Foreign: Cyprus PoMotel

I wrote this whilst trying to waste 4 hours, stuck at Larnaca airport for a flight home. You may wish, dear reader, to aim off slightly therefore, and, in so doing, redact a hint of impotent fury from your interior monologue.

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As another EU Presidency country, I've traveled to Cyprus a couple of times to go to meetings and wear a suit and be British. 

Owing to a delayed flights on the way out (this time: freezing fog at Heathrow), I didn't get chance to look around Nicosia and see what the place is like. All I did see of Cyprus was from a window of the coach. In September, it looked like a sun-blasted quarry, with blobular white Moss Eisley housing on the horizon. But in December, the place was much greener, and actually looked a bit like England in summer. I can see why our agéd chavs come here to retire and deflate and go orange. 

But perhaps the hotel made up for all the delays. The Larnaca Hilton (not to be confused with the Larnaca Park Hilton, of course, that would be stupid. Like our coach driver), is an externally unlovely bit of 60s concrete.

Much more excitingly, it was refurbed in the late 90s in the Postmodernist styling of an early bit of Canary Wharf. 

We Brits stopped doing PoMo in about 1990, when we ran out of boom money, and all started enjoying negative equity and high interest rates. When we restarted building, we'd decided that the 80s were terribly vulgar, and it made more sense to build curvy white and glass things, like the Germans did in the 1920s. Anyway, our recession clearly didn't affect our European cousins in such a way, hence the Corporate PoMo style seems to have flourished onwards for many more years.

The arcade of 'luxury' shops is strange mix of travertine arches, twiddly metalwork and a suspended ceiling with spotlights. 

The entrance to the bar is flagged by some Corinthian columns and triple-helix Hippocratic uplighters. 

The main lift atrium is particularly fun - towers like stacked Doric columns of banded stone rise up to a glass canopy, above a shiny marble floor of meaningless hieroglyphs. Two large metal gates denote where the entrance to the lifts isn't - the gates are simply decorative, and the lift doors are round the other side. 

Some massive scrolling pretends to hold up the floor above. 

I was delighted at the silliness of some rustic detail nearby - a row of terracotta roofing tiles along to top of a wooden screen. 

You might think that it's entirely in keeping, a hint of Cypriot peasant hut near a Grecian temple.

But that would be to miss the point of this Hilton's PoMo. The design is not supposed to look like something of local significance. Rather, the hotel is supposed to look like the ones in America (did). The architecture's itinerary is Greece to Cyprus via Chicago.

Much of the UK's Corporate Grecian PoMo has been refurbed away, but I was pleased to find another trace of Yuppie aspiration - a ubiquity of 'Executive' bedrooms, flattering every guest into feeling like a double-breasted Thatcherite trader.

Sutton: All suburban shopping Bar None

Sutton is the home of the first All Bar One.

Despite this, or perhaps because of this, it is quite well-connected by trains.  Thusly, the curious and devilishly handsome urban explorer can get there with ease from, say, Kings Cross, Victoria, Blackfriars or, um, Mordern South.

Turning right out of the station [the direction, rather than necessarily with urgency] one toddles along a long downward sloping High Street, where rainwaters must cascade in those monsoon-season summer months.

One's eye is caught by a bit of suburban concrete brutalism; one might even fail at first to notice that someone had planted the first floor with shaggy grasses.  Perhaps it's a tribute to the Olympic Park.  But why is the floor above it partly open to the elements?  Is it a car park, once you've driven through the office space behind?  A Corbusier-style sun terrace with a roof?  A horrible, horrible mistake?

One soon comes across a nice bit of artificial stone PoMo, which looks like it might be a shopping centre, but is actually just a facade that extends well above the two-floor shops in it.

Shortly further on, one comes across a real shopping centre.  One which appears to have been modeled on the 1980s Space Lego Monorail set that I used to [/still] want.

Sutton's Times Square Shopping Centre

Legoland set 6990

Someone's putting in some valiant effort with Times Square.  The Christmas decorations are rather pleasant, with blue fairy lights matching the Lego canopy, but there are a heck of a lot of empty shops.

The heads of the hanged Christmas trees were left as a warning to others.

Things are livened up somewhat by a really grim 'Happy Happy Yellow' flying walkway that links the shopping centre to the multistorey carpark out back.  It looks like that acetate sheeting that shopkeepers used to stick on the inside of their windows to keep their haberdashery from fading in the sun.

Happy now?

