I pointed out the canteen, the bar, the offices. I said the studios were behind us and if nothing was filming we could go and look inside them.
‘Do you fancy having dinner with me again? You liked Bartholomew’s, didn’t you? That Black Forest gateau must’ve reminded you of home?’
Bel laughed a little too much. Was that a good thing?
I continued. ‘I heard about this little French place. Apparently they do a nice confit duck.’ I was very pleased with this line. Scandalously, it was both pre-prepared and cynically intended to both make me look better than I really was, and to manipulate Bel into saying yes. I couldn’t suggest a curry on Ladypool Road. And I wondered whether Bartholomew’s had been a mistake. I thought my prawn cocktail and chicken Kiev were first rate, but she seemed more amused than romanced by the place. I remember her commenting on the fake brickwork and the waitresses’ miniskirt uniforms. She said the place was only a decade old, but they’d tried to make it look as if it was approaching its 500th birthday. She told me it was post-modern, and that wasn’t ‘a good thing’. I had to impress her. She was sophisticated. She was foreign. The funny thing was, when I finally did take her for a curry, she said she preferred it to some of the fancy places I’d taken her because it was ‘real’, ‘authentic’.
She snickered. ‘Very sweet.’ And lit a cigarette. ‘Tell me, do you like the programmes you write? Do you like the words you put down on paper?’
‘I like that question. The answer, Miss Schneider, is essentially: not always. Sometimes. Sometimes I like things I’ve written, and then other people don’t. Sometimes I don’t like things, and other people agree with me. It’s funny that all these fictions come from your head, and land on a screen, on paper. These falsehoods that masquerade as truths.’
She stared out into the distance. ‘I want to write. I want to write a book about brutalist buildings. I want to write about how they touch me, what they make me feel. What they are capable of making everybody feel. I want to find a new way of writing about architecture that hasn’t been done before. You could help me.’
‘I’m impressed by that. I think it’s great that you want to write. And about something you’re passionate about. And about Brum, right?’
‘Of course! A love letter to Birmingham and its dreams of bigger things. Other cities too, but mostly, yep, Birmingham. So you’ll help?’
‘Could I help you? I don’t know enough. I’m an interested observer of the urban landscape. Well, of the urban landscape of Birmingham, because Birmingham’s TV station is the only one that will pay me, and Brum – like all people in the world, if we think of Brum as a person – only wants to hear stories about itself.’ I paused. ‘Sometimes, when I was little, I thought that buildings could talk to me.’
‘Me too.’
We stood in silence for a few seconds.
‘What was that show you mentioned? That sitcom? About the planners. That sounds fascinating. You do know! You know more than you let on.’
‘Big Plans? Yes, that’s going to be a sitcom set in the planners’ office in the 1960s when they were transforming the city. I’ve started writing it. When they were thinking about building what you just talked about, huge civic centres and big malls. And all the other concrete monstr… I mean edifices.’
‘Ha! There you go.’ Suddenly she seemed to be listening to me more intently. I could feel her eyes on me. I warmed to it. Often I felt self-conscious discussing ideas. Writers who talk about their work and its transient power leave me cold. I want my work to do the talking. But I made an exception to try and impress Bel.
‘I’ve got the two main characters in mind – Rocaster, the city architect, who’s idealistic but exasperated. And his boss, Benedetti, the megalomaniac city planner who wants to craft Brum in his own image; he isn’t afraid of knocking stuff down and ploughing motorways anywhere he wishes. What do you think?’
‘I think it sounds fabulous. I’m going to watch every episode, and I’ll know the writer of it. But it’s going to be funny, right?’
‘Everything I write – well, almost everything – is supposed to be funny. It’s a satire, of course. It’s going to mock them for thinking that they can do anything, that they were gods in their own city. Gentle mocking. It’s important to keep the people in power in check.’
‘People in power are the worst people. We should have artists running everything.’
We squeezed into a small silver lift and it jolted upwards as if it were tired, as if it’d made this journey one too many times for its own liking.
