The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  The Swiss Chalet

  Vivienne Lower, senior custodian of the Dickens Centre, showed us the Chalet. She ascended the external stair, followed by Cedric, and unlocked the door to the upper room, which was a little difficult to open, the weather having been very wet. The building’s exterior is, or at least appears, very recently painted, practically as new, but the interior is beautifully aged in surface and odour, and surprisingly dry. The smell was that of sun-warmed, tongue-and-groove pine interiors not often opened to the outside air – summer houses, boat sheds and so on. The furniture more or less matches, but is not original. I photographed the stand-in for Dickens’s waste-paper basket, and made some attempts at portraiture.

  The room is about four metres square and, I guessed, perhaps three high. We discussed the mirrors. Cedric asserted the superiority, at least in this context, of virtual space over actual space, but I was trying to frame a picture without appearing in it in a mirror, and missed the rest of this. He had recently addressed a conference on virtual reality, in Berlin. We agreed that Dickens would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of actual views through the windows and virtual views in the mirrors, perhaps more than being merely surrounded by windows.

  There is an essay by Eisenstein setting out the similarities between Dickens’s narratives and the forms of early Soviet cinema. Eisenstein, it seems, regarded Dickens as the pioneer of montage.8 I had never followed up this aspect of Dickens, who was, with a number of other English-language writers (such as Oscar Wilde and Laurence Sterne) sometimes misunderstood in England, big in (revolutionary) Russia. While I knew of Sterne’s influence on the Russian Formalists, I had never previously read The Pickwick Papers but, having discovered Cedric’s enthusiasm for it, by the day of our journey had reached Chapter 8. Like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, it is much influenced by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and in Chapter 50 of Pickwick, Dickens has Sam Weller allude to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

  I had not realised how close Pickwick is to the eighteenth century, both in its date and in the innovative structures of its narrative. It was Dickens’s first novel, set in 1827 and written and published, as a commissioned serial, in 1836–37, when he was only twenty-four. It was, on the other hand, the product of a nineteenth-century technological revolution, that of mass-produced, cheap paper, and was a runaway commercial success – so much so that, within the period of its serialisation, Pickwick soaps and Weller corduroys were on sale, and portraits of ‘Boz’ appeared on London omnibuses.

  Cedric, on the other hand, had not read much Sterne, and we were retracing Pickwick’s exploration of a period which, while pre-Victorian, is long past the beginning of the nineteenth century. The slightly later period, when Dickens was writing, is that of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel (his son Isambard narrowly survived an accident working on this in 1827); the first railways (Euston Station opened in 1836); mains gas for cooking and lighting (the Bankside Gas Works was built in 1815); the first suburban cemeteries (Kensal Green opened in 1833); and the first mass-media. Amid this modernity, London’s population, just under a million in 1800, had reached 1.8 million in 1840, and the city was still much smaller than what might be conventionally termed ‘Victorian’ London.

  Nick compared the chalet’s lightness to the traditional gloom of the Victorian domestic interior. Cedric pointed out that sunlight was, at the time, a recognised cure for killer illnesses (Dickens was already in poor health when he received the chalet); the Victorians’ love of views, and the romance of strange sights and strange places. Dickens visited Switzerland in 1844 and 1846, and by 1865, Davos, with its landscape of chalets, was established as a cure for tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases (in 1881 Robert Louis Stevenson would visit, and in 1893 Louisa Conan Doyle). Cedric compared the chalet with Queen Victoria’s summer house at Frogmore. Even in the twentieth century, he added, TB was still a killer in Britain: two of his uncles died of the disease. (His Uncle Charles, who designed furniture for Heal’s, sending money home to his family, died in the YMCA, in Great Russell Street.)

  After Dickens’s death, the chalet was dismantled by Mr J. Couchman, a Strood master builder, who had originally erected it, and re-erected at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, before being moved, again by Mr Couchman, to the grounds of Cobham Hall, as a gift to Lord Darnley from the Dickens family. By 1961 it was deteriorating, and was rescued by the Dickens Fellowship, who presented it to the (Rochester) City Council.

