Foreign: Copenhagen

When heading from Copenhagen airport to the centre of town, I decided to eschew the direct train, and go a slightly more protracted route on the new Metro.  In fact, as the Metro doesn't serve Central Station (presumably putting it on a strategic par with Fenchuch Street), I also got to go on one of the mainline suburban trains too.

The Danes like their design, and like the neighbouring country of Ikea, they like things minimal.  The trains are large and wide, and the floating seats allow easy cleaning of the floor (which was slushy with melted snow and grit).  But this unrelenting efficiency makes them a little characterless, feeling a bit like a cross between the plastic delights of the Croydon Tramlink and the DLR.  Although, like the DLR, you can go right to the front and pretend to drive / be taking off from Battlestar Galactica.  Should that sort of thing roll your stock.

Yes, camera, please focus of the scratched graffiti,

rather than the tunnel.  Thank you.

The Metro stations also seem to be of a uniform design.  Symmetrical escalators zigzag up towards the skylights, whilst the metal-panelled walls make the whole place feel a bit surgical and cold.  But nonetheless hi-tech and pleasantly shiny.

Rather cutely, the arrivals boards count down in half-minutes.

Another bit of escalator porn, for those that way inclined.

The suburban trains were also massively wide, and quite unlike British trains, were happy to carry bicycles.

Note that although loads of people in Copenhagen cycle, none wear helmets.  These seems somehow at odds with the high-pay, high-tax Welfare State system in which you can't even buy booze from an off-license after 8pm lest you get tipsy and fall in the sea.

I had hoped to take a river taxi too, but the canals had frozen over.  It was cold.

I thought that expanse of white was a field.  

Actually, it's a frozen and snowed-over lake...

Shopping: how to make people buy stuff #1

Make your sign look like nice handwriting by someone

who can't do cursive 's's.

1) Make a pun about your food being bland;

2) Use a font that looks a bit 50s and a bit like Comic Sans Bold.

Create some art that looks a bit like a spine.

Sell from a portacabin.

Everyone loves portacabins.

Spell the name of your shop wrong.

Foreign: Prague

A caveat: the only camera I had with me was the poxy little thing on my phone.  Hence the largely crap quality, despite the valiant efforts of Photoshop retouching.  Some of the pics therefore have an (almost appropriate) Impressionist smudginess.

I thought I was starting to get bored of the Art Nouveau curvy bling in Prague.  It's everywhere, and amazingly well-preserved.  The Praguish take of Nouveau is less twiddly and organic than Mackintosh's Scottish version, edging towards the geometry of later Deco (which I much prefer).  Nonetheless, I found myself getting punch-drunk from the relentless loveliness.

One of approximately 100,000 Art Nouveau restaurants in Prague.
Beautiful (and authentic) mirrors, chandeliers,
mosaic-tiled walls, windows, frescos... yawn.

I had two hours to kill before the flight back to Blighty.  I'd ticked off a few of the Tourist Must Sees, despite find the whole idea irritatingly crypto-fascist (100 Things You Must Do Or We Will Hurt The Kitten), and rather at-odds with my postmodern psychogeographical 'as found' tourism (ie toddling around somewhat randomly and seeing what I find).  I decided to indulge my particularly gimpy side and have quick spin on the Soviet-built Metro system, and was pleased to find that a 90-minute metro ticket is just 32 Czech Koruna (about a bargainous quid).

I entered at Náměstí Republiky station, which is perhaps the beigest and most 80s-caravan-like station I have ever seen, full of dank browns and orangey laminate wood panels.

Apparently modelled on an MB Games' Simon Says

The camera's white balance insisted on 'correcting' this shot to 

something less brown, but Photoshop has done me proud here.

Rather lovely brown-glass bricks, 

and a yellow block to tell you which line you're on.

Thankfully less brown, the adjacent Muzeum station appears to have  been made from the shells of multicolour Daleks.

I'd asked the hotel receptionist about the main train station, thinking that I might come across the sort of collosal escalators and blast doors that you find on the Kiev metro in the Ukraine (which was designed to double as a fall-out shelter in the event of nuclear war...).  Instead, I emerged at Hlavní Nádraží into a startlingly vibrant red-plastic-and-polished-aluminium bafflement.

Somehow like being in a toaster.

This part of the station had recently been refurbished, and now sports slightly-hypnotic banded flooring.

Scalextricky.

Curtain walling and leaks.

A small sign above an escalator pointed to the 'historical building of the station'.  I was hoping for some cosmic Soviet concrete installation.  But, gosh, I found something rather different: an astounding and semi-derelict Art Nouveau half-coupla, packed with statues, stained glass and flaking frescoes.

but where teh concretes?  :(

Some sculpture porn 

(from my private collection at www.gregs_posh_grot.com)

The defunct station clock, and a hint of the 

lovely stained glass over the main entrance.

The platforms are most easily accessed via the underground walkways from the Very Red station.  But popping through the Nouveau's doors leads to a poignant collection of bronze figures, commemorating Sir Nicholas Winton's rescue of over six hundred Czechoslovakian children just before the outbreak of WWII.

