The View From the Train

by Patrick Keiller

  4 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The False Amphion, or The Stories and Adventures of Baron d’Ormesan’, in The Wandering Jew and Other Stories, transl. Rémy Inglis Hall (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967).

  5 See Bernard Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double’, in Dalibor Vesely, ed., Surrealism and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile 11, Architectural Design 48: 2–3 (1978), pp. 111–16.

  6 Ten Days That Shook the University: Of Student Poverty Considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual and, particularly, intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy (London: BCM/Situationist International, n.d. [1967]), p. 18.

  7 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, transl. with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor (London: Picador, 1980), pp. 128, 130.

  8 Ibid., pp. 131–2.

  9 André Breton, quoted from a radio interview in Simon Watson Taylor’s introduction to his translation of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (London: Picador, 1980), pp. 9-10.

  10 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, transl. Mary Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1987), p. 22.

  11 See Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double’.

  12 Reprinted in One-Way Street, pp. 209–14, 215–22.

  13 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 228; see also ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931), in One-Way Street, pp. 240–57.

  14 Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double’, p. 115.

  15 Documents, 1929, 6, p. 329. Bataille was secrétaire générale of Documents (1929, 1–7; 1930, 1–8), which usually included a section entitled either ‘Chronique’ (1929, 1; 1930, 4), ‘Dictionnaire critique’ (1929, 2), ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire critique’ (1929, 3) or ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire’ (1929, 4–7; 1930, 1, 2, 6, 7), with entries written by Bataille, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and others, many reprinted in Encyclopædia Acephalica, transl. Iain White and others, ed. with an introduction by Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 1995), pp. 29–84.

  16 From ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation’, in Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, ed. and transl. Christopher Gray (London: Free Fall Publications, 1974), pp. 131–51, at p. 138 – a translation of Chapter 23 of Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-faire à l’usage des jeunes générations, known in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life. For a later translation, see p. 184.

  17 Poe, Selected Writings, pp. 138—–57, at p. 138.

  18 Ibid., p. 143.

  19 Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, ‘The Double Room’, pp. 5–7, at p. 6.

  20 Vaneigem, ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation’, in Leaving the Twentieth Century, p. 138.

  21 Lewis Piaget Shanks, Baudelaire: Flesh and Spirit (London: Noel Douglas, 1930), p. 216, describing Paris Spleen.

  22 Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’, ‘Dictionnaire critique’, Documents No. 2, May 1929, p. 117.

  2. Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape

  1 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, abridged, ed. and with an introduction by Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 395.

  2 Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, pp. 491–3.

  3 Thomas De Quincey, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the revised version of 1856 (London: Folio Society, 1963), p. 90.

  4 Ibid., p. 73.

  5 Edgar Allan Poe, The Domain of Arnheim, in Selected Tales (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 382–98, at pp. 386–7.

  3. Port Statistics

  1 Nations for Sale, a study of Britain’s overseas image, was written by Anneke Elwes in 1994, for the international advertising network DDB Needham. Patrick Wright reported (‘Wrapped in tatters of the flag’, Guardian, 31 December 1994) that she found Britain ‘a dated concept’ difficult ‘to reconcile with reality’.

  2 The statement is part of Lord Henry Wotton’s monologue to Dorian on their first meeting; see Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Complete Works, general ed. J. B. Foreman (London: Collins, 1984), p. 32.

  3 From ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation’, p. 138.

  4 See Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 359.

  5 Port Statistics (HMSO, London) is compiled annually by the Department of Transport. Most of the figures in this essay are for 1994, from the edition published in August 1995.

  6 The UK’s total port traffic in 1994 was 538 million tonnes. The ten major world ports in 1994 were: Rotterdam, 294 million tonnes; Singapore, 224 million freight tons; Shanghai, 166 million tonnes; Hong Kong, 111 million tonnes; Nagoya, 120 million freight tons; Antwerp, 110 million tonnes; Yokohama, 103 million freight tons; Marseille, 91 million tonnes; Long Beach, 88 million tonnes; and Busan, 82 million tonnes. Among major ports in the EU in 1994 were: Rotterdam, Antwerp, Marseille; Hamburg, 68 million tonnes; Le Havre, 54 million tonnes; London, 52 million tonnes; Amsterdam, 48 million tonnes; Genoa, 43 million tonnes; Dunkirk, 37 million tonnes; Zeebrugge, 33 million tonnes; and Bremen, 31 million tonnes.

  7 Tony Lane, conversation with the author, April 1996.

  8 As reported in the Independent, 21 January 1996.

  9 The Scott inquiry investigated UK arms sales to Iraq during the Iran–Iraq war and thereafter. Its public hearings, between May 1993 and June 1994, were a continuing source of revelations about the conduct of ministers and officials of the Thatcher government. Its report was published in February 1996.

