St Cuthbert's Village

Apologies, for the version of this article I posted earlier, for some unknown reason an previous draft was published ,and not the finished article.  Mea culpa.

     I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead.  (I really can't show you the scene in question, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.)  It serves as a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis.  It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.

     St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council, and was opened by the Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970.  It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council that the Prime minister should give his support in such a way.
    What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War.  It had neither church nor green, nor school.  Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents.  There was no traditional urbanism.  It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it.  A sort of ghetto.

     The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry.  He talked of a 'village community', but all that actually meant in practice is that, like a good many architects and planners of the period, he wanted the strict segregation of pedestrians and motor vehicles.  The site was a steep slope on the south bank of the Tyne, opposite Newcastle city centre, between between Bensham Rd and Askew Rd..  The estate overlooked a rail marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that carried the East Coast Mainline into the midst of the city.  Historically, the area had been known as Windmill Hills, and before slum clearance in the mid 60s, the site had contained a dense network of terraced housing.

     The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd.  The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short).  The estate consisted of a single tower, or point, block and a dense checker board of four storey maisonettes, everything connected by a series of aerial walkways.  Construction began in 1967, and the cost all in, was, I believe, £3,700,000.

     There were problems almost immediately - flats were damp and roofs leaked.  The project limped on for some 25 years before it was demolished.  Its fate matched that of another council estate of the period, the nearby Clasper Village.

     I now want to skip over the Pennines to Manchester and this BBC documentary, from 1974, about the redevelopment of the city on the 1960s.  The documentary presents the council as struggling to keep up with the effects of its redevelopment policy, including apportioning blame to its own tenants.  We underestimate the complete dislocation that working class people suffered as a result of these schemes.   By the end of the 60s the Post-War vision of the New Jerusalem began to crumble and few years later it seemed that Modernism was itself defeated.  For some on the left, including perhaps the director of Get Carter, Mike Hodges, it caused a cognitive dissonance.  The failure of such estates as St Cuthebert's Village, really wasn't the result of corruption, but an intellectual failure.  I think, that in some respects, it caused the breaking of the social contract.

The New House Book II

      A second tranche of images from Terence Conran's 'New House Book' of 1985.

    The first image is a page of photographs taken in Leon Krier's Belsize park flat.  In the mid-eighties I began to know the place quite well.  There was, I think, a grand piano in the room, though I may be mistaken.  The library was at the front looking out on to the street.  The rustication in the hall contained all sorts of storage, with a tiny bathroom at the far end on the right. Anyway, outside of the world of the country house, I think it must be one of the stylish rooms I have yet experienced.  I wonder if it still exists.

The New House Book I

     A day of sunshine and half-hearted showers; a blustery day with the trees just beyond the garden sounding like the sea.  A welcome return to normal weather.

     A return also to the world of Terence Conran, and his second big book of interior design: 'The New House book' of 1985.  My edition of the book is published by Book Club Associates; the original by Conran Octopus.  'English Style', by Stafford Cliff and Suzanne Slesin, was published the previous year and the difference could not be more marked.  Like the original House Book, this is a collaborative effort.  The usual names appear: Stephen Bayley, Gillian Darley, Susan Collier (of Collier Campbell), and the aforementioned Suzanne Slesin, and Stafford Cliff.  Cliff was the Project Consultant, and Hilary Arnold the Project Editor.

