Cities

Some years ago I was working in Milan, designing an HR dashboard for a bank.  It was late summer and over breakfast my Italian client complained about how cold it was.  That day, I had to fly to Stockholm for a meeting.  Exchanging pleasantries at dinner in the evening, my Swedish colleague remarked how warm the day had been.  I obsessively check the weather when I’m travelling and had noted that the temperature in both cities was 15C.

How we apprehend the world is determined by our prejudices and expectations.  In Invisible Cities, a series of imaginary conversations between Kublai Khan and his emissary Marco Polo, Italo Calvino shows how approaching the same city from different angles produces different perceptions.  The camel herder arriving through a desert sees Despina, a city located by the sea, as a gateway to the freedom of the ocean; the sailor reaching the safety of Despina’s harbour perceives the conurbation as a source of the bounty of the earth gathered from distant lands.

A city's own dwellers have varying experiences of the city they inhabit.  A busy street can be a vexatious traffic jam to the motorist, a hazardous muddle to the cyclist and a noxious cloud of pollution to the walker.  A dilapidated street market is simultaneously a nutritional lifeline to the impoverished, a cultural icon to the historian and, to the investor, a development opportunity.

The perception of dramatic events is also influenced by the preconceptions and perspectives of its onlookers.  This variability was used to such dramatic effect in Kurosawa's 1970 film Rashomon that the title has become a byword for unreliable witness.  Internet consumers rely on others' views as curated by social media.  Yet books lauded on Amazon and restaurants pilloried on TripAdvisor are filtered through reviewers' own perceptions and benchmarked according to their standards; they do not represent absolute truths and may not even accord with the preferences of those seeking guidance.

Urban flaneurs observe different features depending on their interests.  One is absorbed in shop windows, another is fascinated by church architecture.  The aspect presented directly by the city to each person is not their only input; each is also impacted by the refraction of others’ experience, generating a meta level of information.  The wealthy landlord is assailed by the pleas of the homeless he has displaced, crouching on street corners.  So each person’s kaleidoscope of experiences combine to form a unique experiential city autograph.  In the face of such subjectivity, how can a city be truly captured or definitively described? Kant distinguishes between the appearance of things, which comprise our experience: the phenomena; and the things themselves, which comprise reality: the noumena.  Measurements are objective and form indisputable reality: a city is so many kilometres wide and so many metres above sea level: the noumena.  Yet that same city would be experienced as paltry to a visitor from a Chinese megapolis but gigantic to a villager: the phenomena.

The most frequent reaction from participants during walks I lead in suburban London is: 'I've lived in this area for decades, but never knew this was just around the corner!'  Architects and urban planners might despair if they realised how little their efforts are appreciated - or maybe they are grateful to be able to inflict their enormities blithely on a largely indifferent populace.  But citizens’ lack of appreciation might have consequences.  In his fantastical novel The Phantom Tollbooth, a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress for children, Norton Juster describes a city named Reality, whose inhabitants became so distracted by their obsession of getting from one place to another as quickly as possible that they no longer took any notice of their surroundings:

“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear.  Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible.  There was nothing to see at all.”

Phyllis, one of the cities described in Invisible Cities, suffers a similar fate:

"But it so happens that, instead, you must stay in Phyllis and spend the rest of your days there. Soon the city fades before your eyes, the rose windows are expunged, the statues on the corbels, the domes."

Walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities, Roger Deakin remarks in Waterlog.  These slow methods, largely unburdened by technology and regulation, remain the most effective ways to be anchored to the environment, enabling us to be watchful and observant, and chime with Cyril Connolly’s advice that no city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning. 

Double planetoid, Escher, 1949.

Two regular tetrahedrons, piercing each other, float through space as a planetoid. The light coloured one is inhabited by humanoid creatures who have completely transformed their region into a complex of houses, bridges and roads.  The darker tetrahedron has remained in its natural state with rocks, vegetation and weird beasts.  The two bodies fit together to make a whole but they have no knowledge of each other.

© David Thompson 2016

Urban Water

In the first month of the new millennium, post-festive season lassitude hung in the air.  It was late afternoon and drizzling.  The estate agent looked up from a pile of papers.

‘There is one more you might be interested in,’ he said uncertainly. ‘It’s been empty for a while though.’

‘Great,’ I replied, ’that means I can view any time, right?’

‘Ye-es,’ he replied cautiously, glancing at his watch.

‘Like now,’ I suggested, brightly.

Weaving through unknown backstreets and catching glimpses of deserted docks I was soon disoriented.  We stopped at an unprepossessing block of flats, the estate agent entered the code and we took a battered lift to the top floor.  There were gashes on the front door.

