Quarter Poundbury with Cheese

Over recent months, while working on my projects related to subjective approaches to geography – “Tourist In Your Own Town” and “The Perfect Spot”, both still seeking a publisher – I’ve been struggling with the seemingly mutually-defining duo of place and non-place. Increasingly I’ve been finding it hard to define what a “non-place” actually is, particularly as some of the regularly considered candidates – motorway service areas, theme parks, business parks, retail malls – are such crucial components of our everyday existence, and also considering that the less well known parts of our towns and cities often display quirks and character in ways that more celebrated districts fail to do. Gaps between “places” have a placefulness of their own. Truly awful places are still places.

Following the standardised approach to both menu and service adopted by the 37,000-plus McDonald’s outlets worldwide, a convention has arisen that one may prefix any commonplace species with Mc. Thus we might have a McPlace, one lacking distinctive and positive attributes. A McPlace would lie conceptually somewhere between place and non-place. I’m not sure, though, and the more I think about it the less I understand what a “non-place” might be.

Until Friday of last week, as I thought, initially, finding myself deposited off a Number 10 bus in Poundbury, the royally promoted development on the western edge of Dorchester, the ancient county town of Dorset. My instinctive reflex was, aha, now I understand, now I’ve caught a specimen ! But wait a moment. From this still-developing location (construction scheduled for completion in 2025) glimpses of the surrounding gorgeous Dorset countryside are frequently available, including Maiden Castle, the Thomas Hardy (Kiss Me Hardy, that is, not Madding Crowd Hardy) Monument, and Dorchester itself - so any glib accusations of placelessness are surely off to a wonky start. Poundbury is very definitely what it is.

I don’t know what the inhabitants think – I imagine they find it workable and pleasant enough in a cheesy kind of way – but I found it uniquely unsettling. The few pedestrians I encountered looked fearful and solitary. At least the housing isn’t as gratuitously forbidding as some recent developments on the Isle of Portland – also Dorset – which evidently feel the need to commemorate that particular peninsula’s role as a penal colony. Cheesy, again, is an appropriate overall descriptor for Poundbury’s building style. But it’s not as simple as this, not even as simple as cheese with holes in it or as bland as Dairylea slices.

Friday was a very hot day, so imagining that I was in some hostile enclave of Los Angeles where casual sightseers and people on foot aren’t welcome wasn’t difficult. Architecturally, Poundbury is a surreal mix of the parodic and the pastiche, the fake and the phony, the kitsch and the corny, perfectly Trumpesque, and reminiscent of Disneyland (but without the insistence that one should have a nice day), Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (but without the deep sincerity), and odd corners of Islington or Notting Hill (but without the grittiness or gravitas), with bizarre hints of Cheltenham or the pricier parts of Bristol thrown in for good measure. So, lots of stylistic associations.

Does the mere fact that Poundbury reminds one of so many other places inevitably condemn it to being a “non-place”? It’s tempting, but I think not. And what about the reverse? When I ogle the backwaters of Canonbury or the Italianate towers and turrets along Kensington Park Road in W11 will I inevitably think of Poundbury? Only time will tell. Placefulness can be enhanced by effortless comparison. Mental association and perceived similarity should not automatically impose a verdict of McPlacelessness. Poundbury, in its random pseudo-stylistic inclusiveness, is surely – hopefully – unique, and thus indubitably a place. Of sorts.

 Queen Mother Square

As I wandered round Poundbury’s confusing layout – at one point convinced that the helpfully provided map on Peverell Avenue West had been printed with left-right inversion - I was constantly pursued by cars and white vans, psychologically almost mown down by them, and depressed by the truth that this supposedly genteel habitat has been completely given over to vehicles. Lacking any genuine sense of centrality, or the anticipatory aura that surrounds centrality, but rather resembling a stage set for a Piccadilly Circus designed by someone who had never been there, Poundbury’s  “central place” is called Queen Mother Square. It is essentially a car park overlooked by a pretend airport control tower, and a plastic pub or two. Plus a statue of the QM. Send for another G & T immediately ! 

