Addendum to Brum

A few bonus thoughts on the Spaghetti Junction entry:

Scale:  A chum has pointed out the disparity between Spaghetti Junction's hugeness, and Manchester's rather more restrained interaction with the M6 (say, here, where it meets the M62, and looks from the sky like an angry Grimace-of-McDonald's fame).  Such wonderful big-tech hubris from Brum's '60s civic planners.

'Lextric:  My vaguely throwaway references to Doctor Who were perhaps more apposite than I had initially thought.  In the Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks in 1963, they were (narratorially) powered by static electricity supplied through the floors of their city - hence they needed ramps and couldn't go up or down stairs.  Daleks are, essentially, bumper cars.  Bumper cars with death rays - Daleks being the early epitome of road rage. Perhaps the Dalek design tapped into some sixties fear of a wholly car-dependent way of living, of becoming trapped within a one-man vehicle. Spaghetti Junction is one manifestation of this nightmarish fantasy: a post-nuclear complex cleansed of human life, an intimidating step-free realm in which ramps allow space-age vehicles to ascend and dip between levels.  We've built part of the Dalek city on Earth - and afforded the invasion fleet a route to reach Brum city centre from the motorway.

Spaghetti Junction

The Dalek city

Pundom:  There's probably a joke to be made about Gravelly Hill / Aston / Aston Villa, and whether Aston is viler than Gravelly Hill.  But perhaps it's not a good one.

Cliff:  And finally, some amazing footage of Spaghetti Junction when it was newish, featuring Cliff Richard in a hovercraft.  Skip to 45:00 for that, and some dreadful guitar/nose-flute noise.

Space Age Birmingham: Looking Up

The plan had been simple. Get the train from New Street to Gravelly Hill, have a look at one of the most amazing feats of applied concrete in the world, get the train back from Aston, have a coffee.

The concrete in question being Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham's ZOMG-scaled Mario Kart track, which weaves the arterial Aston Expressway (an alien nomenclature, sounding more like a corner shop than a road in England) with orbital M6, on its happy way to Walsall.

For those not familiar with the Junction, some Wikipedia stats add flavour. 30 acres of fun where 18 roads intermingle in the air, propped up by almost 600 columns. It forms part of Brum's pre-70s-oil-crisis efforts to embrace the motorcar wholesale and enable the speed that the future traveller will demand. Our past future, of course, us back then.

As one might imagine, the houses lining the road from Gravelly Hill station to Spaghetti Junction are less desirable than they were before someone poured quite so much concrete. Once-pleasant Victorian confections, with parti-coloured brickwork and generous front gardens, these houses are now unsaleably blighted by the knot of carriageways tangling together at the bottom of the hill. One house, patched up with unpainted plywood, had a couple of smashed-up hearses on its drive, scattered with soiled clothes. A dirty protest, or perhaps a sacrifice to some pagan poo-god.

Reaching the bottom of the first slip-road, I was surprised to find that provisions had actually been made for the pedestrian to exist underneath the network of roads, this realm of cars. Entering through a subway of Croydon-underpass mosaic tiling, the explorer finds himself in a large sunken space, a walled garden with a forest of concrete pillars like petrified trees. It's deserted, and frankly very weird. Although not really any weirder than the sort of person who goes down there and finds it.

There is something powerfully over-the-top about the size of the soaring curves and improbably mass of all that concrete on such tall, slim columns. The Scalextric set of every boy's dreams. It'd make a mega Rainbow Road.  It's not as loud as you might imagine, despite the hundreds of cars and lorries overhead. Presumably the sound bounces upwards and outwards, and contributes further to Gravelly Hill's grimness.

Although it's not fashionable to see it any more, the Junction is magnificently sculptural. The loops and arcs and inclines take functional roads and make them into something inscrutable, something awe-inspiring. The structural similarities with Stonehenge are perhaps not accidental.  The scale is insane. Like the fearful experience of a penitent serf gazing heavenwards in a cathedral, it's dizzying to stare up at this mystery in the sky. From underneath, it's impossible to work out which roads lead where, as they split and merge in the air. Appropriately, the junction can really only be comprehended in aerial shots; a deity-eye view of something man-made and yet so inhumanly-sized. It's another piece of our space-age future, which has since become dirty and disliked. But the ambition! How incredibly different to the Victorian high-street, or simple ring road of a New Town like Basildon.

