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 day
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?
