The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  I had wondered whether the increasing scope and availability of new technology, especially mobile communications technology, would make any difference to the apparently marginal character of much everyday experience, especially urban experience. For much of the twentieth century, artists, writers and revolutionaries had attempted to deal with this and similar predicaments by employing more or less explicit strategies to poeticise or otherwise transform experience of everyday surroundings. The Surrealists and their followers were probably the leading exponents of this, and the Surrealist encounter with everyday experience generally involved the cultivation of subjectivities that revealed previously unappreciated value and meanings in ordinary things. The found object, being portable, is the most familiar result of this revelatory process, but the Surrealists also discovered examples of found architecture and found space. Photography, in the most general way, has also offered similar transformations since its invention. In life, this kind of experiential change, which sometimes involves a heightened awareness of events and appearances not unlike that produced by certain drugs, is (in the absence of continuous revolution) generally ephemeral; but in art, literature, cinema and so on, such glimpses, conventionally experienced in isolation, or perhaps with another or others to whom one is very close, can be reconstituted and shared with a suitably receptive viewer, reader or audience. Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ offers an early prototype for this kind of modernist flâneur text, and was written at about the time when the modern paradox of visibility and isolation – the convention of silence in public between strangers – was beginning to dominate in cities such as Paris and London.

  In the early 1990s, it had seemed to me that the growth of virtual space, and the migration into it of all kinds of economic activity, would speed the decline of some kinds of actual, public space. The closing of bank premises was sometimes referred to as an example of this trend, banking activities being increasingly conducted via cash machines, and by post or telephone. With only slight exaggeration, one could imagine that in some kinds of public space – the less frequented streets of the City of London, say – the sense of their being conventionally public places had all but disappeared, there being so few people about outdoors; while indoors, people were more likely to be peering into the virtual space of their computer screens than looking out of the window. These exterior spaces seemed to be developing something of the feel of other kinds of space that, while not inaccessible, are largely hidden from view – the space behind a television, perhaps, or on top of a wardrobe. In the rural landscape, too, there was a similar quality. With a bit of effort, one could imagine that parts of it were as unexperienced as if they were merely access space for the maintenance engineers of mobile telephone networks.

  By the mid 1990s however, it appeared that this new aridity, while it undoubtedly existed, was not all that widespread. I had noticed that our local high street, for example, despite its increasing dilapidation, was a site of still-flourishing economic activity and increasingly visible global connectedness. The newsagent’s window displayed cards offering cut-price telephone deals to many distant territories. Other shops offered cheap flights, both to emigrant and tourist destinations. New ‘ethnic’ restaurants and shops were opening all the time, most recently (then) a Russian delicatessen. It also turned out to be the locale of an internationally successful pop group. In many ways, this local, physically decaying space was more pervasively and successfully global than the average airport, and certainly much more so than the nearby business park, built on what was previously the site of a car factory, and owned by the property development subsidiary of British Aerospace, which I had been previously inclined to read as a typical spatial outcome of the contemporary economy, and was certainly characterised by the aridity previously identified, despite its electric fountains.

  Perhaps the condition of the local was beginning to evolve in a different, more positive way. Perhaps we were on the verge of a new, electronic flânerie, in which experience of place was enhanced by the possibility of immediate connection, via the virtual realm, to people, both friends and strangers, in other places. Perhaps the era of visibility and isolation, of silence between strangers in public, was coming to an end. Perhaps these new predicaments would give rise to a kind of radical subjectivity, which might even be less ephemeral than those of the Surrealists, the Situationists or their latterday adherents, and would somehow install itself in the street, transcending its marginality and dilapidation. For some reason, I first encountered these thoughts while riding a bicycle. For a week or so afterwards, I experienced a mild e-euphoria, a quasi-surrealist frisson, though when I finally got round to signing up with Demon (then a leading provider), this soon disappeared. A few years later, however, many of the former banks that briefly exemplified the evacuation of economic activity from the high street have reopened as bars,1 and in most of them there are people talking on mobile phones. A kind of electronic flânerie has arrived, though, as with so many predicted phenomena, not in quite the way it was anticipated.