Pressing further onwards, the landscape takes on a industrial wasteland / Doctor Who outside broadcast / dystopia-on-the-cheap feel. The spaces under the roads, voids really, are unlit and a bit scary. A network of canals appears to consist of 80% traffic cones, 20% lurid green water. The only way to escape the Cyberman invasion force would be to swim for it, and hope the underwater cones aren't secretly Autons </geek>.

There is apparently a cycle route running through this double-complex of canals and roads, although I wouldn't advise using it as the paths are slippy and the dark is full of Daleks.

I took a snap of a wonderfully passive-aggressive sign for passing barges. Actually, I think you'll find that people like you shouldn't collide with our wall, please. Thankyou.

There's also a canal sign that some patriotic soul has un-metric'd from kilometres to miles. Take that, EU Commission! Wonder what BCN stands for. I imagine it's just short for Bacon.

There are a couple of plaques down there in the gloom. One (sans serif, brushed aluminium) celebrates the physics-defying feat above, the other (serif CAPS, picture of cottagey house) harking back to a rather more twee time when the canals were the engineering masterpiece of their time. Somehow strange that it's socially more acceptable to have a romantic view of waterways than roadways. Perhaps it's because the roads still hold some utility, and we struggle to enjoy things until entropy has begun weathering them to dust. Ruin Theory still runs deep within our collective consciousness. What will future archaeologists make of Spaghetti Junction?

In the dark, there are further engineering works ongoing, presumably to sure-up parts of the concrete above. I found myself trapped somewhere between canals, concrete, rivers, railways and fences, and eventually had to concede defeat and double back to the drizzly gloom of Gravelly Hill.

Aston may be lovely. I do not know.

My Secret PoMo Shame

Look, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

You shouldn't blame yourself.  It's not your fault.  No, really.

It's me.  I'm different.  I've changed.

I've realised that I quite like PoMo.  And by PoMo, I mean the lowest-brow version of Post-Modern architecture, the type that found its way onto British high streets and bypasses throughout my youth.

Chatham's Pentagon, which was not narrowly missed by one of the hijacked jets on 9/11

Exhibit A, below,  is Marco Polo House (1987).  You may know this better as the QVC building, next to Battersea Park. It's by Ian Pollard, who I'd never heard of either.

It is shortly to be knocked down and replaced with another lump of 'luxury' flats within flobbing distance of the trains thundering to and from Victoria.  Lucky residents-to-be, stroking their iPad Airs and rattling with delight in their Smeg-fridged studios.

And what a shame for London to lose this.  Vertical slices of black-glass Miesian minimalism, interspersed for no apparent reason with heavy slabs of banded travertine Baroque.  It looks like some fantastical Lego set, built for real for adults to play in.  I find the building really very endearing.  I'm also surprised to see that marble apparently goes manky with age, foxing in the sunlight like a copy of the Beano on the back seat of a Ford Orion.

The slim volume Postmodern Architecture in London also enjoys Marco Polo House, broadsiding it as having 'the design integrity of a car-showroom'.  The book continues that it 'is often regarded as the most vulgar building in London'.  Top stuff!  And quite an achievement to be considered the most vulgar in a city replete with insane Victorian whimsy, and dreadful cash-in crap proclaiming themselves to be new-build luxury flats.

An massively-enjoyable bit of Victorian kitsch in Streatham, 

desperately pretending not to be a pumping station.

Pollard also built an early Homebase, up on Warwick Road near Earl's Court, in '88.

Homebases are so often big sheds.  Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders.  It's impossible to look at Godalming's Homebase without humming Jerusalem.  Don't worry, I'm just a oast-house, fibs the Bromley-by-Bow's Tesco as the traffic roars from the Blackwall Tunnel.

Pollard's building, however, really is special stuff.

Demarking the edge of the carpark, essentially a fence, is a colonnade of Egyptian columns.  It's unclear if this is borrowing from antiquity, or Temple Mills in Leeds.  Is it important to know which?

There are etchings and glyphs on the Homebase walls, some picked out in gold.

