High Streets and Mary Portas

'Tis the time of year for asinine and caveated headlines like 'It's expected to be one of the busiest shopping days of the year'.  This apparently applies to the Saturday before Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve, and the day after Boxing Day, and the Saturday after Christmas Day, and, and.

As ever at Christmas, I've headed back to the parents' house to eat some Quality Street and play with the dog.  I also like to check in on the market town's High Street (I'm going to shorten this to HS), to see how thing's changed since I was last there.  During my school years, I saw the local HS curl up and die.  In response to the redevelopment of the indoor shopping precinct (and the last-but-one recession), the main stores moved from the Victorian HS, and those units filled with charity shops and pound stores.  Only in the mid-Nineties, when a local campus became a part of Luton University, did the HS awaken, albeit as a slightly-downmarket run of studenty pubs and kebab shops, thereby supplying the small-town needs of booze, meat fat and somewhere to fight.

Earlier this month, Queen of Shops, Mary Portas (try not to think of a ginger Liza Minnelli from Cabaret) released her review of the future of HS across the land.  Firstly, I should say that I think she's largely right.  HS cannot, and should not try to, compete with the brute-force selling power of large chain retailers, and the internet.  No-one benefits from dead and deserted town centres and HS.

However, I found her My Struggle prose rather over-the-top.  Portas wants to represent her commentary as a non-governmental and therefore independent and therefore personal and therefore unbiased and therefore accurate telling of how things really are.  'The only hope our high streets have of surviving in the future,' she intones, 'is to recognise what’s happened and deliver something new'.  Our plucky HS have become cognisant - it is for them to be sentient and understand their past and future.  Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Portas then indulges in a classic sophomoric essay technique, exploring a variety of meanings of a key term, in this case 'heart' (the centre of something / life-giving / strength of feeling / expression of fidelity / emotional engagement / love etc etc).  She emotes:

High streets are the heart of towns and communities. They have been for centuries. People are passionate about high streets. They may have different views on what’s wrong and what’s right, but I don’t believe anyone can put their hand on their heart and say they don’t care.

[my, laboured, emphases]

(No, I don't)

In addition to (relentlessly) demonstrating her strength of faith (repeating 'believe' eleven times in the three-side Foreword), there's also a 'vision' which aims 'to find and nurture tomorrow's innovators and ideas that will create the new sustainable high streets of the future'.  Yuk.  The not-quite-heroic hyperbole continues with the underwhelming claim to have 'visited many high streets to see what the situation is for myself...'.  Wow!  Such dedication to the Noble Cause.  Literally several!

Anyway.  The niceties of her text are not (supposed to be) the point.  Rather, the focus is on her 28 concluding recommendations for revitalising HS.  There're some technical taxation / land 'use class' thoughts (the latter aiming to reduce the rash of betting shops), and a 'visionary' benign dictatorship of 'Town Teams' seeking to make it all better.  Another of her proposals is to encourage local markets, and 'establish a new "National Market Day" where budding shopkeepers can try their hand at operating a low-cost retail business'.  A nation of shopkeepers, indeed.  But I suspect that Portas means something none-too-glamorous: she elsewhere suggested that HS should host car boot sales.  Indeed a 'low-cost retail business'.  Hmm.  Lucky HS.

Furthermore, in my experience, markets fall into two categories.  Firstly, the cheapo back-of-a-lorry 'spectatulars' to be found in most towns, somewhere near the bus station and some cafés serving OAP Specials on Wednesdays.  Whilst there may be a romantic view of salt-of-the-earth traders, there's also the risk of crap quality, knock-off goods, and no hope of redress from a stall you might never see again.

The other contemporary manifestation of the market comes in the tedious cabal of Famers' Markets, where the aspirational classes joyfully subscribe to the pretence of 'authentic' and 'better' 'rural' food by buying an £8 quiche from a 'farmer' / man in a Barbour jacket outside Putney Tube station (cf the 'Organic Duck Fat Is Good For You Because It's Expensive' syndrome).

