Safe in the city

Enclosure is an important concept in urban planning and in subjective geography. The sense that one is surrounded by buildings, by the city carrying on relentlessly all around while one remains detached from it, is one of the enjoyable features of many successful towns and cities, and is found, for instance, in communities all around the Mediterranean, with the souks of North Africa and the Middle East, and the arcades and piazze of many Italian cities – Milan and Turin in particular – being especially effective in this way. Enclosure creates a sense of manageability, of having part of what might be a vast, complex, and even dangerous metropolis, under one’s immediate control.

A related pleasure can also be obtained from being in enclosed spaces where one can, as it were, see out or, at any rate, “imagine out”. If there is a Freudian explanation for this is I suppose its best facile summary is “a womb with a view”. Intra-uterine experiences apart, my earliest memories of this claustrophilic kind of arrangement relate to Chester, where on the famous Rows, primarily in Eastgate, Watergate Street and Bridge Street, one can shop at first floor level, able to look out and down at the passing scene, while protected from it, and from the weather. Maybe I find this memory so pleasurable (a) because on childhood visits it was usually raining in Chester and (b) because it would have been the preamble to a visit to my favourite toyshop, in St Michael’s Row, which we always called The Arcade. Today this leads into the Grosvenor shopping centre, but in the 1950s it was a dead-end off Bridge Street Row, and especially safe in a psychological sense.

 

Most large internal urban spaces will provide something of this effect – the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, for instance, or the concourses of great terminal stations. I want to illustrate the point with images of two such termini I visited recently, the lovely Glasgow Central (upper picture) and London’s Charing Cross (lower picture) - these days rather less lovely. They are similar in that they are hemmed in by high buildings, have links to underground railway systems, are built on sloping sites giving rise to interesting complexities, can be accessed through several narrow passageways (and remarkably similarly by steep steps from the left hand side as you face the tracks, from Union Street and Villiers Street, respectively), and are approached railside by a massive girder bridge across a major river. One arrives by train slap bang in the centre of the city, yet momentarily protected from it. A minor pleasure for those who are easily pleased.