The emptiness aesthetic

There can be few positives extractable from this current global tragedy. One of them is the friendship, kindness, generosity and altruism of neighbours and strangers alike, qualities which so often lay dormant until activated by disaster. It’s good to know that they still exist. Still the same old country.

The second benefit, although in a normal sense hardly desirable, is the enormous reduction in activity in almost everything. Suddenly, the world is a quieter place. Environmentally this is good, and it would be even better if some degree of it could be sustained when normality returns. If this terrible episode doesn’t conclusively define and condemn what a disaster so-called globalisation has been, and lead to a fundamental change in how we manage our world, then we’re all stuffed.  Already over the last few days the sky looks bluer - probably just a meteorological coincidence - with the Spring flowers at their best.

 People are naturally gregarious, and enforced separation is distressing for many, as it is for me, grumpy introvert though I am. But when I see on the TV news images of commuters on the Tube, squashed together, noses in armpits, breathing in each other’s diseases, my reactions are a combination of nausea and relief that I’m not involved, although at many times in my life, normal times, I’ve been happy to endure and even to enjoy such conditions myself. There are sensory and psychological pleasures in congestion and busyness; they are among the appeals of a great city, expressions of life at its most intense and, some would say, most civilised.

While urban vitality is important, conversely, there’s something to be said for emptiness and quiet among the bustle. In London, the many parks, squares and commons cater for this need, and contribute their particular loveliness to this greatest of cities, throughout the seasons. Many other British towns and cities are similarly blessed; many aren’t, and finding a pleasant spot, quiet but safe, may not always be so easy. But for now the streets are empty too, and that is unusual and unnatural.

As an older person, rapidly approaching the official threshold of coronavirus vulnerability, I remember years with much lower population densities, little vehicular traffic, and tourist destinations which could be enjoyed in relative peace. When I think back to my suburban childhood the essential quality I recall is that of peace and quiet. You could actually hear how quiet it was; just a kind of distant gentle hum.  Not much traffic, no unwanted intrusions of other people’s electronics (except for “The Archers” theme tune wafting across from the old ladies round the corner - dumpty dumpty dumpty dump etc), just the occasional Vulcan bomber which was tremendously noisy and made your ribs rattle if it flew low. Today, scarcely a couple of miles away from where I grew up, as I draft this blog, the only sound I hear is lawnmowers and, bizarrely, the jingle of a cruising ice cream van. Though the ultimate reasons for this state of acoustic affairs are appalling, purely as background, as ambient sound, it makes me happy, reminding me as it does of more satisfactory times.

Cities are primarily about people, but as architectural and geographical entities they have other roles to play, including visual and spiritual ones. As someone who likes to draw and paint cityscapes I know I’m not the only one who has preferred to exclude people and / or traffic from the painted scene. Artists far better than I have exploited the same instincts for urban visual emptiness, whether they were trying to portray alienation and loneliness, a mood of noir, desolation ecstasy, a sensation of space, an architectural peculiarity, a time of day, or otherwise. In my case this habit has been enforced  partly because of painterly incompetence, but also because I love the paradoxical quiet sometimes to be found in the heart of a major city. It’s a state of mind I like to experience and to express as best I can on paper or canvas. It’s the sound of early Sunday morning. 

                                                        Notting Hill      ©  R. Abbott 2014

 Now, it seems, in the last few days, we have had this quietude thrust back upon us, unasked for - the empty streets and parks, empty squares, empty cities. Not so much a month of Sundays, as an unknown number of them to come.

Sensible advice therefore would be, for someone like me, to enjoy the sight while it lasts, to make the most if it. Much more sensibly, the advice is, not to. So I can’t, even if I wanted to. I have to imagine it instead. All the same, artistically, aesthetically, selfishly, I can’t help thinking that it’s a kind of missed opportunity.

 
Meanwhile I’d happily exchange this nightmare for a chance to inhale some armpits on the Tube. Armpits aren’t great, but in a normal world they’re rarely lethal. Stay safe.

Absolutely riveting

As a child, the default brand of model cars in my much-loved hardboard toy garage – built by my dad’s friend Artie Withnall - was Dinky Toys. An excellent product, well-made, realistic and finely detailed, with each vehicle in the catalogue sized appropriately in comparison with its colleagues. Occasionally, as presents, I would acquire Corgi toy cars, which were built to a smaller scale than Dinky, and sometimes I would get hold of other brands, of varying size and scale. Though I suppose I was aware of the differences in size, mixing them all together for the purposes of play was never a problem, and the fact that a racing car was larger than a petrol tanker simply didn’t matter. I accepted it all as perfectly natural.

Fast-forward sixty-odd years of critical observation. Last Saturday morning I was standing in the “viewing box” of the  Baltic in Gateshead. The view out from the building far surpasses anything you are likely to see inside. I was focused on the view of the Tyne and its bridges – surely one of the finest urban perspectives anywhere, especially for any lifetime bridge-fancier like me.

I noticed that the buildings on the Newcastle side of the river closest to the Tyne Bridge are of a visual density that complements the detail of the bridge, which – like many steel structures of its era, Art Deco, more or less, and completed in 1928 – looks immensely solid, reassuring, a tour de force of daring and precision engineering, adored in its familiarity, "iconic" as the cliche has it, and covered in an immense number of rivets. The more rivets, the stronger one imagines the structure to be. According to Wikipedia, there are 777,124 of them. So I guess it's quite strong. I know you’re not suppose to take Wikipedia at face value, and you have to check these things, but the truth is I’d only counted about half of them before it was time for my train.

 

The buildings along the quay here possess a grittiness and a granularity that I find appealing. According to Abraham Moles, things have to have the right amount of detail, the right level of information - not too chaotic, not too bland - or they confuse and overwhelm or, alternatively, bore. One of those Goldilocks-style happy mediums which is certainly true here. The bridge itself reminded me of a not too distant age of excitement in achievement, progress, and competence, of an admiration for and personal psychological investment in what was being done by local people. A structure whose construction would have been watched excitedly day by day. “Made in England”, and made properly, made to last, made as perfect and as well and as thoughtfully as possible. We could still do that, you know, the mindset still exists in places like Tyneside. Something built by "us" for "us", not the sort of negative progress imposed by "them", which is so often today's depressing tale.

Moles to Newcastle, as they used to say, and back to the Dinky analogy. Further east along the north bank, beyond the gritty bits, away from the Tyne Bridge and towards the Millennium Bridge, and you get buildings at a scale less appropriate and appealing. Not taller than the others, but less finessed, less interesting, less likeable. Not bad buildings, by any means, but representative of our less confident age. Plastic, glassy, glossy, shiny, boring. Definitely not gritty. The skyline too, across the city centre and beyond – spiky and multi-levelled and with huge amounts of detail, too much for the eye to take in properly – yes, brilliant, but spoiled by a handful of ungainly late 20th century boxes (one in particular, in the photo - which was not in fact taken from the Baltic, but from a viewpoint a little to the west) that are the wrong size and lack the necessary detail. In a word, boring. In a few words, boring and in the wrong place. The sort of incompatibility that I never noticed with the toy cars of childhood, but which I certainly do now, with an inner groan.