  We left Eastgate House and walked back along the High Street towards the bridge, which replaces that on which Mr Pickwick stood looking at the view when invited to consider whether ‘drowning would be happiness and peace’. I asked Cedric how the virtual reality conference in Berlin had gone (it had gone very well). We passed the Corn Exchange, where the clock was donated, in 1706, by Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who I knew only from the sign of a public house in Liverpool Road, Islington, near Cloudesley Square, but who was, it states beneath the clock, MP for Rochester in three parliaments in the reign of William III, and in another in that of Queen Anne. Nick suggested, rather suddenly, that the clock was a phallic symbol. Cedric recalled an account of Shovel’s death at the hands of a woman who murdered him for his ring, but said he didn’t know Liverpool Road, and that there were many parts of London which he had never been to. We approached the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, which is the original of the Bull Inn in The Pickwick Papers.

  The Bull Inn

  Beneath the archway, to the right, there was an Italian restaurant, which we passed up. We tried the hotel entrance to the left and, finding it unattended, continued to the bar, which was empty of customers but staffed by two sympathetic young women. A bottle of wine not being available, we bought, in unconscious homage to Pickwick, one hot brandy-and-water and two half-pints of Guinness (porter), sat down at a table by the window, and ordered what were arguably sandwiches.9 While the others were looking at the menu, I read the notices displayed in the street door lobby:

  Rochester Pub Watch WARNING

  If you commit any offence you will be immediately barred from all licenced premises in the area.

  Proof of age may be required.

  Pickwick notes, of Rochester:

  The streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military … It was but the day before my arrival, that one of them had been most grossly insulted in the house of a publican. The bar-maid had positively refused to draw him any more liquor; in return for which, he had (merely in playfulness) drawn his bayonet, and wounded the girl in the shoulder. And yet this fine fellow was the very first to go down to the house next morning, and express his readiness to overlook the matter, and forget what had occurred!10

  Cedric was trying to remember the name of a coaching inn in London, which he thought appeared in Pickwick, in which the cellars, later in the nineteenth century, could accommodate 2,000 horses. I had recently learnt (from a radio discussion about biodiesel) that before the petrol engine, about 26 per cent of agricultural land was devoted to growing food for horses. Was the inn called the Star? It was destroyed early on in the Blitz. His mother had owned a car called a Star before the war, built in Solihull. They lived at Studland, in Dorset, in Agglestone Road. His father was in the marines, having been in the Navy in the First World War, and was at Scapa Flow.

  We talked about Shovel, about Rochester’s wealth (in Dickens, it is still a bit brash) and about the Georgian Navy, ‘the largest industrial unit of its day in the western world’; of the decline of timber building in Britain, and the shortage of timber caused by the growth in iron-making. The Agamemnon, Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of the Nile, had been the last warship built in the New Forest shipyard at Buckler’s Hard. Cedric referred to a (technological) time lag that sometimes exists between England and mainland Europe, as with, for example, the import of bricks and tiles from Holland. He recalled the Soupçon restaurant in Hastings, built with ship’s timbers recovered, he conjectured, from a ship wrecked on the nearby Goodwin Sands
.

  West Green

  Still in Dorset, I mentioned Patrick Wright’s books on Tyneham and the tank, which I had recently read, and that J. F. C. Fuller, the evangelist of tank warfare, had previously been involved with Aleister Crowley. When at Cambridge, Cedric had borrowed a couple of pages of Crowley’s diary from Tom Driberg, and published it in an article by Nicholas Tomalin in Granta, under the title ‘Favourite Eccentrics’, which led us, via Rabelais’s ‘Do what you will’, to West Green House – built by Henry ‘Hangman’ Hawley (who commanded the cavalry at Culloden) – the former home of Cedric’s friend Alistair, Lord McAlpine.

