Catching Up

Time to catch up somewhat. Short holiday.

Yesterday at 12.30 I was standing on top of Mount Snowdon. We had to take the (very expensive) train as it would have been a difficult walk with my three-year-old son.

Also paid a visit to Porthmeirion - costs £9.00 if you go before 15.30 - we went later when it's half price. I'd never been before. The money has probably gone towards sprucing it up - my wife said it was looking shabby when she was last there 20 years ago. Memories of The Prisoner were unavoidable - I'd like to see the early episodes again, but I think it became unwatchable towards the end.

The National Slate Museum at Llanberis is more interesting than it may sound.

A short stay in Manchester to see the Ford Madox Brown exhibition and the murals in the incredible Town Hall, designed by Waterhouse.

In Liverpool I visited some old haunts, the magnificent Philharmonic and atmospheric Ye Cracke pubs and for the first time went to the Ship and Mitre, nearest equivalent to a comprehensive Belgian pub I have found in England - massive selection of beers.

The Philosophy Town talk the previous week went well - a thoroughly worthwhile venture I think. I particularly enjoyed 'How to be an Existentialist' by Gary Cox, a talk that briefly explained a philosophy I had been wrestling with in a very difficult book earlier this year.

Alan Moore's Dodgem Logic

Alan Moore always has something intelligent and interesting to say - this interview from The Quietus includes his thoughts on the banalisation of his home town of Northampton.

I've also been thinking recently that there aren't enough pretentious people out there.

Mary Queen of (disappearing) Shops

Mary Portas is the latest weapon in the fight to save the high street - she has a mighty problem to cope with. See here.

Edgelands

I finally got round to reading Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts last week. I had never heard of the authors before now, not being up on the contemporary British poetry scene, but they have done a decent job. The book is divided up into short chapters on different aspects of the edgelands - the landscapes on the edge of conurbations used for dumping, sewage works, power stations, business and retail parks etc; it therefore covers prime Blandland territory.

The authors take more of a celebratory tone than may appear in this blog, hymning for example the beauty of power station cooling towers, which is understandable, but some of their praise seems defiantly perverse. The more whimsical musings I found hard to take - these would never be found in the work of Iain Sinclair, whose work they clearly dislike for its 'flaneurism', although they rarely seem to engage with their chosen areas as lucidly and closely as does the father of English psychogeography (a term he's uncomfortable with I know); I detect a whiff of envy.

Nevertheless there are a number of interesting and stimulating passages on satellites, lofts, pallets and weather. It's also good that they concentrate on the north and midlands rather than the all-too-familiar London and the south east. As with so many modern books I could have done with a bibliography/list of interesting websites - many poets, artists and photographers are name-checked in the text and I've been following up the ones I was unfamiliar with online. Also I really think some photographs or other images might have improved it, given the number of references to those who work in these (increasingly fashionable) territories. I deliberately haven't used that overworked adjective 'liminal' - I don't think the authors do either, to their credit.

Maybe I'm too obsessed with information gathering but I could have done with more hard facts and statistics about such topics as waste disposal, which is the one of the major 'businesses' of the edgelands; but this book is supposed to be more a work of poetry than an academic exercise, a good thing as there are some historical errors. On the whole I think it's a worthwhile collection, but not as original as may be supposed by the casual reader - I wonder though whether it will make much of a long-term impact (I've included in the essential texts section on this site). There's a review which I mostly agree with here (Robert Macfarlane is also one of the authors that they are attempting to subvert), one from the Telegraph here and another by Marion Shoard who came up with the term 'edgelands' with a video of the authors talking about the book here.

England's most deprived town

An article from today's Guardian names the town that comes top in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2010 - surprisingly, perhaps, it is in the south and very near to the capital. Also another piece on the burst property bubble in Spain and its unsightly aftermath.

Sherborne

On our way down to Poundbury we stopped off at Sherborne in Dorset. Most historic towns have an explanatory map notice in a car park, such as the example above, although this one had been amusingly, in my opinion, amended. Incidentally, I didn't think that Sherborne was shit.

