Foreign: Sofia's Palace of Culture

There doesn't seem to be much on the internet about the Bulgarian Palace of Culture. It's so large, so swollen, so beige-and-brown.  And so, no-one seems to notice it.

I can find that it was built in 1981, celebrating the foundation of the Bulgarian nation 1300 years previously. I don't really understand how a Communist-run state was allowed to celebrate its own uniqueness and history.  I'm sure it worked in the favour of politburo somehow.

The Palace is the focal point of a large set-piece park, sitting between the city centre and the Vitosha mountain in the distance (where one can ski cheaply with a gleeful disregard for health and safety / self-preservation).  The park, like the Palace, has clearly seen better days.  An irrigation (an excellent, and made-up, plural noun) of ponds and fountains is dried up and empty, and there was little greenery in the cold March sunlight.

The Monument to the Bulgarian State, also erected by the munificent Soviet overlords in '81, is either falling down or being taken down.  It remains as a fragment of something, some shattered hoarded-off thing that youths now graffiti to express their frustration at a time they didn't live through.

Unlike Socialist Realist art, this isn't the usual worker-duping interpretation-resistant propaganda (a happy Soviet soldier with a happy peasant farmer, holding a happy pudgy baby and a basket of food).  It looks to me like something horribly wounded.  I wonder how Hitler's pet architect, Albert Speer, would have valued this Socialist ruin.

Underlining the failure of the Communist regime, the northernmost edge of the park has been appropriated by gaudy advertisements in neon.  Which again make me feel like a Capitalist pigdog, personally forcing bland brands onto the homogenising Eastern European market.  Bulgaria, I am sorry for the Tuborg.

Sited elsewhere, the section of the Berlin Wall might have seen like a celebration of the human spirit over the divisiveness and horror of the Cold War.  But here, inscription daubed with more graffiti and on a dirty glass podium, it just seems to be another example of a nasty failure.  Perhaps, on balance, the perfect antithesis to Speer's self-serving assertions that his buildings would look wonderful when picturesquely weathered.

Crossing the park to the Palace (there is a old man busking opera, in the cold), there's a Costa coffee (again, I am sorry), and a security man vigilantly doing nothing.  The Palace is now just used for conferences and the like.  There is a lot of empty space.

An anatomically-improbable statue of Sofia welcomes you into the foyer.  A moulded crowd scene of interlocking waves rather counterpoints the emptiness.

Brown signs encourage you up to the empty three-and-a-half-th floor.

There's a startling geometry to the design.  Lights like chemical structures hang from a ceiling patterned like graph paper.  The treble-height windows create vanishing points with shadows.  

Science and art.  And no-one there.  At the top, facing the mountain, is a bar where trendy young things pretend to be somewhere cool, whilst drinking terrible cocktails made by a barman with absolutely no skill.

On the other side is a tremendous view of the park and the waterless water-features.

The Palace, in its current state, is a mess.  Notionally a gift to Bulgaria, it is inevitably more-so a self-aggrandising monument to the Soviet Union.  It is falling slowly into disrepair.  An overblown symbol of past failure, and the failure of the present to keep the building alive.

Foreign: (a bit of) the Sofia Metro

This entry on the Sofia metro is fairly short, for reasons that will become apparent...

Whereas the London Underground is proudly turning 150 years old, the Metro in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia is brand new, and still being built.

There're currently two lines, a red one and a blue one, which join up at the top (or bottom, depending how you read the map).  I'm not sure whether the completed configuration will form an 8 or an A.  There's going to be a third line, which will probably still form one of those wacky Cyrillic letters they use over there to confuse foreigners.

The construction is a deep cut-and-cover trench, which allows for spacious stations with plenty of headroom and platform depth.  The trains are likewise large and boxy.  I boarded at the station called European Union, which is next to the Sofia City Centre (SCC) shopping complex.  The SCC is:

1) Nowhere near the centre of Sofia
2) Utterly rubbish.  

I feel like a disgusting Capitalist pigdog when I visit a foreign country and see it, as in the SCC, splattered with McDonald's and KFC and Nike genericdom.  Even though, technically, it is not my fault.

Anyway, the EU station is brightly lit, and has a rather nice multi-layered metal sculpture which mixes together the EU 12-star symbol and the Euro sign. I imagine the edges have been smoothed off appropriately to meet an EU Regulation.

The plaque beneath the metalwork gives thanks for the financial contributions of the 'European Regional Development Fund' and the 'Cohesion Fund of the European Union'.  Such snappy names these EU committees give themselves.  Perhaps they're more stylish nomenclatures in French.

Because I have testicles, I am a man,  Or, perhaps, the other way round.  Either way, my scrotal munificence means that I [believe I have] an innate sense of bearing and polar North, and consequentially, a deep-seated fear of asking for directions, lest my magnetically-sensitive gonads be proved misaligned.  Which would obviously be a painful experience.

The upshot of which being that I misread the Metro map.  I therefore went two stops in the wrong direction, and ended up on an empty train in the sidings, being shouted at by the driver.  In Bulgarian.  Shouldn't they check the trains are empty, rather than assuming that all the passengers know which way up the Metro map goes?

Why's is everyone else getting off the train?  Oh, um.

That fundom behind me, I was relieved when shortly later the train left the sidings and returned to normal operation.  I decided to ride the train to the [other] end of the line.  I'd seen from an earlier taxi ride [they're cheap over there, I'm not suddenly rich.  Despite being a Capitalist pigdog] that the line emerged from its underground trench and was covered by a plastic chute, which looked like it might be fun to see (whereas London trains just emerge from their tunnels, blinking and startled, rudely exposed to the grey twilight and icy rains of a British summer).

So, a short ride later, I alighted at Obelya station, the top crossbar of the current A.  Here, the station is in a tunnel of blue plastic, much like a huge water slide.

At this point, there was an announcement over the station intercom in, of course, Bulgarian.  A nearby and timid member of station staff gestured that I should stand behind the yellow-tiled line.  As a seasoned Londoner, and since the next train wasn't due for 4 minutes, I thought this a little OTT (another EU Regulation?), but was content to comply whilst taking another few pictures of the distinctly-DLR-like Lego-coloured station.

I was surprised when the policeman came up the escalator and approached me.  He had clearly been summoned (by, I suspect, that fucking creep of station staff), to address some transgression.  He gestured that I should not consider boarding the train that had just pulled in.  I herefollowing recreate the conversation with startling accuracy:

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian 

ME: Oh hai, Mr Big Policeman Man! Do you speak English, officer? 

POLICEMAN: Something in Bulgarian 

ME: Um, sorry, I don't understand.  Do you speak English?  Incidentally, you're a quite a scary looking man.  You could probably crush me. Please don't.

POLICEMAN: Annoyed - something in Bulgarian. 

ME: Err, would you like to see the pictures?  Are the pictures a problem?  Do you speak English?  You would look less scary if you shaved occasionally. Or perhaps cleaned your teeth.

POLICEMAN:  Annoyed - something in Bulgarian...  Passport! 

ME: Ah, passport!  Um, no, it's in the hotel room, in the safe, along with, now I think of it, my wallet, containing, for example, my bank cards, and all sorts of other acceptable ID forms.  Do you speak English? Are the pictures the problem?  I begin to show him my photos of the Metro and other random crap like the shopping centre, and a can of beer with a funny name that I had the night before.

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  Passport!

ME: Ah, no, I still don't have my passport?  Do you want to see more photos?  This is like a modern version of a post-holiday slideshow.  How odd.  Aren't digital cameras amazing?  At this point I remember that my driving license is tucked into my jacket pocket, as an earlier precaution to ensure I am allowed to purchase alcohol.  My youthful good looks can be a real drag when trying to get pissed.  Aha!  My driving license!  I now cannot legally be sent off to a gulag to endure 20 years in a salt mine!  I think.  Is that right?

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  He looks at the driving licence.  Then at me.  He hands me back the driving license.  He points to the camera.  Ne! 

ME:  Is that No, as in 'I don't want to see any more pictures', or No, as in 'Don't take any more pictures?'  You know, I think I'll just not take any more pictures.  I don't want to be sent to Siberia.  I need to be back in work on Monday.

POLICEMAN:  Something in Bulgarian...  He walks away.

ME:  You still scare me, Mr Big Policeman Man.  I board the next train with slightly wobbly knees and sit down with utmost care not to break any laws.

I did not take any more pictures on the Sofia Metro.

Slough (of despond)

Taking some linguistic liberty, I can claim that Google defines Slough as:

1) A swamp;
2) The dropping off of dead tissue from living flesh.

