Master Plan

I went to see an exhibition celebrating the 50^th anniversary of a company called Building Design Partnership. I admire the fact that the founder, an architect, deliberately set out to avoid celebrity by not using either his own name or the word ‘architect’. Instead he established a collective of specialists to design and deliver large-scale buildings. The strategy was unusual but it worked and the commissions began to flow in. Over time they grew in scale so that the work is now international and includes not only individual buildings but also complete environments such as airports, campuses, green housing estates and city regeneration projects.

Their achievements are impressive, as is the exhibition where examples of projects are represented by intricately crafted models, professional photos and beautifully rendered drawings. In the presentation everything looks at its best: even the scaled-down people who inhabit the models and drawings look cool and their little cars, lightly distributed around the tree-lined, uncongested roads, seem trendy.  Everything is perfectly ordered, clean and functional: architecture has been re-named ‘building design’ and large, complex projects ‘master-planning’.

That same evening I went to a meeting at the Town Hall to hear the police Superintendant report on his progress towards keeping on top of things in our city centre. He spent a lot of time describing how he had structured his force – as if it had only recently occurred to him that it needed a structure. I found this disconcerting until I realised that he is continually discarding previous structures that have either failed or outlived their effectiveness in a fluctuating, dynamic situation.

The city has many stakeholders and their interests often conflict. That evening there was much discussion, for example, about that part of the night-time economy which generates income from the sale of alcohol (and other drugs) and, to the disturbance of many residents, results in noise and disorder in the streets into the early hours. This is one of the issues that keep the Superintendant and his force very busy.

His load would be considerably lightened if a little master-planning could be applied to this state of affairs. If all the late-night drinking places were in zone A and all the residents lived in zone B he would need fewer cops to sort out the problems between them. Actually it would simplify many peoples’ jobs if such a logistic heaven were to become reality but, alas, it is too late. The city didn’t have a conceptual master plan and no amount of retrospective planning will ever compensate for that.

But all is not lost; there are schemes abroad to build new cities from scratch – the Master Planners’ dream-come-true.  If they ever build one conveniently situated for me I would like to live in it for a while - just to see if they got it right and, of course, to check out how long it takes for all the model people and cars to get jumbled up.

Dancing on Graves

If there is such a thing as a ‘modern architecture gene’ then I certainly have one. I became aware of it during my teenage years in Plymouth. The centre of the city was completely re-modelled in the 1950s and, although I had no knowledge of what it was like before it was laid waste by the German bombers of World War Two, I instinctively approved of the reincarnation: wide, straight boulevards and bright buildings of concrete, white stone and glass, clean and unadorned except for a little meaningful modern sculpture here and there. This patch of modernity, however, was not about denying the city’s deep heritage which is rooted in the places visible from the hilly vistas down to Plymouth Sound. Places such as the Barbican, the Royal Naval Dockyards, Stonehouse and the Hoe continue to be the lifeblood of the city.

Proudly positioned high on the Hoe stands a structure dedicated as a reminder of the city’s role in history. It is the memorial monument to the Royal Naval personnel who died in the two World Wars. I was drawn to it visually by its striking, sombre architecture but then, more intimately, by the lists of names recorded there on bronze tablets. I began, out of simple curiosity, by looking for my own family name but soon progressed to friends’ family names and then to any name that might be familiar - by whatever connection. During this process the realisation dawned that I was related, by shared values and common ground, to all of those on the list and that I was myself a part of the continuous process called ‘history’. I understood that the names were posted in order to give each their individual place in that same history and that the names stood for real men of my father’s and grandfathers’ generation who had died in circumstances I could only imagine.