  10 Sarah Hogg and Jonathan Hill, Too Close to Call: Power and Politics, John Major in No. 10 (London: Little Brown, 1995), p. 125.

  11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: OUP, 1990), p. 36.

  12 See Arthur Oswald, ‘Country Homes and Gardens Old and New: West Green House, Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, the Seat of Evelyn, Duchess of Wellington’, Country Life, 21 November 1936, pp. 540–5.

  13 See for example the Independent, 12 May 1996.

  4. The Dilapidated Dwelling

  1 Office for National Statistics, reported in the Guardian, 7 October 1997. The figure was for unpaid work valued at the same rate as average paid employment.

  2 ONS, reported in the Guardian, 7 October 1997.

  3 Michael Ball, Housing and Construction: A Troubled Relationship? (Bristol: Policy Press, 1996), p. 1.

  4 Philip Leather and Tanya Morrison, The State of UK Housing (Bristol: Policy Press, 1997), p. 21.

  5 Central Statistical Office, Regional Trends, 1995 edition (London: HMSO), p. 94.

  6 Ball, Housing and Construction, p. 7.

  7 Ibid., p. 47.

  8 Ibid., p. 8.

  9 Florian Rötzer, ‘Space and Virtuality: Some Observations on Architecture’, in Bernd Meurer, ed., The Future of Space (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1994), pp. 205–19, at pp. 205–6, 216–17.

  10 Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 145–61, at p. 145.

  11 Saskia Sassen, ‘Economy and Culture in the Global City’, in Meurer, Future of Space, pp. 71–89, at p. 74.

  12 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 312.

  13 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xvii.

  14 Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 160.

  15 Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 311.

  16 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, pp. xi–xii, xx, xxiii–iv.

  17 André Breton, quoted from a radio interview in Simon Watson Taylor’s introduction to his translation of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (London: Picador, 1980), p. 10.

  5. Popular Science

  1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, introductions by Holbr
ook Jackson and William H. Gass (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), p. 47.

  2 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, transl. Cloudesley Brereton, Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), reprinted in Comedy, ed. with an introduction by Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 59–190, at pp. 157–8.

  3 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 368–78, at pp. 368–9.

  4 Michal Bregant, ‘Poems in Light and Darkness: The Films and Non-Films of the Czech Avant-Garde’, Umění XLIII: 1–2 (1995), pp. 52–5.

  5 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, pp. xi, xxiii–xxiv. The quotation is from Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos, transl. Eric Mosbacher (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), p. 126.

  6. Architectural Cinematography

  1 The Production of Space, transl. and ed. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 189–90.

  2 Reprinted in Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978), pp. 28–31.

  3 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, transl. with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), pp. 113–15.

  4 Reprinted in Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov, transl. and ed. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 51–2.

  5 See, for instance, Eric de Maré, Photography (London: Penguin, 1968) and Architectural Photography (London: Batsford, 1975); Margaret S. Livingstone, ‘Art, Illusion and the Visual System’, Scientific American 258: 1 (January 1988), pp. 78–85.

  6 The End (1986), Valtos (1987) and The Clouds (1989), the first two independently produced with support from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the third for the British Film Institute.

  7 See, for instance, de Maré, Architectural Photography.

  8 The 35mm film frame was initially standardised with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (the ratio of many of Turner’s best-known works, often 48″ × 36″) and then, for sound, in ‘Academy’ ratio – 1.37:1. With the advent of television, also 1.33:1, wider ratios were introduced in cinema. These were initially achieved using anamorphic lenses which ‘stretched’ the 4×3 frame laterally. More recently, however, widescreen films have been made increasingly with conventional lenses, the frame masked to achieve the wider ratios, typically 1.66:1 or 1.85:1. A large proportion of the frame is not used, and the image has to be magnified more in projection. To avoid this, and to enable the cinema, television and video versions of the film to be the same, the older Academy ratio was used. Also, as all the prints were made from the original camera negative, the picture was unusually sharp.

  9 The film documents IRA bomb damage, the general election, the problems of the royal family, the ERM crisis and the parliamentary debates about the Maastricht Treaty, and two big demonstrations that followed the government’s announcement of pit closures.

  10 Larry Sider, also known for his work with Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, and the Brothers Quay.