  An article in the Sunday Times, not long before the 1997 election, described parties at West Green:

  The guests were not just prominent Tories but also artists, dealers, writers and stalwart socialists. One of McAlpine’s closest friends, the architect Cedric Price, has been on the left of the Labour Party since he was 16. He says: ‘I feel I’ve been in an occupied country under the Tories in the last 18 years. But I don’t care about Alistair’s politics – I think he’s a great man.’

  Cedric recalled a Christmas at the house; McAlpine was in Venice, and had lent him the keys. His (Cedric’s) sister came from Shetland dressed as a witch, his brother David as Long John Silver, and David’s wife as a penguin. The witch was later seen begging in the woods. He recalled their childhood home in Staffordshire. Staffordshire, he said, does everything by halves,11 adding, in the context of country houses, via Shugborough and Ingestre Hall in Staffordshire, that Wren built only one country house, Winslow Hall, in Buckinghamshire, not far from Stowe. Wren, he argued, as a scientist, was a more significant figure than Hawksmoor, who was the better architect.

  Bath chaps

  On a visit to Sheffield, Jeremy Till, the head of Sheffield University’s school of architecture, had recommended a visit to Castle Market, a building admired by Cedric who, he said, had gone there to buy Bath chaps, but neither Jeremy nor I knew what a Bath chap was. Castle Market was completed in the early 1960s, designed by the City Architect’s department under Lewis Womersley. It is a unique, multi-levelled interior, its viability now threatened by the mall at Meadowhall. A Bath chap is a kind of fast food: a pig’s cheek, cooked. They can be bought in Bath, and in Castle Market, Sheffield (and perhaps elsewhere), but in Sheffield, they come with the jawbone, including the teeth.

  Cedric once hosted breakfast, at his office, for David Allford, Bryan Henderson (also of YRM) and Alistair McAlpine. McAlpine was to bring Bath chaps, but arrived with grouse, ‘looking like the president of the Maidenhead yacht club’ in someone else’s clothes. He had set fire to West Green cooking the Bath chaps, as is traditional, over candles. The house was gutted.

  The nineteenth century

  I asked Cedric whether, given the choice, he would have preferred to live in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. In the nineteenth century, he said, everything was up for grabs, for invention: custard powder, Carter’s Liver Pills, Beecham’s Powders. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, was the century of slavery, of an old, Classical idea of knowledge, and established reason. He cited Dickens’s admiration for America.

  London

  One of the factors in our choice of destination had been the predicament of the Thames estuary, and of north Kent in particular, as one of the few places (perhaps the only place) in the UK where a new landscape is being created. This involves both the construction of the Channel Tunnel and its rail link, and the related project for the regeneration of the estuary – the Thames Gateway (‘Heseltine’s Valhalla in the east’, Cedric called it, later) – an attempt to balance, or even reverse, the westward drift of London’s prosperity and the pull of Heathrow Airport.12 In the last few decades, however, the UK’s east coast ports have grown much more than those on the west coast, partly as a result of increased trade with Europe, but perhaps more because of their proximity to the world’s largest port, Rotterdam. I asked Cedric if he thought it was possible to reverse centuries of westward drift in London. Without rejecting it, he didn’t seem to accept the generality of westward drift, and suggested instead that the future of London was more likely to be determined by its position on the map of intercontinental air travel. Once again, Cedric referred to the English Channel as a time warp, and to Dutch faience. It was never quite clear, he said, whether the Channel was a thoroughfare, or something to be crossed. On the map of air routes, London was out on a limb. In the long run, Paris might overtake Heathrow, and London face the prospect of decline, just as Liverpool, once the major European north Atlantic port, and a world city, had done before it.

  Blue Bell Hill

  We drove to the M2 junction at Blue Bell Hill, south-east of the town, to see the Channel Tunnel Rail Link under construction. Cedric recalled the project for the Solway Barrage, whose protagonist, Dr Robert Drew, had commissioned his computer centre for the British Transport Docks Board, near Heathrow, in 1967. Cedric had had some involvement with London and Continental Railways, who are responsible for building the link between the tunnel and Ebbsfleet.

