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.