knit one street purl one city

Borealis by Héctor Serrano Studio

No borealis in Scotland this weeknight but this is nice from last year.

…and Burns’ bit on the lights, from Tam O’Shanter…

Or like the snow falls in the river;
A moment white – then melts for ever

Or like the Borealis race
That flit before you can point their place

And a clip from Daisysaint’s superb YT channel – Tam Lin with Stephanie Beacham and Ian McShane (lovejoy).

The opening sequence here is lovely if you like fresh-minted brutalism seen from quiet motorway via Jensen, Aston and Corniche… (not too sure what the gold droptop is – Wolseley? )

gold star for mr saxe-coburg-gotha

Well not quite. But I do feel myself drawn to believe Charles’ protestations about the real reasons why he dissed chelsea barracks – “one’s subjects need to be protected from the moneygrabbing slab n’ glass merchants operating in this, um, glorious scept’red islOK enough.

Poor old George VII. Damned if you do (Poundbury) and damned if you don’t (listen to your tenants).

The fact is his protestations on behalf of Clapham omnibus person-of-no-fixed-gender-or-ethnicity-or marital-status (have you been affected by the stereotyping issues raised in this post? Like to talk to someone? Call 0300 123 1212 in confidence and ask for “Knacker”) are decades too late, and far too puny. The whole system of architects and planners and developers and public consultations is rotten to the core (but very safe, and accessible, and ISO accredited and – oh joy – GREEEEEENNNNN – our new supamegaxtra-store may look like a cardboard box with holes punched in it with a blunt stick but did you know, due to our water recycling plant, 5 ducks will not now die in the displaced brackish pond we had to dig because we built on marshy wetland? We are so committed to excellFUCK OFF!!!!).

Some people love post-war brutalist architecture. Some people love a man in a ponytail flourishing a favourite Rotring. Some people think Skodas and Hyundais are quite nice and must buy a brand new one at full cost over all other options… in this company, Vauxhalls are exotic. In this company, white socks and grey plastic shoes are really very practical – and comfy.

So there is a problem here, above and beneath. Above, the articulate Lord Foster gives it away first by his terrible taste in clothing – pink corduroy trousers and yellow shirts are not PoMo, just infantile. Cucumber Charles wears suits that make him look as if he’s about to re-enact the St Valentines day massacre. Beneath – the Primark-clad, american-imperialist-baseball-topped, sink-estate’d baldricks just look traumatised as usual, nipple-surrogate chemical-stick their only pleasure and ultimate pain. Yet they’re the only ones who really know about “modern architecture” – ironic, eh?

Along with Betjeman, one person who foresaw all this complete crap and stupidity and crass commercialism and inhumanity, top to bottom, was Ian Nairn.

north british station hotel book

Edinburgh’s landmark hotel, the North British (now called the Balmoral) was opened in 1902. I’ve just bought a copy of the souvenir book (from Cooper Hay books in Glasgow) that was published to commemorate the opening; and it is most beautifully illustrated and typeset. It contains three sections – Old and New Edinburgh; a description of the hotel; and then a gazetteer of the places covered by the NBR’s routes throughout Scotland. And a lovely big routemap tipped in at the back too. What the guests that day would think of Hallam Foe…

NB is journey’s northern end for Auden’s Night Mail. As railway hotels are a focus of intense transience, whilst remaining themselves the static empty vessel for these fleeting flickers, they do take on a weight of – well this is where it gets subjective. All I can say for myself is that they hold a fascination beyond their architectural iconography. Central Hotel in Glasgow, like the Balmoral, also has this feeling (Central’s currently being renovated). And of course the mother and father of them all has it too – the newly restored St Pancras Hotel, the model for Chhatrapati Shivaji in Mumbai. Cultural hegemony at its finest.

I once did a brochure for the Balmoral’s downstairs bar, No. 1 Princes Street. The third picture shows the main hotel brochure used at that time, done by an agency in London I think, with vogueish soft-blur photography. I’ve appropriated A day in the life (also a reference to simple minds’ first album Life in a day, which has always stuck with me since seeing it in Bruces’ record shop on shandwick place) for the title of a piece musing on Waverley station for PsyGeoEdinburgh.

one day is a lifetime under the canopy of ghosts
From the arrival of the 19:00 Kings Cross to Waverley; to the departure of the 23:36 Waverley to Euston 24hrs later – our flickers are ghosted into the grain of sleepers across years, decades, eternities. So and so appears; an unknown number vanish never to return. We sit; we stand; our belongings jumble around us; fellow pilgrims delight and infuriate; our time is mostly spent engrossed in ephemera. Spun out on a zoetrope of tree and telegraph post, the train and that symbol of the industrial revolution, the precision railway clock, plots linear life-shaped trajectory, perhaps to the music of Steve Reich; or Coward’s Brief Encounter; The Archer’s Red Shoes.

st james centre edinburgh

The 60s deep-space prison-chic of Edinburgh’s St James shopping centre remains in stasis awaiting removal of asbestos before demolition begins. A wander yesterday on the upper deck attracted not one security guard – and also surprisingly, considering all the awkward dead ends hidden from lines of sight and the easily accessed sloping glass/perspex roofs, the place is still intact with very little vandalism/graffiti. For all this, it sounds better than it actually is – the most interesting part of the deck is the babble of voices and strains of music coming from the mall underneath.

At least Stalinist architecture had an underlying social mentality and intention – St James is utterly soulless (much like the stupendously banal, formulaic contemporary buildings opposite at Greenside). Yet as is often pointed out, people flock to it. I think the reason, after many years of strolling through this poor relation to a Paris arcade myself, is that the low ceiling, pyramid skylights, the dogleg route and the entrance and exit points create the feeling of a cosseting, blinkered maze; or a warren. The best feature is the multilevel John Lewis department store which also dissuades you from any plans on going home – why windowshop when you can be in the window itself. But of course the real reason it’s still popular is that it’s the only place to go if you want to shop in the centre but can’t handle the Princes street crowds or the social cachet on George street.

Humanity – must try harder, says God

Having grown up in Easter Ross, a place deep in the lore of the Brahan Seer, the gift of foretelling was a definite fact to me as a child. But when David Icke predicted that in 1991 my neighbouring island of Arran would be destroyed and sunk by an earthquake, in the absence of Charlie Brooker I had to debunk myself. The humanitarian disaster in Haiti (part of Hispaniola, not an island known for earthquakes, but one that knows plenty about colonialism), is an only too-real indicator that nobody – even Sportsreporter Incarnate – can definitively say what will happen.

Now the recriminations – Haitians made a pact with the devil so that he’d help them get rid of the French… the French accuse the Americans of taking advantage of the situation and making a move on the island… Haitian leaders are corrupt and that’s why the buildings are so shoddy… the Aid Agencies, selfishly jostling for position in the aid money-fest… (For a different take on what’s happening in Haiti, visit the Tanzanian/Scottish photographer Pradip Malde who has a strong connection with the island).

This re-run of Who’s Faultline Is It Anyway, broadcast whilst the bodies bloat and common looters get murdered in the streets by their own police force, make Icke and his highly confused form of truth about several political situations we all understand only too well, seem quite cuddly. And so those who will make political capital from the disaster should remember there but by the grace of…

Richard Dawkins is at the opposite end of the P T Barnum / Cassandra Scale from Icke. Yet both seem to share common themes (worryingly their web sites also seem to share the same crusading I’m Right, So Buy All My Stuff! look and tone). One of those themes is about either denying something exists (God; Dawkins) or insisting that something does exist (er, lizards; you know who). Delusional? I’ve got an App for that (app now removed from iTunes)

The answer is of course nobody, even the Pope on a good day, is right and nobody can know the seemingly infinite width height and breadth of life, the universe and all that – only Beeblebrox has survived the Total Perspective Vortex. And just because you live and work in a building designed by, for instance, Zaha Hadid (just to get the world/building analogy right – we wouldn’t want to suggest that God does 50s brutalism), shouldn’t mean she’s there permanently, concierge-style, answering all our dumb questions about what to do about today’s problems and accepting the blame when it all gets a bit too much. That’s Jesus’s job.

OK hats off to all the aid workers in Haiti, and the Haitians who are doing the best they can to survive the disaster.

trams to vacantville

The issues at Leith’s failed luxury land reclamation project at Newhaven’s western harbour – Platinum Point – continue with news that the first stage of council house residents from the blighted brutalist Leith Fort scheme up the road are to be welcomed into brand new flats (i.e., single-breezeblock rabbit hutches) opposite the bankrupt development during early 2010. Naturally PP’s residents association, now cynical due to the shaky-in-reclaimed-sand property developers and their ripoff factors, see this as yet another blow for their negative-equitied designer-hell-on-Forth fog-flats, once a much-cited prestigious stopping point for Edinburgh’s new trams.

The debate should not be with either the mortgaged-to-the-hilt; nor the sometimes, er, rather limited life-expectations locals – it should be with, as usual, the sub-par but well-connected architects, aesthetics-free town planners, overambitious developers and thoughtless toon cooncillors, who always as a cabal fail to equate housing with community. This crash of social groupings will only benefit the crass Asda megastore plonked between them – and of course the cctv manufacturers – and police overtime. lower image: Jamie Reid

Constant Nieuwenhuys : situationist architect

For those interested in Unitary Urbanism, the architect/artist Constant Nieuwenhuys is key to understanding what a Situationist cityscape would have looked like. This article by the cult architect Lebbeus Woods, discussing Nieuwenhuys’ neo-marxist city vision, New Babylon, covers a great deal of ground.

New Babylon is a world created by, rather than for, the individual – for me it suggests a masculine angularity and brusqueness, rather than a softer, more hopeful, organic form. I’ve also always been nonplussed about the neo-Babylonian moniker too – not the most auspicious of re-creations, with its connotations of confusion and hubris. Nonetheless, it removes the layer of architect-presidio and gives instead a collective multilayered labyrinth, split into two levels – the mechanics of modern life below and the life of the liberated individual, free to move in space unhindered by traffic, above.

Images from Lebbeus Woods’ post

anderston : M8

Anderston is overrun by roads, inaccessible pedestrian walkways, a railway station buried under a bridge – and lost communities. Swept away by the motorway in the late 60s (masterplanned from the notorious Bruce Plan, a counterattack to the moguls in St Andrews House, Edinburgh, who attempted to stop Glasgow regaining economic power at the expense of Edinburgh after WWII), Anderston is a wasteland, a remnant… yet slowly being approached by the resurgent financial district. A new commonwealth games mural under the Kingston Bridge also suggests a softening of Anderston’s grim netherworld.

The entire area should be a case study in how planners, developers and councillors, in the absence of strong architectural guidance and sensitivity to context, will destroy citylife. Boston’s urban renewal experience is similar in many respects.

This is where Billy Connolly was from. All you need to know about the character of destroyed Anderston is shown in his attitude to life.

before dubai and all that :: harvest of journeys

This is one of those insightful books that creates a freeze-dried moment in time; one that is then quickly melted away forever by events coming up fast behind. Bought casually for 20p in a charity shop, Harvest of Journeys, amongst other difficult places, takes a look into the gulf area before the oil was discovered. Hammond Innes was I thought a pulp hack but he was an experienced adventurer keen to use his military contacts to get to places normally inaccessible – 50s Aden was one of them. His description of the mud city of the Hadhramaut (backyard of the bin Laden family) shows it was not all sand, Bedouins, T. E. Lawrence and camels prior to the black jackpot.

Funny how culture can slip away so quickly… certainties upended… the dignity of desert arab in their cultural homeland, unchanged for centuries, and the experience and skilled rapport of a well-travelled, informed foreigner, accepted as equal; both now long forgotten.

Check out Freya Stark for more on mid-20c middle east realities.

fake realities out of other peoples’ misery

Glasgow’s Springburn, once the proud birthplace for steam locomotives sent to every corner of empire, is now notorious for “acting” as sink estate for the disposessed, Crusoe’d with a buckfastering of de-humanised ex-working classes; and more recently as rubik cubes for those expecting, and being sorely disappointed of, a better life in dear old North Blighty.

Not far from a massive Tesco (built on top of the St Rollox train factory, and probably the most multicultural shopping space in Glasgow), lie the Red road flats. Occupied in 1969, along with other “slab and point” high rise blocks (its westerly neighbours at Sighthill, across the road from Tesco, were blown up in November 2009), it became recently another icon of the scottish film industry’s middle-class infatuation with its long line of cliched tartan schemies, thistle’d druggies, hoots-mon jakies and sociopaths wearing see-you-jimmy bunnets.

As they used to say in Kelvinside, in their stanley baxter accents – ohhhh… the DEPREDATION…. hev anither wee g an t tae calm yer nerves, Maisie… noo whaur’s yon re-mastered re-issue af Trainspotting, wi’ extra slamdugging…

It would be fair to say now at this point I intensly dislike the studied-from-a-safe-distance, preferably Hyndland or Dartford, morally bankrupt sub-Loach kitchen-sinkery of films like Ratcatcher, Small Faces and recent cctv downer Red Road. Even the knuckle-dragging, Howson-shaped thuggery of tartan noir, er, “literature”, seeks a higher place than these imposed sub-hoi-polloi stereotypes of scottish people. Like bad architecture, slumxploitation films can have a lasting and damaging influence on the psyche of the decent people who are left behind to shrug off the slurs and labels that are still attached long after the directors’ star has faded. Meanwhile the egos-the-size-of-hampden (I am loving my hyphens) filmbrats from the right side of town slum it and think they’re doing serious and important homage to robert louis stevenson.

Anyway, the scottish photographer George Logan is a perfect example of good intentions made muddy by the ability to fake reality out of other people’s misery. On the surface, the quasi-allegorical nature of the images and the cartier-bresson quality moments give a feeling of delight and hope – I was completely taken in. It’s when you look more closely at where Logan is coming from (london-based, high-end advertising photography) and then, crushingly, his quite open (to his credit) admission that the figures are actors (on possibly a bluescreen set) with the tableau then comped on top of the Red road backgrounds, that things go slightly awry. That said he seems a really decent guy who is surely not naive about the social context and local compromises he’s chosen to work with here, unlike some.

Image copyright George Logan