At Tower Hill in London there is a similar monument (it also has a World War Two “extension”, designed by Sir Edward Maufe, in the form of a sunken, walled garden) except that this one is dedicated to the civilian, merchant seamen who perished. And, while the backdrop history of the wars may be the same, the listings themselves hint at a broader picture. Many of the names are more exotic or foreign-sounding than the typically British names of the period which suggests that they may have been recruited in the faraway ports of a once sprawling maritime empire. Their names are grouped under the ships they sailed on and the ports to which those ships were registered. The names of the ships may not be familiar but the ports - such as Aberdeen, West Hartlepool, Belfast, Liverpool, Cardiff, Hull, Glasgow, Grimsby, Troon, Scarborough, London and so on - certainly are - although most are now shadows of what they used to be. Once thronged with ships and ship-building, they are now sidelined by containerisation and airfreight, their industrial expertise all but lost, searching for other reasons to be.

I was at the Tower Hill Memorial on a sunny afternoon when the place, because it has a tiny park attached, is a magnet for office workers on their breaks and for tourists hovering around the Tower of London. The tourists did not stop to read the cast-bronze plaques fixed to the stonework. They ambled past them, wide-eyed for the big picture, stopping only briefly to photograph each other with the Tower in the background. The office workers read their books and papers, ate their snacks and closed their eyes to look up to the sun for a recharge before heading back to work.

 

The tourists and the lunchtime solace-seekers may be forgiven their nonchalance. The owner of the land, Tower Hamlets Council, may not. It has agreed to rent the park to a hospitality company who will cover it with a marquee for four weeks in the run-up to Christmas. There they will host lavish office parties for the very City firms who have wrecked our economy and will now be encouraged to dance on our graves. 

Roaming Ticket

I took a bus the other day, around the Isle of Dogs in East London. It’s a regular, scheduled bus which takes people about their daily business but, since I had no particular daily business and I am not familiar with the route, I was able to enjoy the journey for the simple pleasure of discovery. The history of this area is probably familiar - it contains many of the docks of London which were once so important to the trade of an empire. But they became redundant and unloved when the empire collapsed and cargoes became containerised. Now they have been revived as marinas and ‘water features’ for the enhancement of housing and office developments.

I would have appreciated a knowledgeable guide to give me a spoken commentary on the journey but had to make do with picking up the clues and piecing them together with the help of an A-Z street map. Names, like Westferry Road and Eastferry Road, have very obvious origins, as do the many others with seafaring references to wharfs, cargoes and overseas destinations. Other streets are named after people of presumed importance to the area and there is, intriguingly, a major route called Manchester Road. Best of all is a place called Mudchute, so named because it was the destination of all the mud and silt excavated during the creation of Millwall docks then deposited there by conveyor belt.

The topography of the Isle of Dogs is dominated by the huge rectangular tracts of water chopped into the land which, although they may disorientate the casual visitor, have dictated the geography of the place since their conception so that even Canary Wharf- that self-contained, commercially sustained private estate- is, despite its massive scale, built around those old dock excavations. The bus diverts through security gates into the guarded territory of Canary Wharf so that passengers may access its immaculately tended buildings and open spaces. The power of money is manifest here in a harmony and order which contrasts sharply with the visual jumble of the public environment surrounding it.

Back in Manchester another, less epic, bus journey also transported me through history - although this time it was my own past that I encountered. The bus passed a house I had once lived in and wound its way through old stamping grounds I had long since forsaken. On this route I should not have needed clues to help with the story; my own, silent commentary was running. But, after a while, a question emerged: “Had I really lived here?”  I tried winding back the tape and pressing replay but the picture was rather blurred. All those years later and, with no remaining connections to the place, the focus had become indistinct. It could have been another person’s life that I was contemplating, set in a familiar-looking suburb on a typical bus route. Some memories emerged, like brief sequences of a dream, but I could detect no real trace of me in the passing landscape. At my destination I stepped off the bus and into the present day wondering what had really happened back then.

Getting from A to B is straightforward and easy to achieve if that’s what you want: take stock of where you are, decide where you want to go and when you want to arrive, buy yourself a ticket and get on board. For some this serves as an effective strategy for life itself– a focused progression towards a predetermined outcome. But not knowing where you want to go can be a more interesting proposition; it contains the potential of open horizons and adventures beyond everyday experience. The scenic route, the roamer ticket, the speculative journey: these are not to be dismissed as mere whimsy, for they may be used as the means to an end – one which is deliberately not predetermined. Getting on a bus is a great way to get you to places you didn’t know you wanted to go.