     So the mid-eighties, and many of us will have an idea of what that entails, a notion gleaned from journalism and the internet.  The same applies to the proceeding decade, as though 1970s decor comprised solely of garish wallpaper.  I cannot stress enough that since the end of the 18th century we have been in period of eclecticism.  So what do we find here?            Firstly, much that I wrote about the first 'House Book' (Mitchell Beazley, 1974) could equally apply here.  Those six categories of interior which were there as a guide for the perplexed remain, but their presence is by implication.  Secondly, let me say that not all the interiors on display are contemporaneous, some are the creation of the previous decades, centuries.  Realising also, that these images are a selection, an editorialising, so not entirely objective, it is still possible to make some general comments on what, it has to be said, is a very middle class selection.*  On the whole it is 'all done in the best possible taste'.  The outlandishness that was the hallmark of a certain strand of 60s/70s taste is largely absent.   An elegant sobriety rules.  After all, the interview with Conran which fronts the book is entitled 'A Taste for Simplicity'.  Colours are on the whole subdued.  There is a tendency to isolate items, endowing them some sort of signification, which may be the result of the increasing interest in the 'designer' object.  Many of the rooms are very serious, if not intellectual; austere to the point of loosing a sense of domesticity.  They are rooms of parade, not comfort.  As I have written before these sort of rooms begin to take on the quality of public space.  All that said there is much to admire.  The design of the book is excellent (with the exception of the Dust Jacket).  Perhaps those rooms which hint at the Mediterranean are the best.  You may recall that 'Mediterranean' is one of those six categories of the original House Book, and is one that in this book Conran sought to emphasize, it being the only one mentioned in the introductory interview.

     Unlike Habitat, this Conran publication happily takes Post-Modernism in its stride.  One of the reasons, I think, that things went a bit awry at Habitat in the 80s was the inability to come to terms with the change in taste in the late 70s.  Perhaps a bit strange that, as I believe, and I'm sure I've said this before, it is possible to make a case for Habitat being in a state of eclecticism if not Post Modernism since its inception.  It was always a bit of a dressing up box.  This book is no different.

* A book like this is a complex enough thing; at one level it functions as a survey of contemporary taste, but it is also in a quiet, polite sort of way, a polemic, and a manifesto.  And that's before we get to the book as 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua'.

A Red, Red Rose

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns (1759-1796)

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair are thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!

Caught on a Train

     I had intended to take a break from this blogging lark for a few days, but yesterday, purely by chance, I watched 'Caught on a Train' a BBC television play from 1980, part of the BBC2 Playhouse strand of one-off dramas that ran for 8 seasons between 1974 and 1983.  It was deeply impressive, so much that I've felt the need to commit my thoughts to 'paper'.

     'Caught on a Train' was written by Stephen Poliakoff, produced by Kenith Trodd, and directed by Peter Duffnell.  It was first aired 31st October 1980, and has been repeated a few times on the BBC, and is now available on BBC iplayer (if you live outside the UK you may have difficulties in accessing this remarkable play).  Score, I should add, by Mike Westbrook.
          The play, filmed entirely on location (much of it on the Nene Valley Railway nr Peterborough), is set in a Europe in the mist of The Cold War, haunted also by the fear of terrorism.  The 'Red Army Faction', aka 'The Baader-Meinhof Gang', were then active in the German Federal Republic.  In Italy, these were the 'Anni di Piombo' - 'The Years of Lead' - a perfect storm of extreme left and right violence.  Poliakov depicts the continent in decline; the train is filthy; there are football hooligans; the station in Frankfurt, and then the train, are crowded with young people silent, sullen and resentful; the authorities are jittery.  Into this continent of distrust and fear arrives the young Englishman, Peter (Michael Kitchen).  He is travelling by train from Ostend (in Belgium) to Linz (Austria) - he works in the publicity department of a London publishers and is on the way to a trade fair.  Peter is ambitious and 'full of himself'.  Not an entirely sympathetic character.

     At Ostend, when Peter and the other passengers, especially Lorrine (Wendy Raebeck) with whom Peter fancies his chances, have settled into their seats, an elderly Viennese lady, Frau Messner (Peggy Ashcroft) - stylish, neat, self-contained, quite dreadful - steps into the compartment, and proceeds to demand that Peter give up his seat even though it is not the seat she has booked, claiming; 'I don't think you understand. I have to sit by the window."  An uneasy relationship then develops between them that is the emotional centre of this film. Both actors sparkle, but I think the palm goes to Ashcroft.  One feels that her character always has the upper hand, that she has greater reserves of intellect and guile to draw upon. The narrative, keeping pace with the train, lurches towards disaster when Peter is escorted from the train by the Austrian police.

     At the end of the film Frau Messner sits alone in the restaurant car surrounded by detritus of the journey.  The wreck, one is tempted to say, of European culture at the end of 20th century.

The Whitsun Weddings

      Today is the Eve of Whitsun - Whitsunday - Pentecost.  The day churches celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Disciples who were gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Shavuot.  It is a moveable feast i.e. its date each year is governed by the date of Easter

     It is also the day of Philip Larkin's poem 'The Whitsun Weddings'.  Published in 1964 by Faber in the collection of the same name. The first poem in the collection, 'Here', describes, in part, a journey to Hull, 'The Whitsun Weddings' a departure; describing as it does a train journey undertook one hot Saturday afternoon from the Paragon Station in Hull to London Kings Cross.  The opening stanza suggests the journey, at that particular time and date, has been made before. One gets the sense of the mundane quality of an oft repeated journey.

     Then, in the third stanza, things begin to change.  At first the narrator pays little attention to the noise on the platforms when train stops; 'and down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took were porters larking with the mails, and went on reading.'  But when the train departs one of the unnamed stations he looks up and notices:

'grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it.'

     His interest piqued, he makes the point at the next station and subsequently of looking out at the platform and the waiting passengers, and wedding parties gathered to see off the newly married on their honeymoons.  Larkin it has to be said is a little pejorative in tone, just as he is in 'Here', however as the train moves toward the capital the subject changes from the particular to the universal.

     One of the reasons I like this poem so much, and it is quite a personal reason, is that the poem talks about things I know; Lincolnshire, the eastern side of England, the East Coast mainline.  My line, which I have travelled more times than can remember or count.  It could be my relations on those platforms. My parents took that line on their honeymoon, spending the first few days in London before taking another train down to Cornwall.

     Here is Philip Larkin reciting his remarkable poem.  Of the two recordings I found on YouTube, the best.

Queen Elizabeth Memorial, part 3: A Small Proposal

     This is a response (a little tongue-in-cheek, perhaps) to the proposed national Queen Elizabeth II Memorial.  My proposal is relatively simple, being merely an equestrian sculpture on a suitable plinth.  The image depicts one of the long sides of the monument.

     My design has a number of sources.  Firstly the plinth which I envisage to be constructed of either Ketton or Bath stone.  I dislike the chill of Portland Stone.  The design is based on that created by Alessandro Leopardi to bear the equestrian statue, designed by Andreo Verrochio, erected in the Campo San Giovanni e Paolo by the Venetian Republic to honour the condotierre Bartolomeo Colleone. I increased the number of columns on each long side by one, using the Corinthian order as set out by Sebastiano Serlio in his book 'Tutte l'opere d'architettura et prospetiva'.  The Corinthian order is suitable for such a monument because it has been traditionally connected to funeral monuments.  Vitruvius, in his 'De Architectura', tells us that the order was invented by the Greek sculptor Callimachus after seeing acanthus leaves growing round a votive basket of toys, with a slab on top, on a child's grave.  The French architect and theorist Jacques-Francois Blondel, believed that architecture had it roots in the honouring of the dead.

     A small number adaptations have been to Serlio's interpretation of the order: I have shortened the height of the column by 1/2 module, and have simplified the base by using that from the Maison Caree at Nice; an Antique Temple dating from 1st century AD and used as a Caesareum i.e. to house the Imperial cult.  Each column is quarter attached to the core of the plinth.  The core of the plinth is rusticated in the manner of the Maison Caree.

     The entablature has a deepened frieze to take a lapidary inscription and the elements of the cornice have been simplified, omitting some altogether and enlarging and simplifying others.

     My drawing of the equestrian statue is based not only upon prototypes from the Western tradition; Antique, Medieval or Renaissance, but upon the Sassanian rock sculptures at Naqsh-e Rostam, and the Murghal miniature tradition.