One of the figures is, charmingly, sitting on the fire escape.  The sharp comic-book boundary with the banded stonework does not permit any pretence that this is any real Egyptian artefact, uncovered in a London carpark.  Nope, this is unapologetically fake.  The Egyptian style was an unrealistic representation of the human form; this is an unrealistic representation of the Egyptian style.

When the Georgians and Victorians aped the forms of Greek or Gothic buildings, they did so in part because they felt those forms were the aesthetic zenith and, in some confused quasi-moral delusion, how buildings ought to look.  Pollard here is borrowing the Egyptian style not because it's the best style ever, and not even because it best suits the demands of the 80s DIY-enthusiast.  Rather, because he can.  Egypt in West London?  Why not?

Which leads to the cheekiest bit of pillaging - this curvy glass undulation along the side.

Which, as of course you'll know, is nicked directly and completely from James Stirling's art gallery in Stuttgart.  Again, why not?  On one side of the building, Egyptian art; on the other, art gallery.  We are used to architects stealing from the ancient past for their new buildings.  Pollard, with admirable honesty, steals from both his ancient forebears and his modern contemporaries.  Or, even, Post-Modern contemporaries.

Pollard's Homebase, gaudy as it is, has far more integrity than Quinlan Terry's waver-thin Georgian shams (such as Richmond Riverside, which was being built at the same time).  Pollard is faking it, proudly producing a collage of nonsense for West Londoners in need of some emulsion and rawl plugs.  Which I prefer infinitely to the saccharine pillock-pleasing crap of HRH Chaz's Poundbury in Dorset.

Please don't knock this one down.  It's one of the most delightful, weird buildings I know.

A [nightmare] vision of Britain: Poundbury

The below is a clip from a late-80s TV programme, in which Prince Charles laments the fate of London's once-beautiful skyline at the hands of post-war (re)building(s).  'Can you imagine the French doing this sort of thing in Paris?' he taunts, fomenting NIMBY fury in the vague direction of modern architecture.

HRH Chaz is very much a fan of old (or old-looking, anyway) buildings.  He elsewhere described a proposed extension of the National Gallery as a 'monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend'.  Regardless the architectural merits of the extension, to call the lumbering stodge of the National Gallery 'elegant' is simply inane.  It's greatest rival for London's Most Insipid Neoclassical Wank is, natch, Buckingham Palace.

In the vid above, His Chazness decries Birmingham's (old) Central Library as looking 'like a place where books are incinerated, not kept'.  But what should a library look like?  What cultural symbol or language clearly announces a building's purpose?  Should a library looks like a giant book?  Or be entirely clad with books?  Have a large enough sign proclaiming LIBRARY to be totally unambiguous?

In response to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, and indeed, half of the Nineteenth, Chaz allowed an 'unashamedly traditional' sort-of New Town to be built on his lands, just to the west of humdrum Dorchester.  Poundbury: an idealised mock-Georgian 'urban quarter', a sort-of English Amish wonderland in which time stopped a couple of hundred years ago.

At first, Poundbury seems rather fun.  Swinging off the A35, the eye is caught by the Fire Station HQ, shaped like a Georgian version of a Greek temple.  And the drill tower is in the Venetian sytlee.  Tee hee!  How very silly.  But surely, Chaz, a fire station should be in the shape of a flame.  Or some water.

There are no painted road markings, no traffic lights, few signs, and a uniform set of period streetlamps.  Only replica Georgiana is permitted.

What becomes clear, however, is that Poundbury is not fun.  It may look like Chessington World of Adventures, but Poundbury takes itself very, very seriously.  There's a sterilised, totalitarian approach to everything.  It's clearly ridiculous, and yet no-one seems to be admitting it.  The experience is rather uncomfortable, like straight-faced panto.  Featuring on-stage incest.

And it goes on.  Streets and streets of particoloured brick-and-render, punctuated with bigger set-piece bits of silliness.

And there are cars.  Cars parked on the street everywhere.  There are some efforts to hide these, but the Georgians only had stable blocks, not garages or - heavens forbid! - multi-storey car parks.  And so Poundbury becomes trapped in its own Luddite rhetoric, and cannot permit any solution other than large, dead, confused spaces, such as the car park / main square / void outside Waitrose. 