Poundbury falls well short of the over-the-top absurdity and amusing grossness which justifies, for example, Ricardo Bofill’s Antigone development on the outskirts of Montpellier. Though stuffed with improbable fusions and abrupt adjacencies of style, it lacks surprise and humour. It is timid, bland, postmodernist at its most supremely dull, and, in its way, oh dear, so very English. No doubt about it, anywhere that can arouse such a negative reflex reaction cannot be accused of being a non-place.

But … I still don’t know what a non-place is.

Painting with two fingers

In too many places around the world we see odious, corrupt, thuggish, hypocritical, criminal regimes holding on to positions of absolute power - evidently for the primary purposes of personal greed and self-preservation. Sickos and their henchpersons who want a controlled reality to stay the same for ever, regardless of the fate of millions or the wellbeing of the planet. Luckily we are relatively free from that kind of thing here. In the UK, though our politicians routinely ignore the wishes of the common people, though – if you read ‘Private Eye’ – corruption is endemic, though so often our news is a saga of incompetence, betrayal and hypocrisy, and though voting changes nothing, we are fortunate that we can – if necessary via the medium of paint – stick two fingers up to the lot of them, without fear of arrest … or worse. 

Therefore it is particularly gratifying that this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the 250th, and overseen by the wonderful Grayson Perry, includes a great deal of two-fingered content. Much of it is funny, makes a point, might even be seen as subversive. Well, I hope so. The spectrum of material ranges from visual puns and absurdities, bling poodles and carpeted bears, via parodies of famous paintings and a standard yellow ‘new development’ direction sign reading “Unaffordable Housing”, to the Korean Kims studying a Duchamp-esque urinal, and a POTUS strategically placed against a spread-legged Miss Mexico.

Protest against the freaks and monsters who run our world is always healthy, and it is good that art can be harnessed in this way – as it always has been. Art, protest, humour, propaganda, subversion, and resistance have a long, intimate, and worthy history. Art as fun, art as protest. Totalitarians and obsessives of all sorts have a phobia of fun, for that is invariably their Achilles heel, and – anatomically improbably – their blindspot too. They never see how unintentionally and absurdly funny they and their strutting little empires are. 

So far so good. There’s nothing quite like humour for getting one on side. Piss-taking can be irresistible, especially when there are brightly decorated rooms full of it. However, expressing a political opinion or being disrespectful are not the sole purpose of art, nor is being hilarious, as it so often is at this show. This exhibition is brilliant as a one-off, but I hope it doesn’t become too much of a habit. Equally I hope there won’t be a return to the years of accommodating the endless dreary fixations of elderly academicians (there’s only a handful of that sort of thing this year), views of smug studios with window views of south-west London or overpriced (and also smug) excursions to European art cities, or a return to the shock-horror of the shock-horror merchants, or to the studiedly difficult genre of the deeply meaningful daub that only clever people ‘get’, a world where any old rubbish can be said to be Angst No. 93 or Dalston Junction or made into a neon sign. Let’s have art that is enjoyable, understandable, and well made.

As ever, the Summer Exhibition this year is eclectic, and there is far more to it than I have suggested so far. Besides the humour and the schoolboy smirking, there is great painting as well. There’s imaginative and technically accomplished design, as well as the usual contingent of the dire and the WTF. I’m not even sure what Hockney is trying to achieve this time, and the Anish Kapoor contraption in the courtyard is only slightly less meaningless than his oversized red twisted paperclip thingy at Stratford East. But I bet the Japanese visitors like it.

Overall, though, I found the exhibition hugely enjoyable, as did, very evidently, others who were there at the same time, on Saturday. Most of them grinning, some laughing their heads off. More than anything, as I emerged afterwards into a blisteringly hot Piccadilly, it made me want to get out my paints again.