor-skydiving airkix (ooh urban!  And all lower case!) and SNO!zone (caps-and-lower-case punctuation sandwich) and can be found inside the huge tapering semicylinder of the indoor ski slope, Xscape.  Surely the 's' there is redundant. Ecks-scape?

Milton Keynes has the air of the airport about it - the clean, untroubling modern lines, the endless car parks, the mysterious scale of all that must happen out of immediate sight, the frankly collosal number of mummy-class chain restaurants that live symbiotically in such places.  The thrill of the familiar Café Rouge, Ask!, Est Est Est, La Tasca, Pizza Express, Giraffe, Jamie's Italian...  This is precisely what the Brit on holiday wants - what s/he already knows, with a different backdrop.  The unfamiliar horror of the alien tempered and soothed by the oral delight of same again.  More Jamie's breast milk for me.

And Thamesmead

Milton Keynes and Thamesmead were both New Towns nobly seeking to correct the past.  Actually, in comparison with Milton Keynes, it's hard to think of Thamesmead as a town - it has no real shops, no centre, no function other than housing.  Milton Keynes, maligned and as sexy as Norwich it might be, is far more purposive and successful.  Perhaps it's also a fluke of architectural choice.  Thamesmead's concrete brutalism is now widely reviled, whereas Milton Keynes' high-tech modernism happens to remain contemporary - it could happily sit alongside the London Eye, the Gherkin, City Hall, Heathrow Terminal 5, almost any of Canary Wharf, the unfinished addition to Kings Cross, the unfinished Shard, the unfinished Pinnacle...

But it's not just luck.  Milton Keynes is simply Well Done.  And, just as crucially, Well Maintained.  Whereas Thamesmead reeks of abandonment and discontent, Milton Keynes remains fresh, appealing and relevant.  Even if the car parking is no longer free.

John Lewis en Plage

Cycle Path Fails: #1

There's a phone box in it.

Very Bad Things about London: #1 Euston (part one)

London, 1968.

Right, chaps. Thanks for coming.  Do sit down.  Take some tea.  And a biscuit.  Please.

So - we're building a new mainline station for London. Euston - we have a problem!   No seriously, let's stay focused.  And Apollo 13 doesn't launch till 1970.  

So - this station.  It'll serve the entire North West of the country, and up to Scotland too. There're two Underground lines here - well, three if you count to split branches of the Northern Line. So - how many escalators shall we put in?  Hmm.  It is a major London terminus.  A flagship late-60s development and modernisation programme.  Five?  Ha, no Perkins, I think not.  Hmm.  I reckon... one each way. Yeah.  There is no possible way that one escalator could not be enough. I mean, seriously - it would be ludicrous to put more in. Or even leave space for more. No, there could never be a freak set of circumstances in which one escalator would not be grossly generous.  Particularly at rush hour.  Yup, no problems here at all.

See!  Told you.  Huge amounts of capacity.  It's almost embarrassing.

A Sunday afternoon is clearly indicative of the busiest it'll ever get.  

Another thing - we need to help passengers understand the Tube setup here.  This new station should make best use of the brand new Victoria Line, which has only just started running.  It's really important that things are as simple and streamlined as possible.  I think I'll get that Escher guy in again - he did such a good job with the Thamesmead flying walkways.  I have a feeling that this brilliant decision will secure me an MBE...  Just mark my words.

Cyrstal.  Clear. 

Think we're pretty much there, chaps.  All we need now is to destroy the iconic arch out front, jam in a charmless and windswept plaza, and we're done.  

A good day's work, I think.  Pass the biscuits.

Thamesmead

I'd been to Thamesmead once before, a flying visit, safely in the car with the doors locked.  I remembered the road running between blank concrete walls, like the Death Star trench, and the simply huge flyovers that appear to go from and to nowhere.  But at that youthful time (2003, on the way back from France in a friend's mum's BMW which fascinated HM Customs), I was less sensitised to the esoteric delights of concrete housing blocks.  

But, excited by Owen Hatherley's 'New Ruins of Great Britain', and engorged by a recent viewing of Clockwork Orange (which has a slow-motion ultraviolence fight scene filmed along the concrete lake there), I set off again to view the massive 'town of the 21st century'.

Thamesmead is a late 60s New Town, the only one built in London.  It sits in a largely inaccessible part of Zone 4, just south of the East-widening river.  The nearest Tube or DLR station is Gallions Reach.  But getting there involves swimming the Thames.  For a bit of August tailwind fun, I cycled there.

Thamesmead is, by the way, huge.  I'd love to see an oblique aerial shot.  Aparallel row and angle after row and angle, slight shifts in style like a lucky dip selection of English Brutalist leitmotifs.  I saw a sign for garages numbered 2005-2018.  So, unless the numbering system is whimsically perverse, there are shed loads of flats.    Wikipedia suggest the population is 50,000.  The parts around the lake are easily the best, even if the lake is now largely clogged with pondweed and trolleys and other urban jetsam.

The highish rise blocks.  

And some swans wondering where Greenwich is.

Near the bit where Alex's droogs get cinematically beaten up.

Have those clothes been hung out to dry?  In a lake?

Thamesmead is enduring some scorched-earth gentrification, with boxy old concrete blocks being replaced by, um, boxy new concrete blocks with render. 

 Replacing crap old with crap new.

Almost acknowledging that the new bits aren't actually any better (just not blighted by our cultural association of exposed concrete with poverty and violence), a few of the highish rise concrete blocks have been given a whitewash facelift.  They really look just like the brand new bits.

Stunning (re)development.

In places, the redevelopment appears to have taken the form of a dab of blue paint (reminding me of the bright yellow staircase from another baffling and unfriendly concrete megastructure, Lasdun's South Bank Centre).

Happy now?

As all good psychologists, and no architects, know, the repetitive uniformity of concrete estates does not appeal to the Englishman [apologies for the sexism], whose home, albeit one built on the Thames floodplain, is his castle.  Said Englishman will therefore gleefully etch a little of his character on his home.  There are lots and lots of foul personal touches, like those naff novelty phone cases that you can buy to keep your HTC Rumba free of grease from your Gregg's pasty.

Because my concrete home is half timber-beam 

Tudorbethan and half Georgian.

Because my concrete house is a gated country estate

(and / or prison).

Because my concrete house is a foul Thatcherite Plexiglass Portal 

(cf Surrey Quays Shopping Centre).

I suppose Thamesmead hoped to emulate the success of the City's Barbican.  Whilst it fails at this, it has managed to emulate the some of the Barbican's 'I can see where I want to go, but I have no idea how to get there' / 'Oh, this walkway goes nowhere' hilarity.

A Thamesmead flying walkway.  By MC Escher.

'Aborted walkway (always seem that hardest words to say)'

Thamesmead's failure is attributed in some part to the crap public transport thereabouts (it might once've had a bridge over the Thames or a Fleet Line tube station), which knackered the place's ability to appeal to commuters or basically anyone with a job outside a Thamesmead corner shop.  I couldn't even find the nearest train station, Abbey Wood, because some wag / prick had turned the signs round.  Incidentally, if approaching by bike, strictly the road signs that will send you pedalling wildly past HMP Belmarsh (which scares the hell out of me) along a whopping dual carriageway before suddenly depositing you at the massive flying roundabout above and just to the north of the lake-and-towers part of Thamesmead.  It is a perhaps unintentional, but utterly appropriate, vista.

I love dated versions of the future.

Failed and unloved as it may be, Thamesmead interests me far more than the smug Georgiana of windswept and paranoid Blackheath.  #personalvendetta