  One of the internet’s most intriguing capabilities, for a topographical film-maker, was that it offered contemporaneous views of distant landscapes. During 1996, I had heard that there were websites where one could access the cameras that observe traffic on UK motorways, and immediately conceived a strong desire to explore, and perhaps to sample, what I imagined would be a large and increasing number of real-time moving images of landscapes throughout the world. I wondered if perhaps, one day, I might be able to make a film without having to leave the house. In fact, at the time, there seemed to be hardly any real-time outdoor web cameras operating anywhere in the world – most of the topographical camera sites only offered a still, updated daily or perhaps hourly, or not at all – but somehow the scarcity of this imagery, its poor resolution, and the way that the images trickled, very slowly, into the monochrome screen of my already obsolete PowerBook made it all the more attractive. In the house in which we then lived, the telephone socket was in the kitchen, and I used to let the pictures load while I was doing the washing up. I never found any views of UK motorways.

  The first site I came across that offered anything approaching real-time moving pictures was that of a company called Actual Size Internet Solutions, who had a camera in a first-floor office overlooking Trinity Square, Colchester, in Essex. This showed a fresh still every two or three seconds, and was particularly impressive at night, when occasional figures passing along the pavement suggested an Essex noir. The site became briefly newsworthy when it was revealed that the Neuhoff family, formerly of New Mexico, had moved to Colchester as a result of having seen it, attracted by the apparent absence of crime. They were not, they said, disappointed by the reality of the town, despite its garrison of 4,000 soldiers, and streets patrolled by military police.

  Another early favourite was a camera at Mawson Station, an Australian research base in Antarctica. To begin with, this was a single image of the station, updated every hour. If it was dark, as it often was, the screen was black. If it was daylight, with a blizzard, it was white or grey. At other times, there was a view of huts, sometimes illuminated. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I suspect that part of the attraction of this view was the ease with which one could misconstrue it as a window looking into another time. Mawson Station is named after Sir Douglas Mawson, whose Australasian Antarctic Expedition was undertaken in the years 1911–14, and the rudimentary monochrome images were not unlike those of polar explorations of the period. They also evoked the décor of the Howard Hawks-produced film The Thing from Another World (1951).

  The name of Mawson was familiar as that of the designer of Stanley Park, in Blackpool, who quoted the remark of an unidentified Lancashire businessman: ‘Blackpool stands between us and revolution’.2 Stanley Park in Blackpool is named after a member of the family of the Earls of Derby, other members of which have given their name to Stanley Park in Liverpool and Stanley Park in Vancouver (and Port Stanley in the Falkla
nd Islands, which is not so far from Antarctica). I had visited the latter Stanley Park in 1994, in Vancouver for the film festival, and been fascinated by the view from its beach of English Bay, where there are nearly always twelve ships lying at anchor, waiting to enter the port. It is said that if there are fewer than twelve ships in English Bay, people in Vancouver worry. Searching for an image of the bay and its ships I encountered, instead, recorded sounds: one of the park’s Nine O’Clock Gun, another of a floatplane taking off from the harbour, like one I had photographed when I was there. There were a number of other sites on the Pacific coast – a view, from a first-floor window, of the car park of a scientific institution in Alaska; a view of the sea transmitted by a Santa Cruz fogcam, and a baycam in San Diego, which first offered an image of the bay, then another of the airport – all of which recalled the eeriness of a few jet-lagged days in autumn three years earlier. Once again, more or less contemporaneous views of distant places seemed to bring with them the suggestion that it was possible to see across time. One night, just after midnight, I came across Camera 58 of the Freeway Management System of the Arizona Department of Transportation, with an image of Phoenix that was presumably the most Hitchcockian of these metaphysical spaces, but when I tried to revisit the site a few days later, I couldn’t find it.