Back across the High Street is yet another indoor shopping arcade, the one which presumably killed off the Times Square one.  This sports a rather impressive bit of heroic Gill Sans bursting forth into the winter sky.

Reminds me of Nova Huta

The St Nicholas shopping centre has all the most mediocre high street brands that the low-aspiring surburbanite could want (Next, Debenhams et al).  There's also a pleasingly over-the-top central dome bit bursting with bunting.

Happy Jubilee / Olympics / shopping

On the way back to the train station, one passes a pleasant example of small-town punning.  One can spend the entire journey back to London proper pondering [that's 'London-proper, pondering', not 'London, proper pondering'.  I don't speak like that] its hidden meanings.

A reference to 'dress to impress'?

A reference to Avis' 'We Try Harder'?

Just a bit illiterate?

Ebbsfleet: it were all fields round here

For some years, Ebbsfleet has been the (rather lame) bane of my life. It's the place that ruins Eurostar journeys. There I am, spread out like some kind of two-seat gentry, when a Kentish bumpkin boards at Ebbsfleet International, sits next to me, and thusly two hours of silent wresting for the arm-rest ensue. Oh what fun.

Whilst there's a station, Ebbsfleet isn't really a place yet.  So far, it's a potential New Town for the north Kent 'Thames Gateway'.  It's already served by the first High Speed train line (the one that doubles as the Javelin service for the Olympics).  There's a masterplan which shows what the proposed Ebbsfleet development might look like. When looking at the Battersea Power Station plans, I noted that the architects / propagandists had sometimes greyed out undesirable features, such as train tracks that run alongside proposed apartment blocks.  Here, the High Speed line is of course a draw for Ebbsfleet (indeed they've greyed out the roads) - but note the apparently vacant area in the far right of the image below...

...Google maps reveals that's a sewage works, that is.  Let's hope there's never an easterly breeze.

Ebbsfleet International station itself is an almost featureless glass box, sitting amidst a somewhat Tellytubby rolling green countryside.  The vista is only somewhat marred by the pylons lurking on the hilltops.

The station is served by allegedly-exciting Fastrack buses (Fast Rack?  Fasttrack?), which run to Bluewater shopping centre in the west, and Gravesend to the east.  So I went to both (which cost £6.  Bloody provincial fares).

Approaching Bluewater, the road loops down into a huge chalk quarry pit.  You are not allowed to arrive by foot.  The shopping centre has something of a theme park feeling about it, being surrounded by huge expanses of car park.  The front (if there is one - anyway, the way I went in) is strangely the weakest part, or, perhaps, that which has dated the most badly.  

The silver wire-frame structure of standard PoMo shapes (pointy, pyramidy, towery) looks like a particularly pretentious greenhouse.  Perhaps it is - it's called the Winter Garden, although any signs of greenery were hoarded off for refurbishment during my visit.

But just wait until you get inside (darling).  Bluewater, dear reader, is awesome.  It is perhaps the most attractive shopping centre I have ever seen.

Each of the sides of the sort-of triangle that makes up Bluewater is styled differently, and beautifully.  For example, the 'Guidhall' side is lined with 'sculptures' of artisans (weavers, glaziers, poulters, and the like).

The 'Rose Gallery' side has excerpts of poetry embossed on girders up by the high, bright roof, beneath a trellis of roses.  

A spur from the triangle, the 'Village', is darkly Historicist, all rich woods and glossy surfaces.

It leads to a water feature, some more ur-Tellytubby grass, and buildings wearing a dunce's hat and a Rubics cube.

Oh, PoMo, your jokes will never get old.  No, wait...

Back inside, each of the centre's 'corners' has a skylighted dome with sculptures and light pouring in.

The whole effect really is lovely.  There an almost high-Victorian thoroughness to the styling - everything that could be carved or emphasised or designed, is.  Even the poles that are strung with Jubilee / Olympic / woohoo-it's-summer bunting are different on each side.

Then again, given this is PoMo, I wonder whether all the styling is supposed to be taken ironically.  After all, there is no actual rose garden here, rather a post-industrial brownfield site topped with tarmac.  None of the goods for sale were made by the artisans captured in the sculptures, rather mass-produced for the lowest price in far-East factories.  Read differently, the massive Trajan simplethink poetry has a whiff of 1984 about it...

Repeat: I am happy in the dales of Kent.

Whilst the buildings are lovely, I've no doubt that shopping here is a vile experience on a busy weekend.  Luckily, the bedraggled shopper can then take the Fas Track bus to a quiet place, the enticingly-named estuarine town of Gravesend.  Mmm.

