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.