The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  If cultural diversity and richness are synonyms for poverty, as to some extent they are, they are almost certainly threatened. In postregeneration London, for example, the frequently ensuing sterility is perhaps not so much a question of culture as of residential densities. Wealthy, childless couples living in 300-square-metre riverside lofts are unlikely to generate anything like the street life of a community of immigrant families with children, each living in a single room. Diversity and richness, however, will survive in other neighbourhoods. In any case, it is not certain that the make-over, such as it is, is European in character. The pavement cafés of post-1994 London seem to have arrived, not from Europe, but via North America. The evolution of London’s population, too, increasingly polarised between extremes of rich and poor, more closely resembles that of North American cities than anything in Europe.

  London in 2003 certainly seems to be a more enjoyable place than it was in 1992, in all sorts of ways, but physically it has not changed anything like as much as its stock of recently constructed public buildings might suggest. One of the more striking aspects of the cities of present-day mature economies is how, in the twentieth century, they changed, physically, much less than they might have been expected to at the beginning of the century. Cities now often evolve in ways that involve social change and subjectivity rather more than actual physical alteration. Much of London’s physical fabric is older than that of many other cities in Europe, and older than that of much of the rest of the UK. New built environments are usually less socially and economically diverse than older urban fabric, so perhaps the fluidity of London’s population is encouraged by this physical stasis – though at a price, since it condemns thousands, if not millions of people to live in unusually impoverished physical surroundings, both public and private. If London really is more open to new possibilities of various kinds than other cities whose urbanism is more conventionally European, its physical shortcomings soon restrict their impact on the general condition of the city. In the long run, London’s economy is becoming increasingly specialised (in finance and administration). In this, as so often in the UK and presumably elsewhere, life in London seems to be characterised by predicaments in which a ‘yes’ is followed by a ‘but’.

  8

  London – Rochester – London

  In December 1864, Charles Dickens received a Christmas present from the actor Charles Fechter – a prefabricated two-storey summer house in the form of a Swiss chalet. It was delivered from Switzerland in ninety-four pieces packed in fifty-eight boxes, and was erected in the shrubbery at Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens’s house near Rochester, in Kent, where he lived from 1856 until his death in 1870. The main coach road from London to Dover ran through Dickens’s property and, to reach the shrubbery, he had a tunnel made beneath the road. The upper room in the chalet became Dickens’s study, where he wrote parts of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, on which he was working in the chalet the day before he died. On the walls, in the spaces between the windows, Dickens placed five large mirrors, of which he said: ‘they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees.’

  Knowing that Cedric Price had appeared in a film that I had made about houses and possessed a video copy of another, the publisher Nick Barley* suggested that we should go on a trip together. He told me that Cedric was keen on Dickens. I suggested the Thames estuary, which I had long associated with various themes – mobility, expendability, non-plan and so on – in the work of Price and some of his contemporaries (and which is featured in both the films already mentioned, partly for this reason). We decided to go to Rochester because of its role in Dickens’s first novel The Pickwick Papers, and only then discovered that Dickens’s chalet is preserved there. It was arranged that Cedric, Nick and I would travel to its present location in the garden of Eastgate House, in Rochester, which is now the Dickens Centre.* Nick was to drive; there was to be no stopping off en route. We would meet at Cedric’s office at ten o’clock in the morning, and be back by half-past-four in the afternoon.

  Dickens’s chalet, Rochester, Kent, 2001

  Alfred Place

  Cedric had been in the office since eight, but had been interrupted by telephone calls. We discussed the pros and cons of various methods of communication. I mentioned that I had recently located a copy of a useful but long out-of-print book in a bookshop only a few minutes’ drive from my home with the aid of the Bookfinder website, which led Cedric to suggest Serious Business, a book of water-colours by J. H. Dowd, a popular artist of the 1930s, as a test of any such facility.1 The cover of this cloth-bound book which, he said, contained images of children and sandy beaches, was a particular shade of green favoured by interior decorators of the 1930s, but neither of us could think of the name of the colour.2 He was about to fetch his watercolours to identify it when Nick arrived, and we set out, in a hired Kia.

  Russell Square

  I was already suggesting we might manage a detour to Chalk, the village between Gravesend and Rochester where the blacksmith’s forge is traditionally the model for that in Great Expectations, when Cedric pointed out a truck, which crossed our path as we approached the square, with a single twenty-foot container on the end of its semi-trailer, as a Foden, and we discussed surviving UK and other truck manufacturers.

  Guilford Street to Clerkenwell

  Back to Chalk, then hulks (the prison ships of Great Expectations), their location in the river, and the difficulty faced by escaping prisoners in getting off the marshes; Cedric suggested the spatial uses characteristic of the estuary were determined by its potential for secrecy and security. We passed the end of Doughty Street, where Dickens lived between 1837 and 1839 at No. 48, now the Dickens House. Seeing a Citroën DS coming the other way, I ventured it was a ‘nice car’ (Alison Smithson’s book AS in DS having been republished a few weeks earlier), but this led instead, via the colour of the driver’s pullover, which was green, back to Serious Business, and whether (or not) it is becoming increasingly difficult to imply nuance in written language in the way this title did in the 1930s (it seems to have become something of a catchphrase).

