The Burghers of Rutland

I was saddened, as no doubt were many, just before the New Year, by the death of Neil Innes, variously described as the Seventh Python or the Sixth (or Seventh) Beatle, and always as a really nice guy and talented musician who didn’t really receive the recognition he deserved. One of my favourite vignettes was of his Walrus-inspired song about the “Montana Café“, released in the late 70s, which shortly afterwards encouraged me to do a painting called “Sunray Café”. 

“Sunray Café” (detail) © R. Abbott 2020

The location is semi-fictional, Warren Street, or thereabouts, and the slightly Modigliani-ish figures are the consequences not of astigmatism but of inability. However, like the Montana, it’s a café where a sad man could seek solace, a fry-up, and a quiet smoke.

As well as Bonzo Dog, Innes will always be associated with The Rutles, for which he provided the principal musical input, with his accurate Lennon vocal impersonations and Beatles pastiches as group member “Nasty”, including such classics as “The Knicker Elastic King” and “Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik”. The Rutles were of course intimately associated with Rutland Weekend Television, a series which managed extremely successfully to combine Pythonesque humour with parodies of the loveable absurdity of the later Beatles, and to put England’s smallest county on the map of popular culture.

Rutland hit the headlines again this week, in news reports that the local council were meeting to discuss the proposal to build a drive-thru McDonalds on the northern outskirts of Oakham, Rutland’s county town. As a planning dispute there was something most unusual about it, namely that both sides of the debate were respected and the inevitable outcome – approval – was received graciously. More specifically unusual was the nature of the argument against the plans, which we will come to in a moment.

In most disputes of this sort there is a strong, positive, objective, forward thrusting, carefully costed, computer modelled proposal to build something – a fast food outlet, a by-pass, a wind farm, a housing estate, a runway, a high speed railway – which it is claimed is desirable, and will improve local conditions, benefit transport, bring in investment and jobs, provide “green” energy, create money, and overall be a good thing. Opposing it is a weak, subjective, negative, backward looking, vague, intangible, highly subjective argument that the proposed construction will spoil the neighbourhood, mean the loss of something valued, damage a treasured view, upset a colony of rare newts, generate traffic and noise and litter, be a waste of money, and overall be a bad thing. The proponents normally have access to all kinds of professional support, including lawyers and people with strong presentational skills; they will in all likelihood have done this kind of thing before, know all the arguments, know all the tricks, be well placed. They will be prepared to play fast and loose with the truth, whatever that is. The opponents are usually ordinary honest people, fearful, defensive, inarticulate, on the back foot, presented with something they don’t want, who rapidly have to learn tactics from first principles, get little help from anyone, endure stress and expense they can ill afford, and can only put together an amateurishly mumbled and feebly hand-drawn objection. The outcome is almost inevitable.

In the Oakham instance there were worries about litter and traffic, but since the proposed site, at Land’s End, on the A606 by-pass is away from housing, on an essentially greenfield site but adjacent to a filling station and other commercial retail premises, those sort of objections were minor. McDonalds is something of a symbolic red rag for people who don’t like matters corporate and in particular American, and it has also been associated with arguments about its employment policies, and about the nutritional quality of its principal products, especially as consumed by young people. Those factors were aired too. People interviewed in the street had differing opinions, many seeing both sides of the debate. Many, especially those with children or grandchildren, could see the attraction of an edge-of-town vendor of fast food. Salivating already.

What was very unusual about this case, though, was the main “soft” or “subjective” argument, the one that normally gets sneered at as mere nimbyism.  Specifically, the defence as to why the proposed development should not go ahead was that Rutland was the last county in England that did not already have a McDonalds, and therefore that it was “special”, was “different”, and it ought to remain that way.

 
So in this instance it was heartening to see the “subjective” case perceived as perfectly valid, unique as it was, and when – as expected – it was defeated, the good citizens of Oakham seemed not unduly troubled. The whole business was civil in  both senses of the word, as befits such a delightful English county. I’d like to think that Neil Innes would have been pleased with the outcome too, the only possible improvement on the situation being that, instead of being just another outlet featuring the Golden Arches, it could be named the Montana Café instead.

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.

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.

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.

“Tourist In Your Own Town” progress report

Progress with “Tourist In Your Own Town” is going well, and proofing is now at an advanced stage. The cover, featuring a stereotyped tourist in a well-known London location, looks great. The first attempt at printing has been undertaken. This has demonstrated that the preferred typeface, Garamond, doesn’t come out too well, with the crossbars on the e’s and the H’s, in particular, tending to vanish. Current thinking is to go for a bolder and denser font for the main text, probably Baskerville Old, and at a larger point size. This will mean a fatter book, currently estimated at around 488 pages. Everything always takes longer than expected!

Allowing for other commitments, publication of “Tourist” is at present projected for early October. For anyone interested in the subjective aspects of geography, the psychology of places, how we experience travel, and what has become known as psychogeography, “Tourist In Your Own Town” will be an essential book to purchase.

Blurb on the beach

In the throes of preparing for publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town”, and seeking an alternative to being molested by dogs on an otherwise glorious Norfolk beach, it occurred to me that I needed to write a kind of blurb, which would serve as an introduction but also, well, act as a kind of blurb. In a blurbish kind of way. So what I wrote was along the following lines.

“The central theme of “Tourist In Your Own Town” is how, subjectively, we perceive the geographical environment, with an emphasis on the experiencing of ordinary places, as it applies to daily life and to travel and tourism. The book is concerned with how it feels to be alive in the sorts of very ordinary environments most of us inhabit, the impact that places make upon us, the sense of place, and with why some places are interesting or pleasant, and others are not.

Subjects covered include the impressions that places make when we first encounter them, why some places are perceived to have humorous qualities, subjective similarities between places, the recent enthusiasm for psychogeography, nostalgia, the psychology of travelling within and between places, and the associations and imagery that places hold for us.

The book’s primary purpose is to encourage an appreciation and enjoyment of one’s surroundings, drawing on references from geography, planning, architecture, the psychology of perception, autobiography, fictional literature and visual art, in an original synthesis. There are also implications for the sensitive redevelopment of places.

The book will be of interest to anyone who takes an interest in places, plus those with a professional or educational interest in travel, tourism, geography, the built environment, and the psychology of place. “Tourist In Your Own Town” is extensively referenced but is not academic in style, is occasionally humorous, and is accessible to the general reader”.

With that, blurb provisionally completed, a raincloud appeared, and – though probably Normal for Norfolk - it seemed prudent to retreat.