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.