‘Probably an attempted break in, the last tenants were drug dealers.’  

The flat was small and musty.  The bathroom looked like a 1970s stage set, everything was avocado.  An abandoned mug languished in the kitchen sink.  I was beginning to wish I’d taken the hint and declined to view the property.  Then we entered the lounge.  Projected on to the wide picture window was a panoramic view of the river, a glossy blackness stippled by raindrops and reflecting the lights of the Millennium Dome.   In the distance, the Thames Barrier proclaimed the estuary.

‘I’ll take it.’

The estate agent blinked.

‘Subject to agreeing the price,’ I added.

I have learned the rhythm of the Thames.  Tugs ply the river daily, hauling London’s waste in canary coloured containers.  On Saturdays kayaks from the local rowing club gather, urgent blue shards slicing the water.  Each month, a vast sand dredger with a Meccano superstructure discharges its cargo noisily.  Occasionally cruise ships visit, their cabins at eye level with my window, their passengers impatient for the London landmarks they have been promised and bewildered by this hinterland of decaying industry mingled with cookie-cutter apartment buildings.  Ark Royal sang her swan song here, a bevy of tugs in attendance.  Once, a pair of amphibious cars passed, looking frail and lost in the immensity of the river.

On still days, the river is a perfect mirror and the thickets of red cranes reshaping London’s skyline seem to stab the river bed.  When it’s blustery, the surface corrugates as though protecting the river’s inhabitants from the tumult above.  At twilight, when colour drains from the landscape and the tips of the Dome’s yellow towers are crowned with red lights, I sip a glass of wine and gaze contentedly from my eyrie. 

The Thames is clean now: there are plenty of fish and occasional seals, their dog-like heads surfacing for tantalising seconds.  Children play on the sandy foreshore.  In defiance of the byelaws, on summer evenings I swim.  It is placid and unexpectedly warm in the shallows.  Unconcerned by my presence, gulls alight nearby, huge in their proximity.  Semi-submerged, perspectives are altered.  It is the river that persists - forever in motion, yet forever the same - while the buildings alongside are revealed as impermanent and at the sufferance of the capricious water.  I drift on my back, looking up at the window from where I so often survey the river; a satisfying symmetry.  This immersion is a kind of covenant: now I am one with the river.

© David Thompson 2015

Margate

Two weeks before the winter solstice is not a conventional time for a trip to the seaside, but a TV programme about David Chippendale’s architecture inspired me to visit Margate to see the Turner Contemporary museum.

I was early for my train from Lewisham and watched the construction activity on a new apartment building.  The concrete skeleton was finished and the block was in various stages of completion.  At the bottom, the exterior cladding was attached and windows were in place.  Higher up, the flesh was visible: insulation panels, the manufacturer’s name printed in capitals, would be concealed until the block is demolished and the faded insignia becomes an echo of some long forgotten enterprise.  Wide platforms bearing building materials crept up tracks attached to the naked building, making a chirruping sound as they ascended.  Post-war Lewisham is being comprehensively redeveloped.  The street market persists but everything else has been swept aside.   When I was 13, I saw a poster on Blackheath station advertising My Fair Lady and announced to my parents that I wanted to see it.  It was the first and last time we went to the cinema as a family.  The venue, the Rex cinema, vanished in 1988.

The view from the train between Margate and Broadstairs, which paralleled St Peter’s footpath which I’d intended to walk, was flat featureless farmland.  I decided instead to try the coast path.  Further, but likely to be more interesting: at least there would be the sea to enjoy.

Living in the metropolis, everywhere else seems redolent of the 1950s.  Broadstairs was no exception.  Teashops with names like The Cat’s Whiskers harbouring elderly gentry clustered around small tables; second hand shops, masquerading as antique dealers, whose stock in trade is the meagre assets of the unmourned deceased.  I lost count of the fish and chip shops eagerly patronised by school children on their lunch break.

Broadstairs’ claim to a Dickens connection is tenuous: the person on whom the character of Betsy Trotwood is based lived in a house overlooking the harbour.  It is now a museum but was closed when I visited.  While I was wondering how annoyed I should be, I was accosted by an old man tottering with a walking stick.

‘Very mild weather,’ he opined, ‘flowers think it’s spring.’  I nodded.  His teeth could have passed for an art installation, a multitude of colours at every possible angle.

‘Having a walk round, are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m going to Margate,’ I declared.

‘On the Esplanade? You’ll be passing Botany Bay Hotel then.’

‘Oh, well I might pop in for coffee.’

‘You’d better throw your wallet through the door,’ he advised, gnomically.  ‘All that rubbish up there, they keep having collisions, you know,’ he added.  That sounded like a warning to be heeded; high prices I could cope with, but violence was best avoided.  I must have looked nervous.  He waved his stick at the sky. 