  As the months passed, websites generally grew bigger and more cumbersome, the PowerBook became more and more ill suited to these plongeur excursions, and I abandoned the habit. A few months later we moved house, and shortly afterwards bought an iMac. The telephone point was no longer in the kitchen, the images were colour and much faster-loading, and the dish-watery, time-suspended ambience of the previous situation was lost. In any case, when I attempted to revisit them, some of the sites had gone, while others had become more extensive and hence, often, less mysterious.

  By this time, I had begun work on a film about the present-day predicament of the house. This had been under development for some time, and had arisen as a kind of pendant to its predecessor,3 which had, for reasons I could never quite fathom, largely avoided domestic space. While photographing it, however, my colleague and I had been faced, nearly every night, with the vexed question of where to stay. One night, after a particularly bad experience, we found ourselves in one of a rapidly growing chain of what were, in effect, motels, which had opened during the previous week.4 We were, the receptionist told us, the first people ever to occupy our rooms. These were large, well furnished and equipped, warm and comfortable, with a decor which, while not entirely sympathetic, was a great deal less disconcerting than that of most of the other places we had stayed in. Before going to sleep, I turned on the television, on which there appeared an image of some young people playing music, one of them, seen in close-up, on a Fender Stratocaster. Musing on the beauty of this instrument, which I had long considered a key twentieth-century artefact, I came to the conclusion that an economy that offers an adolescent the opportunity to own such a guitar, and hence the life-changing possibility of becoming a half-decent imitator of Jimi Hendrix, for less than a couple of hundred pounds (my possibly low estimate of the then-current price of a mass-produced Stratocaster), and that could produce, in the UK, a brand new hotel bedroom of the quality of the one I was then occupying, capable of accommodating a family of five (as we later proved, returning from a day trip to Blackpool) for only £34.50 per night, could not be entirely bad. With this epiphany began a flirtation with consumerism which lasted for a couple of years. What would happen, I thought, if the capabilities of globalised, automated production and distribution, which were held to have made possible what people then sometimes referred to as the consumer revolution, could be applied to the production of domestic space, to housing?

  A couple of years later, the Tories had been swept from office, and the nation was led by a man who not only owns, but apparently plays, a Fender Stratocaster. A few weeks after our night in Wigan, we had stayed in a Forte Travelodge – the rival brand – in the future prime minister’s Sedgefield constituency, and discovered a metal plaque which recorded that, earlier in the year, he had officiated at its opening. In the following year, Forte were taken over by Granada, whose chief executive, Gerry Robinson, subsequently appointed by the incoming government as chairman of the Arts Council of England, had stated that Forte’s brands were ‘under-priced’. As a result, perhaps, of Robinson’s intervention, the UK’s two rival motel chains no longer offer the emancipatory, bargain-price mobility they did in 1995, and can now be perceived as, sadly, just another aspect of rip-off Britain.

  The idea that new technology might be about to have some impact on housing, which had occurred to me, had also occurred to others. In the spring of 1996, the architectural press reported a number of initiatives by architects and others which set out to encourage reform of the UK’s unloved house-building industry, with references to post-war prefabs, Japanese factory-built houses, car production, and other industrial technologies. It was not difficult to detect the expectation that such projects might flourish under an incoming Labour government. In other parts of the world, notably Japan and North America, computer-aided manufacturing techniques had already been employed, in a variety of ways, in the production of housing. It seemed merely a matter of time before some global corporate initiative began to shake up, buy up or eliminate the UK’s house-building industry, either with or without such new technology, in an echo of what had happened to the UK-owned car industry in the early 1970s. There were a number of more or less likely suspects. These included Toyota, by no means the biggest producer of factory-built houses in Japan, but a familiar name; Hutchison Whampoa, who own the port of Felixstowe and had co-founded the Orange mobile phone network, and were already involved with various developments of luxury apartments in central London; Lend Lease, the Australian developer who subsequently realised Bluewater, the last UK shopping mall of its era in the UK, and were planning large new housing developments in its vicinity; and IKEA, who were reported, wrongly, to be developing ‘flat-pack’ houses to sell for £7,500.