More Poundbury Photographs August 2006

“almost like a hedgerow” – the vision that is Poundbury

HRH The Prince of Wales has written that, “If development of new homes has to take place on green fields and sadly, that appears to be inevitable over the coming years – then it should enhance and not detract from its surroundings, both built and natural.” Prince Charles’s views on modern architecture and planning are well known and have been widely publicised; his memorable description of the proposed extension of London’s National Gallery in 1984 as, “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an elegant and much-loved friend” caused the projected scheme to be abandoned. It therefore came as little surprise when, in the 1980s, the Prince decided to use a small portion of the extensive property portfolio owned by the Duchy of Cornwall as a testing ground for some of his personal ideas on the subject. This experimental exercise was intended to be, “a high density development that would help to create a lively, thriving neighbourhood with a distinctive sense of place.” An exemplar of tasteful design, that combined traditional architecture with modern town planning, where people could live and work in close proximity, the project was expected to be a prototype for similar developments.

Building commenced in October 1993 on the 400-acre site of a former Second World War army camp, beside an existing nondescript housing estate at the edge of the historic market town of Dorchester in Dorset. Named Poundbury, the so-called “urban extension” has been designed to the overall plan of Leon Krier, an architect who had decisively rejected modernism to embrace classicism and traditional town planning. Construction work has been split into four planned phases, intended to last twenty-five years, by which time Poundbury will consist of around 2,400 dwellings with a population of roughly 6,000. The majority of private homes will be blended with a smattering of social housing. It is the latest in the handful of similarly idiosyncratic British settlements - principally the result of one man’s architectural and social theories - that includes the working communities of Saltaire near Bradford, Port Sunlight in the Wirral and Bourneville in Birmingham and the eccentric Italianate village of Portmeirion in Wales.

One of the principal builders entrusted with the task of creating this model town is the firm of C. G. Fry & Sons (an ampersand is often used to signify a venerable and classy trader of distinction). Their lavish promotional brochure describes Poundbury as being, “in harmony with our heritage” and as, “a dream come true”. It continues, “One man’s vision [an allusion presumably to Prince Charles’s influential book A Vision for Britain, published in 1989] is rarely sufficient to turn notion into reality. The vital added ingredient is a team of talented professionals and skilled craftsmen with the determination to progress the hopes and dreams of those who believe while others doubt. C. G. Fry & Son is proud to be part of just such a team, dedicated to bringing about the vision that is Poundbury.” So strongly has Poundbury become identified with its illustrious overseer that it has been nicknamed “Charlesville”.

It would be true to say that I experienced a vision, standing on the prominent and formidable ancient earthwork of Maiden Castle (constructed between 450 and 300 BC), looking over Dorchester, in August 2006, as the late summer sun was setting, the uncanny illumination giving Poundbury the aspect of a mirage, an unmistakable - yet strangely artificial-looking - stage set on the horizon. The next day I intended to return and see this remarkable social and architectural experiment for myself.

First of all, I had to find Poundbury - a far from simple task. The town’s name does not appear on any official road sign (apparently because it is an “urban extension” of Dorchester and not a village in its own right, although I shall refer to it as such). I therefore looked in vain for the board proclaiming, “Poundbury welcomes careful drivers”, so ubiquitous as one enters most English towns these days. While Poundbury attracts thousands of curious visitors each year – a coachload of German students were being reluctantly shepherded round during my visit – it seems bizarre that locals have had to become used to strangers pulling up in their cars to ask for directions. It would be pointless for visitors to try to stay in Poundbury, as there is no hotel or bed and breakfast.

Fry & Sons’ heroic hyperbole informs us that, “People who first visit Poundbury tend to be amazed by just how quickly it has come to live and breathe. There is a real identity, vibrant yet gentle, thriving but not frenzied, an indefinable something which makes it a very special place to live, work or visit.” The utopian development is described as, “every bit about community as about architecture”, although during my time there, early on a Saturday afternoon, hardly a soul was to be seen. By 2005, Poundbury had around 650 residents. It is this unnerving lack of citizens on its streets that only enhances the feeling of unreality one experiences walking around the area. Mock-Georgian terraces terminate abruptly at a patch of waste ground, you listen to the lonely sound of your feet scrunching on the ubiquitous gravel paths (deliberately laid to deter the most cat-footed of burglars); there are no children playing or even visible. An ornate and pretentious fountain trickles forlornly in front of the expensive delicatessen - with adjoining bistro - that passes for a village store. Perhaps many of the missing people were at a nearby out-of-town retail park, or in the heart of Dorchester, shopping for the kind of provisions unavailable in their local “community”; only ten per cent of Poundbury’s residents work there.

