CONCRETE WINTER

Back in the day when I had a “real” job, I worked near Oxford Circus in London, and I lived for the lunch hour when I could go out walking and explore the neighborhood.  And I was always struck by a building in Welbeck Street, which I knew nothing about, but thought it was just great.  It’s a multistory car park but I felt it could have been almost anything.  Maybe a spy headquarters.   I even took a picture:

Westminster Council has now approved its demolition, and it’ll be replaced by a fancy, ten-story hotel, which I suppose will have a car park of its own.  Demolition of the existing structure presumably won’t be too hard since it's made of prefabricated concrete sections.  Maybe they can even be recycled.

At the time I first admired that Welbeck Street building I’m not sure I’d even heard the word Brutalism, which is how it’s been described by people who object to the demolition, because I suppose Brutalism is now thought as a good thing.  Frankly I think it seems a bit too light and ornate to be truly Brutalist. Can you have Brutalism-lite?  But I’m not going to fight about definitions. Compare and contrast the Welbeck Street car park with the American Cement Building in LA; now being converted into lofts:

Before I lived in London, I was in Sheffield and I often used to walk by this monster in Sheffield, brutal in every way.  

I loved it, but at the time I didn’t even think to question what it was.  I was young and my sense of curiosity hadn’t been fully developed. Now I know it’s an electricity substation – and good luck trying to demolish that thing.

Last week was Concrete Week in the Guardian and Jonathan Watts, among others, has been telling us that concrete is a terrible, terrible thing - which is to say just one more damn thing to worry about.  Watts comes up with some extraordinary, if not fully explained, statistics.  Concrete is apparently responsible for up to 8% per cent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, more than any material after fossil fuels.  Not sure why it’s only “up to” 8 per cent – other sources put it at 5%.  Concrete also uses a lot of water, 10 per cent of the global industrial water usage, which actually doesn’t seem all that much when you read another statistic, that about ten billion tons of concrete are produced and used every year, and currently half of that is in China.

Then again, other sources will tell you that concrete has some has some environmental advantages. Trucks get better mileage on concrete roads than on tarmac, and concrete reflects light rather than absorbing it, which reduces the temperature in major cities by (here it is again)  “up to” 7%.

 I have no dog in this fight.  I’m all for the survival of the planet.  I just like concrete buildings, and car parks, including this one I discovered while wandering between Victoria and  Sloane Square, which is “greener” than some.  

It’s a multistory car park in Rysback Street, in London.  It’s not an especially attractive building, and it’s only borderline Brutalist (if you ask me).   However there’s some water leakage which has created ideal conditions for moss to grow.  Green enough to be getting on with for a (very short) while.

WALKING BRUTALLY

The first time I went to London I was 16 years old.  It was a long weekend, going down from Yorkshire with my parents and some family friends.  We were rubes.  We didn’t know what anything was and we didn’t even particularly know what we wanted to see.  We knew the names of some familiar places: Greenwich, Birdcage Walk, the Tower of London and we went to all of them.   We walked ourselves into the ground.  And somehow - I think we must have taken a boat ride along the Thames - we ended walking around the Southbank, including the Hayward Gallery, which I now realize had only been completed the previous year.  Below are some rather badly processed black and white pics I took on that visit.

I liked the Hayward, I think, because it seemed new and modern and different, though I certainly had no idea the architectural style was called Brutalism, whether old or new. 

My dad, on the other hand, was horrified.  He was a joiner, and by then a foreman for the council on various building sites around Sheffield.  He looked at the  finish of the Hayward, with the impressions of wood grain in the concrete, and what he saw was “shuttering,” familiar enough from his own work – wooden planks used to make a form that was filled with concrete, when you were making a foundation or a trench.  It was the kind of work you gave to joiners who turned up at the site and weren’t skilled enough to do anything else. 

The idea that you’d leave this visible on the outside of a finished building was just incomprehensible to him.  Of course he was also well aware of Sheffield’s Park Hill flats, another bit of Brutalism, and he found them pretty horrifying too.  He died long before they became fashionable and desirable, and he’d have found that incomprehensible too.

As you see from my photographs, there was an exhibition of Pop Art on at the Hayward when we were there – but I couldn’t tempt any of the others inside.

One way or another I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years walking in and around the Hayward, going to exhibitions, working there briefly as a security guard.  And during a particularly grim period when I taught creative writing to fashion students (terrible in all the ways you’d imagine and in some you couldn’t even conceive of) I used to go walking there after work, in an attempt to decompress. Somewhere along the line I did realize, having read my Rayner Banham, that this was indeed an example of Brutalism, possibly even New Brutalism.

     When I first started living in London I also spent a certain amount of time in the Barbican, on the way to and from exhibitions, films, concerts, and so on.  But it was an odd thing, the Barbican felt far stranger, for more alien, than the Hayward.  It didn’t feel like the “real” London. 

I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that when you’re at the Hayward you can look out and see various familiar London sights – the river, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge.  Once you’re inside the Barbican (and finding your way in through that hideous fume-filled tunnel can be quite a challenge), it’s as though you’re in a separate, hermetic world.  You could be anywhere.

Well, we’re all fans of Brutalism these days and the Barbican is a place where a lot of people like to be.  So when I was in London last month, I went along there so see how it felt these days.  It felt fine.  And there were absolutely swarms of people wandering around taking pictures, including a whole art school class it seemed.  Of course they, by which I probably mean we, found plenty to photograph.  We all know what the beauty of Brutalism looks like.

And in many ways it’s a great place to walk, or at least drift.  Finding your way when you’re in a hurry can be a bit of a nightmare, but if nothing else, once you’ve penetrated the fortress you’re entirely protected from traffic.  This is a place for walkers not cars.

There’s something called the “High Walk” which takes you along the top level of the complex, and you walk along some fairly inscrutable corridors, and I dare say “pedways,” where you’re likely to be one of only a very few people.  It’s interesting and intriguing, and definitely photogenic, and filmic in a noirish kind of way but it’s not exactly friendly or comfortable.  We could argue about whether the experience is literally brutal, but it’s certainly bleak and maybe threatening. This looks like a location where bad things can happen.  You wouldn’t want to be walking up there alone at night, in the shadows, with all those echoing footsteps and blind corners. Or maybe you would.  In the daytime however it’s quite exhilarating.

My visit to London wasn’t meant to be a Brutalist vacation but somehow it turned into one.  I ended up spending a couple of nights staying in the St. Giles Hotel, on Tottenham Court Road.  

I’ve walked past it hundreds of times and never paid much attention to it,.  But now, looking through Brutalist eyes, it appeared to be some some kind of Brutalist masterpiece, taking up a whole block: huge, angular, solid but somehow sprightly.  The rooms are small but I think they all give views over London, views that are inevitably framed by concrete.  Who’d have it any other way?