‘It’ll damage the satellites.’

I realised the conversation had changed course abruptly and he was referring to space debris.   Time to move on.

Any rural path worth protecting needs a catchy name and on the cliffs north of Broadstairs I found myself on the Viking Coastal Trail.  It dodges in and out of housing, with rambling mansions occupying the best spots.  Without visible signs of life, I could only speculate who occupied them and why they chose to live there.  From the commercial activity I had seen in the town, fish and chip shop proprietors seemed the most likely candidates.  A dusty sky-blue Rolls-Royce crouched in front of one sprawling edifice.  Nearby a skip overflowed.  The building was dilapidated and it was impossible to tell whether it was being demolished or refurbished.

Further along architecture lost its coherence.  Nineteenth century confections, tricked out with frivolous turrets and set in generous grounds, were interspersed with mock-Tudor family homes, Modernist houses with flat roofs and wide windows as though they had been squeezed by large weights, and architect designed new-builds with flamboyant picture windows and plentiful aluminium and wood.  Model sailing boats were framed in upstairs windows; from indoors, imagination would have them tossing on the waves.  Some were converted to doleful guesthouses, all with vacancies advertised.   Older properties had first floor verandas with wooden balustrades and scalloped canopies, making the most of the sea views.  A few were painted in pastel shades in a valiant attempt to regenerate the seaside spirit.  Clinging to the edge was a castle with full castellation, converted to private apartments.  But North Foreland lighthouse, usurped of a prime spot on the cliff, presided over a field of cabbages.

This is island country, the very jut of England, and I felt at home: the Isle of Thanet leverages the same topographical conceit as the Isle of Dogs.  At the tip sits a waste-water pumping station, playing a small part in the earth’s rotation by discharging effluent at the easternmost edge of the land mass.  I encountered several dog-walkers, but none of them greeted me.  Despite its isolation, metropolitan etiquette prevails.  More forgotten than neglected, the general atmosphere was reminiscent of Thoreau’s quiet desperation.

On the approach to Margate, I left the coast road and made my way down to the broad sea wall.  As I descended, tall cliffs muffled the ambient sounds of town and traffic.  On reaching the concrete plinth, protecting the crumbly chalk buttresses, the buffeting wind died.  There was an eerie stillness.  Wavelets tickled the seaweed-encrusted beach, intensifying the silence.  I sat on the edge of the wall inhaling the sweet, rank scent of seaweed and conjured memories of walks with my mother by the sea in Norfolk.  She loved she tumult of blustery east winds and bemoaned the sedate weather of the south coast where she retired.  A thicket of offshore wind turbines drifted in and out of focus as the mist swirled.  Brightly coloured tankers were painted on to the grey sea, awaiting their turn to enter the port.  I lingered long, finding it hard to tear myself away from this unexpected tranquillity.

Margate wears the defeated look characteristic of English coastal resorts.  Nevertheless it is extraordinary that a town boasting such a spectacular location should be so terminally depressed.  Grand four storey Victorian terraces with sea views have been converted to shabby multiple occupancy flats from which fetid smells emerged.  Even the crazy golf course, usually the last bastion of declining seaside towns, was overgrown, its concrete channels and indistinct tumescences shrouded in blowing weeds.

A couple of tourists, warmly wrapped against the blustery weather, asked me to take their picture.  They’d come down from London for an overnight break.  I asked them what they’d found to do.

‘Not much, it’s just a seaside town, isn’t it,’ they replied, ungrudgingly.

Turner Contemporary, my destination, is strikingly plain.  Aptly, the locals dismiss it as ‘the shed’.  Opaque sandblasted recycled glass panels line the exterior and there are few windows except in the café, which faces the town.  The seaward side is a high blank wall; it wouldn’t shame a prison.  Inside, the theme continues: plain concrete floors, neutral décor and windows set into the roof.  This austerity forms the perfect setting for the display of art works: unobtrusive, airy and light.  Despite its name, there is no permanent collection of Turner’s work on display, although he features frequently each season.  The exhibition I saw, ‘Risk’, was challenging and well-curated.  An attendant, friendly and informative, clearly had a genuine interest in and knowledge of the exhibits.  She finished by recommending the Old Town, so I left enough time before my train for a quick recce.   It didn’t take long; a few galleries, the obligatory coffee shops and some sad charity outlets.

On the way to the station, a new brick built casino, contrasting painfully with the stuccoed villas, showed the only sign of activity.  Nearby, an illuminated vertical sign dominated the seafront parade: Dreamland.  An ironic epitaph for my visit to east Kent.

© David Thompson 2015