  Cross-channel rail traffic is not new. Until quite recently, train ferries still ran between Dover and Dunkirk – 29,000 rail wagons in 1994. In Dover’s Western Docks, where the Dunkirk ferry berthed, there was formerly a bar, The Golden Arrow, named after the passenger service which ran between London and Paris. I asked Cedric if he had ever travelled on the Golden Arrow. In 1953, he said, on his way to Venice: ‘I liked Venice, when I went, but it was very smelly.’ He sold a lot of drawings. ‘My dad had just died, so it was quite a rough time.’

  As we drove back to London, he remarked on the extent of countryside he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t drive. When we reached Blackheath, where his brother lives, and where Tom Driberg lived at the Paragon, there was a Chinook, perhaps the same one we’d seen earlier, following the river.

  In Rotherhithe, I said I’d only recently learnt that Marc Brunel was French, and that, in Plymouth for the car ferry, I had seen the Saltash railway bridge, for the first time. We all admired this bridge, completed in 1859. Cedric asked what sort of car ferry leaves from Plymouth. He doesn’t spend much time in France, he said, but was interested in Portugal.

  Crossing Tower Bridge, we saw Norman Foster’s Greater London Assembly building, under construction, overlooking the river. ‘It’s not very big, is it?’ I said. Cedric had recently been having a look round ‘with Paul Finch, and his instant camera’, when Max Neal, Foster’s project architect, who used to work in Cedric’s office, had spotted them. He would have laid something on, he said, if he’d known they were coming. Cedric thought it was good to have a small building for the GLA. ‘Keep it small, like a cartoon.’ (A small city, he said, not like ‘Heseltine’s Valhalla in the east’.)

  A few minutes later, we passed the Richard Cloudesley School (in Golden Lane), then Ron Herron’s GLC school (at the corner of Gray’s Inn Road and Sidmouth Street, now part of Westminster Kingsway College).* On the opposite side of Sidmouth Street there is, I learnt, an experiment in brick and concrete panel prefabrication, an estate of flats built in the early 1950s. At about five o’clock, the car pulled up near Cedric’s office, and we went our separate ways.

  * The essay was commissioned for and first published in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Re:CP (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), a book of projects and texts by Cedric Price, with an interview by Obrist and other texts by Arata Isozaki and Rem Koolhaas.

  * The Dickens Centre closed in 2004. In 2010, the Rochester and Chatham branch of the Dickens Fellowship and Medway Council launched a £100,000 appeal to restore the chalet.

  * Since demolished.

  9

  The Robinson Institute

  Most of us spend much of our time in spaces made and previously occupied by other people, usually people of the more or less distant past. We might reasonably expect our everyday surroundings to feel haunted but, by and large, they don’t. Haunting is still relatively unusual. We all live, as far as we know, i
n the present, and the present in Nepal, in Tokyo, or on Mars, can sometimes seem nearer than yesterday morning in one’s own kitchen. As it has become easier to move around in and communicate across space, have we, perhaps, become more sensitive to the fact that we are inescapably stranded, shipwrecked almost, in our own present, and are we therefore increasingly attracted to the idea of time travel?

  I can remember, a few years ago, trying to imagine how subjective experience of space might change as a result of one’s connection to the internet. For a long time, it had seemed that the spaces of everyday surroundings – the home, the high street and so on – were becoming more marginal in character, compared with other spaces that might be thought typically modern, or postmodern – the airport, the office tower, the big museum and so on. Local spaces, at least in the UK, then appeared, as they still appear, to be suffering a general decline: in the disempowerment of local government, for example; from physical dilapidation and decay, as trends in the wider economy make small-scale maintenance and repair of ordinary buildings increasingly problematic; and in a variety of other ways. A large proportion of housing, in particular – especially private-sector rented housing – appeared, and still appears, to be in very poor condition.