And the middle ground?  It's chain supermarkets.  That's why they are so popular.  They're a place to find half-decent veg and half-decent meat at half-decent prices, without fear of being ripped-off by a Del Boy or financing a  Fearnley-Whittingstall's third Jag.  It may not be particularly good food, but it's hygienically packaged, and there's no need to interact with a grubby man with a common accent (cf the 'Waitrose Cows Make Posher Milk Than The Ones Who Work For Morrisons' syndrome).  Perfect.  Well, perfect enough.

Anyway.  Portas' ideas are nice enough, provided there is a critical mass of genuinely useful services provided along the HS - an actual reason to go there, and overcome the challenges of congestion, inadequate parking, swathes of betting shops, etc. I can see this 'vision' working in affluent areas.  For example, SW11's Northcote Road already supports independent artisanal breadmakers, Brio-heavy toy shops, and music stores specialising in instruments for under-elevens.  However, being near the well-to-do sub-suburb of Wandsworth Common (which is in Balham), and the country's busiest rail station, Clapham Junction (which is in Battersea), cannot hurt.  I just can't see those with less disposable incoming being in a position to stop taking advantage of the bulk-buying economies of supermarkets and the .coms to financially support local traders.

What Portas' Manifesto does do well, is open the debate.  HS are dying, and retail parks are thriving, because of our choices.  We'd much prefer to blame someone else (cf the 'It's The Bank's Fault They Gave Me A 110% Mortgage And Now I'm In Negative Equity' syndrome).  But we have opted to turn our backs on small stores, and embrace the convenience of the internet and plastic sheds on ring roads.

As a final note, when Googling 'Mary Portas', the first hits are ads for her brands at places like House of Fraser, Clarks and (I don't want to think about her gusset) Mytights.com.  It's as if all this bluster about HS might actually, and quite coincidentally, make Ms Portas some money.

From online retail.  Hmm.

Foreign: Krakow (Nowa Huta)

As part of it's 2011 EU Presidency bumf, Poland has put together a free English-language paperback advertising the delights of Poland, its cities and its citizens ('About Polska').  It's mainly anodyne and harmless sub-propaganda ('We see ourselves as friendly, welcoming folk' etc etc), encouraging tourists to pop over and spend some dosh before the EU implodes and the Euro becomes the Deutsch Mark Mk II.

Amongst its pages on the Krakow, the book mentions a place called Nowa Huta, describing it as 50s 'social engineering experiment' that is now 'a troubled district...that fascinates with its grandiose Stalinist architecture'.  As a high-risk tourism venture goes, it's up there with London advertising 'Come to Norwood Junction - it's edgy.  There are chicken bones.  Mmm'.  But, having nearly collected the full set of English 50s New Towns, I thought I'd take the opportunity to see how the Socialists did urban planning back then.

The whole settlement of Nova Huta was inflicted on the middle-classes of Krakow, for their refusal to vote for Uncle Vladimir in a post-war referendum.  The idea was to balance out the vile Krakowiak bourgeois with some honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth Workers.  Hence the New Town was focused on a steel works - a vast complex, which once held the largest blast furnace in Europe.

The receptionist at the hotel was clearly somewhat dismayed that I was asking how to get to Nowa Huta, rather than the walled charms of the Old Town.  She told me I could catch a tram directly Howa Huta, but was unable to tell me how I'd know when I'd actually reached there...

So I got off the tram sort-of at random, on the basis that I had passed the picturesque kitsch of the Old Town some time ago (and a couple of really horrid PoMo shopping centres).  I could see some post-war 50s-ish buildings, so hoped I might be in the right sort of area.  These point blocks look distinctly similar to the medium-rise things we have dotted around the UK (particularly now they're adorned with satellite dishes).  So far, so not very exciting.

'...grandiose Stalinist...'?

But, fortuitously stumbling (I was well off the tourist maps of Krakow here) upon the main square of Plac Centralny, I found the huge radiating boulevards of Socialist Realist blocks - 6-storey rendered and arcaded rows of apartments and ground-floor shops.

That's my shadow in the bottom right.

I appear to be saluting.

This aerial shot shows the design of the development - with the Plac at the bottom, the main avenues fanning out, with housing blocks filling up the spaces in betweeb.