Bel greedily watched the numbers getting bigger on the screen – each number was cut from a little piece of metal and a white light went off behind it as we hit that floor, illuminating the number.
‘You know, in Berlin, television was a political act. We had television wars. The east built a big transmitter to try and send signals to the west, propaganda. In fact that transmitter itself was a big piece of concrete propaganda. And if you were in East Germany you could receive the West German TV signals. Each station on each side had programmes which tried to rubbish the output of the other side. The only place you couldn’t get the western signal was right in the very far east of the country, around Dresden. They called it the “Valley of Ignorance” because all those Saxons got was the official GDR state propaganda, no balance at all.’
‘But if you pointed your aerial to the west, didn’t you get in trouble?’
‘Exactly. Hey, you know your stuff! The Stasi would immediately suspect you if your aerial pointed to the west, but then if your flat was to the east of the East German transmitter like ours was in Lichtenberg, what could you do? You had to point it west anyway. It was a pretty stupid situation, I guess. I’m just glad we… well my parents really, had something to keep them sane. To show them that it wasn’t all some fucked-up dream they were trapped inside of. I really worried about my mum. I know how much pressure she felt to conform to what those bastards expected.’
The lift pinged. Top floor. The doors shot open. ‘Wow! I’ve always wanted to come up here,’ she said, her eyes as bright as a rabbit’s.
‘Just a few more steps first – if I can remember which direction. Hmmmm… yep, over here.’
We tiptoed gingerly up the steps. I pushed. A heavy steel door creaked open and clanked loudly as it banged on the side of the stairwell exit. We walked over to the edge. The city spread out before us. As the view came into focus, the background din of the traffic and the wind became noticeable in my ears. The roads formed patterns like ones you find in nature – curves and swirls of roundabouts and slip roads which looked like stalks or streams. Yellow steel cranes looked alive but temporarily paused, flower-like. Concrete blocks of different shapes and sizes jumped up and down at you as you looked at them – that was just your eyes adjusting to the sensations.
‘This view is amazing.’
‘We’re right on top of the office tower. Above that silly giant “M”. Everyone who runs Mids TV is below us.’
‘You worked your way to the top!’ She seemed to like this joke.
I demurred. ‘The closest I’ll ever be.’
Bel looked awestruck by the city that was opened out below us. I watched her watching. She kept smiling, shivering slightly but grinning through what chills she felt, fumbling with her hair to keep it out of her eyes as it blew around in the breeze. She eyed up different buildings and the same scene from different angles, as if painting pictures in her mind to remember what she was looking at. I was painting too. She was in my pictures.
‘This is Paradise Circus,’ she said, pointing down towards the library.
‘I thought it was the library.’
She made a circular gesture with her arm. ‘Yep, but the roundabout is called Paradise Circus. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Ah, I did know that. Of course.’
‘Paradise. What an incredible name for a place. Paradise!’
‘Isn’t it!’
Bel laughed. ‘Yes, a few pe
ople probably hate it. But I love it. What a name, what an idea. That was the whole idea of architecture back then, of city planning. To create a paradise. And this paradise is called Paradise. It’s so perfect. Why don’t people use it in their stories? You could write something set here, Donald, something nice, something that ends in Paradise.’
‘Perhaps we’ll end there some time,’ I said. ‘We began there, didn’t we?’ But it sounded too cheesy and she just made a kind of ‘Hmph’ noise in response.
‘You know I was there on the day the library opened?’ I looked too pleased with myself.
‘Gosh. You are old! I’m impressed by that though. You can definitely take away from tonight that you’ve impressed me.’
Bel looked in every direction as she inched along the roof, gently, imperceptibly away from me almost without me realising. She was her own anchor, and her anchor was something a lot more solid than my own, something that seemed to weigh her perfectly, so that she could do anything she wanted, but she’d always remain perfectly connected to the ground. She’d never fly away. She was at the other end of the roof now. She turned and looked at me, and spoke. I didn’t pick it up.