Interior Motives

The Geffrye Museum of the Home contains a series of replicated, domestic room-sets chronologically displayed. The first is from circa 1600 and the last is from the present day- a typical, so called ‘loft’ apartment converted from an industrial building. Despite the fact that the Geffrye, a former alms house, is a very linear building, which dictates the layout of the display, there is a perceptibly circular trend to the history of the interiors depicted: from the minimal content and decoration of the Elizabethan room, through the clutter and over-decoration of the late Victorian and back again to the bare bones of the contemporary loft. It was while viewing this last exhibit that a fellow visitor turned to me and said “I couldn’t live in that!” When I pressed him he did not offer a rational explanation but I concluded that such an interior would not fit in with his habitual way of living.

My preferred style of living might be described, in current terminology, as ‘minimal’ but I have had my preconceptions on this point challenged just lately; most notably by Junya Ishigami, an architect who “works between the spheres of architecture and art” and strives to “dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside”. He takes minimalism very seriously, as can be seen in his gallery pieces, which are structures on a very large scale yet so delicately made, of gossamer-like fibres, that they are almost invisible. Actually this transcends minimalism- I would call it etherialism and wonder how that might translate into a style of living.

Outside of museums I have had an opportunity to consider other peoples’ modes of living in a very practical way: I have been ‘apartment-sitting’. For us apartment-sitters the domestic circumstances of the absent occupants inevitably present a variety of vicarious experiences but, regardless of whether it’s a comfortable place in a desirable location or a gloomy dwelling in a desolate spot, there is always another dimension - one from which we may draw imaginings. Sooner or later the observation of some small detail- such as the positioning of a chair, a plant or a picture- will begin to suggest what is of importance in the lives of the absent occupants and this is the moment when we begin to reflect on our own priorities. Living in someone else’s place presents an opportunity to awake from our complacency, see things from another’s perspective and learn that apparently innocent,  everyday objects can obstruct the inventiveness of our minds simply by their habitual presence.

During my recent sitting I tried to balance the urge to re-arrange the place to my own liking with the need to respect the preferences of my absent hosts. The process resulted first in contemplation of a new career as an interior designer, then a brief flirtation with Feng Shui, but progressed, eventually, to the higher plane of questioning how and why I acquired my own habitual routines and rituals, my own physical and mental clutter. I concluded that clutter creeps up, unnoticed, and accumulates in whatever space is available. After a while routines, rituals and clutter all become inter-dependent and start to dictate my life-patterns. The cycle needs to be broken, the desk cleared and the job started afresh.

Apartment-sitting is good therapy for this condition because different or unfamiliar environments will engender random connections- and random connections are fuel for the imaginative, creative processes. If we stay at home we remain in an environment which has been honed to preserve habitual behaviour patterns and makes us feel too comfortable to be bothered with adventure.

I have it in mind to contact the Geffrye Museum soon with a proposition for a creative art installation/performance/experiment. It will take the form of me living, one week at a time, in each of their period room-sets without changing or moving any object. I should also like to propose to Junya Ishigami that I live in his place on similar terms, although I would be very disappointed if it turned out that he lives in a Tokyo suburb in a cosy bungalow full of bric-a-brac and surfaces printed with floral patterns.

Mental Mapping

Whenever I travel I have a map of the world in my mind’s eye: so, if I were travelling northwards of my start point, I would be moving up the map; if southwards I would be moving down; and, if east or west, across it. I don’t think this is unusual (apart from the fact that I have recently started to worry about whether I should be using the Mercator or the Peters projection).

I came down from Manchester to London to stay for a few weeks, during which time my sister visited, insisting that she had come up to London from Lincolnshire; those who are familiar with England’s geography will soon spot the anomaly. I happen to know that she is not geographically challenged, that she came by car and was guided by a sat-nav map. So what is going on in her mind’s eye? Does she perceive London to be in a different direction or, perhaps, a different dimension? Has our capital city come to rest on the same elevated plane as Oxford and Cambridge universities which, according to their convention, are always up no matter what your direction of approach?

