In early 1877 my great-grandmother, born Emily Beadle, was preparing to get married. She was living in Dove Row, in east London, a thoroughfare which twelve years later would be colour-coded on Charles Booth’s poverty map as very poor, bordering on the “vicious and the semi-criminal”. If she had emerged from her house, turned her back on the Imperial Gas Works at the western end of the street and headed the other way, she would have reached Goldsmith’s Row, the southerly extension of Broadway Market, and further scenes of poverty and destitution. Luckily, over time, and following her marriage, things very slowly started to look up for her.
How times change. Broadway Market in recent decades has become one of the hippest alfresco scofferies and niche shopping destinations for London’s would-be über-cool, replacing the King’s Road, Carnaby Street, even Camden Lock and Brick Lane, now disdained as hopelessly un-hip venues, suitable only (in normal times, of course) for accommodating the regular weekend influx of – aaagh – tourists..
Let’s follow in young Emily’s footsteps out of her street,
turning sharply right before we reach the bridge over the Regent’s Canal and
the start of Broadway Market. Very shortly we will see this:
Fabulous, isn’t it.
For me, one of the many downsides of this hateful plague has been an inability to visit bookshops and to browse. Therefore, given my needs and instincts, and against my better principles, I’ve had to order online. Mistakes can be made.
On 30th September, “Basic Forms” was published by a company called Prestel, ostensibly to celebrate the industrial photography of the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. I’d been looking forward to it and had pre-ordered. At 160 pages, I thought, I couldn’t go wrong. A great disappointment it has proved to be, however, containing as it does much blank paper, a barely adequate selection of photographs with no interpretation, and a brief (10 page) recycled text by a Belgian philosopher and art historian with little of interest to say. Although I’ve always been a fan of the visual and other sensory aspects of industrial design, I’m also - as a sometime information scientist - interested in classification. I was hoping from this book to learn more of the rationale behind the typology of the Bechers’ photographic catalogues of water towers, cooling towers, gasholders, blast furnaces, silos, pit head gear, and all the other spectacular installations from a fast receding age, which attracted their attention. Alas, nothing. As far as I’m concerned the book is a waste of paper and a waste of money. I could have done better myself, I thought, at least I could have if only I’d bothered to collect the photographic material while it was still available.
In the UK, as elsewhere, what survives from this late-industrial era is patchy. Though the Bechers’ photos were in monochrome, our heavy industrial heritage was nothing if not colourful. Gasholders – the icon of the perversely anti-aesthetic - were often interestingly rust-covered, or painted in a diseased shade of olive green or bilious ochre, even a fetching faecal brown, while the tall waterless ones (think Southall, Northolt, Battersea Park) were usually a delicate shade of light grey-blue, designed to be invisible against the smoggy sky. Steelworks could be fiery, ferric red, especially at night; chemical factories could smell pale green. Cooling towers were usually the colour of the concrete from which they were made, but not always, as with the sand-pie-like prettification of a clump of them at Rugeley, Staffordshire:
As the book tells us nothing of what the “basic forms” implied by its title actually were, what would be the likely taxonomic criteria? Obvious ones that occur to mind are function, general style, location, nationality, age, architect or company responsible, size, and colour. Of the several fundamental approaches to categorisation, possibly the most appropriate of them in this instance is prototype theory. Developed by Eleanor Rosch and others at Berkeley, this theory suggests that, when classifying, one will identify a “central” example, and relate other specimens to it. The chosen prototype might be the one first encountered in childhood, or it might be a metropolitan example or another one deemed for some reason to be the biggest or best or most important or the most typical. Local and national styles might well enter the picture. The Bechers’ examples focused on the industrial heartlands of Germany, but also on the coalfields of northern France and eastern Belgium, with a few examples from the UK and the US.
The Bechers found an aesthetic in what they photographed, a sculptural quality, snapping them in neutral, objective conditions, under overcast skies. Clearly they felt affection for these objects, yet tried to squeeze their own personal subjectivity out of their subject matter, treating these artefacts instead as isolated scientific specimens. Maybe the fusion of aesthetics, affection, and a desire to identify pure form contributes to the classificatory problem.
So much has been lost. One took a pride in local industry, in its power and productivity, and in its installations – despite their size, harshness and intrusiveness. So many places were one-industry towns, especially in the case, for example, of coal and steel. Obviously there was an emotional investment in them from an economic perspective, even one of survival, but that investment had its physical symbols too. For them there was a regard – even a love - of the relevant structures, however supposedly stark and unlovely, smelly or environmentally unfriendly. We’ve all seen film of people weeping as pit head gear is dynamited, or as cooling towers or landmark chimneys are felled. Symbols of a way of life, gone forever.
One recalls how every town had its gasworks, often on a site by the railway; it would be distinctive, a source of local affection and jokes in bad odour. Reading (the town, not the activity) was one such place, and the final approaches into King’s Cross and St Pancras were famous in this respect. Approaching Birmingham New Street from the north east were the two massive and seemingly leaning gasholders at Washwood Heath, shamefully dismantled just a few years ago. Etruria gasworks, in the Potteries, was huge; it’s now a retail park. That’s what we’ve become. Didcot had a distinctive solitary gasholder long before it acquired a power station. A friendly looking thing it was, slightly olde worlde. The variegated gasholders at Kennington Oval, next to the cricket ground, are still surely a part of our national heritage, or at least the televisual rendition of it. Many parts of the capital, like parts of many other towns and cities, were – shall we say – flavoured by their gasworks: Fulham, Battersea, Wandsworth, the Old Kent Road, Stepney, Bromley-by-Bow, Kensal Green, Beckton. Not much of those left now.
Things felt differently then. Pride, optimism. Little standardisation, lots of quirky local input, peculiar and vernacular, easy to understand, easy to find interesting, easy to find a sense of personal ownership for, or identification with. “That’s my gasworks”. “It’s mine”. “That’s my smell” (as it were). Remember that feeling?
Enter the national grid, not as part of an unhappy argument against the drawbacks of modernity, but as the provider of further examples. Recall the masses of cooling towers (usually in groups of even numbers), along the Trent valley and up into Yorkshire (Willington, Drakelow, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, High Marnham, Ferrybridge, Drax, Eggborough and several others), and occasionally elsewhere, like Fidler’s Ferry on the Mersey. Most of these still survive, for the time being, though coal-fired power stations are now doomed for environmental reasons. Maybe, though, their cooling towers could be left as inspirational monuments, relics from a more optimistic, futuristic, modernistic age. Perhaps, someone could even produce an at least halfway decent illustrated book celebrating them and explaining how they came to look that way. There is more to be done.
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