‘I can’t hear you.’
She spoke again. I couldn’t hear.
‘I’m coming closer, it’s too noisy. What was that?’
‘I said, “You can kiss me now”.’ Her lips were parted, moistened, calling out to me. Her eyes were shut. For a split second I could roam over her face, enjoying all of her features – her cheeks, her eyebrows, her small chin, her dainty ears. I moved towards her. My right hand was shaking a little as I brought it up towards her left cheek. I parted my lips and slowly aimed for hers, my mouth tense and greedy.
‘Too late now!’ She pulled away and giggled. ‘You missed your chance.’
14
‘ Elizabeth Anderson’ by The Rationalists
Is it me?
That you see?
Is it me?
Is it me?
Is it me?
That you see?
Is it me?
Is it me?
Oh Lizzie please.
Lizzie please.
Is it me?
Is it me?
There’s a place where I can see.
Oh Lizzie please.
Lizzie please.
There’s a place where I can see.
The city breathe.
Oh Lizzie please.
Will you see?
Will you see?
What you’ve done to me?
Oh Lizzie please.
Lizzie please.
Will you see?
Will you see?
What you’ve done to me?
Oh Lizzie please.
Lizzie please.
Is it me?
That you see?
Is it me?
Is it me?
Is it me?
That you see?
Is it me?
Is it me?
Oh Lizzie please.
Lizzie please.
Is it me?
Is it me?
2008
Baxter looked like a French scarecrow. Terrifying, suave. He never seemed to inhale or exhale; I didn’t see him take a breath. I never witnessed him eat or drink anything. He ran on some kind of unnamed, unknown impulses – electrical, perhaps; chemical, certainly. Perhaps he also fuelled up on the blood of children, the skin of toads, heavy-metal-tainted canal water. His favoured gothic black polo-neck-and-suit combo was disconcerting. I wondered whether Baxter realised there was a slightly sick joke at work on this spot: just a few yards from him, down among the cheap ironic clothing shops in Priory Square, Birmingham’s angsty teenagers bought everything they could find in black too. This was where the alternative strata shopped: the goths, the metal fans. I’d shopped here for T-shirts when I was younger too. I was a swot, but inside my belly lay a grenade charged with equal parts hope and anger – just like today’s kids that exist outside the mainstream. I threw mine, but all I wanted to do was demolish everything using jokes.
The first day of filming. This was how Belinda’s book would come to life. This was what television people did to boot the ideas of a writer presented in paper form into a sixty-minute programme that you could watch on the sofa with a cup of tea in one hand and a biscuit in the other. What would happen during this shoot? Could we do justice to what Bel wanted, to what she’d said in Ten Brutalist Buildings? We all knew Birmingham; it was our home. But what would we find in Leeds, Sheffield, London and Berlin? The researchers checked the most important thing of all – were all the bloody buildings in all the other bloody places even still standing? Apparently, the answer was a reassuring, though at the same time slightly concerning, ‘yes, mostly.’ ‘Mostly?’ I preferred the ‘yes’ bit. One thing was for sure – if we waited much longer to film at, and to tell the stories of, those buildings in Brum that Bel had written about and loved, it would be too late. All of them seemed to be on the chopping block. The powers that be wanted to bulldoze both the Central Library and Priory Square, the complex I was looking at right now. I wondered what these dickheads would want to put up instead on the site of the places my wife loved the most. The word was that the vultures were also swarming round Mids TV’s own headquarters. I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised if they knocked down our home too – these days it was almost empty and the atmosphere sour. Mids had had some fat years alright – mainly at the start, alas. The last few had been a disaster, and to me at least, the writing seemed to be on the wall. I was surprised that Bob had managed to get the cash signed off to make Bel’s show. But now it was without its leading lady to write and present it. I looked at Bob. There was something deliciously shifty about him. He made things happen, but I sometimes wondered how, and at what cost. People would do anything for him. I include myself in that.