Those who have lived in London (and I am one) will be familiar with the notion that its inhabitants believe themselves to be at the centre of all that matters and that every other place in the U.K. is provincial - in the most demeaning sense of the word. But I have now lived long enough in Manchester to have acquired a Northerly perspective which makes me keen to subvert such a view and to promote Manchester to the premier league of British cultural achievements other than football. I take my opportunities whenever I can: as in, for example, an after-dinner discussion on the outbreak of rioting which, a few weeks ago, was big news. One of the Londoners present recalled hearing that there had been a similar (but minor) disturbance in one of the provinces – was it Manchester? “Yes”, I said “but it was a mere shadow of the real outbreak back in 1819 when 80,000 Mancunians turned out to demand the reform of parliamentary representation”. There was, of course, no riposte to this famous illustration of Northerners’ advanced political views and zealous pursuit of social reform for the benefit of the majority of citizens in England.

Flushed with success and confident of having earned some respect for the prowess of lowly provincials- I was brought back down to earth later when, in a packed Tube-station elevator, I took the initiative to act as operator (having read the instruction posted on the wall) but pressed the ‘alarm’ button instead of the ‘ascend’ button. A bell sounded, the door froze in the open position and a collective sigh of despair went up around me. My public admission of guilt and my bluff, Northern apology did nothing to advance my cause.

Maybe it’s a hopeless cause anyway. Locating Manchester on a map is a simple question of reading the grid reference. Putting Manchester on the map proves to be more difficult. The first Londoner I ever knew was from Brick Lane and he told me that, for him, ‘up North’ meant Hackney. Some years later, in Portsmouth, I met a bloke who referred to the Isle of Wight as being ‘down South’.

Up, down or sideways everyone’s reading of the map centres on their own location: everywhere else is of secondary importance. Grid references and sat-nav can help you get to them physically but cartography is only one tool in the box when it comes to going places.

The Ways We Live

I once lived in a Victorian suburb in a Victorian villa which, although grandly conceived, had subsequently suffered degradation as a result of socio-economic and demographic change- in short it had been converted into bed-sits in the early 1960’s. I spent several years fondly restoring it to something like its original condition only to find (to my surprise) that the end result was a house that was perfectly suited to middle class, Victorian family life - but not to my own lifestyle.

I had this in mind recently when I took a trip down Memory Lane, hopping aboard the newly-opened tram service from the city centre to a similar suburb, Chorlton, five miles out. Returning to this once-familiar place I was struck by how ugly it now looks. I mean no disrespect to Chorltonites, as I am sure the same can be said of many such suburbs around the country, but the harmoniously conceived architecture of the late 19^th century has been rendered un-harmonious by successive generations of inhabitants. Progressive layers of modernisation clash visually with each other and with what remains of the original architectural aesthetic. Redundancy of purpose and change of use sit unhappily on many formerly handsome edifices.

I suspect that, to those who live there, the place is comfortable like a favourite old coat and the visual aesthetics do not offend in the same way. But, walking around those streets, I saw shabby, run-down villas subdivided into flats, their unkempt front gardens mostly paved over and littered with big rubbish bins, their decorative features chopped up or painted over, their graceful proportions ruined by cumbersome extensions and all the streets crammed with cars, vans and motorcycles. I imagined what it must have looked like in the heyday of its development when the integrity of its design was intact: the rows of houses intended for family life, the parade of shops built to accommodate all the specialist retailers, the schools, the churches, the library and the pubs all conveniently positioned within walking distance of the houses. It had been designed for a society with shared values and a uniform way of living but what I now beheld was the messy result of haphazard adaptation to different ways of living.