At present the number of shops, amenities or businesses is small; the few that have appeared signify the whimsical and elitist nature of the whole enterprise: Dorchester Chocolates, Dorset County Council's Toy Library, the Sunny Day children's nursery, The Dolls House, The Stitching House and Whistlejacket Equine Vets. In January 2006 a new depot for West Dorset District Council’s refuse collection, street cleaning and recycling vehicles opened - the streets of Poundbury are unusually clean and tidy. There is one pub (which I failed to find) called The Poet Laureate, named in honour of Ted Hughes, a friend of Prince Charles, although John Betjeman would probably have been more appropriate, given the palpable nostalgia for a cosy, sepia-tinted past that Poundbury embodies. Residents had to wait many years for this basic amenity. In 2001 national newspapers were reporting that none of the major breweries was interested in taking on the Poundbury pub, claiming that it was too big and would cost too much to run. The building stood empty for two years before a manager could be found; it finally opened its doors in November 2002.

Fry & Sons’ brochure claims that the architecture of the town is, “traditional, while of our time” and asserts that, “the reason why Poundbury is such a fresh, welcoming place is due to different styles, textures and tones blending successfully; rather than one specific discipline being imposed. The effect is pleasing, organic, informal. As though that house – or this terrace – actually belong [sic] to their environment, almost like a hedgerow.” For many visitors, however, the effect is of a bizarre pick-and-mix of architectural styles and periods: an Edwardian artisan’s house here, a Cotswold-style stone cottage there, cod Regency terraces, string courses and Tudor chimney pots, sash windows and leaded lights, imitation gas lamps, shiny black railings, stucco and rustication. A terrace of accurately rendered redbrick houses, that would not be out of place in any Victorian industrial town, bears a plaque informing us that they were built within the last five years. Absurd classical porticoes and Adam-style pediments abound. Even the electricity sub-station is housed in a Roman temple of golden stone. Strangely, for somewhere designed to echo aspects of traditional English villages, there is no church.

Residents have complained about their tiny gardens; front gardens, considered a waste of space, have been dispensed with. Priority is given instead to car parking, which is extensive, but hidden away behind the house where the garden would usually be - an aesthetic and anti-crime decision. Public transport provision is consequently inadequate, as it is assumed that most Poundbury folk will be car owners. Local anger was roused when an historic and distinctive avenue of tall ash trees that lined the old Roman road from Dorchester to Poundbury disappeared owing to the actions of over-zealous contractors. Despite developers’ claims that there is “an abundance of trees and grassed areas” one is much more conscious of harsh gravel, heterogeneous stonework and bright brick than of tranquil greenery. Poundbury does have a high density - there are 15-16 people per acre - and the green spaces are on the outskirts of the development rather than in the middle.

The buildings themselves are constructed according to the Poundbury Building Code, which insists on local stone as the preferred material and a respect for the English vernacular style. The code decrees that no lettering on a house's name panel shall be higher than four centimetres and that no front door colour shall be chosen without consulting the palate provided. The builders have ensured that their pastiche dwellings are, “as comfortable, convenient and maintenance-free as the 21st century can make them.” There are solar walls on new-builds, and every house has been awarded 99 out of 100 on Britain's Standard Assessment Procedure - a mark of real energy-efficiency. However, Poundbury’s green credentials are undermined somewhat by the house designs, which are wasteful of increasingly scarce resources. In common with most new homes, a typical four-bedroom house can have as many as three or four bathrooms; this at a time when water shortages are becoming a common problem each summer in the south of England.

Architectural writer Jonathan Glancey has criticised the dull and “gerontocratic”, nature of the town, calling it, “urban design as a comfortable afternoon nap in a favourite armchair and slippers”, and only suitable for, “those who want to live in a real life Quality Street.” Residents consist largely of the wealthy, the white and the retired. Most homes, at almost nine times the average regional salary, are well beyond the means of local people wishing to buy. Efforts have been made to ensure that the development is socially mixed. A fifth of the total is social housing, owned by the Guinness Trust and offered to people on local authority housing lists at a fraction of the market value. These working class families and single mothers live cheek by jowl with those able to afford £450,000 for a second home. The roads linking Poundbury to the neighbouring estates are blocked by bollards, apparently intended to prevent the roads from becoming a rat run, but they have been taken to represent something else - segregation.

This potentially divisive situation is ignored in the optimistic gush of the builders’ brochures. According to one: “As the first homeowners [not ‘residents’ note] began to move into Poundbury, a certain spirit emerged and this has continued to grow, flourish and prosper. In fact there are many Poundbury families that extend to children and grandchildren – setting the foundations for generations to grow up and call Poundbury their home. Perhaps it’s not too fanciful to suggest that the inherent friendliness and ‘lived in’ character of the homes themselves had something to do with this?” Recently, CCTV cameras have been installed, despite the low crime rate in the area, in order to deal with so-called “antisocial behaviour”. Simon Conibear, spokesman for the Duchy, commented: "We support the idea, if that is what the residents want. We are quite lucky, in terms of vandalism and antisocial issues such as littering, as we do not tend to have too much of a problem. But we do get youthful high jinks."

The affluent nature of the majority of the town’s population is evident, but the development has also helped to swell the Prince’s already amply filled coffers. Ten per cent of profits from The Poet Laureate pub, where Charles can very occasionally be seen quaffing a pint, go to the Duchy of Cornwall. The more usual arrangement involves landlords paying rent and receiving drink from a brewer, while keeping all profit from food and other services. Similarly, the land on which the ambitious project stands has efficiently generated huge profits. Initially, each of Poundbury's four hundred acres was sold at £40,000. Experts now say they change hands for at least twelve times that amount. Such astonishing growth has helped Prince Charles - himself worth more than £380m - to post record profits for his seven hundred-year-old Duchy estate. It may soon acquire the new nickname of ‘multi-million Poundbury’.

However, towards the end of 2005 there was growing unease among the local people that the second phase of the development would be cramming too many homes into too small a space. They also felt that the Duchy of Cornwall was ignoring their concerns – noises were made about a return to feudalism. Dorchester hosted a public inquiry, which was being watched closely by developers, who might use the decision to argue that similar high-density schemes should be allowed in other areas of the country. In the meantime Prince Charles has won key planning approval for a second town, built partly on Duchy land. “Surfbury”, as it has been dubbed, will be on the south-east fringes of Newquay in Cornwall, within two miles of Fistral Bay, the centre of British surfing. Some local people have already questioned the scale of the development and whether it is necessary in a county already struggling to cope with its traffic, particularly in summer.

Despite having some high profile enthusiasts such as the musician Jools Holland and the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Poundbury is, at present, a neighbourhood singularly bereft of life and vitality. It more closely resembles the impermanent set for a 1970s television period drama series such as Upstairs Downstairs or the Duchess of Duke Street, its residents quietly going about their Stepford lives. Similarly, if a remake of the 1960s television classic The Prisoner were to be considered in the near future, Poundbury would make a suitable twenty-first century substitute for the claustrophobic artificiality of Portmeirion. This valium village, comprised of perpetual show homes, stands on the periphery of Dorchester, one of Dorset’s most charming and thriving towns, familiar from the novels of Thomas Hardy in its literary guise of Casterbridge. Certain titles from the great writer’s books might also be used to encapsulate the philosophy behind the new settlement that is gradually expanding on the outskirts of this historic location. Prince Charles and his developers would probably prefer the sequestered tranquillity of Far from the Madding Crowd, but others would perhaps plump for the more accurate Desperate Remedies. Hardy understood the local significance and organic growth of the town when he wrote the following passage:

"Thus Casterbridge was in most respects but the pole, focus, or nerve-knot of the surrounding country life; differing from the many manufacturing towns which are as foreign bodies set down, like boulders on a plain, in a green world with which they have nothing in common." [Thomas Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge chapter IX]

NB As this piece was written in 2006 a number of changes to Poundbury may well have taken place - an unsuccessful remake of The Prisoner has in fact since been made, but in the US. Photos are by Antony Clayton 2006.