From there, on a hot summer's day, the lucky Kentish folk can bask in the sun and enjoy the views of Tilbury Power Station across the estuary.  

There're two cast-iron piers.  One is closed because it's a restaurant; the other is closed because it's owned by the Port of London Authority.

There is a statue of Pocahontas, because everyone in Kent loves Disney.

There are also signs of redevelopment.  Fingers crossed it'll be completed soon.

Best of British (nobody likes PoMo)

The opening of the Shard: typically understated.

TimeOut (you know, that thing that no-one in London reads) is doing its annual Best Building / Worst Building popular-o-meter.

Rather than just letting us all name and shame / phrase and praise [best I could do] any old building, the TimeOut crew have preselected 20 iconic and 20 bad 'bits of architecture'.  This helps us all not have to think too hard.  Or notice that TimeOut is using 'iconic' as an synonym for 'good'.  Hmm.

Anyway, the 'iconic' list can be broken down into a few basic tropes:

- Old / old looking (the Globe, the Tower of London, St Pauls)
- Fairytale Victoriana (St Pancras, Natural History Museum, Royal Courts of Justice)
- Moderne / Art Deco (Hoover Building, Senate House, Battersea Power Station)
- Brutalism (South Bank Complex, Trellick Tower)
- Random novelty (Neasden Temple), and
- The oooh shiny-shinies (the Lloyds Building, the Gherkin, the Shard)

You mustn't think too hard here either, or you'll spot that the 'South Bank Complex' is a cluster of buildings ranging from the simple curve of the 1951 Royal Festival Hall to the oh-god-I'm-trapped-again shuttered concrete mazes of 60s and 70s fundom alongside it.

Familiarity inevitably helped the TimeOut lot select their best buildings. Goldfinger's Trellick Tower is nice enough and has been seen by loads of motorists stuck on the A40 (like the Hoover Building). But the lesser-known and earlier Balfron Tower, done by the same geezer somewhere over near Poplar, is a better bet if you like your Flapjack Brutalism.  Balfron is surrounded by a cluster of other Brutalist slabs and point-blocks, and has a simply terrifying concrete 'playground' at the bottom, which adds to the inhuman, other-worldly nature of the site.

Smile.  Or perhaps don't.

And Balfron thoroughly trumps Trellick in terms of views - the west-facing panorama from a top-floor flat in Balfron is astounding, taking in everything from Battersea Power Station to the City in one glance.

Oh hai all of london!!

A great addition to the shiny-shiny list would be the Canada Water library, which looks like an improbable golden Sandcrawler, leaning towards the Surrey Quays BHS across the lake.  But no-one knows it's there.

And Barratt's Aspiration Wharf 'stunning development'.

Suppose it's too early for any of the lovely Olympics stuff to be included.

The 'bad' list notably only contains things built after 1960 (because everything more than 50s years old is, of course, wonderful).  There's a more Brutalism (the Brunswick Centre, Centre Point, Robin Hood Gardens), and more brand-new stuff (the silly ArcelorMittal Orbit 'sculpture', the new Wembley Stadium, City Hall), and a bit of PoMo (the Millennium Dome, No 1 Poultry, and Farrel's actually rather good MI6 juggernaut).

The City's novelty-socks building.

Undermining any pretence that the whole exercise is anything other than a measure of current fashion and taste, the TimeOut worst list features a few buildings that are also on the best list (the Shard, the Barbican, the South Bank Complex).  

Shockingly, the conclusion might be that some people like some buildings, and others prefer different ones.  Oooh.  Fancy that.

Southampton

I've used Owen Hatherley's awesome Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain as a sort-of tour guide for unfamiliar places like Sheffield (which led me to get lost in a distant suburban nowhere of identical 30s semis). He's a lefty Modernist (I shall leave it to you, sweet reader, to determine for yourself whether or not that's a good thing) architecture writer. As a not-deliberate tribute to the imminent publication of his new book A New Kind of Bleak, I travelled down to Southampton, Hatherley's hometown, to look at the port from which the Titanic, and plausibly other ships, sailed.

With curious honesty, the history-facts-are-fun! plaque mounted by the original city walls noted that Southampton was once more than a collection of shops, a pair of Universities, and somewhere for Portsmouth to hate.

Once upon a time.

The massive late-90s West Quay shopping centre takes up much of the centre of town nowadays. Replete with fashionable PoMo ideas like context / reference / sympathy, it looks like a Cubist portrait of a steamliner, all bits of bows and prows and fragments of things that look like sails and rigging.  And, because Southampton had a defensive wall, bits of rubble infill are packed into neat tidy panels at the bottom. Inside, it's white and bright (and hot, on a mild June day - apparently, geothermally-heated), anchored at either end by the Mummy-friendly twin bastions of Marks and Sparks and John Lewis.

