When I was about ten years old I was taken – over a short period of a few months - on visits to Cheltenham, Bath and Bournemouth.Yes I know, but I should emphasise that generally speaking my parents were loving, caring, and well meaning people. In each of these places I noticed the apparent importance of the word Lansdown (in Bournemouth it was spelled Lansdowne, and was a major bus destination, obtrusive, rather along the lines of my comments about Cockfosters in my previous posting). Clustered closely together in autobiographical time as they were, and unfamiliar as I then was with most towns and cities of the British Isles, I wondered at the significance of these observations. Everywhere had a town hall, a parish church or a cathedral, a market place, a Woolies and a Marks, so did everywhere have a Lansdown too?
If so, what would one expect to find there? Crumbling Regency crescents, building societies, solicitors’ offices, art galleries, old folk with walking frames? In Cheltenham even the railway station was named for this Lansdown Phenomenon. Clearly it was not to be taken lightly, but my questions were brushed aside as being essentially unanswerable (along with algebra).
For many years I lived with this troubling knowledge, and it is only recently that I’ve dared to speak about it in public. The Lansdown Phenomenon as I’ve called it, giving it due respect and initial capitals. Over the years I’ve grown to realise that it is only the privileged few places that make much of their Lansdown, that for the most part Lansdowns are not that significant in the scheme of things, and certainly not worth losing any sleep over or seeking counselling. They’re not as important as, for example, Caffè Nero or Pizza Express (though they’re more important than algebra).
However, although I can hardly face the psychological implications of what I’m about to confess, in more recent years I’ve also had to accept the possibility that there might be other types of Lansdowns too, not named as such, in fact entirely unnamed ones, clichés of urban form, features that go together, emerging stereotypes of place, archetypal clumps, nuts and bolts of city form as predictable as eggs and bacon or, er, nuts and bolts. Which means that, unlike in Cheltenham Spa et al, you don’t even know that they are Lansdowns. I mean, they could be anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. They aren’t labelled. Frightening or what? In fact, this is the first time I’ve raised this suspicion in public, so you’ll appreciate that this is a delicate moment for me. These hidden “other” Lansdowns resist classification, they have no recognised overall generic name, but with practice one can start to recognise them – conceptual Lansdowns, if you like. At least I hope one can, otherwise I fear I may be entirely alone in this.
Tentatively, I’ll suggest a few possible candidates. How about this one: the scruffy area between the bus station and the back entrance of the 1960s covered market, close to the public conveniences, smelling of fish and slimy and slippery with them, stacked with pallets and parked randomly and untidily with white vans. Sound familiar? Is there somewhere like this in your town? Could this be a secret and novel form of Lansdown? OK, upmarket a bit: one of those new “quarters” – Manchester and Leeds are full of them, and so is anywhere else currently undergoing regeneration – all orange brick and grey steel, sharp corners, tricked out with a Premier Inn or a Travelodge, and most likely favoured too with a Gregg’s, a Sainsbury’s Local and/or a Tesco Express. Know the sort of place I mean? Repetitive, aren’t they. Likewise the “Docklands” clones – Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, Swansea Marina, Sovereign Harbour near Eastbourne, and so on. You hadn’t got those down as secret Lansdowns, had you. Well, they are. Then, top of the pile, the “iconic” cultural node, designed to draw the tourists, to put a declining post-industrial has-been on the map: the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the Baltic in Gateshead, the Albert Dock in Liverpool, Eureka in Halifax, the Ikon itself, in the wonderfully named, the kinaesthetically named, the sphinctertastic Oozells Square in Brum. Oh dear, I knew there would be a psychoanalytical subtext.
There are variants, some of them overlapping. For instance, there’s the much lauded but peculiarly shaped building, geometrically counter-intuitive and functionally perverse, the work of a “signature” architect, one where – since it’s so innovatively designed - you might not be able to find the entrance or be able to afford to go up in the lift. Sarkinesses none of which apply to the Sage in Gateshead (best seen at night, from across the river), that armadillo/croissant thing in Glasgow, the unsettling Libeskind war museum in Salford (which so effectively – and so subtly - makes the point that war is, well, unsettling actually, really quite upsetting …), the Shard at London Bridge (best when the cloudbase is extremely low (50 feet-ish) though not, presumably, if you’re on board an aircraft). Not to mention the art galleries where typically one goes simply to say one has been, to enjoy the view out to sea (Margate, St Ives), to admire the internal spaces and volumes (Walsall, Tate Modern), and to mosey round the gift shop, chuckling quietly. All in their way highly appropriate symbols representative of our time, all quasi-Lansdowns of the present era. Bath, Bournemouth and Cheltenham eat your old-fashioned hearts out.
But don’t take my word for it, for it may of course be an outrageously subjective, entirely redundant and ridiculously overblown idea, an over the top psychogeographical delusion. Better still, go out and find some Lansdowns of your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment