The Wall in the Head

by Christopher Beanland

‘So it’s over.’

  ‘Finished.’

  ‘What about us renting some other space, borrowing another studio for productions? Close the building – fair enough. But save the station?’

  ‘That was never going to happen. You need a TV… centre. You need what’s here: offices, studios, technical facilities, everything together. This was it. And that, I’m afraid, is that.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Exactly. Ten Brutalist Buildings is the final production. He’s shutting everything down next month, flogging the station, and putting the entire site on the market. Probably be turned into flats, won’t it? They turn everything into flats – sorry, “luxury urban apartments” – now. Fucking solicitors and accountants who work on Colmore Row fucking buying them no doubt so they can fucking do loads of fucking coke off a glass coffee table before they go to one of those new fucking trendy wankers’ bars in the Jewellery Quarter.’ Bob picked up one of the heavy-bottomed ashtrays shaped like ‘M’s from the table and sauntered over towards the bar, the ashtray swinging from his hand, turning his right arm into a demented pendulum.

  ‘What say you and I take the lease on the bar and try to open it up as some kind of retro attraction? Posters of the stars of Mids TV from the 1970s on the wall, the great programmes we made.’ He made a sarcastic ‘Ha!’ sound immediately after suggesting this.

  He went behind the bar and I stood up to see what was going on. He smashed the ashtray down onto one of the locks keeping the fridges from being ransacked by alcoholic staff. He looked like a man who knew exactly what he was doing; the whole procedure was as casual as could be. He bent down then reappeared and walked back over carrying four bottles of lager. He handed two to me and sat the other pair down on the table beside him. ‘They’ve fucked us. It’s happening to all regional TV. I know guys in Newcastle, Plymouth, Norwich – all the same story. No one gives a monkey’s anymore. No one’s making money anymore. Everything’s a Londoner’s game these days. That’s it. They make everything down there, it makes more sense. Or buy it in from abroad. There’s no more room for local programmes, things just for the Midlands, from the Midlands. From any region.’

  ‘What about all the TV we made though? We slaved for them. Doesn’t it mean anything? All that stuff we did on a shoestring.’

  ‘That’s the bloody problem, isn’t it? It was all cheap shit.’

  ‘I guess it was. With a few exceptions.’

  ‘Hardly any. Obviously some of the stuff you did and some of the stuff I did.’ Bob popped the cap and started drinking his beer. ‘But even we made some shite. And as for everyone else… saints preserve us, there was some toss on the screens. And besides, people don’t watch TV anymore. Or… well… not the kind of TV we made anyway.’

  I exhaled.

  Look at this place.’ Bob looked around the room. ‘Everything we built, everything we made. All gone to shit. What’s the point?’

  ‘It was good while it lasted.’

  ‘It was fun, wasn’t it? Maybe that was the point. The output may have mostly been crap, but it was a lark.’ Bob snapped his fingers. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll see. Come with me.’ Bob yanked my left arm.

  ‘Alright, boss.’

  ‘This way.’ He frogmarched me towards the other end of the bar and finally fell on his knees, crawling along to the point where a brown and burgundy and white carpet ended and some wooden panelling began. We were about a foot from the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the bar. ‘Yeah. Here… I think.’ Bob reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a prison warden’s bunch of keys. ‘Well, who cares now?’ He made for a Swiss army knife, flipped open the blade and began to extravagantly slice at the carpet. ‘Too blunt,’ he moaned. He hacked out three sides of a square and began ripping it up. The carpet died with a hideous tearing sound, like a malfunctioning zip. ‘Nah, must be…’ He tried again, chopping out another square.

  ‘Buried treasure?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He ripped the square of carpet up and I saw a little white corner poking out.

  ‘Here!’

  Bob delicately grabbed the corner of paper with thumb and forefinger and began to tease it out from under the carpet. I could see now that it was a photograph, about A5 size. Bob pulled it out and blew on it. Then he presented it to me.

  ‘Look how fucking young you look there. You clown.’