 Copyright: teh internets

I mentioned before how social and political ideas are so often manifested in the buildings of the time.  For example, English New Towns like Welwyn Garden City were built with swathes of trees and parks as a reaction to the dense slum housing of the industrial revolution, to enhance the quality of life for the residents.  As an added bonus, and quite terrifyingly, the greenery of Nova Huta was included to help soak up the radiation from the feared nuclear war; the wide streets would prevent the spread of apocalyptic fires; and the layout of the housing blocks meant that the city could be turned into a walled fortress with comparative ease.  Serious stuff.

According to a slim volume I later bought from the one-room Howa Huta Museum, these blocks were originally pretty dismal inside, with 'no central heating, no sewage system...the floors were simply lined with bare, unplaned planks'.  That said, in the setting wintery sun, the blocks looked a little like the cute pastiche of somewhere like Welwyn (although, as if the punchline to a Victoria Wood skit, rather than a whopping great steel plant, Welwyn had a Shredded Wheat factory). Presumably completing the aims of this design, the outside of the blocks looked quite attractive to a Prole like me.

Off to the east of the main housing matrix lies the eponymous steel works, its huge on-stilts signage rising up from the trams' power cables.  From a distance, it looks a bit like Croydon's Ikea.

Ampere Way, Communist style

The administrative blocks standing of either side of the sign are topped with a comb attic of renaissance details, nodding to the fluted stylings of the Old Town buildings.  The steel works - apparently still in operation - are closed off behind some gates.

Amazing bit of sans serif on dynamic stilts.

Broken ice floated on the surface of the Nowa Huta lake, as I headed back towards the warmth of the hotel.  It was cold.

Making Faking the English

At Richmond Station there's a lovely old poster for Chessington, which dates from around the time that the latter opened as a theme park (1987).

The starkly energetic colours, bouncy serif fonts and slightly naff collage evoke perfectly the child-friendly and slightly overwhelming experience of theme parks.  It's also unmistakably English.  Take, say, the mild crapness of a polar bear trying to eat a traffic cone. Or perhaps the confused capitalisation of 'Amusement' - which flags surely the least interesting word possible to describe a land of roller-coasters and roaring tigers.  One is not amused.

I think there are only three proper theme parks in the UK*.  The epic and distant Alton Towers sprawls somewhere - Christ - up by Stoke.  And yet there are two within the M25: Thorpe Park, and the aforementioned Chessington World of Adventures, which I shan't henceforth abbreviate to Chessington WoA.  (*Pleasurewood Hills not only sounds like a festival of furtive rural masturbation, but was also unthrilling during a family-packed holiday to Norfolk in the mid-80s).

Chessington gives both children and adults a healthy dose of fantasy.  For example, the park-touring monorail (the Safari Skyway, since you don't ask) gives the children a big-person's view of the sea-lions and tigers.  It also indulges the adults' late-80s property dreams, departing from a playful bonanza of new-money aspirations: outside, a castle tower with Tudorbethan annex (complete with twee waterwheel); inside a confection of mock-Georgian columns and balustrades.

Please keep your aspirations inside the car at all times.

The whole place is relentlessly charming, a sensation reinforced by the unmistakably English acceptance of naffness and kitch.  This recurs throughout the park in the form of self-consciously unconvincing props and manifestly unreal sets.

Are there really professional papier mâché artists?  

No, apparently not.

Perhaps most surreal is the lions' enclosure, which has them romping around in front of some derelict Bollywood set (a broken bit of Mughal cupola baffles the tigers in the adjacent enclosure).

And why not?  The delight of the place is the mash of colours and cultures (what child wouldn't want a real Land of Dragons?).  This is a carnival place, where unreality, impossibility and artifice are to be welcomed.  The façades here help the excitement build - the best fun comes from the rides they simultaneously hide and decorate.

Particoloured columns, exposed beams, and a couple of bales of hay on top, for good measure.

An article from The Telegraph notes: 

The cacophony of detail... evokes a broad range of styles more or less for the hell of it. So what?... The exotic is arbitrarily juxtaposed with the local... Sometimes the sublime meets the ridiculous head-on. 

Quite right, I say.  However, the article cited is not about Chessington.  Rather, it's addressing a development completed a year later, a few miles north in Richmond: Quinlan Terry's mock-Georgian Riverside Development.