This magnificent old building is apparently due for refurbishment by 2013.  Which I think gives me a lovely reason to plan to go back.

Very Good Things About London: #4 Happy New Year

The fireworks, from Lambeth Bridge (the best bridge in London), as taken by me.

High Streets and Mary Portas

'Tis the time of year for asinine and caveated headlines like 'It's expected to be one of the busiest shopping days of the year'.  This apparently applies to the Saturday before Christmas Eve, and Christmas Eve, and the day after Boxing Day, and the Saturday after Christmas Day, and, and.

As ever at Christmas, I've headed back to the parents' house to eat some Quality Street and play with the dog.  I also like to check in on the market town's High Street (I'm going to shorten this to HS), to see how thing's changed since I was last there.  During my school years, I saw the local HS curl up and die.  In response to the redevelopment of the indoor shopping precinct (and the last-but-one recession), the main stores moved from the Victorian HS, and those units filled with charity shops and pound stores.  Only in the mid-Nineties, when a local campus became a part of Luton University, did the HS awaken, albeit as a slightly-downmarket run of studenty pubs and kebab shops, thereby supplying the small-town needs of booze, meat fat and somewhere to fight.

Earlier this month, Queen of Shops, Mary Portas (try not to think of a ginger Liza Minnelli from Cabaret) released her review of the future of HS across the land.  Firstly, I should say that I think she's largely right.  HS cannot, and should not try to, compete with the brute-force selling power of large chain retailers, and the internet.  No-one benefits from dead and deserted town centres and HS.

However, I found her My Struggle prose rather over-the-top.  Portas wants to represent her commentary as a non-governmental and therefore independent and therefore personal and therefore unbiased and therefore accurate telling of how things really are.  'The only hope our high streets have of surviving in the future,' she intones, 'is to recognise what’s happened and deliver something new'.  Our plucky HS have become cognisant - it is for them to be sentient and understand their past and future.  Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi.

Portas then indulges in a classic sophomoric essay technique, exploring a variety of meanings of a key term, in this case 'heart' (the centre of something / life-giving / strength of feeling / expression of fidelity / emotional engagement / love etc etc).  She emotes:

High streets are the heart of towns and communities. They have been for centuries. People are passionate about high streets. They may have different views on what’s wrong and what’s right, but I don’t believe anyone can put their hand on their heart and say they don’t care.

[my, laboured, emphases]

(No, I don't)

In addition to (relentlessly) demonstrating her strength of faith (repeating 'believe' eleven times in the three-side Foreword), there's also a 'vision' which aims 'to find and nurture tomorrow's innovators and ideas that will create the new sustainable high streets of the future'.  Yuk.  The not-quite-heroic hyperbole continues with the underwhelming claim to have 'visited many high streets to see what the situation is for myself...'.  Wow!  Such dedication to the Noble Cause.  Literally several!

Anyway.  The niceties of her text are not (supposed to be) the point.  Rather, the focus is on her 28 concluding recommendations for revitalising HS.  There're some technical taxation / land 'use class' thoughts (the latter aiming to reduce the rash of betting shops), and a 'visionary' benign dictatorship of 'Town Teams' seeking to make it all better.  Another of her proposals is to encourage local markets, and 'establish a new "National Market Day" where budding shopkeepers can try their hand at operating a low-cost retail business'.  A nation of shopkeepers, indeed.  But I suspect that Portas means something none-too-glamorous: she elsewhere suggested that HS should host car boot sales.  Indeed a 'low-cost retail business'.  Hmm.  Lucky HS.

Furthermore, in my experience, markets fall into two categories.  Firstly, the cheapo back-of-a-lorry 'spectatulars' to be found in most towns, somewhere near the bus station and some cafés serving OAP Specials on Wednesdays.  Whilst there may be a romantic view of salt-of-the-earth traders, there's also the risk of crap quality, knock-off goods, and no hope of redress from a stall you might never see again.

The other contemporary manifestation of the market comes in the tedious cabal of Famers' Markets, where the aspirational classes joyfully subscribe to the pretence of 'authentic' and 'better' 'rural' food by buying an £8 quiche from a 'farmer' / man in a Barbour jacket outside Putney Tube station (cf the 'Organic Duck Fat Is Good For You Because It's Expensive' syndrome).

And the middle ground?  It's chain supermarkets.  That's why they are so popular.  They're a place to find half-decent veg and half-decent meat at half-decent prices, without fear of being ripped-off by a Del Boy or financing a  Fearnley-Whittingstall's third Jag.  It may not be particularly good food, but it's hygienically packaged, and there's no need to interact with a grubby man with a common accent (cf the 'Waitrose Cows Make Posher Milk Than The Ones Who Work For Morrisons' syndrome).  Perfect.  Well, perfect enough.

Anyway.  Portas' ideas are nice enough, provided there is a critical mass of genuinely useful services provided along the HS - an actual reason to go there, and overcome the challenges of congestion, inadequate parking, swathes of betting shops, etc. I can see this 'vision' working in affluent areas.  For example, SW11's Northcote Road already supports independent artisanal breadmakers, Brio-heavy toy shops, and music stores specialising in instruments for under-elevens.  However, being near the well-to-do sub-suburb of Wandsworth Common (which is in Balham), and the country's busiest rail station, Clapham Junction (which is in Battersea), cannot hurt.  I just can't see those with less disposable incoming being in a position to stop taking advantage of the bulk-buying economies of supermarkets and the .coms to financially support local traders.

What Portas' Manifesto does do well, is open the debate.  HS are dying, and retail parks are thriving, because of our choices.  We'd much prefer to blame someone else (cf the 'It's The Bank's Fault They Gave Me A 110% Mortgage And Now I'm In Negative Equity' syndrome).  But we have opted to turn our backs on small stores, and embrace the convenience of the internet and plastic sheds on ring roads.

As a final note, when Googling 'Mary Portas', the first hits are ads for her brands at places like House of Fraser, Clarks and (I don't want to think about her gusset) Mytights.com.  It's as if all this bluster about HS might actually, and quite coincidentally, make Ms Portas some money.

From online retail.  Hmm.

Foreign: Krakow (Nowa Huta)

As part of it's 2011 EU Presidency bumf, Poland has put together a free English-language paperback advertising the delights of Poland, its cities and its citizens ('About Polska').  It's mainly anodyne and harmless sub-propaganda ('We see ourselves as friendly, welcoming folk' etc etc), encouraging tourists to pop over and spend some dosh before the EU implodes and the Euro becomes the Deutsch Mark Mk II.

Amongst its pages on the Krakow, the book mentions a place called Nowa Huta, describing it as 50s 'social engineering experiment' that is now 'a troubled district...that fascinates with its grandiose Stalinist architecture'.  As a high-risk tourism venture goes, it's up there with London advertising 'Come to Norwood Junction - it's edgy.  There are chicken bones.  Mmm'.  But, having nearly collected the full set of English 50s New Towns, I thought I'd take the opportunity to see how the Socialists did urban planning back then.

The whole settlement of Nova Huta was inflicted on the middle-classes of Krakow, for their refusal to vote for Uncle Vladimir in a post-war referendum.  The idea was to balance out the vile Krakowiak bourgeois with some honest-to-goodness salt-of-the-earth Workers.  Hence the New Town was focused on a steel works - a vast complex, which once held the largest blast furnace in Europe.

The receptionist at the hotel was clearly somewhat dismayed that I was asking how to get to Nowa Huta, rather than the walled charms of the Old Town.  She told me I could catch a tram directly Howa Huta, but was unable to tell me how I'd know when I'd actually reached there...

So I got off the tram sort-of at random, on the basis that I had passed the picturesque kitsch of the Old Town some time ago (and a couple of really horrid PoMo shopping centres).  I could see some post-war 50s-ish buildings, so hoped I might be in the right sort of area.  These point blocks look distinctly similar to the medium-rise things we have dotted around the UK (particularly now they're adorned with satellite dishes).  So far, so not very exciting.

'...grandiose Stalinist...'?

But, fortuitously stumbling (I was well off the tourist maps of Krakow here) upon the main square of Plac Centralny, I found the huge radiating boulevards of Socialist Realist blocks - 6-storey rendered and arcaded rows of apartments and ground-floor shops.

That's my shadow in the bottom right.

I appear to be saluting.

This aerial shot shows the design of the development - with the Plac at the bottom, the main avenues fanning out, with housing blocks filling up the spaces in betweeb.

 Copyright: teh internets

I mentioned before how social and political ideas are so often manifested in the buildings of the time.  For example, English New Towns like Welwyn Garden City were built with swathes of trees and parks as a reaction to the dense slum housing of the industrial revolution, to enhance the quality of life for the residents.  As an added bonus, and quite terrifyingly, the greenery of Nova Huta was included to help soak up the radiation from the feared nuclear war; the wide streets would prevent the spread of apocalyptic fires; and the layout of the housing blocks meant that the city could be turned into a walled fortress with comparative ease.  Serious stuff.

According to a slim volume I later bought from the one-room Howa Huta Museum, these blocks were originally pretty dismal inside, with 'no central heating, no sewage system...the floors were simply lined with bare, unplaned planks'.  That said, in the setting wintery sun, the blocks looked a little like the cute pastiche of somewhere like Welwyn (although, as if the punchline to a Victoria Wood skit, rather than a whopping great steel plant, Welwyn had a Shredded Wheat factory). Presumably completing the aims of this design, the outside of the blocks looked quite attractive to a Prole like me.

Off to the east of the main housing matrix lies the eponymous steel works, its huge on-stilts signage rising up from the trams' power cables.  From a distance, it looks a bit like Croydon's Ikea.

Ampere Way, Communist style

The administrative blocks standing of either side of the sign are topped with a comb attic of renaissance details, nodding to the fluted stylings of the Old Town buildings.  The steel works - apparently still in operation - are closed off behind some gates.

Amazing bit of sans serif on dynamic stilts.

Broken ice floated on the surface of the Nowa Huta lake, as I headed back towards the warmth of the hotel.  It was cold.

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.