The Labworth

If you knew that it offered meals, you might anticipate of somewhere called The Labworth a futuristic celebration of molecular gastronomy, where you would be served by staff dressed in white coats in a space-age gravity-free environment, where you could enjoy an efficient ingestion of some cognitively-enhancing functional food, washed down with a squirt or two of vitamin-enriched liquid nitrogen, guaranteed to crackle the taste buds and to make you live for ever. I suspect that both the menu and the ambience are somewhat different, though the reviews are good. At the time I took the photographs I wasn’t particularly hungry, so I can’t offer my own opinion on the available edibles, but clearly the place was popular with the locals.

The name ‘Labworth’ is fortuitous, deriving apparently from that of a local farm, but the sense of futurism is palpable. When the building was designed in the 1930s, by Ove Arup, a better future was envisaged or at least yearned for widely, following the tragedy of the Great War and accompanying the flourishing of technology and scientific rationalism. Architecture and design were visible manifestations of an optimistic zeitgeist. An innocent decade, evidently; concrete and glass, arterial roads and electrification, gymnastics and lots of UV, outdoor lidos and art deco would herald a cleaner, pleasanter, healthier world. The Soviets and the Nazis shared similar architectural visions to the international modernism practised elsewhere, such as here on the shores of Canvey Island, Essex. We know now what the end of that decade brought, but 73 years to the week since its most symbolic and terrible revelation of what man can do to man, the imagery of The Labworth remains one of hope and excitement. Simply, it elevates one’s mood. Hooray for Canvey Island and hooray for a better future.