Cripes.  That's a bit different, isn't it?

This wodge of particoloured eighteenth-century-façadism, with terraced grass leading down to the Thames pathway is utterly gorgeous, it's south-west aspect drinking in the occasional British sunshine. Nonetheless, The Telegraph's sublime / ridiculous claim only operates here in the way that these buildings house particularly dull examples of minimum-think chain eateries - a Pitcher and Piano and a Med Kitchen. There'll be a Pizza Express round there somewhere.

As if a deliberately rewarding close reading, Richmond is itself a pleasingly textual bag of conceits. Richmond-Upon-Thames, as it likes to be called, captures the English obsession with affluence ('rich mound'), and rural idylls, staking a claim to a picturesque site abutting perhaps the world's most famous river. Furthermore, the place refers to itself as being in Surrey, rather than humdrum London - this estate-agent mixology doesn't work elsewhere (Croydon-Upon-Wandle, anyone?), but is embraced in Richmond.

And yet Richmond's success is inextricably tied to the ability to get away from it: the Thameslink, SW Trains and District Line all help the residents quickly reach their offices in the City, where they can make the money that allows them to live in their Victorian tradesmen's terraces. Hence the English infatuation with the 'countryside'. We don't want to be in the real country, where there's cattle and mud and no Café Nero; we want to live in the countryside, from which we can escape to civilisation by the fast train to Waterloo. We want a fake country, one on the mainline and Tube.

I've elsewhere sung the praises of Welwyn's Parkway, the New Town's main drag, lined with 20s and 50s mock-Georgian houses. I like mock-Georgian. I like it in the way that I like toast. It's comforting. It's satisfying. It's thoroughly undemanding. 

Despite the manifest beauty of this obscenely detailed pretence, Richmond Riverside leaves a strange taste in the mouth.  Behind the glorious frontages is a bunch of office space, a few flats, and some particularly bland retail units.  And the whole place is about money and aspiration.  It's not about architecture.  It's about snobbishness and pretension and the paranoia that comes with it.

No-one's going to steal my coaching lamps.

In a sublimely snide bit of middle class sniping, the place's architect, Quinlan Terry, complains about other builders who knock up mock-Georgian stuff, observing 'You can't achieve grandeur on the cheap'. Read: faking it is fine, provided you've got the cash.  Terry continues, 'only very grand people's houses had porticoes'.  Note that it is not the buildings here that are grand - it's their occupants.  Wealth, demonstrated through the choice of an appropriate domestic architecture, confers grandeur.  As if begging for a smack, Terry prickishly boasts he's 'built for old wealth and new wealth'.  

The self-congratulatory obsession with money is perfectly manifested in the commemorate plaque that marks the opening of the Development.

Minted.

Nonetheless, Richmond Riverside is a theme park.  A fantasy land of Chambers, Palladio, Venetian, Gothic, Baroque and Greek Revival themes.  A place where Richmonders can let's-pretend the fictive Georgian riverfront they always felt they deserved.  What adult wouldn't want a real Georgian townhouse?

And yet Richmond Riverside is the po-faced and joyless side of English fakery.  The fakery that takes itself seriously, and believes itself better on the basis of that which has been faked.

Undeniably English.

The novelty of new New Town shops

Having chalked up a visit to another a 50s New Town (this time, Sussex's Crawley), some t'internet trawling led to the Borough Council's plans to rework the main shopping area.  Whilst most towns and cities in the UK have evolved over hundreds, or even thousands, of years, in these unusual situations, the architects of these towns got the opportunity to deliver a whole town (or at least the plan for one) in one fell swoop.  But, to quote surely the worst advertising tagline of all time, Change Happenz.  (Italics and bold.  A vile typographical war crime).

Crawley's large-scale redevelopment plan includes reworking the set-piece Boulevard, a road which was intended in the original 1950s masterplan to be 'enlivened with floodlighting and illuminations in colour' (presumably making it something like Welwyn Garden City's superb Parkway).  In the event, Crawley's Boulevard has become a busy orbital road forcibly demarking the northmost end of the shopping precinct, making a trip across to the brutally dull 1960s Civic Hall a life-threatening funrun.