Inviting.

Bullied by by Betjeman and Brent, Slough is famously shit.  I'm disappointed to say that I've missed the Brunel Bus Station, a brown-and-concrete megalith that, given my esoteric / perverse tastes, I might have rather enjoyed.  But, happily, Slough is partway through its Heart of Slough remoulding and modernisation.

One part of this scheme has been completed, a new £12 million bus station.  The wonderfully partisan Slough Times website (which really should be in Comic Sans FULL CAPS) loathes this structure, and cites such heart-breaking tales of public transport woe as A Pensioner misses her bus (which concludes 'she was forced by Slough's uncaring Labour-run council to stand in the pouring rain waiting for her next bus') and the eschatological thought-provoker Everything closes at 4pm.

It's certainly an odd bugger.  I suppose that modern bus stations don't want to end up being places for loiters and tramps to hang around, so seek not to be particularly comfortable, with a tolerable dwell period of about ten minutes.  Taking some cues from Vauxhall Bus Station, the Slough structure is a two-pronged silver thing that (deliberately?) provides limited shelter from cold, wind or rain.  The Council's website says that the metal cladding will 'change character with the varying light conditions', which I think means that it will look darker at night.

The two worms-in-cross-section meet a larger worm-in-cross-section, where there's a caff and a mini newsagent, but the interesting glass end seems sadly to be a staff room (well, I couldn't find a way in).

In between the bus and train stations and the shops, somewhat unhelpfully, thunders a pair of dual carriages that form a ring-road.  A glass-and-steel bridge that spans the roads was presumably paid for by the massive millennial Tesco, but the tiling looks like a naff version of a 70s Jubilee Line platform, and absolutely everything (tiles, handrails, flooring, glass) is liberally plastered with pigeon poo.

Welcome to Slough

The smashed safety-glass panels make a pleasing installation of urban art in the winter sun.

Welcome to Slough.

Across the shit-and-shrapnel assault course sits the concrete fundom of the Queensmere Shopping Centre.  T'internet suggests that this will be flattened and rebuilt as something nice (/with a greater rental income).  At the moment, it's a distinctly lacklustre affair with an unhealthy number of 99p and discount stores.  Someone's tried to hide the exterior concreteness with a cheap and unadorned internal façade of white plasterboard, and a bunch of light fittings that are often bulb-free and/or just a cable hanging from the roof.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO HER TEETH?

Out the other side of Queensmere is a redeveloped square on the High Street, with some street furniture, a new cinema, and some charming dining options.

CCTV ensures that no-one steals the pigeon poo.

Adjacent is the Observatory shopping centre, which is a rather nicer PoMo affair with Lego-blue detailing and some decorative capitals/balcony-type contrivances.

On the way up to the roof of the Observatory carpark, one can visit some charming toilets, and perhaps experience the alfresco thrill of weeing in a cubicle that has had its door smashed off.

Well, at least they are appologising for the iconvenience.

On the roof, there are three lifts - one of which is, surreally, the pin-coded entrance to an EasyGym.  From this lofty vantage, one can look down on some utter shit strewn across the roofs at the back of the High Street.

Will this also be rectafied shortly?

After the vigorous exercise of urban exploration, one might seek a refreshing beverage in a local hostelry.  The 'friendliest pub on Slough High Street' comes with the stern and slightly confusing warning on its front door 'Do not attempt to use public toilets unless you are a paying customer'.  So, they're not public toilets, then?  Or do different terms and conditions apply if seeking to use the staff toilets?

FRIENDLY.

Sadly, it seems that one can no longer source a horse pie in Slough  :(

Although this has thankfully not dampened the spirits of the locals, who have chosen to have a fun time in the piss-soaked alleyway alongside.

Polish lager, fags and jaffa cakes.  A classic Berkshire night out.

If you would like to live and work here, a local job shop suggests becoming a leering chef and serving up a tasty platter of raw potato wedges, accompanied by a bowl of radishes.  Mmm.

Um.  Nice curtains.

A nearby store sells some genuinely exotic treats, like eyebrows.

Bargain.

In all, Slough might actually be the crappest place I have visited in quite some time.  Although perhaps my memory of Bracknell has faded.

Keep up the good work, Berkshire.

Birmingham: a tale of two libraries

My family lived within a few miles of Birmingham for three years in the late Eighties, but, for reasons that don't really make sense to me, it seems that we only went into the city centre twice in that time.  I recall spilling UHT milk over my father's suit in a café near Snow Hill station on one of those occasions.  This is perhaps why we did not come back.

So, returning to the place some twenty-five years later, there was almost nothing for me to remember.  I did distantly recognise the Stirling green handrails and globular PoMo lights of Snow Hill (which seems to be a car park with a station attached, rather than the other way round), but nothing of the city itself.

Retaining the charm of the underside of a motorway flyover.

As England's Second City (TM), Birmingham is lucky enough to have its own Pevsner guide, which is a really great book (they all are #fanboy).  This blog here has a great account of the rebuildings of Birmingham, so I wont re-cover any of that.  My interest was in the soon-to-be-demolished Central Library, which the Pevsner describes as a building 'of European importance', although in Culture Minister Margaret Hodge's judgement, there was 'insufficient architectural value' and 'insufficient historic importance' for the building to be listed.  So it should therefore be flattened forthwith, and the land flogged (cf Preston Bus Station).

From 1974, when the library opened, and colours were wrong.

As if often the case with such post-War schemes, little of the original masterplan, which would have included a drama centre and athletics institute, got built.  What was finished is in two main parts.  The low-rise curve of the Corbusier-meet-carpark Lending library doesn't attract much hatred because it's pretty inoffensive.  The larger structure, that which gets all the attention, is the Reference Library.  It forms an inverted hollow ziggurat, cantilevering out into the sky from improbable stilts at the base.  That mass of floating concrete creates the distinct menace of impending doom. An intimidating architectural game of Chicken.  A Thwomp from Mario about to smash into you from above.  Standing in the centre of the structure, at that time open to the sky, must have felt like being in the eye of a hurricane.

This primal death-from-above fear is perhaps the point of the original design (along with flipping the concept for Lasdun's 1966-7 University of East Anglia accommodation blocks on its head).  The Library was supposed to be impressive, challenging and intriguing.  Of course, it was never intended to look like the nearby Town Hall (please try to remember quite how daft it is that our Georgian and Victorian forebears built things that looked like Greek temples), although perhaps some sensitivity of scale should be acknowledged.  It was a building block for a post-war future, a proud civic monument.

Seeing the building today, it's really really hard to recognise that.  It's clear that the structure has been loathed for some time, and fashion-conscious councils have sought to change or soften or disguise or, oh dear, 'improve' it.  In the same year that Prince Charles described the library as looking 'like a place where books are incinerated, not kept', a tubular steel and glass canopy was jammed between the concrete masses.  Today, punters are lured inside by the charming transfat treats of Greggs and Mcdonald's.

Hanging baskets.  The last-ditch attempt to disguise something hated.

Inside, the space has been roofed in, and a bunch of single-storey retail outlets clutter up the place.  From the library itself, you can look down on the plasterboard ceilings, power cables and other mess on top of these commercial portacabins.  In its current state, it's a horrid experience.  And it's not to be renovated, or restored, or preserved.

Approached from the other side, a late-80s walkway over the ringroad is framed by a pair of unloved PoMo glass boxes (one of which is the Copthorne Hotel, which must be visited if only for the ZOMG mirrored ceiling on the ground floor and Leuven-centred beer selection), grimy red-framed windows like bleary eyes from one too many Steakbakes and Stellas the night before.

One can follow that same walkway over to Centenary Square, where the new C21 library is nearing completion.

Taken from the builders' hoarding, hence the join.

Finished in concrete, this might have looked rather like a Brutalist pile of boxes.  But the architects have sought to hide this hunmdrumdom behind a cladding designed using a Spirograph.  Here's a Youtube CGI flypast of the site and tour of the building with music taken from an early series of Location, Location, Location.

I've nothing in particular against what Charles Jencks would enthusiastically call Radical Postmodernism, although, much like the nearby MAKE-designed Cube, it will date absolutely horribly.

Perhaps it really will make everyone happy.  I can only imagine that future generations of Brummies will be vacuously braying for this to be pulled down because it's not in keeping with the surrounding area and doesn't look like Corinthian temple (or, if tastes have changed that much, because it doesn't look like a Beton Brut megastructure...).

I'll leave you with a rather balanced interview with John Madin, the architect of the Central Library, who passed on in January 2012.  RIP, John.

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?