Margate Blues

(Margate photographs Antony Clayton)

A couple of years ago we paid a visit to Margate on a wet and overcast summer Saturday. Amidst the beautiful Georgian and Regency architecture, it was noticeable that the town was very rundown. An article in yesterday's Guardian confirms this, highlighting the depressing fact that Margate has the highest number of shut-up shops in the country – 37.4%.

On our visit I took some photos of the imaginative way in which the windows of some of these had been transformed into striking painted papier-mâché displays, together with a sadly optimistic list of possible retail uses for the shop – examples above.

The much-vaunted ‘Bilbao effect’ is becoming an increasingly desperate gamble by local authorities to regenerate poor and deprived communities – the Turner gallery is due to open by Margate harbour in April 2011. On our visit a temporary contemporary gallery in an abandoned high street store (possibly a former Woolworths) held some interesting work, but an impressive sculpture constructed purely from ice cream cornets looked rather forlorn after having probably suffered the attentions of a hungry child.

The delightful and unusual shell grotto is worth visiting but the Margate Cave has been closed since 2005 owing to subsidence and looks unlikely to reopen in the near future. Since then it has been an obvious destination for ‘urban explorers’.

Bland Buildings: Barratt homogenisation and boring housing

Above: Sovereign Harbour Eastbourne (Antony Clayton)

Modern house builders such as Barratt, Wimpey and Persimmon build around 160,000 new homes a year. All too often these are of a soulless, standard design, constructed out of glaring red brick, with little effort to incorporate local vernacular styles or materials. Incongruous features, such as classical doorways, are bolted on with no sense of architectural style or detailing. Wimpey Homes anachronistically describe their flats in Gloucester as “Queen Anne apartments”.

Housing estates – often gated communities - are designed totally around the car, with land-devouring layouts of closes that make navigation difficult. In an audit of one hundred new schemes in the south-east Cabe (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) reported that, “often the public realm effectively becomes a technical area for storing and manoeuvring cars, rather than spaces or places in their own right.”

Designer Wayne Hemingway has commented that, “The house builders have the perfect business model. They have managed to keep their output the same, year in, year out, and yet their profits have gone up on a very steep curve. They have been able to produce something incredibly bland and still make massive profits.”

Introducing Blandland

The Situationists had a word for it, banalisation: the gradual drift toward total conformity and the erasure of any unusual, idiosyncratic or uncomfortable elements from everyday life and landscape.

Britain is swiftly metamorphosing into a bland and banal nation.

We turn off the motorway or emerge from a railway station to a predictable and depressingly uniform scene. The familiar litany: Boots, WH Smiths, Next, Accessorize, Top Shop, Millets. A standardised range of cds, dvds and computer games is available from the local branch of Virgin and an unadventurous selection of ‘3 for the price of 2’ bestselling books from Waterstones. Takeaways, nail parlours and mobile phone outlets abound. The historic core of the town, if it survives, has become a ‘heritage centre’, close to a car park eyesore and a tourist information office offering a pre-packaged ‘heritage experience’.

The media bombards us with stories about the ‘death of the high street’, the rapidly escalating profits and seemingly unstoppable growth of supermarket giants such as Tesco, acknowledging the growing standardisation and homogenisation of many aspects of British life.

Craven obeisance before the car has fundamentally altered the landscape and the built environment of Britain. Many streets of towns and cities are cluttered with ever larger and more cumbersome vehicles parked bumper to bumper or crowded into huge sprawling car parks. Pedestrianised high streets become wastelands after dark, stalked by knots of alcopop-swilling disaffected teenagers. Even the latest exponent of Britain’s once thriving and imaginative youth subcultures - the chav - is desperately conformist, flaunting his or her own unconscious commodification with every dodgy designer label and cheesy item of bling.

How have we got to this dismal state of affairs in such a relatively short time? Blandland both catalogues numerous examples and analyses the origins of many manifestations of the dull, boring, bland and homogenous in contemporary Britain, focusing principally on the built environment and rural landscape.