Pleasurably perplexing perceptions

 

Bong, bong, bong, bong; bong, bong, bong, bong;

bong, bong, bong, bong; bong, bong, bong, bong:

BONG !!!

Sorry, did I wake you up?

Among the more unlikely benefits of growing up in the vicinity of Nottingham was the occurrence of features which encouraged interesting misunderstandings, although I suspect that many localities offer equivalent examples to a perceptually wayward child. There was, for instance, a cinema called the ‘Globe’, which was squeezed  between Arkwright Street and London Road as they converged onto the north end of Trent Bridge. How could such a tiny site contain a cinema, I wondered? From the outside it looked as though its seating capacity would be about four. Well, as I later discovered, many buildings deceive.

Again, not a unique occurrence (the Severn in Shrewsbury can offer a similar experience, as can many places along the Thames), the large bend in the River Trent between Wilford Bridge and Trent Bridge induced in me a pleasurable kind of controlled puzzlement, so that while walking along the Victoria Embankment I could amaze and amuse myself at how distant views shifted, how the war memorial which was over there a minute ago was now over here, and how the buildings of the city centre a mile or so to the north had suddenly moved somewhere else – as had the distinctive profile of Sharphill Woods away to the south-east.

Nottingham, conventionally starting out as twin communities dating from Saxon and Norman times, is relatively unusual as British cities go in possessing a large central space, the Old Market Square, as indisputably the nodal point of the city, a place where people “just go” for what it is. Uncouth people call it Slab Square; more familiarly it is just “the Square”. A few years ago it had a makeover that has done nothing to enhance its appeal, unless you like tripping over micro-steps, being nice to weirdoes, scarfing pop-up streetfood, or riding the occasional big wheel. The Christmas tree, placed in the centre of the Square (in other words at the centre of the centre) and throughout the ages notoriously of variable degrees of weediness, has in recent years been partially obscured by the shabby sheds of seasonal retail tat and by festive amusements both high-adrenalin and high-cholesterol. Trams come and go; buses and trolleybuses no longer do so. This vertically slightly warped quadrilateral was always awkward and asymmetric, but I was happier with the deco-ish layout from between the wars. Even the pigeons seemed more stylishly urban in those days; the lamp standards certainly were.

Although common in many continental cities (Brussels, Barcelona, and Krakow being among the most spectacular), only a handful of other UK cities have a definite focus in the form of a market place or square that unarguably celebrates the centre, while not necessarily being the main hub of commercial activity. George Square in Glasgow is the only comparable instance that springs readily to mind – Piccadilly Gardens and Albert Square in Manchester, Colston Avenue in Bristol, Donegall Square in Belfast, and the area around St George’s Hall (St. John’s Gardens) in Liverpool all approach the ideal but don’t quite succeed. The market places in Cambridge and Norwich are also feasible candidates, and there are surely others, but not many. Trafalgar Square acts as a magnet for tourists and for public gatherings in London, yet is only one of several contenders (Piccadilly Circus and Parliament Square among them) for being the very heart of the metropolis or, indeed, of the nation.

Given the existence of the Old Market Square, Nottingham’s residents may have an unusually strongly developed concept of the role of centrality in urban places. I certainly grew up with that kind of awareness and expectation, and I think it aids both navigation and the development of a sense of place. This centrality is emphasised by the location on the east side of the Square of the Council House, the edifice that most other communities would call their town hall or city hall. It really is a glorious pile, a magnificence of civic pride and municipal splendour, undeniably powerful while not overpowering. In front of the building, with its eight enormous Ionic columns, sit two stone lions, Leo and Oscar. Their faces are so un-leonine, in fact so human, puzzled-looking rather than snarly, that you know they aren’t meant to be taken seriously. They’re friendly lions.  More familiarly known, respectively, as the left lion and the right lion, they serve – as befits the guardians of a central place – as popular meeting points. “See you by the left lion” is implicitly understood by every Nottinghamian - except those who can’t tell right from left anyway. The lions were designed by local sculptor and art teacher Joseph Else, who has a Wetherspoons named after him just across the road from here.

While the Council House is still used for ceremonial events, the city council some years ago relocated most of their office space elsewhere. Designed by T. Cecil Howitt and completed in the late 1920s in a cheerfully successful bastardised fusion of architectural styles in Portland stone, the Council House assists the feeling of centrality by virtue of its bulk and height – the golden ball on the top of the dome is at exactly 200 feet above the ground. Until the eruption of the typical and mostly unlovely highrise from the late 1950s onwards,  the dome was - together with the Castle half a mile away on its sandstone outcrop - absolutely dominant over the cityscape, and visible from many miles around. The chimes (similar to those of Westminster) of the Council House clock ring out every quarter of an hour, and incorporate the famous bell called Little John. This bell, cast in nearby Loughborough, weighs over 10 tons and has the deepest tone in the land, providing a regular audible reminder of the centre of the city for everyone within earshot – up to seven miles away. Earlier this year, when we went outside on Thursday evenings  to “clap for carers”, we often heard it chiming eight o’clock, providing a kind of reassurance of normality, a connection with the centre of local life.

 As a child I loved to glimpse the Council House dome, especially if I caught sight of it unexpectedly, from different places in the city – Lady Bay Bridge, for example, or Thorneywood Rise, or the Victoria Embankment.  I also loved to be taken into town and to go into the Council House, or rather, the part generally accessible to the public, namely the Exchange, a T-shaped arcade then lined with upmarket shops (most famously Burton’s, the local equivalent of Harrods) that lay immediately behind, via an invisible segue between civic and commercial. The Exchange Arcade – usually abbreviated to “the arcade”, there then being no other, or known alternatively by older residents as Burton’s Arcade - was supposedly inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, a city with perhaps the finest central public place anywhere in the world, the Piazza del Duomo, with the Cathedral occupying the spot analogous to the Council House.

Long long ago and once a bong a time, I liked to stand in the arcade at the spot  immediately beneath the dome, in order to listen to the chimes of the bells, ideally at 12 noon, getting the benefit of maximum bong-count. I would look up to the underside of the dome, high above me, at the spandrel-filling murals featuring Robin Hood, Charles I raising his standard, and other scenes from the city’s real or mythical past. In passing, I should say that, visiting the city last week for the first time since before lockdown, I felt strongly - and sadly - that someone needs to raise the standard again.

 Only gradually, as a child, did I realise that something was wrong about what I saw from this perspective. It appeared that daylight was coming in directly overhead, yet how could this be so, given that the dome is covered in grey lead and by ever-increasing quantities of pigeon produce? My dad, who I assumed would understand these matters, tried to explain, and even made me a model “under-dome” out of strips of cardboard with cellophane layered over it. This made me very irrationally cross, for it didn’t make any sense to me. The whole thing appeared impossible, mainly because I assumed, wrongly, that the underside of the dome as I saw it from the arcade was immediately beneath the dome I saw from the outside. But , if so … where were Little John and friends? They were up there somewhere, but where, exactly? The sound of the bells was coming from somewhere … impossible.

To this day I’m not quite sure what is going on up there, but there must be a drum-shaped chamber that houses the bells, with the externally-visible dome sitting on top of that. In fact, seen from the outside it’s perfectly obvious that this is the case.

Well, I enjoy perceptual oddities. I find it fascinating that you can look at something from one side and, from the other side, see something completely different, and that between the two, there can exist a whole realm of the invisible and the unexplained, the delusional and the misunderstood. Like the Globe cinema, a space that seems geometrically impossible..A magical realm where Little John and the merry men will bong, loud and happy, every fifteen minutes for the rest of eternity. Ah ha, midday is approaching:

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG