Orpington: a perambulation

The adventurous traveller arrived at Orpington with the sounds of Girl Thing's Last One Standing in his muscular ears (damn you, Big Reunion).  But, despite having voyaged into the Kentish depths of Zone 6, your dear friend and author was reassured to know that the Tudors had thoughtfully built ye wattle-and-daub taxi shedde to whisk him home should he get overcome by all the oast houses and inbreeding.

Strutting attractively down the road towards the town centre, your guide came across (no sniggering at the back) a Tesco of such a size and style that he genuinely mistook it for an entire campus of De Montford University.

On the other side of town, which is about three minutes away, is a rather tasty Brutalist Sainsbury's brick pile.  The views from the en bloc car park include no fewer than three concrete spiral ramps.  Fighting talk, indeed, to quote Nairn talking about something else (Crawley, I think). 

Nearby is what happens if you leave two Erno Goldfinger buildings together for an evening with a bottle of red wine and no adult supervision.  Wonder which of Alexander Fleming House and Balfron Tower took and which received.

WHY DOES IT COME WITH BRICKED-UP WINDOWS?  Stupid new-builds. 

At the rather attractive villagey end of town, the recent flooding confused the geese as to whether they were in the lake still or on a path.

Nearby there is a super and super-silly confection for a kebab house (with the sky from Quake).

The Walnuts shopping centre sounds a bit dirty and is a deeply unconvincing affair, with no useful shops but a lot of security guards keeping a keen eye on your author taking photos, lest he be a warlock capturing the souls of the Kentish maidens with his evil incantations / camera.

Part of the Walnuts is a 90s all-white enclosed thing.  Google says there was once an astounding a purple glazed pyramid in the middle, but that appears now to have been knocked down.  Boo hiss.

The superbly-hung raconteur can find some of the earlier, original, coffered concrete.  Sadly, not a bit of cantilevered wizardry, just a normal jutting out bit supported by a column.

Handsome concrete moulding.  In Coventry, this was on the wall of a fried chicken shop.  Here, it's a café full of old people, which is erm much better. 

Foster fans, it's a little-known fact that Orpington Leisure Centre inspired the Pompidou Centre. 

I shall leave you with a charming piece of local Kentish art, made from real hops and Goths' eyelashes.  

Fucking hideous. 

Nation builders

Three things that have excited me this week:

1)  RIBA exhibition on Modern British architecture (1950 - the present day).  Super!  Also: free! Amazingly, there is a talk by Sir Richard of Rogers, Sir Norman of Foster, Terry I-did-a-Charing-Cross Farrell, Nicholas BorisBus Grimshaw, and Mrs and Mr Hopkins (who done the millennial Forum in Norwich). Unamazingly, it's sold out :(

2)  The exhibition's twin, a BBC4 series of programmes called The Brits Who Built the Modern World.  The website goes to great lengths not to tell you when most of the programmes are on. Good stuff.  Wouldn't want people watching them, eh?

3)  This little gem on iPlayer, and, happily YouTube.

All together now: 'Neasden / It's like a hankie that you've sneezed-en'.

Catford Palace

I've never really understood Crystal Palace as a desirable place to live. To me, it's just another example of special pleading from my generation of out-priced brethren. Unable to afford places that are actually nice, we are obliged by self-respect to lie to ourselves and reinvent the humdrum places we live in as simply super.
 

"Yeah, it's basically Dulwich South"

Crystal Palace has three main roads, describing a triangle of shops, although it's only really got stuff on two of those sides. It's got a swanky cheese shop and a hipster coffee joint, but then again, so has Victoria Station and I don't want to live there either. The trains to Crystal Palace's attractive parti-coloured brick station aren't particularly frequent and aren't particularly fast. The housing stock thereabouts is largely decent Victoriana, sadly hacked into multiple little spaces for young commuters to squeeze into with their iPads and single-speaker Sonos set-ups. It's a bit grubby, congested and windswept. It's not dreadful; but it's nothing special either.

"Yeah, it's basically Dulwich South"

The area's claim to fame is what's not there any more: the eponymous Crystal Palace. The Palace was an insane-scale Victorian sort-of  Millennium Dome of glass and iron, which stood at the top of the hill from 1854 until it burnt down in 1936 (the wooden floor burnt, and caused the rest to collapse).  Perhaps the nearest surviving contemporaneous structures are the wonderful (if slightly worthy) glass houses at Kew.

The remnants of the Palace itself have been totally cleared away. What's left on that large open slope of park is nonetheless quality fodder for desolation-porn lovers. There's a huge terraced hillside of smashed statues, strangely unsmashed Sphinxes, and lovely broad staircases leading nowhere.

'In Dulwich South did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree'

The hill is topped with one of the two TV transmitters that form constellations of red lights in the south London nightscape.  Shallow puddles slosh around the gravelly paths, easy Instagram subjects.  

#NOFITLER!!

There's also the remains of the old high-level train station, which can be peered at from between spike-topped railings.

"Basically better than Dulwich because it's on the Tube"

If you get a bit lost, you might find the Crystal Palace museum, a one-room affair that explains almost nothing, but is nonetheless enticingly free.  

Walking back down from there, you'll find the wonderful unsympathy of the Sports Centre, an attractive concrete affair complete with its own entirely superfluous deck-access pedway. With typical 60s wrong-headedness, the sports centre is much easier to access by car than on foot from the station.

The multi-pyramid installation reminds me of the extant ceiling in the travel centre at Euston, and, for some reason, the egg cups from TV AM (RIP).

Further down, there's a child-thrilling installation of lumpy creatures and dinosaurs, survivors from the days of the Palace. They slightly-jarringly do not quite look the same as those in Jurassic Park (which goes to show where my knowledge of dinosaurs comes from).

The small-bladdered explorer will be delighted to know that there are free loos right at the bottom of hill. And so are Anerley and Penge, each of which sounds a bit filthy.

Penge sports a particularly low-effort Homebase, a grey corrugated-plastic shed. Which is strange because a little further into darkest SE London, there is an early Homebase that rather appealingly apes the form of the Crystal Palace. I've no idea why they tried so hard with these first few Homebases.

That moment in architecture when the Crystal Palace met Tower Gateway DLR

It's even got its own lake and somewhat understated fountain.

I'm not quite wrong enough to suggest that it's more interesting to visit Catford Homebase than Crystal Palace. But it's a close-run thing.

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.