Civic pride fail 

(spelt FA'L).

The old masterplan document (written about the same time as Orwell's 1984...) advocates a benign Corporation  which should oversee the whole design of the town to ensure consistency and yet 'prevent the monotony of design and layout which are so often found where no aesthetic control has applied'.  Variety good and continuity good.  The document continues:

It is a defect of the modern town that the design of street furnishings is so rarely considered in relation to the street itself and to the buildings along it. Lamp standards of poor design, for instance, are frequently selected from manufacturers catalogues and used without discrimination. Footways are often obstructed by lamp standards, beacons, traffic signals, signposts, pillar boxes, fire alarms and other furniture, the design of which has obviously not been subject to any over-riding control or co-ordination.

These wise words have of course been ignored over the years.  The town centre is now blessed with a selection of PoMo streetlights and signage.  And - sigh - a transplanted Victorian bandstand that intentionally clutters up the central space, Queens Square.

Incongruous bandstand, superfluous steps and 

tubular metal handrails all help cure the Scary Open Space.

The old High Street gets some strange silver-gothic 

Millennial street furniture and, um, perhaps some gallows.

Crawley's current redevelopment plan is not the first attempt to bolster the array of shops and address the contemporary shoppers' desires.  As is apparently obligatory with such New Towns, the 50s precinct was joined later by a full-enclosed shopping complex, centring on a large department store.  Crawley's Debenhams is housed the multilevel 1990 PoMo of County Mall.

A shuddering orgasm for escalator-fanciers.

Harlow's Harvey Centre (1979) holds a glamorous and brown BHS.  The whole of Bracknell appears to surround the large Bentalls, to the point that the store can be approached from all sorts of confusing aspects, including from the wilting Princess Square of 1984.  Basildon's 1985 Eastgate once held a Savacentre and Allders - now an Asda and another Debenhams.  Hemel Hempstead's 1990 Marlowes lacks such a punter-magnet and is therefore largely dying (and apparently modelled on a massive white trench).

Happy.  Space.

But how many shopping centres can a modestly-sized town support?  Crawley's new plan includes 100 new shops (anchored by a John Lewis).  Hemel's new complex, Riverside, has already been built, again housing a large department store (Debenhams, naturally).  

These redevelopments inevitably draw businesses (and shoppers) away from the original 50s parade and into the new, shiny, weather-proof complexes.  The 'regeneration' of the town centre so often leads to the stagnation and abandonment of the original precincts.  Much of the 50s shopping stock in Bracknell in particular is in a parlous state (despite a fucking deluge of fucking hanging baskets of fucking flowers).

Wild. West. 

(ie Bracknell)

Great.  Unwashed.

Fuck's.  Sake.

Again, Hemel's Riverside has helped to knacker the Marlowes, which had in turned helped to knacker the set-piece 50s high street, which is now relegated to local supermarkets (in the former Sainsbury's), and chain pubs like Wetherspoons (which occupies the town's old theatre, and is done up inside like an industrial Nando's).

The stains of the Sainsbury's signage 

peak out from the right.

Improbably groovy pub.  

Completely unsympathetic on the inside.

So, what should be done with these old parts of New Towns?  Bracknell's approach appears to be much like Thamesmead's - daub some render, splash around some blue paint, and pretend that the old buildings are new.

Happy now?

(fucking baskets of fucking flowers).

This approach, performed in a staggeringly inept way in Bracknell, rather underlines that there is nothing wrong with the old buildings [I am aware of writing 'underlines', but then using italics.  For some reasons, 'this rather italicises' does quite convey what I meant].  Whilst 50s buildings are too new to be much admired (culturally, we've got as far as Victorian Gothic, and the occasional bit of Deco in the background of Poirot), simply sticking up wodges of new shopping next to them is not a way to ensure that a town continues to thrive (cf Bracknell).

Unless, perhaps, there is a deliberate masterplan being enacted.  Perhaps the idea is to create a huge museum of consumerism, consisting of shopping precincts throughout the decades, thoughtfully arranged around clusters of increasingly-tall multi-storey car parks...

And, on that, I shall start thinking about scooting to the UK's newest shopping centre, the Olympic Stratford Westfield.