  11 Robinson in Space (1997) and The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000).

  7. London in the Early 1990s

  1 Alexander Herzen, Ends and Beginnings, transl. Constance Garnett (Oxford: OUP, 1985), p. 431.

  2 See Cecily Mackworth, English Interludes: Mallarmé, Verlaine, Paul Valéry, Valéry Larbaud in England, 1860–1912 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

  3 The story of Apollinaire’s affair and his visits to London is told in John Adlard, One Evening of Light Mist in London (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1980), and alluded to in Apollinaire’s L’Emigrant de Landor Road and other poems in Alcools. The Playdens lived at 75 Landor Road. In 1992, an unofficial blue plaque commemorated this. Landor Road is named after the poet Walter Savage Landor, and Landor’s Cottage is a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

  4 Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).

  5 Charles Baudelaire, Journaux intimes: mon coeur mis à nu, XXI (36): ‘Étude de la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile.’

  6 Including, for example, the passage in Paris Spleen, transl. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970), ‘Any Where Out Of The World’, pp. 99–100, at p. 99: ‘Life is a hospital where every patient is obsessed by the desire of changing beds. One would like to suffer opposite the stove, another is sure he would get well beside the window. It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.’

  7 This might be confirmed by this sequence’s being the only part of the film with anything like direct sound. The picture was shot mute and all the sound was post-synchronised, but while I was editing the carnival footage, the film-maker Patricia Diaz, who was working in the same building, happened to walk past the open door of the cutting room and recognise the subject. She had been on the float with a video camera, and we subsequently arranged to use some of her sound. The film later developed a following among Colombians in London.

  8 Richard Bate, Richard Best and Alan Holmans, eds, On the Move: Housing Consequences of Migration (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2000), p. 6.

  9 Paul Dave, ‘The Bourgeois Paradigm and Heritage Cinema’, New Left Review I/224 (July–August 1997), pp. 111–26.

  10 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), p. 18, pp. 108–9.

  8. London – Rochester – London

  1 No problem here – plenty of copies.

  2 The colour was jade green.

  3 The fiftieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain was in 2001.

  4 See ‘Flatscape with Containers’, Reyner Banham, New Society, 17 August 1967, in which Banham admired Price’s application of ‘container technology, near enough’ in the Potteries Thinkbelt.

  5 Nearby is Ebbsfleet, the site for a future Channel Tunnel Rail Link station, and the centre of one of the biggest concentrations of house-building in Europe.

  6 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 30. Conrad’s narrator tells his story on a boat moored off Gravesend, beginning: ‘ “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” ’

  7 Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 29.

  8 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’ (1944), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and transl. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).

  9 A Pickwick motif, first mentioned in Chapter 2.

  10 Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, p. 30.

  11 For more on Staffordshire, see Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths.

  12 As W. G. Sebald noted, of Dunwich: ‘A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes.’ The Rings of Saturn (London: Harvill, 1998), p. 159.

  9. The Robinson Institute

  1 During the same period, a large number of bars were bought by banks – in March 2001, the Japanese investment bank Nomura owned 5,585 pubs in the UK, and it was announced that Morgan Grenfell (a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank) had bought Whitbread’s estate of 2,998.

  2 T. H. Mawson, The Life and Work of an English Landscape Architect (London: Richards, 1927), p. 344.

  3 Robinson in Space (1997).

  4 This was a Whitbread Travel Inn at Orrell, near Wigan, a couple of hundred yards from junction 26 of the M6 motorway.

  5 The Dilapidated Dwelling (2000).

  10. The City of the Future

  1 However, in Building Futures, an analysis of the future of the construction industry produced by the UK’s Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in July 2003, academics and professionals imagined five scenarios, in one of which Will Hughes of Reading University predicted that, by 2023,
‘technological advances will create an industry in which procurement of new buildings is fully automated and no role is left for architects’, and that old buildings will be ‘quickly replaced by shiny new standardised products that can be maintained by a semi-skilled workforce’. Similar transformations were anticipated during the 1990s, but seem no nearer today.

  2 See, for instance, Philip Leather and Tanya Morrison, The State of UK Housing (Bristol: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1997).

  3 Including business, retail and leisure parks, hypermarkets, shopping malls, distribution estates, container ports, prisons, hotels, airports, etc. Rem Koolhaas characterises these as ‘Junkspace’, ‘the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together’. Koolhaas probably spends a lot of time in airports: in much of the UK and ‘old Europe’, Junkspace appears to be largely peripheral to older spaces.

  4 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Penguin, 1964), p. 201.

  5 The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example.

  6 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, pp. xxiii–xxiv.

  7 Adolf Loos, in his essay Architecture (1910) wrote: ‘The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art, which does not. The work of art is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.’ Transl. Wilfried Wang with Rosamund Diamond and Robert Godsill, in Wilfried Wang, Yehuda Safran with Mildred Budny, eds, The Architecture of Adolf Loos (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), pp. 107–8.