  I smirked. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Look at us. Look at you in that stupid chicken costume. Jesus, I wish you’d kept your fake head on for this photo, to be honest. Then I wouldn’t have to see your ugly mug.’

  ‘You look a lot less fat here. Less pasties back then, more five-a-side.’

  ‘Same number of pasties, bit more footy, more fags.’

  ‘Look at the library too – you can see it right behind us.’

  ‘Fuck the library, look at those birds. That blonde one. And is that… is that…?’

  ‘Bel. Yep. That’s the day I met her.’

  ‘Bugger me, of course it was.’

  ‘Remember we were trying to find foreigners, asking them to do Brummie accents.’

  ‘She was the type of foreigner you wanted to meet.’

  ‘Rather than another bloody engineer from Dusseldorf, absolutely.’

  ‘When the hell is this from?’

  I turned the photo over. There was writing on the back. In my handwriting it said, What a day to be alive. 16 June 1990. My heart was going like mad. In Bob’s handwriting it said, You look like a dickhead mate.

  Bob ran his hand over the words as if he was trying to suck the meaning of them up through his fingers and into his soul. He looked up at me, like a puppy. I thought he was going to cry. ‘Remember we got pissed and we decided to put this under the carpet, for a rainy day? Poked it right under using a brolly. One afternoon when we were supposed to be writing Welcome To The Masshouse in here. So we’d always have a part of us in the building – in our favourite bit of the building – forever.’

  ‘And in case we got sacked.’

  ‘Which was, of course, always quite a likely possibility back then.’

  ‘It really was.’

  I stared at the photograph. Bob had his arm round me, was grinning wildly; I was grinning too. And then the girls on either side of us, on benches, a long way behind us and right in front of the library. Bel on one side, the mystery one with blonde hair on the other. The one I’d bumped into in Berlin. The one who’d vanished as quickly as she’d appeared.

  ‘We had some good times, didn’t we? We really had some bloody good times.’ Bob ran his hand through his hair and sighed. He looked defeated.

  ‘We did. And now some of us are closer to death than others.’ I smirked.

  ‘Oi. Bring those beers over.’ Bob flipped himself, slowly, heavily, off his knees and onto his arse. He backed into the window and fell hard against it.

  I went to the toilet and then to fetch the bottles of lager from the table. When I got back Bob was asleep, slumped, drool running down his jowls. This leader, this inspiration, this guide to me. He belched but it didn’t rouse him. I couldn’t watch. I walked out of the bar and was struck by how empty, how quiet the whole sorry place was now. As if on autopilot, I strolled into the office tower and called a lift, but they all seemed to be broken. Maintenance was, apparently, already winding down. I climbed the stairs to the top of the building and walked out onto the roof. I stood there, out of breath, surveying Birmingham and wondering what else was about to be knocked down by the imbeciles running the city these days; people even worse than the clowns I satirised in Big Plans – because at least they had ideas, even if they were often the wrong ones. Today’s city fathers are destroying at the same speed that the ones from the past were creating. Bel hated them. She could see her dream was dying. It was.

  I peered over the edge, dared myself to lean out and see what I would feel. I didn’t want to jump from here again. The sickness in my stomach co
nfirmed that. Vertigo’s normal service had been resumed. I wanted to live. At least, I wanted to live for the people who needed me. That was a start.

  It suddenly became gusty; I felt a chill too. I heard the fire door, that familiar creaking and clanking. A black-clad human emerged and floated over. There was something spidery about the get-up: the bits of fabric billowing around, the black-cloth-clad limbs.

  ‘What do you want? Why don’t you speak to me?’

  Baxter looked at me for ten minutes. Then he opened his mouth. One minute elapsed, and then he finally remarked, ‘I had congress with Belinda, an affair.’

  Er.

  What.

  The blood drained from me as I contemplated the seven words he’d just said. Could it be true? Jesus. I boiled. I fucking boiled. Then I coiled my right arm back. I hit Baxter with such force that he fell down to the ground in a pile of bones. He lay, propping on his arm on the roof, nose bleeding, rubbing his head. I crouched down. I looked him in the eyes.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I pointed towards the edge, overcome with aggression, unnatural hatred. ‘Well fucking jump off here then if it’s true. Fucking jump.’ Did I really mean it?

  ‘I shall.’

  Baxter struggled to haul himself up onto the lip of the wall that ran around the roof’s edge. He dusted himself down. He coughed a little and calmly shuffled to the edge. ‘I apologise, Donald.’ I ran over towards the idiot and tried to grab him, to save him. He jumped off as my hands reached out. One clean manoeuvre. Cleaner than my try. I think… I think… I assumed there was some kind of forcefield. If it saved me it’d save him. No one could die jumping from up here to down there. Could they?

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four. Pop, like a balloon bursting.

  I bent over the safety rail. Shit. He looked like a swatted fly, a tiny black pinprick flattened out with bursts of ruby squeezed outward in three directions. Could have been me. Could have been me down there on the paving stones. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Oh… shit.’

  I stood there, drinking that beer, grasping that bottle in a quivering hand, imagining my wife having sex with someone else. I thought I knew everything about Belinda, but clearly there was so much more to it, so much more to her, so much more going on. Maybe I’d never know the whole story. Belinda couldn’t be boxed in – by the Berlin Wall, by Birmingham, by me. She had to escape. She had to choose her own path, make her own mistakes. It was as if everything had changed; everything I thought was there was not there. There’s no narrative. I was right. Nothing makes sense. Nothing makes any sense anymore. Events aren’t linked, people come and go, truths and half-truths ebb and flow, bits and pieces, ideas and regrets. There are no complete visions, no good stories, no perfect endings. I looked back over the edge. I thought long and hard about this. Thought about what had happened. Thought about what to do. I saw two paramedics rushing over to the swatted fly. Bystanders shouting, screaming.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Ten Brutalist Buildings

  By Belinda Schneider

  Appendix – sort of

  A guide to the buildings you’ve just read about

  Most writers would put this in at the start, but I didn’t want you to get bogged down in the boring details too early. I wanted you to get a feeling for these places, to see how emotions could mix with concrete before we got into too much of the serious stuff. I also wanted you to see how pieces can effortlessly slide into place – if something (a building, a painting, a book) is well-constructed and meaningful enough to do that without you even noticing how it’s done that. Hopefully you’ve come to the realisation that we’re dealing with an idea, an aesthetic, that’s actually important. Uncommonly important. And in fact so important that it can and should be seen in hundreds of years’ time as totemic of an age, as the totem of the post-war age of progress. Not just a concrete monstrosity. Not just an aberration. Not just a failed utopia. But a genuine attempt to reimagine and improve the cities of the world on a vast scale. Was it a success though? Well, again we come back to the human experience. I can’t tell you what you feel, what to feel. But I can tell you that you must feel. That you must feel a building with your hand, that you must feel a building with your heart.

  Our ten brutalist buildings:

  1. Birmingham Central Library

  Birmingham, England

  Year built: 1974

  A huge public library in my adopted home town. My husband said that the first time he saw this library – on the day it opened in 1974 – he thought it was a spaceship that had landed in the middle of Birmingham. It was in this place I studied, in this place I met my husband. The library is part of a wider complex of shops, arcades, bridges and undercrofts in the middle of a roundabout evocatively named Paradise Circus.

  Status: due to be closed and demolished.

  2. Priory Square

  Birmingham, England

  1966

  A complex in the shopping district of Birmingham on several levels, on a hill between Bull Street, Corporation Street and Dale End. Shops, an open-air market, bars and a huge music venue – all linked by stairs and bridges. Not as famous as the more widely remembered and regarded Bull Ring, but every bit as exciting. The complex had a second life from the early 1980s onwards as a haven for alternative culture. Its clothes shops catered to fans of goth, metal, then dance music. There were record shops. The music venue was the most important in the city from the 1980s to the 2000s, hosting an astonishing number of gigs by the best bands and DJs of the day.