Tower blocks: Bracknell's Point Royal

It rained on me most of the time I was in Bracknell.  It was sunny in Virginia Water on both the way there and the way back.  But raining in Bracknell.

Having thoroughly confused some locals by asking for directions to the only residential tower in the town (one of whom clearly thought I was a mentalist), I finally came across the 17-storey block in the conservation area of Easthampstead.  Not quite sure what qualifies the area as conserved - the 50s houses thereabouts have been routinely subjected to the usual improvements of coaching lamps and mock-Georgian windows.  But the tower itself is very good.

Apparently nicknamed the 'thruppeny bit'.  

Quaintly dated iconic branding.

The tower sits atop a large smooth concrete disk.  This is in turn surrounded by a sort of moat, which provides ventilation and light to the car park underneath the whole thing.  The frequency of the trees growing in the moat suggests that they were deliberately placed there, or at least deliberately not removed.  Not sure that it was a great idea, as it gives the place a rather unkempt air of abandonment.

The moat / blast pit.

The moat is spanned by a couple of concrete bridges.  The load-bearing central core is hidden in the shadows of painted concrete screens, implying the whole building is light enough to rest on just those slim supports.

Not sure if the listing is my photography or the tower itself...

The styling is unashamedly space age - the tower sits like a rocket resting on a launch pad.  It is so much more 'designed', more interesting than the later, lazier blocks built across the the country, which are now so widely hated.  As the external doors to the block are (wisely) locked, I didn't get to infiltrate, so I have no idea what it's like inside.  Perhaps it awash with needles and urine.  But, from the outside, in a burst of sunshine on a rainy day, it looked really rather decent.

Ancient and Modern Revised (an introduction)

This post started life as an introductory paragraph for a separate post on a visit to some 50s New Towns.  So, the themes of regeneration, Zeitgeist and back doors will be returned to.

During the non-stop TVathon of the 2010 General Election, Prime Minister-to-be David Cameron was trailed constantly by the media.  Poor chap must've hated all that exposure.  Of course, the solitary advantage such coverage provided Conservative HQ was the opportunity to deliver a range of liminal messages to the voting public, from tie colour, to haircut, to a warm healthiness of subtle perma-tan.

Whether chosen by Cameron himself, or thoughtfully selected by Conservative HQ, his London house is quite perfectly suited to a man asking to run the country.  Not so ostensibly new-money as some gated Banker Georgian, nor so whimsical as a 70s bungalow, Cameron emerged each morning, striding businesslike and reassuring, from a scrubbed-clean piece of Late Victorian suburbia in Notting Hill.  

Such Queen Anne properties have become the Heights of Aspiration (whether an original or a more recent pick-and-mix of Victorian confections).  Solid Empire brickwork, clean white paint, a large bay of sash windows. A proper space to raise a family.  Respectable, established, safe.

An advert for new-build Victoriana in Hemel Hempstead.  

Aspiration + sans serif + fear of rocketing house prices = Zeitgeist

And reassuringly expensive.  Strange to recognise that these Victorian houses, which are now so costly that they are just out of reach of the average Londoner (according to some slightly bitter guesswork on the Internet, Cameron's pad would set you back about £2.7 million, heading towards 100 times the mean London salary), were knocked up on the cheap by speculative builders - literally jerry built - for mere bank clerks.  Even stranger, such clerks would have employed a servant.  The houses' front parlours would stand resolutely unused, a rhetorical caesura for the demonstration of wealth and status.  Tradesman would come to the rear door to deal with the servant, not troubling the mighty clerk at his (certainly his) polychromatic glass front door.  

Modern Revised

Such social mores are preserved, locked in the brick of the domestic architecture of the time.  To an extent.  As the demands that society places on the buildings that provide us with shelter and workplaces change, we modify the past to address our new conception of our needs.  Those Victorian piles are now routinely hacked into apartments for high-density modern living (a money-making manoeuvre only made possible by the post-war relaxation of regulations to permit windowless bathrooms).  With a combi boiler, a plasterboard sheet and an extractor fan, the old front parlour can now be passed off as an entire flat (a studio!  How arty and bohemian!  And dreadful).