  Old Street roundabout

  On the west side of City Road, at its junction with this roundabout (one of the realised fragments of Abercrombie’s 1943 plan for London) is a large building with terracotta facing, of mixed, uncertain use, called Imperial Hall, which we all agreed looks as if it might have been misplaced from Manchester, or perhaps Blackpool, or even North America. I suggested that this might be because in these places buildings are allowed to age, whereas in London they are more likely to be subject to continual, often ineffectual refurbishment. In Commercial Street (which fails to confirm this idea), Cedric asked where we were, before recognising the huge redevelopment at Aldgate, circa 1980, as the last built work of the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd.

  Commercial Road, East India Dock Road

  I had recently looked at a film, Houses in the Town, made by the Central Office of Information in 1951, in which Gibberd presents an argument for an urban (as opposed to suburban) quality in new housing development, and which ends with footage of the construction of the Lansbury Estate (the showcase housing project of the Festival of Britain, in Poplar). Gibberd was involved in this, and designed its market square at Chrisp Street, an early example of a pedestrian shopping centre, which we passed a few minutes later. Cedric mentioned Gibberd’s book The Architecture of England from Norman Times to the Present Day, published by the Architectural Press in 1938. ‘I liked him,’ he said, adding that Gibberd had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s (one might not imagine this from the film, in which he appears the epitome of an affable, pipe-smoking bourgeois) and that his contact with Attlee had helped him get the commission for Heathrow Airport.

  Cedric’s first visit to London, he said, was to spend a half-day at the Festival of Britain.3 He had admi
red Basil Spence’s Sea and Ships Pavilion (‘the best thing he ever did’), and recalled the Regatta Restaurant’s door handles, in the shape of human hands.

  The Bridge House, Canning Town

  Beside the A13 flyover, on the north side of the road east of the river Lea, this was a music venue of the punk era. Either it’s been demolished, or we missed it. I thought, wrongly, that Charlie Kray had once been its landlord. Kray’s twin brothers owned Cedric’s first office, above corset-makers Sylphide, at 86 George Street, W1. One day they visited, in a big black car with a couple of minders to block the stairs, to suggest he might like to have a look at other premises in Great Portland Street (all this seemingly something to do with Joan Littlewood). Charlie Kray later showed him round this office, which was (much) later occupied by Peter Murray’s company Wordsearch, the original publisher of the magazine Blueprint.

  The Northern Outfall Sewer crosses the A13, overlooked by the ski slope known as the Beckton Alp; East Ham, Barking, Dagenham

  More talk of secrecy and security: the military, prisons, danger, explosives, criminals; Purfleet – the Admiralty’s powder store in the eighteenth century, where Benjamin Franklin’s experimental lightning rods were installed during the controversy between Franklin and Benjamin Wilson over the correct design of lightning conductors. Franklin believed that lightning rods should be tall with pointed ends, Wilson (a successful portraitist of the period) that they should be short with ball ends. There was a theatrical demonstration at the Pantheon, then recently built, in Oxford Street (now the site of Marks and Spencer), gutted by a fire in January 1792, the aftermath of which was a watercolour subject for the sixteen-year-old J. M. W. Turner.

  There was a very large stack of containers to the north of the road. As a product of the architectural culture of the late 1960s, I still consider these a photo-opportunity, but Cedric seems to have moved on, or was, perhaps, never that interested in their appearance.4

  Lakeside, Thurrock

  In the 1970s, a Mr English, the Essex environmental officer, commissioned Cedric Price Architects to suggest planning proposals for the chalk quarry at Thurrock, later the site of the Lakeside Shopping Centre.

  The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, Dartford; Stone

  Joining the M25, we crossed the bridge, remarking how oddly unremarked on it is, for such a large and geographically significant structure. As we approached the centre of the span, a Chinook twin-rotor military helicopter passed above from east to west.

  Travellers descending the bridge are faced by a view of a strange, cliff-like brick building suggestive of a nineteenth-century workhouse, or a prison, which turns out to be the Dartford Bridge Hilton (rooms from £99.00 per night, midweek). Wishing to consult the map, we followed a brown sign for a picnic location, took a wrong road, turned in the entrance to the Davanden Boarding Kennels (tel. 01322 222192), and a minute or so later reached a viewpoint looking north across the river, near the village of Stone, Kent (Cedric was born in Stone, Staffordshire). On the top of a wooden pole was a steel basket, which I took to be one of the nationwide chain of beacons erected in 1988 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Both Cedric and Nick seemed incredulous, as it was not even at the highest point of the surrounding landscape, but we were not far from the fort at Tilbury, where Queen Elizabeth I reviewed the army raised to resist the Armada, and where there would probably be another beacon. Cedric, still unconvinced, pointed out that the fleet was then kept at Two Tree Island, between Canvey and Leigh-on-Sea, some distance downriver. Two Tree Island, formerly an Essex County Council landfill site with a large population of Brent Geese, now a nature reserve, had been the site of another Cedric Price Architects project, for a marina in 1972, successfully opposed, at a public enquiry, by the defenders of the geese – hence the nature reserve. I took some photographs, and we left at about 11.30. There was a man in a red Ford Escort van who may have been dead, or merely asleep, and strands of police tape fluttered at the entrance to this touristic location.

  Stone, Swanscombe, Northfleet

  At the end of the road we had rejoined we found the A226, the old coach road from London to Dover. At the junction is Stone House, a Victorian asylum still in use as a psychiatric hospital, unlike many others visible from the M25 as it circles London. We turned left, and entered the landscape of the former chalk quarries of north Kent, passing a landfill gas burner in a field to the south of the road. At Stone, Cedric pointed out the McDonald’s (job vacancies) as a former coaching inn. We continued east, up a hill to the south of which is the huge hole in which is Bluewater, the last out-of-town shopping mall of its era in the UK, built by the Australian developer Lend Lease. We passed flowers placed by the roadside (it is undoubtedly a dangerous road), long walls made of flints, and developers’ signs for new housing.5 At the top of the hill was another coaching inn, a view of a characteristically square-topped north Kent church and, further on, the gigantic cement works at Northfleet, with which Cedric’s friend, the late David Allford, who became a partner at the architects Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, had been involved.

  Gravesend

  We pulled off the road into a street called Khartoum Place, and I read out a passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, including the following:

  We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine – what d’ye call ’em? – trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north … Imagine him here – the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina – and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore.6

  Returning to the road, we passed soldiers in a backstreet, then drove on past Chalk, Dickens’s house at Gad’s Hill, a bridge over the dual carriageway that leads to the Isle of Grain (the location of, among other things, the fully automated container port Thamesport), and descended to Strood, Rochester Bridge, and the former city. According to Cedric, the appearance of Rochester Castle, which faced us across the river as we came down the hill (‘glorious pile – frowning walls – tottering arches – dark nooks – crumbling staircases’7) is partly a result of a twelfth-century bishop’s melting the lead on the roof, to pour on surrounding attackers.

  Before we set out, Cedric had given us photocopied pages (sent by his brother) from J. M. Richards’s compression of Nathaniel Lloyd’s History of the English House, in which is written, beneath a photograph of the keep of Rochester Castle:

  Although the introduction of stone for regular building purposes by the Normans begins the period when examples of domestic architecture survive, these examples are by no means typical dwellings of the people. Stone was introduced for purposes of fortification. The political organisation of the time demanded a secure nucleus round which each local feudal unit could gather itself; and the typical surviving Norman building, excluding ecclesiastical buildings, is therefore the castle, which combined the functions of a dwelling-place for a lord and his retainers with that of a fortress. For many years following the Conquest it had to be strong enough to resist attacks by any rebellion of the Saxons. The peasant’s dwelling meanwhile remained the primitive hut of wattle and daub or rough timber with thatched roof.

  This traditional English scenario contrasts with that of the surprisingly unfortified Roman villa, suggesting that, despite Conrad’s worries, the class relations of the Roman occupation were, in the end, more peaceable than those of later periods.

  Rochester

  From the car park we had thought nearest, we walked along the High Street in the direction of Eastgate House, the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims, passing an unrivalled succession of historic buildings, not much altered since the eighteenth century. The Watts Charity Hospital dates from 1579, but is re-fr
onted. There is a plaque, which we read, which states that the house is the foundation of Richard Watts (d.1599), and that he left funds for the relief of ‘six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors’ (proctor: ‘person managing causes in court that administers civil or canon law’).

  Further along, there is a shop that sells souvenir and otherwise collectable china, in the window of which were displayed (as there were when I had last stood there in 1990, and probably will be for many years to come) a selection of plates bearing images of historic military aircraft, and four which together made up a seascape depicting a flotilla of small boats leaving Dover for Dunkirk in 1940, in which Cedric immediately recognised a Vosper-Thorneycroft air-sea rescue launch. Also in this window were various items of crockery of the green colour that we had been unable to name. I said that I once owned a teapot of this colour, one of the Woods Ware range ‘Beryl’ – at which Cedric revealed that his mother’s maiden name was Woods, of this pottery manufacturing family. He recalled the Crown Hotel, in Stone, where Stalin’s successor Malenkov spent his first night outside the Soviet Union. The hotel is in the High Street, where the painter Peter de Wint was born above the butcher’s. Cedric’s father, an architect, designed the Blackpool Odeon, and another in Hanley, when working for the practice of Harry Weedon. His brother David Price, who had supplied us with a quantity of information about Rochester, is also an architect. Like Sherlock Holmes, Cedric has a brother.