  Due to be demolished.

  3. St Agnes Kirche

  Berlin, Germany

  1967

  A stark church in Berlin’s Kreuzberg where I married my husband. Look how little detailing there is. It’s a powerful symbol of – to me – the unrelenting nature of religious adherence. It’s now listed as a scheduled monument, and there are plans to turn it into an art gallery and cultural centre – the perfect way to treat it.

  Protected; cannot be demolished. Due to be reconfigured for a new use.

  4. Eros House

  London, England

  1962

  Built as offices first off, then it later became flats for the people of Catford. I love how the facade chimes different notes, with its window pieces popping in and out like piano keys. And I love the glazed staircase on the front. I found this little tic – this glazed staircase – on many more brutalist buildings I discovered later during my travels. This was the first time I saw that style, though.

  Now it’s residential, and it doesn’t seem in imminent danger of being knocked down, though it has had an odd re-clad job which has spoiled it a bit.

  5, 6, 7. The three brutalist mega-villages:

  Leeds University

  Leeds, England

  1963–78

  A sprawling new campus for the students at Leeds University. The site drops off a cliff but the buildings keep flying through the sky so you can stay on the same level. The dramatic switches in levels, the bridges, the vast spaces – they’re all quite profound. This complex includes the EC Stoner Building of classrooms, labs and offices; then there’s the Roger Stevens Lecture Theatre building and the EC Boyle Library. The library was opened in 1975.

  Listed, well looked after and still going strong today.

  Thamesmead

  London, England

  1966–

  A council estate so big that it resembles a new town. And it looks more like a town today because new building continues, so everything is from different periods. But the bit we’re interested in is the southern portion of Thamesmead around South Mere Lake and along Yarnton Way. That was built from 1966 to roughly 1974. It consists of high tower blocks and medium-rise ‘clusters’ – courts of flats with walkways and paths threading through. There were also interesting shopping parades, a pub and a medical centre.

  The site continues to be home to thousands of people – a
nd more move in as new homes are built around the periphery of Thamesmead. But the pub, shopping parades and medical centre around South Mere Lake have been knocked down.

  The Barbican

  London, England

  1965–82

  One of the world’s most impressive brutalist cities within a city, the Barbican is a huge complex in London’s financial district that was bomb-damaged in World War II and rebuilt in this total style – not just a building but a whole space-age neighbourhood. There are blocks of medium-rise and high-rise flats, a school and a gallery, cinema and arts centre – everything raised up on a platform and free from traffic, with the cars in a tunnel below it. The water gardens in the middle give it an incredibly relaxing and quiet feel for such a central, highly urban location. If I could have lived anywhere in the world that wasn’t the Birmingham suburb of Moseley – where my husband and I reside happily – then it would have been here at the Barbican.

  Listed, wildly popular and incredibly well janitored. This is brutalism that even the haters love.

  8. Yorkshire Gazette Building

  Leeds, England

  1970

  A headquarters for the local newspapers in Leeds – offices for journalists and advertising departments, and a print room where the papers were published. Interesting varieties of shapes built the block up into a really engaging whole. The hexagon at the centre catches your eye, as does the clock tower. The Inner Ring Road flyover that shoots across a roundabout in front of the building gives this whole ensemble a complete late-60s flourish. This was what the future city was supposed to look like back then. Mighty newspapers and TV stations of that era wanted to show a progressive face with buildings like this.

  The newspaper wants to move out and flatten the building.

  9. Park Hill

  Sheffield, England

  1961

  A snake. A snake for living in. Essentially one superblock of flats that squiggles its way across a hill above Sheffield. The roof height is the same, so the top bits are shorter and the bottom bits are much more cliff-like. Corridors stretch along the whole thing, and there are playgrounds, parkland, and pubs in the middle. A bridge, with the graffiti Clare Middleton I Love You Will U Marry Me, is my favourite bit of this place. It’s the most sad, surprising and romantic thing.