Baxter glanced at the script for a few minutes while he smoked a fag. He took the almost-finished fag from between greasy lips, set fire to the script and handed the flaming paper to Bob and then crunched up the cig between his palms. As it dropped to the floor, cinders and ash followed it, demonstrating how hot it still was. Bob whispered something in Baxter’s ear as the script burned, and punched him on the right arm. Baxter stepped onto the small, wobbly platform of a bright lemon-coloured cherry picker. It curdled into life. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP went the godforsaken machine. Smoking mums pushing prams along Dale End paused to look. Baxter stiffened as the machine began to jolt up towards the sky. Legs apart, arms by his side. He just stood there, eyes pointed to the horizon as if they were about to emit laser beams, chest puffed up. The cherry picker juddered even further upwards, and after about five minutes Baxter was at roof level. Without looking down, without checking whether he was about to fall to earth and become human jam – the kind of jam I’d planned to be the other day – with a belly full of trust and a heart not (apparently) knowing fear, he simply sidestepped through the little gap in the rails, from the cherry picker’s platform… and placed his feet down on the corner of the roof of the huge Priory Square complex. I could scarcely believe he had just stepped over a perilous gap without even checking his footing. Obviously the machine’s operator, brandishing an oversized radio control panel on terra firma, had done a good job of manoeuvring the platform cheek by jowl to the corner of the roof. But still.
Baxter prepared for his piece to camera by coughing once, fist to mouth. We were still down at street level, eyes pointed up, faces painted with a mixture of abhorrence and a certain amount of perverse admiration. Bob shook his head, grabbed a megaphone – just like directors do when you see them in TV dramas or documentaries about TV or films – and angrily yelled, ‘Action!’
Ten Brutalist Buildings
By Belinda Schneider
Chapter Five
Mega-villages
I said to Donald, ‘You already know more brutalist buildings than you think you do.’
He said, ‘I know more than enough, thanks
very much.’
I said, ‘Shut up. Where did you go to university?’
He said, ‘Leeds. You know that.’
I said, ‘I know that. And did you know that all the time you spent in the library there, reading Nabokov, or Private Eye, that you were inside a brutalist building?’
He said, ‘Actually, now I do remember that library. And you’re right, it was.’
I said, ‘And where did I go to university?’
He said, ‘Birmingham.’
I said, ‘Exactly. With all its beautiful brutalist towers. And your screenwriting course?’
He said, ‘University of East Anglia. Ah ok, I see you what you’re doing.’
I said, ‘And where we met…?’
He said, ‘Birmingham Central Library?’
I said, ‘Yes, well done. And where have you spent half your life?’
He said, ‘Mids TV HQ. But the other half was in a not very brutalist Edwardian house.’
I said, ‘Correct. But the second part is only because you wouldn’t let us move to the Barbican.’
He said, ‘The Barbican’s not in Brum. If it was I’d have moved there with you. Even if it is a bit… overwhelming.’
*
The brutalist mega-villages really take your breath away. I’m being contrary here and, for the sake of the Ten Brutalist Buildings of our title, for the sake of our survey being of a manageable ‘ten’ ‘buildings’, I’m saying that Leeds University, Thamesmead, and the Barbican all count as just one building each, when in fact they’re all formed of many difficult, different shapes, all bundled together. In effect they’re districts, cities within cities. Look at Birmingham University’s 1960s campus extension and the whole of the University of East Anglia – both of which only narrowly missed my cut for the ten buildings I’d focus on, but they’re still ones you should visit. All of the places I’ve just mentioned – and they are, genuinely, actual places with actual character and centres and a feel of their own in each case – they all overwhelm the visitor, as Don remarked. They supercharge, they plump up, they preen, they explode, they engorge: size, abstraction, horror and thrill. Public spaces, differences in height and vertical segregation, dominance over the landscape, urbanity, love of urbanity, excitement. They blow your mind wide open.
The Wall in the Head Page 8