For some reason, this looks a bit like the front of a big boat...

As might be expected, this sort of regeneration - a large new shopping centre - modestly expands, and yet also displaces the sustainable number of stores and jobs in the city. It take them away from the established precincts, rather than generating a boundless largess of new riches. And this, dear reader, is the site of seduction for this handsome author.

Just across from Above Bar (no one can tell me for sure whether its 'Above Bar Street' or just 'Above Bar') is the Bar Gate, a late Eighties covered shopping arcade. Bored-looking security guards patrol the inside, keenly protecting the four or five shops that haven't closed, and stopping Southampton's whole clan of Goths from loitering outside the (presumably only) alternative clothing store. I'm used to seeing disused Victorian high streets and 50s shopping precincts, but to see this failure, which in most other places would be the regeneration, is most odd. 

Lovely PoMo detailing on the columns.

Someone's given the whole thing the same dirty-sky-blue paint job that concrete housing blocks are now often daubed when someone seeks to soften their appearance and demonstrate a bit of effort in maintenance / the existence of emulsion.  The flooring is from Brown Tron.

Is 'The Cunard Queens' a transexual strip club or a maritime museum?

At the very bottom of the complex is a perfectly-nice-looking Philippine eatery with no-one in it, which in London one would call it a pop-up diner, if one were preposterously-inclined. Next to it, like a sulky 90s teenager locked in stasis, sits a magnificently-preserved and deserted Gamesmaster / Stargate-era gaming cafe, with fibreglass statues in the Egyptian Space Deco style.  One can, a hoarding announces, play such recent games as CounterStrike: Source (2004).  On the Bargate website, the What's On page is strangely blank.

He's holding teh internets in his hands!!  Shame they're 14.4k hands.

On Above Bar Street is another white-and-escalators shopping centre, the Marlands (the website for which spouts the sort of irritating estate agent twaddle that makes me want to bite my own face off - 'enjoying direct access onto the main shopping street...'). Inside, a charmingly daft feature pretends to a Georgian terrace, presumably providing context / reference / sympathy for the Georgian streets flattened by the Luftwaffe in 1940. This precinct has got the T K Maxx, so it clearly a poor relative to West Quay.

But the most fun comes just past the colossal 50s department store (currently a Debenhams, after Allders went bust) to the east of the main drag. If approached from a wilfully perverse angle, the East Gate (natch) shopping centre begins as a large, brutal car park, and an office block plonked on top (with a stylish spine / DNA helix / fire escape).

Yes, this sits delicately on top of the car park and shops.

Tripping gingerly down the (mmm) staircase, the broad-shouldered adventurer is treated to an amazing combination of depressingly-bright colours (cf Elephant and Castle / the balcony panels in cheap estates that copy the Golden Lane development).

Welcoming.

As not a single shop remains occupied, it looks like this small enclosed precinct will soon be reduced to rubble / ’luxury’ apartments in render.  It seems currently to be used as a cut-through from some unseen car park to the West Quay shops.

My eyes!

Elsewhere in the town, I caught a few other quality sights (/sites) during my swift extra-London sojourn. Next to the half-geniune Deco train station lurks the unloved hulk of Wyndham Court. To my eyes, the ooh-look-it’s-a-bit-like-a-boat is just as cheesey as the West Quay’s aping, but Hatherley seems to like it, so that's okay then.  It's a pretty hardcore piece of Brutalism.

Can I steer the housing block please, Captain?

These holes provide lighting to the car park underneath, and much-needed gaiety and delight to the residents. Cough.

The estate is set in a sloping concrete-slab wonderland, enlivened by a single tree (but notably devoid of people, on a Saturday lunchtime).  There is however an on-site curry house.

Cheap drinks.  One also wonders whether that’s the entire menu.

Another bit of PoMo (gosh, Southampton really does like the stuff) is the De Vere Grand Harbour hotel.  The lump is described here, sublimely, as a 'shit-brown postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it'.

According to this review, this is just as lovely on the inside as it is out.  Mmm.

I’m sad to report that I didn't get chance to see the what-Southampton-looked-like-before-the-Luftwaffe-and-concrete-ruined-it Oxford Street, or the interesting mash of University buildings. On the plus side, the Bar Gate is just 1 hr 15 from London on the fast trains.