STANMORE SAUNTERING

 

You want to know why Modernist architecture never really took off in England?  I’ll tell you 

why Modernist architecture never took off in England.  It’s the lack of blue skies, which is 

perhaps also to say lack of sun. 

 

I was walking in Stanmore last week, peering at some modernist houses (only the outsides) with flaneuse and professional walking tour guide (Jen Pedler) and we arrived in the morning when the sky was grey and there was rain in the air.

It was easy enough to see that these houses on Kerry Drive and Valencia Road, designed in the 1930s, were architecturally special but under a low grey sky they really didn’t look as fantastic as they might have.  

 

In fact the houses are mostly built of brick and coated with Snowcrete which is still easily available.  I wonder if a pure Modernist might think that was cheating.

 

So we wandered around Stanmore, looking at this and that, and we ended up in the Stanmore Country Park, which was surprisingly muddy in places but worth it because in the end we got this extraordinary view of London – in fact it’s called the London Viewpoint.

 

         While we were up there the sky brightened and by a circuitous route we returned to our starting point, by which time the sun was out, the sky was blue, and the Modernist houses looked absolutely magnificent.

 

Of course whiteness isn’t everything. We had also taken a detour to see the house at 2, Aylmer Close, designed by Gert Kaufman in the sixties (he also designed one of the houses in Kerry Avenue).

It looks like this; not so much modernist as Brutalist

 

From Pinterest

Not that we saw it with our own eyes.  The owners obviously want their privacy, and the best view we could get of it was this:

 

Other attractions in Stanmore, well I can’t guarantee it’ll be there for long, but this car on Stanmore Hill, a Buick Eight:

 

It’s cool enough in itself but the rear number plate said “A Quinn Martin Production.  Quinn Martin was the producer behind The Fugitive, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon among many other fine TV shows.

 

What Quinn Martin's name (and just conceivably his car) were doing in Stanmore, I have no idea.

I'M NOT AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, JUST A BIT WARY

Mrs Dalloway in a hat

                 

I’ve been trying again to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.  I’ve tried before and I gave it up as a bad job, but this time I got to the end of it.  It confirmed, what I already knew, that Virginia Woolf and I are not destined to be soul mates.

 

Mrs Dalloway has a reputation for being something of a walking novel. In Flaneuse Lauren Elkin says, ‘Mrs Dalloway is perhaps the greatest flaneuse of twentieth-century literature.’  She was wise to put in ‘perhaps,’ I’d say.  

 

True, Mrs Dalloway does do a bit of walking - she goes out to buy flowers because the servants are too busy preparing for her party (really - 'What a lark.   What a plunge!'),  but it’s a very short walk; she’s home by 11 am, apparently walking for an hour at most, and John Sutherland has pretty convincingly argued that she takes a taxi home.

 

But there’s a interesting line in the book.

“I love walking in London," said Mrs Dalloway. "Really it’s better than walking in the country!"

The line is unchanged from the way it appeared in the original short story version of the opening section, published in The Dial, in 1923, titled ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.’

I do wonder if this was an unusual or even a startling or subversive thing for a woman (or anybody) to think and say in 1923 (short story) or 1925 (novel).

 

We do know that Woolf had read, or had tried to read, Joyce’s Ulysses  (1922-ish), but she didn’t rate it because it was written by a ‘a self-taught working man’ – self taught at University College Dublin.

 

         And I suppose it’s possible that Woolf was aware that Baudelaire described the flâneur in his essayThe Painter of Modern Life (1863), but I think it’s highly improbable that Mrs. Dalloway was.

 

Fortunately, there is some fabulous unintentional humor in the novel, which had me shorting Guinness through my nose

Mrs. Dalloway is not the only walker in the book. Her daughter walks too, to the Army and Navy Stores along with her one-time nanny Miss Kilman, who is a communist, a committed Christian, and commentators seem to insist that she’s a lesbian, hence perhaps the name -- Woolf was such a subtle writer.

 

         The hilarity comes when Woolf describes Kilman’s conversion, which came while out walking some time earlier.  ‘Bitter and churning Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years three months ago.’

         Walking can be a great source of metamorphosis.

Liz Taylor, acting

THUMBS UP

 I stand before you as a man who’s been arrested, charged, prosecuted and found guilty of 

being a pedestrian. Admittedly I was a pedestrian on the hard shoulder of a motorway, and 

it’s a long story but it was a fair cop.  I went quietly.  Hitchhiking was involved, as was the 

style at the time.  I’ll spare you the rest of my ‘hitch-hiking stories.’

