A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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Thames. When it gets dark here, this is a compellingly alien space, the bright lights inside the Power Station speaking of the heat and electricity generated therein. Next to the pub is the local headquarters of the Port of London Authority, housed in an undemonstrative box, a long way from the baroque palace it built for itself near the Tower of London a century ago.
On that same high street there’s a Town Hall that is really worthy of the Industrial South, a sandstone Doric Temple which for all its architectural rectitude and austerity really ambushes you, tells you that this was once a place which thought very highly of itself indeed; a fragment of the Enlightenment cast down to North Kent. Better still, you can walk through it to the seedily seasideish Borough Market, and then through that to Saint Andrew’s Court, a decent, strong, well-made 1962 council estate. Walk back into the town centre, and you find shopping malls much as you do everywhere else. They’re a little strange, slightly crepuscular, at the point between concrete Brutalism and brick vernacular described by Douglas Murphy as ‘Brutalomo’; an attempt to create the dense and enclosed spaces of a real street to replace, well, a real street. The mall’s multiple layers are enjoyable, although it’s all strangely underlit, as if to make it feel deliberately gloomy, even sinister. Out from there, there’s a fine eighteenth-century church, a statue of improbable one-time Gravesend resident Pocahontas, and a view of some developer excrescence. There’s a very active local Civic Society group in Gravesend, and they are justifiably proud of the fact that they recently blocked a tall tower of luxury flats, through a forthright campaign of sit-ins and civil disobedience, a little Kentish Occupy. It’s a precious and rare victory against developers in the Gateway’s free-for-all; but the guff you can see clinging to the riverbanks in Gravesend is not tall, not modern, and is immaculately in keeping; though it tears up the Thames Path, it dresses up its violence with pediments and neo-baroque details. It’s a bit harder to campaign against something that sweet-talks an area like this.
The reason why Gravesend’s urban grain felt so refreshing was because my point of comparison here is always Dartford, a desperately sad town. You can get a hint of that when you leave the train at the station. Look up at the Town Hall, a ’60s complex of no distinction, and you can always see two protruding things – a Union Jack and a CCTV camera, like a slightly laboured Banksy mural brought to life: community, nationality, security. It’s hard to tell which building-boom decade did more violence to Dartford. You can tick off the suspects. The ’60s, with its roadbuilding and loveless offices? Maybe. The ’80s, with its car-centred shopping malls, and more pointedly, the construction of the M25, which chopped the town in half? Quite possibly. The 2000s, with its faceless brick and aluminium blocks of flats cleaving to the edges of dual carriageways? Perhaps, but they’re all missing the point, really – it’s hard to find much of a heart in Dartford at all. There’s a decent enough high street, ending at a pretty medieval church, but not much else. The poky Victorian terraces in the centre make clear why – this too is an industrial town, but one too close to London to be able to carve out an identity of its own. You now get little comic juxtapositions here, from the attempt to Make It Nice. The pediments of an ’80s improvement scheme act as a gateway to a derelict co-op and a couple of greasy spoons. A big metal drum houses a few chains, and the railway gets you back into London either to work, or if you were born here, to live when you grow up. All that said, Dartford is of some importance for the very large shopping centre on its periphery.
Appeasing the Gods of Craft
I often find myself visiting Bluewater, mainly because it’s the closest ‘amenity’ to the hospital. The first time I went there, I was a little underwhelmed – having spent much of my childhood and youth in malls (like 90 per cent or so of those born since the 1970s), it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed. The only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit. Over time I ended up exploring it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.
I hadn’t initially realized, given the hospital’s hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater at least twice a month. I was within walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes you realize how much modernist housing projects, with their obliteration of gates and enclosures, were driven by a now-extreme libertarianism. As the crow flies, or in a post-apocalyptic, car-free scenario, I could walk in about five minutes from Outpatients to the back-end of Bluewater, counting in some tricksy negotiation of the chalk cliffs. Pedestrians are necessarily bus-riders, as the fact that access is motorway-only means there is literally no way of just turning up and walking into Bluewater, something which I’m sure Americans are rather used to, but for us is still relatively shocking. Eric Kuhne, the American architect whose firm CivicArts designed Bluewater, opined in a fascinating 2008 interview that Bluewater is ‘a city’ rather than a retail destination.7 In terms of its size and population this is true, so we need to evaluate exactly what sort of a city this is – a city with one ceremonial entrance, which can only be entered in a vehicle, where nothing is produced but where many things are consumed. The only sort of regime that could set up such a controlled, channelled city is a dictatorship or an oligarchy. Neatly enough, Kuhne explicitly praises ‘benevolent despotism’ and critiques the very notion of democratic city planning, with admirable frankness. Yet it’s also clear that Bluewater is one of the many possible termini of the nineteenth-century Arcades that drilled through the solidity of the baroque city, their iron and glass construction the ‘unconscious’ of architecture, an oneiric, ethereal harbinger of the future amidst the ostentatiously solid architecture of imperialism – the place where the ‘dreaming collective’ spends its time. As the bus winds through a series of roundabouts on its way from the hospital to the mall that is yards away, you see the elevations that are the (basically irrelevant) ‘face’ of the building: a series of spiked glass domes over a long, bulbous metal roof, which shimmers in the exurban autumn sunshine.
Inside, the first impression is of everything happening at once. The city of Bluewater soon reveals itself to be docile, unsurprisingly considering the draconian code of conduct, and there’s only the slightest hint of menace – but the entrance is chaos. First you go past the standard-issue Blair-era retail architecture of a Marks and Spencer, and then you hit something odd – four glass prisms, seemingly at random, part of the glazed part of the building that ushers you in. This might just be ineptitude, but presumably the designers know what they’re doing here, given the (as we shall see) heavily didactic elements of the interior; just exactly what is unclear. They’re ‘toys’, then, as Charles Jencks used to write about postmodernist architecture’s little devices, they’re purist solids, they’re the building’s ‘logo’ – but if so, it’s a remarkably asymmetrical and unmemorable one. Then you come up to a series of tall pillars, and two overhead walkways crossing each other, a suspended ceiling imprinted with a repetitious leaf motif, with the glare of the glazed entrance intensifying the effect – the shopping mall sublime, exacerbated by the thousands of people browsing, watching, buying, eating, or expelling their waste (for this is a city where those are the only permitted acts), and it’s thrilling in its way, although the pale stone-like substance with which almost everything is clad softens the effect, stops it from ever becoming jarring and strange. Walking around inside, you find a large quantity of public art, and a surprisingly large amount of seating. Is this, then, a version of the ‘Urban Renaissance’, with its mixed use and its encouragement of sociality? Kuhne talks of ‘special meeting places’ that ‘dignify the heroic routine of everyday life that drives you to produce a better world for yourself and your kids’. It could be Richard Rogers, this stuff, except that unlike the Plazas of the Urban Task Forces, people are actually using it, and in droves – apart from one closed noodle bar, you have to look damn hard here to find even the slightest hint that we’re in the middle of the longest recession in British economic history. Unnervingly, it supports the idea of the financial crisis as a kind of Phoney War, which will intensify only later, but will be truly horrendous when it does.