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.

Dungeness

Dungeness is a place, and one with a very strong sense of place, but it should also be a term denoting a quality, a state of being – dungeness. Otherwise a raw, bleak, triangle of scruffy shingle sticking out into the English Channel on the western periphery of the delightful and scenically varied county of Kent. That part of the Garden of England where only sea kale grows.

When I visited Dungeness last Thursday – perhaps the fifth time in my life that I’ve been there - it confirmed itself for me as one of my favourite places in England, or indeed anywhere. It possesses a unique fusion (or arguably fission) of traces of human experimentation and habitation combined with wild barrenness, a powerful paradoxical enabler of life-affirming solitude. Here are to be experienced manifestations of pure energy – the ambient hum of the nuclear industry, the roar of the wind, the swooping and screeching of seabirds, the crashing of sea upon shingle, the visions of individual minds. Ways forward only discoverable amid emptiness. All kinds of vaguely scientific artefacts probe the vast sky (with towering friendly cumuli on the day I was there) – lighthouses, telegraph poles, electricity pylons (some of them disturbingly one-armed); and at a lower level the tiny trains of the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch, the concrete relics of wartime, and the random scattering of make-do dwellings of individuals seeking isolation and escape.

Thus there are constant visual reminders of and references to human society, while the elemental nature of the place provokes one into distancing oneself from “it all”, into world-rejection. In crowded, pressured, south-east England this is the last great wilderness, where one can retreat into pleasurable solitary contemplation, comforted by the wind howling in one’s ears. Here is an escape from all the cleverness and intellectualising of modern man, the endless wittering of “commentators” and people who know better (yes, and bloggers too), the antisocial meddlings of antisocial media, the snooping of the thought police, all the hatefulness and bickering of people with agendas; escape from that vast army of useless and otherwise unemployable people whose job it is to tell you how to live, how to think, what words you’re not allowed to use this week, what to believe, whose career to destroy today. Here one can practise misanthropy without harming anyone. In fact, one can conclude safely that misanthropy is a reasonable response to the present day world.

 
Dungeness is a place – a quality – which I imagine England used to possess, a land in which people could do more or less what they wanted to, inventing their lives as they went along. A land where imposed permissions and instructions were unknown, where control and monitoring were unimaginable, where busybodying bureaucracies had no place, a land devoid of jabbering electronics and moronic noise and … civilisation. Just the wind in one’s face. Desolation ecstasy. No, please don’t bother me with the downsides and please don’t tell anyone about it. 

Dungeness, a place, a quality, and a reminder of the freedoms we have lost.