Of course the evolving ways we live are recognised and addressed by architects and urban planners with myriad ideas and varying degrees of success: the process of change is as old as society itself. On my return to the city centre I visited an exhibition based on the theories of Charles Fourier who, in the early 19^th century, devised a very detailed scheme for living. His grand plan depended on a communal approach and revolved around a standard building design which would serve as a live/work unit for groups of individuals – a sort of urban version of the classic village. His acolytes did subsequently establish some communities based on his plan but none of them lasted for more than a few years, the essential weakness with this type of idea being that it depends upon co-operation and concern for the interests of others.

Fourier wanted everyone to live a lifestyle defined by his ideals, in a dwelling tailored to fit those ideals but he was doomed to failure because he could never persuade everyone else to agree with him. To his credit, though, he had a vision of living which was not defined by inherited housing stock and, in that respect, he was ahead of the pack. Some of us might aspire, as he did, to a different lifestyle, one which manifests itself in another type of dwelling - a country cottage, a town house, a Mediterranean retreat or a narrowboat on the canals - yet, believing it to be beyond our reach, make do with what we have; and thereby run the risk of remaining trapped in the Victorian villas of our minds. 

Psychogeographically Speaking

There is a side entrance to Manchester’s outrageously splendid, gothic-styled Town Hall. It leads to a little courtyard which is fully visible only from within the building. I saw it once, that secret, mysterious and inward-looking place, hidden behind the public splendour of one of the structure’s three facades. The granite setts of its floor are overlooked by heavily featured, stone oriel windows with tiny, leaded lights. The walls between them are decorated with coloured, glazed mosaics and there are small, curved balconies of ornate wrought iron on the upper floors from which the occupants may spy on those who enter below. Surely this is a part of the building which its architect reserved for the indulgence of his own fantasies – his dreams of mediaeval, eastern European buildings with ancient and sinister provenances.

One evening, as darkness fell, I found myself the only person walking on the quiet street which gives access to this courtyard. A solitary car approached and turned in front of me to enter it. I hoped that, as the gate opened, I might get another glimpse of the secret courtyard, just to get an unexpected psychogeographical fix – and to reassure myself that modernity was being held at bay, that double yellow lines had not been painted around it or automatic bollards installed at the entrance. I came close to the car as it waited for the gate to open and saw that it was being driven by a chauffeur, that the passenger, sitting alone in the back seat, was wearing a chain of office around his neck and that there was a coat of arms painted on the side of the car. He turned his head to look at me and I realised I had caught the Lord Mayor in an unguarded, off-duty moment – returning, perhaps, from a function at the end of his official working day. Afterwards, I felt I should have waved or saluted or somehow acknowledged a connection between citizen and elected representative, but he looked away too quickly, perhaps embarrassed by being caught in an intimate, vacant moment. The ornate iron gate swung open and the car slid into the dimly lit courtyard.

I couldn’t really see into the courtyard, but I was struck by the ordinariness of the car, a black Volvo family saloon of indeterminate age, which would have been at home in any suburban driveway.  It was completely outclassed by the magnificence, opulence and historical significance of its parking space, but I supposed that the choice of car was indicative of Manchester’s collective, egalitarian principles which proscribe any flagrant waste of citizens’ money or the undue elevation of an elected official beyond the reach of the ordinary Council Tax-payer.

I bumped into the Lord Mayor again a few weeks later. He didn’t recognise me and, to be honest, I only recognised him because he was at the next table and wearing the chain of office; and I had seen his car parked outside on my way in. This time the venue was distinctly 21^st century and the architecture not at all arcane. We were at the ultra-modern “statement” building that David Liebeskind designed for the Imperial War Museum North. It is very grand and striking, both outside and in. But it sits, as if deposited whole, in the centre of a desolate, windswept, tarmac car park - stranded on an island of self-importance.  It has no imposing portal or splendid, sweeping stone steps and gives no visual clue, apart from “signage”, as to where its entrance is, so there is no dignified or elegant way to enter or leave the building. Visitors park their cars outside its blank facade and scuttle around, looking for a way in. Parked thus, the black Volvo had nowhere to hide; no secret, discreet side entrance to slide into. It was just another family car (with a badge on the door) parked among a sea of others in an environment built especially for them.