  At the same time, travelling up and down the A40, Western Avenue, in London, I had been struck by the dilapidation of many of its 1930s houses. I read a study, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which had drawn attention to the very low rate at which dwellings were being replaced in the UK (implying a future lifespan for the average house of several thousand years) and had detailed the extraordinary inadequacies of the industries that maintain, repair and ‘improve’ existing owner-occupied dwellings. What, I began to wonder, will become of the millions of ageing dwellings in the UK, if they can be neither replaced nor adequately maintained? I finished the Robinson film, and returned to a house full of half-unpacked cardboard boxes and piles of film cans, overcrowded, poorly decorated and furnished, my lover and our children the victims of a neglect of actual space that frequently afflicts people who give too much of their attention to a quality of space found only in films.

  Having briefly reconsidered it, as at similar moments during the preceding decades, we set aside the idea of building a house of the future to live in (too slow, too psychologically risky: as Nietzsche remarks, ‘a truly modern person who wants to build a house has the feeling that he is entombing himself in a mausoleum’). Instead, I imagined a project in which the production of a film might include the realisation of a ‘concept’ house, designed (as a film set, avoiding the need to secure planning permission and the various other traumas that accompany house-building in real life) either by me or, more likely, an established avant-garde architect. If we could find somewhere to put this, which seemed extremely unlikely, we might subsequently acquire it as a by-product of the production, but would move, in the meantime, to a more generous ready-to-wear dwelling, new or second-hand.

  Several years later, we live in a more spacious house, built in 1902, in which I spend most of my waking life working in a room on the first floor overlooking the back garden. This backs on to the gardens of some houses in a neighbouring street, a few doors a
long from which live a couple who came round once to ask if we knew who owns the overgrown wilderness which backs onto their garden, which is the fenced-off gardens of a pair of large dilapidated houses, formerly a ‘hotel’, owned by one of the neighbourhood’s more notorious and insolent slum landlords – one of several who have, in recent years, rapidly expanded their unrestrained, super-profitable exploitation of the public sector’s inability to cope with its responsibilities towards the increasing number of people in the city who find themselves in desperate housing circumstances. Before explaining this, I felt it necessary to say that, if they had seen me looking out of the window through binoculars in the direction of their house, I had been looking, not at them, but at the birds in our garden, in which we are extremely interested, and which have from time to time included goldcrests, blackcaps, goldfinches, long-tailed tits and, unhappily, a sparrow-hawk. They said that they too sometimes watched the birds through binoculars, and he left his card, illustrated with an image of a pen and a bottle of ink, from which I inferred he was a writer. About eighteen months later, I came across a large pile of books in Tesco, in the high street, in which were several copies of his latest 601-page novel, published by Hodder, two for £5.99. Opposite Tesco are the corner-shop premises of an even more aggressive private landlord. The floor level behind the counter is raised, and cars are parked in the narrow space between the pavement and the shop windows, as if those inside were expecting ram-raiders.

  All I have to show for the last couple of years are a collection of essays like this one, and a television documentary5 which is, so far, the only realised fragment of the previously imagined project. Five years after embarking on this, after a second UK election during which housing was scarcely mentioned, there are few signs that any combination of computers, globalised production and consumer pressure is likely to lead to better, cheaper housing. New technology appears to stimulate demand, but does very little to improve supply – as in San Francisco, for example, where the rapid growth of the e-economy was accompanied by a house-price boom. The subsequent bursting of this bubble presumably had the opposite result, so that the overall effect may not only be to inflate prices, but also to increase market turbulence. Meanwhile, the moment of consumerism that inspired my project and its contemporaries seems to have passed. Instead of the housing market becoming more like a consumer market, some consumer markets have become more like the housing market, as manufacturers (of toys, for instance, or computer games) and others have remembered how to manipulate scarcity.