 

Now consider the case of Hassan Mansoor Mohammed Ameen who was found walking in the middle of a busy road at the junction of Esplanade Drive and Fullerton Road in Singapore in August 21^st, causing cars to slow down or stop.

 

It seems like one of those stories you can never quite get to the bottom of, but it sounds as though the police tried to arrest him or at least get him off the road but he resisted.  Complications ensued.

 

The following account comes from the Singaporean website Stomp,  ‘The officer told Hassan he would be placed under arrest if he did not move off the road. When he did not comply, the officers called for backup.

‘After another four officers turned up, Hassan continued to ignore instructions to get off the road.

‘Director of Public Prosecutions Iranian said: ‘The accused also adopted a fighting stance at one point, shouted repeatedly and told the police officers that they were fake police officers.’

‘When they tried to arrest Hassan, he behaved aggressively and swung his hands wildly. He pushed an officer on the chest and swung his right arm and hit another officer on the right side of his face. Another officer then tasered Hassan.  He fell down briefly but managed to get up and remove the probes from his body. Hassan then punched one of the officers before running off against the flow of traffic with the officers in pursuit.  When they caught up with him, Hassan, who had taken off his top by then, continued to resist arrest. He was finally arrested after being tasered again.”

 

         

Well, that sounds like a lot of unnecessary bother, doesn’t it?

Hassan eventually had his day in court, and copped to everything. He admitted disorderly behavior, using violence on police officers, two counts of voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servants from their duties, one count of behaving in a disorderly manner on a public road, and one count of consuming methamphetamine. He was jailed on 30 December 2021, sentenced to one year and 29 weeks in jail. 

The prosecution said he’d been taking meth weekly because he was 'bored and stressed about his personal life.'  I have no idea what the defense said.

 

         Well dude, going for a walk is a great way of alleviating boredom and stress, but not always a complete solution, obviously.  As I recall I was fined 5 quid for my illegal motorway walking, though it was in the days when 5 quid was worth something.

 

ABIDE WITH ME, ETC

 Here’s a picture of an old feller walking in Sheffield.

 

I took it about fifteen years ago when I was walking around the old neighbourhood where I grew up.  It’s taken at the corner of Crowder Road and Crowder Crescent, and I’d have said it was on the Longley Estate, but it could be the Southey Green Estate: these things are finely nuanced and I’ve been gone a long time.

 

I don’t make any claims for myself as a photographer but I’m rather pleased with this one: the twisting of the trees contrasted with the bending of the old man.  (Are they trees? I suppose they may be bushes or shrubs, but never mind). And for one reason another I decided to take a look on Google Street View to see what had been happening on that corner. This view, dated 2021, shows that the twisty trees are gone.

 

What a sad thing.

 

However, if you let Street View take you into the side street, Crowder Crescent, they’re still there.  They’re not looking as healthy as in my pic but they’re hanging in there.  But that picture is dated 2012.

 

So we can say that somewhere between 2012 and 2021 those trees were either removed or possibly they just died.  It seems a sad thing but it may be nature taking its course. 

 

The old man, I assume, is long, long gone.

BUILDING BLOCKS

 If you walk down the high street of Manningtree at the moment, you'll see this, part of a 

building that's being worked on:

 

It’s a door marked for wheelchair users that’s about a foot off the ground – no ramp, no lift. Getting in of course is impossible, but getting out would be a wild ride.  The door opens, the wheelchair passes through and the occupant is (briefly) airborne.

 

I don’t honestly think this is a Thomasson – i.e. a surviving architectural relic that serves no purpose but by some kind of alchemy has become a work of art, or hyperart.

 

Nah, I think the guys working on the building just needed a door, any door, to plug up the hole and the one they found happened to have a wheelchair sticker on it. And maybe one of the guys likes a larf. I expect it’ll soon be gone.

 

If you happen to be walking in Ipswich, up in the next county, you might come across this place:

 

It’s closed up and one of the doors is bricked up, and again not a Thomasson, just a way of securely plugging a hole. But what really catches the eye is that belt arrangement that appears to be holding the house together. 

 I’m sure there must be a technical architectural term for those belts, and perhaps it’s a tried and trusted method.  Even so, the house owner, and the builder, evidently have more confidence in the belt materials than I would have, especially if I lived in the house next door.