We'll all be familiar with personal microcosms of the shock of change.  When returning to places we used to know well, we notice the differences - the shops that have changed, the pubs that've gentrified or closed, the shiny silver confetti of Millennial street furniture.  But we also encounter an unsettling awareness of the huge swathes of the prosaic, the background - did it really use to look like that?  Had we ever noticed that before? 

Returning quite randomly to Basildon a few years ago, I was struck by how many things I'd forgotten I remember about the place.  Not all of which are even there.  There is still a spiral ramp leading up to the multi-storey car park.  Although I had recalled that the orgastic (© F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925) parent-trap Toys Я Us could be seen from the ramp, which it can't.

Scene of a simulacrum.

Basildon's pedestrianised shopping precinct was once accompanied by a blue-glass box housing an Army & Navy store.  Access to this Palace of Suburban Desires (Estée Lauder, Pyrex, Tefal) was via an improbably external escalator, covered by a canopy of the same mirrored blue postmodernism.  The store has since gone.  At the time of my visit, a rusting relic of the child-thrilling show-off escalator was still waiting to be removed.

Fenced off.  

Let's not ask how I got up there to take this photo.

This photo could act as a case study of redeveloping a New Town.  A wing of the original and slightly Lilliputian 50s parade runs along the top right.  An unsympathetic, out-of-scale and now unloved standalone 80s addition sits adjacent.  A coffee-chain Millennial portacabin seeks to fill in the original open-plan vision, recognising the English fear of communal spaces, and the opportunity to generate a few more pounds from the space available (cf the shanty town of eateries on the plaza in front of Euston).

An unlikely on-stilts tower block, stands slap-bang in the centre of the town.  Presumably it was once a  set-piece of engineering, before such buildings became shameful.  The tower forms the backdrop to an open-air theatre space, with steps doubling as raked seating.  Of course, this space is completely empty, an underused pastiche of the squares and piazzas that our European cousins have the weather to enjoy.

Physically-improbable architectural performance.

As I've noted before, all of this was Quite Normal to me as a child, unaware of quite how different this all was to the colossal weight of Victorian housing and shopping across the whole country.  Likewise, necessarily without historical context, I'd never realised that Milton Keynes' fine Point was the UK's first multiplex cinema.  I saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles there without realising that I was enjoying a piece of British history.  Such history lives, whether observed or not.  At least, it does until society, with the best of least-resistance intentions, erases it.

The Ambercrombie Plan New Towns appeal to me because of their scale - whole towns built to house the post-war family of the future: nuclear age places for nuclear families.  These consciously modern places are now routinely subject to redevelopment, so often in terms of whopping ring-road complexes, with housing in reassuring mock Georgian or mock Victorian style.  But the ideas behind those towns, their car-free shopping parades, their conspicuous leisure facilities, their New And Better housing is still there.  To an extent.

I took some photos to ensure I remember.

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.

Foreign: (a bit of) Warsaw Metro

I had a few minutes for a brief exploration of the post-Communist Warsaw Metro system.  Well, system is a bit keen as there's only one line.  And, from what I saw of a quick spin, it's all a bit sensible and functional, in a Heathrow-extension-of-the-Piccadilly-Line type way.

All the thrills of a double-decker Hounslow West.

The old rolling stock will give caravan-fanciers something to enjoy.  

Good thing that veneer is waterproof.

The Metro entrances I saw were uninspiring Thatcherite blue-frame canopies.  Presumably the Polish civic planners were keen to make up for having missed out on the delights of the 80s.

Yawn.  DLR-chic.

However, Plac Wilsona seems to be a pointlessly lovely (although probably accidental) homage to Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Bored-looking commuters ride a short escalator into an elliptical abduction fantasy of soft pink and blue uplighting.

[Insert Star Trek cliché here]

Thank god it's not modelled on DS9 </geek>

Plac Wilsona reminds me of the utterly random Star Trek-themed Page's Bar pub in Westminster, which had a model Starship Enterprise hanging in pride of place over the pool table, and the occasional fan in full Worf-from-season-3 gear.  Whilst surely too niche an interest to be a viable business proposition, Page's Bar was more interesting that the pub that replaced it, the expensive-and-humdrum Westminster.

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