Photoshopping Battersea Power Station

The above is a cameraphone snap (from the Building Centre) of a model of Nicholas Grimshaw's new London Bridge station.  Here, even the shiny-shiny Shard becomes neutrally white, a backdrop to the glinting silver concourse canopies.  And the Shard is there to suggest certain values (modernity, commerce, soi-disant iconism) that the model wishes to appropriate for the station.  The Shard also helps the viewer locate London Bridge within London (which is interestingly the inverse of how the Tube map operates).  The whole model is resolutely dirt-free (even those troublesome trains), pristine and futuristic. Note also that the station itself is shown as snaking along smooth curve of wood.  It has become a giant Brio set.  Simple, clean, wholesome.  Single-Varietal London Organic Bridge Station.

Photoshop'd shots of buildings are the scale model of the twentieth century.

Shame it's the twenty-first century.

A few propaganda Photoshops of the soon-to-be-immured-with-flats Battersea Power Station have emerged.

Reading this image similarly, distance in London is collapsed until the Battersea flats appear moments from the Eye, and but a gentle curve onwards to the Shard.  The bottom quarter or so is verdant parkland.  There're no people from this perspective. There's hardly a vehicle to be seen (perhaps a few toy-like London buses on Chelsea Bridge), and certainly no trains whatsoever rumbling their way within metres of those shiny glass curtain walls.  Whereas most of London is under a somewhat grey and troubled sky, blesséd Battersea sits is a pool of golden sun.

Separately, those new flats look just like what the Doozers were building in Fraggle Rock.

A further shot is awash with happier, more productive Photoshop People busily having a simply super time in the little riverside park on the north side of the Power Station.

Zooming in reveals the sort-of charming clumsiness in the image manipulation, a dollop of glue on an architectural model.

Everyone's a bit ugly, and, more menacingly, no-one is old.  Apparently the future will be like a scene from Logan's Run.

Can't wait.  And helpfully, we don't have to.  One can apparently access a Pop Up Park in the grounds of the Power Station this summer.

Stupid name.  Single-Varietal Pop Up Organic Park is much better.

Childhood memories

I have a number of memories from my early childhood that didn't happen.

One Christmas Eve, I remember waking to hear Father Christmas banging around downstairs in the darkness.  I sleepily thought that I mustn't disturb him, or he wouldn't leave us any presents.  One holiday on a south-coast beach, I remember being knocked over by a boy-height wave and taking a in deep breath whilst swirling underwater.  Both I suppose are some nexus of wishful thinking and sensory confusion.  And yet, I can remember them.  They are empirically real, even if factually imagined.

More frustratingly, I have an elusive memory of the stalls of a market, a typical veg-and-tat market, in the gloom.   I have it in my mind that the market was underneath a multistorey carpark.  A massive concrete carpark.  And  I can quite clearly recall being bought a hotdog from a stall at this market.  The hotdog had fried onions.  I didn't want onion on my hotdog.  Perhaps that's why the memory is so clear.  Or perhaps this is the instant I discovered I don't like fried onions.

Most frustratingly, despite this wealth of sensory recollection, this memory has spent years floating without any place or date to pin it to.   Rough calculations suggest it must've come from somewhere east of Saltash and someplace south of Birmingham, and sometime between 1983 and 1988.  But that is hundreds of square miles, and a billion instants.

I do not understand why this particular memory has stayed with me, and why the lack of place has so itched within my mind.

My mother thought it might be Basildon.  And so I went to check.  It is not.  Non-one else could think of where this market underneath a multistorey carpark might be.  Perhaps I was misremembering.  And who would put a market there, rather than more cars?  Perhaps it never happened.

And yesterday, I don't know why, I remembered.  As mental image of the market again floated across my mind, some part of my memory, silent for years, answered.  Plymouth?  No...Portsmouth.

After 15 seconds of Googling, I had my answer.  It was the Tricorn Centre.

This picture, grainy and hard to make out, is quite eerily close to my memory.

Parental enquiries about Portsmouth lead to a mid-80s trip to the maritime museum there.  I recall nothing of the submarine we apparently went in, but some echo of disappointment with the lack of beach at this particular seaside.  And, it would appear, we went to the Tricorn centre.

Not that I can now go back.  It was demolished in 2004.  It was knocked down to make way for a new shopping development.  Although, nine years later, the site is still a pay and display car park.

I shall not claim for an instant that this childhood trip instilled a lifelong love of Brutalism.  Indeed, although I can appreciate the South Bank complex, and can even be amused by its harsh crystalline jaggedness, I can not quite bring myself to like it.

I shall not claim that in its later years the Tricorn centre was a pleasant place to be.  I do not know; I doubt it.

But I shall never see the Firestone Building.  I shall never see the Euston Arch.  I shall never see the Tricorn Centre with adult eyes.