A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      For something which is supposedly The Authentic Expression of Our Real Uncomplicated Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 1950s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It’s trying to make various points to its clientele which very few seem to have registered, whether critics or shoppers. So there are panels with little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges about the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures – well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanized sort, although the M25 is the most obvious land usage. These quotes are there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass – no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, evoking the pointy tops of Kentish malt kilns, showing a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalize all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list of all those people who used to make stuff is practically endless, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial or administrative. It’s a quasi-religious thing, this – an attempt at appeasing the gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer gods of consumption. What makes Bluewater’s didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibreglass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorializing it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater’s sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.

      If Destroyed Still True

      There is another peripheral exurb of Dartford that is worth visiting, partly as a way of getting Bluewater out of your system. New Ash Green was built by Span Developments Ltd, a company who were the other side of post-war mass housing to that of council estates and state-sponsored New Towns. Founded by the architect Geoffrey Townsend (who had to resign from the architectural profession because of his new job) and mostly designed by the talented Eric Lyons (later a president of the RIBA), an occasional architect to Southampton and Hackney councils but mostly a private practitioner, Span was both a profit-making business and an attempt to design spaces which were, at least implicitly, social democratic. They wrote of their approach, ‘community as the goal; shared landscape as the means; modern, controlled design as the expression’. So they were impeccably ‘Butskellite’, as the post-war consensus-describing phrase had it, only with the emphasis on Mr But rather than Mr Skell.

      Span’s most famous work is in very desirable places indeed – Blackheath, Richmond, Hove, Cambridge. I remember once hearing a moderately successful youngish architect proclaim that ‘Span is interesting because it works’, implying that this was a contrast with things that didn’t work, designed most likely by local councils. It is however very hard to see how what Span were doing – car-free, pedestrianized public spaces, low-rise houses, plenty of landscaping, a Scandinavian softening of Modernism – was any different in design terms from, say, what Sheffield City Council did at Gleadless Valley which ‘doesn’t work’. Span works for one main reason: it was designed, and designed very well, for (often upper-)middle-class clients, so the spaces are looked after, the designs are scrupulously cohesive, and the inhabitants have invariably chosen to live there. It’s not mysterious, and it’s nothing to do with design. What cannot be denied is that Span produced very lovely places. New Ash Green is a harder sell, though, much more so than their enclaves in affluent districts of the metropolis. This place is not so much a New Town as a New Village which Span had designed in North Kent – so ambitious an undertaking that it basically bankrupted the company. The last few pieces of the scheme were entrusted to the somewhat less socially idealistic developers Bovis, then chaired by Keith Joseph himself, who as a government minister under Heath had tried to stop the place being built in the first place. Bovis still has its head office there, which might explain some of the place’s continued affluence.

      As New Ash Green is not a town or a suburb I suppose it must be rural, although I say this with the proviso that I don’t understand or know anything whatsoever about the countryside, generally considering it an ideological phantom wielded as a weapon against towns and cities, inducing them to surrender any true civic life to dreams of homes-as-castles-and-investments, as opposed to a real place, which it must be, for some. You can only reach New Ash Green in a car, or by a tortuous СКАЧАТЬ