The natural bricolage of place, usually driven by history and economics, here comes baked-in.  Artifices implying bricked-up windows are included in Poundbury new-builds because there was once a window tax in England.  Who would deliberately want less light in their house?  There's probably some inversely snobbish appropriation here too - the homeowner frugally choosing to brick up windows to minimise his/her tax bill - but when the houses are this expensive it's manifestly daft.

The below, cropped from the Rightmove world in which the sky is always blue, shows an end-of-terrace that comes ready-made with an 'extension' and a 'loft conversion'.  The house acquires a sense of age at the expense of practicality (say, the ability to stand up properly in the top floor, or storage space in the loft).  A fantasy heritage that is just as silly, and just as po-faced, as designer jeans that come ready-ripped.

What appear to be a single house is often purpose-built flats.  The fact that such destructive divisions, motivated by rising land prices and rising house prices, have been wrought on genuine Georgian houses by property speculators is surely something to be lamented, not something to ape in a new-build development not in the same way constrained by space.

Wandering around, I thought a few touches of Modernism had somehow sneaked under the eugenic radar.

But on reflection, Poundbury has not admitted real plurality, but rather appropriated and rewritten this unwanted aspect of history.  This result is a genetically re-engineered Modernism, a mutant form of the movement that remained centripetally drawn to the past.  A fantasy in which Corbusier limited himself to four piloti, and recognised that any building without a coaching lamp is dangerously subversive.

And it just stops.  Incomplete Poundbury becomes hinterland.  

There's a creepy, quasi-apocalyptic nothingness, a moat of wilderness around the town.  Which is, quite plausibly, deliberate.

Perhaps most, the picking-and-choosing irritates me.  If you want to live in a Georgian world, you should have to do it properly.  Cars should be banned, thereby making the place far more picturesque.  Maybe the water should be enriched with cholera. And maybe the air perfumed by some giant tuberculosis nebuliser.  Yes.

It terrifies me that the next King of England thinks that the last two hundred years were entirely a bad thing.  This does not bode well for the future.

Poundbury is the scariest place I have ever been.

Bracknell revisited

Like you, I have often laid awake at night, starched pyjamas in parlous disarray, milky Horlicks growing tepid, pondering which of the London-circling New Towns is the worst.

It's not Harlow.  Definitely not Basildon.  My sleep-addled mind proposes Hatfield, with its deserted plazas and horrible motorway-spanning mess of an outlet mall.

But, of course, it's Bracknell. Poor, poor rubbish Bracknell.

The Powers That Be try to keep you away - the train there stops absolutely bloody everywhere en route - for your own good. But the brave / daft tourist can get there if he displays enough vim and spunk and doesn't get arrested for so doing.  And, because I'm a fan of the underdog / desolation, I went back, almost two years to the day since my first trip.

Again, it was drizzling in Bracknell.  I do like a good spiral ramp up to a multistorey car park, looming like a concrete lighthouse to guide travellers to the safety of the shops.  It's a shame that Bracknell doesn't have one.

The train station is the most poxy and boxy of all the New Towns.  It's got an office block popped on top, pigeon-spikes tastefully decorated with an urban art installation.

Bracknell cares.

Like all good New Towns, the pedestrian can avail him/herself of a network of underpasses from the train station to the shops.  This being Bracknell, the underpasses are decorated with depictions of hanging baskets of flowers (the eidetic reader of this blog, or one with good taste, will recall that hanging baskets are hideous).  Sigh.

The main square (Charles Square) has, as ever, been filled with a mess of glass-canopy escalators, street furniture and other vile clutter.  It's like a pastiche of the naffest bits of Coventry.

Thanks for that

There's also a water clock, which shows the time once every five minutes, and for the rest of the time is just decorative.  The idea makes my brain hurt.

Oh, it's either 29:04 o'clock or it's not

Princess Square, the basically rubbish indoor shopping bit, is being restyled and has sadly lost its amusingly overblown entrance canopy thing.

September 2011

September 2013

The regeneration masterplan is in various stages.  The first, honestly, is to build a Waitrose.  Social engineering lives!  The plans for the revamped Charles Square are a bit grim.  Which is, I suppose, in keeping for Bracknell.

