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.