It's not all bad.  St Joseph's church opposite Princess Square is a little gem -  a clean, simple A-frame structure, immaculately maintained.  And actually open, which, empirically, is unusual for a church.

Also fun is the sort-of out-of-town retail park which has a lovely, lovely bit of yellow-frame PoMo, with (bless!) a little pyramid hat on.  Grubby!  Shame really that the Odeon inside has been refurbed and isn't in its original livery.

For some reason, I imagine that Bracknell is like the Outer Circles of Hell. Not actually horrible, like the infernal torments reserved for estate agents, but just consistently unpleasant.

I shall leave you, sweet reader, with a photo taken in another of Bracknell's underpasses.  Lovely.

WHY ARE WE HERE?

Things you probably won't want to do: Tunnels under the Thames

Frankly, I could probably entitle the entire blog 'Things you probably won't want to do'.  But that would perhaps be unwelcoming. One is suddenly 'minded of Why Don't You? suggesting you switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead. But! Dear, dear reader, I, rather, propose that you read on, and have your life immeasurably enriched. Quite a proposal.  Quite an inaccurate proposal.

I like to give my otherwise-random cycling efforts some purpose. I try to find places to go to give my life meaning, and thrill my little point-and-click camera. Hence this thematic voyage of discovery.  Tunnels under the Thames that a cyclist may enjoy en bike.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel runs from an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs to the south of Canary Wharf (from which you get a wonderful view of Greenwich Maritime College, alias Les Mis Land), to Greenwich (from which you get a view of an uninspiring bit of grass on the Isle of Dogs, and the towers of Canary Wharf in the haze).

Basically, all of SE London looks like this (cf Thamesmead).

On each side there is a spiral staircase down from the turret / 99-without-a-flake entrance, and a large and oddly wood-paneled lift.  Like a drawing room on a pulley.

The tunnel itself is cool in summer (wonder if it gets cold in winter), and slopes slightly too steeply down, and then back up. It's much like any number of Tube tunnels you've tramped along. Makes me think for some reason of the Bakerloo line. Must be the mud-brown tinge. Despite the signs urging pedestrian pursuits, a collection of idiots is constantly on hand to skate or cycle along the tunnel.  One should try not to hope that they fall over and injure themselves in some sort of facial way.

On the Greenwich side, pause briefly to be annoyed by the post-fire reconstruction of the Golden Hind (or whichever boat it is), now trapped in a wave of geometric Tupperware.

A few miles further east is the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, which is much like the Greenwich one, albeit a bit longer. The lifts are currently broken, so the adventurous cyclist will have to carry his bicycle up all the bloody spiral stairs. There's not much to see back on the north side (well, there's the (free!) Woolwich Ferry, and, mmm, Woolwich), although the wonderfully and slightly-wacky Thames Barrier Gardens are a short cycle west, by Pontoon Dock DLR station.

Fun and daft in roughly equal measure.

Of course, the cyclist is not allowed down the Limehouse Link (and, since it doesn't go under the Thames, the tunnel is beyond the rubric of this blog post), but one can, one speculates, do over 30mph on a bicycle down there, given the steep downramps and hefty tailwinds. One speculates.

A less illegal cycling option is the Rotherhite tunnel, which goes from glamorous Surrey Quays to glamorous Limehouse (home of the aforementioned lovely fun illegal tunnel). It's probably dull to drive along, but it's a good laugh on a bike, despite the general stink of traffic fumes.  I decided to ride on the pavement, rather than risk the narrow road, which is, in hindsight, probably also illegal.

Trusty steed.

Finally, narratorially, there're the Big Daddies of Thames Tunnels, the ones which the East London Line runs through.

Occasionally, they leave the tunnel lights on (above), so you can peer down the tracks and imagine yourself a Victorian gentleman (below), all top hat and searching for a filly of liberal morals unbismerched by the pox.

And then there's the Victoria, Northern and Jubliee Lines (oh, and Bakerloo, forgot that one), each of which delves under the Thames, but none of them permit bikes.  The District Line, at its poncy end, has its own bridges over the river, although some idiot designed the Richmond bridge's sides so high that you can't see the water at all.

I don't know if you can take a bike through the Dartmouth Tunnel, and I'm not going to try.

Pleasant voyages, now-enriched reader!