Essay on Algernon Newton and other diversions

One can so easily disengage from the unnatural habit of blogging, and so it has been these last few weeks. Apologies to anyone who has missed my rantings; sadly, HS2 hasn’t been abandoned – yet. Travel has been one excuse for my inactivity, lack of inspiration the most honest one, a slow stage in the production of “Tourist In Your Own Town” another. However, things are on the move again.

Since the creative urge will out anyway, in the absence of significant activity on “Tourist” I’ve been letting the muse follow her own channels. She’s been trickling out in several media (that’s enough purple pompous pretentiousness, thank you.-  Ed). Sorry. Musically, I’ve been attending to The Catford Tendency, playing around with some explosive little tunes which, in their raw state, are enjoying the working title of “The Dysfunctionals”. Tunes inspired by some people I know quite well. Anger, despair, other negative emotions. No, you don’t know who you are, do you, you don’t read blogs.

And I’m painting again. Though I’ve never consciously copied anyone, given my appetite for visions of urban grot and aesthetic shabbiness (I’m watching you – Ed), comparisons with the pet themes of Edward Hopper and Algernon Newton are probably inevitable. Especially as I like oblique sunlight and deserted city scenes, early morning stillness and such. Hopper of course is regular fare for calendar producers and TV psychologists steeped in the imagery of metropolitan alienation; Newton is much less well known, probably because he’s British but without the need to boast or to shock as an alternative to  possessing talent. To be honest, much of Newton’s output is naff, it’s flat and lifeless, amateurish and mediocre, and with some of his later works one is left wondering “why ?” Nevertheless, at his best - and that isn’t often - he’s gorgeous.

Relatively little has been written about Algernon Newton, and therefore I decided to indulge myself by writing a little essay about him, a brief biography, and some highly subjective comments on some of his paintings. Anyone who would like a free copy of the essay is welcome, although the accompanying illustrations are not copyright cleared. But it will give you a potted account and some weblinks, if you’re interested.

Rather like Hopper and comments about alienation and loneliness in the big city, Newton routinely attracts remarks about his works portraying menace and ominous foreboding, sometimes regarded as psychological portents of World War Two, or as delayed side effects of his First World War experiences. There’s quite a consensus, apparently, but I’m not sure about this; it seems to me that city scenes can be empty, quiet and still, without necessarily portraying anything sinister. That would be the case as regards my own paintings. Thundery skies can just be thundery skies. Visual or topographical pleasure may need no further analysis.

The quiet city in question is (mostly) London between the wars. Newton became known as the “Regent’s Canaletto”, a neat pun acknowledging his admiration of the Italian maestro plus his frequent choice of the Regent’s Canal for subject matter – mostly in shabby locations in Paddington and Camden Town. Those sort of places are among my favourites too. His very best painting, however,  one that fills me with unfulfillable yearnings, is of Camberwell, an idyllic canal scene now long since obliterated by the banalities of Burgess Park, a location dead and buried along with the age and the values it represented.

Thus stimulated by my brief study of Algernon Newton I have returned to one of my favourite artistic locations, the area of west London close to Trellick Tower, the former Great Western main line and the Grand Union Canal known formally as Kensal Town, a broken off outpost of humanity that at one time might have declared allegiance to Paddington or North Kensington. From the early sixties onwards this area was seen to good and proper by planners, social engineers, architects, you know the sort, the same ilk as the begetters of Burgess Park, all hygiene and fresh air. The best recollection of its ambience remains in the photographs of Roger Mayne, taken in and around Southam Street in the heart of this district. There isn’t much of it left now, hardly anything. The sky looks more or less the same. So all I can paint is an idea, an atmosphere, a might have been, a could have been but never was. Perhaps next time I’ll have something to show you, and more news on “Tourist”, which also includes an account of the district I’m referring to.

One paradox. In the TV series “’Allo ‘Allo’, the character Edith, wife of café owner René, bears a strong facial resemblance to Jo Hopper, the artist’s wife who modelled in many of his paintings. The radio code name Edith and René use for communicating with England is “Nighthawk”. “Nighthawks” is of course one of Hopper’s most famous works. Strange.

“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.

This is the age

Of the ironic way. Le chemin de fer, el ferrocarril, die Eisenbahn. Damn it, we invented it and gave it to the world. I alluded in my last posting to the Thomas the Tank Engine character, can’t quite remember his name (no, not Ringo), whose repetitive strain as regards HS2 is that he’s right and everyone else has got it wrong. Recently he’s been televised, uttering his habitual spiel, on Nottingham station, while it was closed for 5 weeks for infrastructural improvements.  It’s a location highly appropriate, symbolic even, for Thomas the Tank, for this precise spot illustrates so well the historical failures of railway planning.

Right at the start of the Age of Steam, Nottingham decided that it didn’t want anything to do with the new-fangled railway, so Derby got it instead, with good connections and lots of railway-related employment that have lasted down the years and done that city proud. Having missed the – er – train, Nottingham’s wise elders belatedly allowed their city to be connected via a spur to the Midland Railway, which in turn became part of the London Midland division of British Railways, and was subsequently branded the Midland Mainline – all three affiliations commanding respect, loyalty, and a degree of affection. Latterly this route has been operated by East Midlands Trains.

Post-Beeching, Nottingham abandoned its larger and centrally located station, Victoria - a vast cathedral-like, cavernous place, on the former Great Central line - in favour of the Midland, draughtily inconvenient on the dodgy southern periphery of the central area and permanently infused with the ambient whiff of decomposing mailbags (perhaps the 5 week closure has allowed them to be located). Of course it’s true that Derby, Crewe and Birmingham would have been awkward to reach from Victoria, and that the glories of dear old St Pancras itself may have been imperilled by such a loss of traffic if Nottingham Midland had closed. Victoria, however, had the potential for fast services to Sheffield and Leeds, and to Leicester and London. That is, to the centres of those cities, not to “hubs” quite near them. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, the obvious route for HS2’s proposed north easterly extensions was there, built, ready, waiting for someone with some imagination.

The old Great Central out of Marylebone, the last UK main line to be built before the Eurostar link, was well engineered for high speeds and smooth running. It traversed the centres of Leicester and Nottingham via magnificent viaducts and tunnels. Since the line closed in the Sixties much of this infrastructure has been done away with, vandalised, and the right of way built over.

In Nottingham, lines 2 and 3 of the NET tram network are currently under construction, part of the route being along the old Great Central axis. Other than those who stand to benefit financially, directly, most local people appear lukewarm about these developments in a city already blessed with good bus services that could be improved still further at relatively little extra cost. At present, the construction work is causing considerable road traffic disruption. Naturally, there was a business case for the tram project, with suitably impressive figures – investment, jobs – dreamed up accordingly. The benefits to public transport were apparently incidental, an irrelevance, as were the environmental objections. It was very obviously all about money and politics. Ah yes, a business case. Sound familiar?

Thus it was especially amusing to see Thomas the Tank on the telly, puffing away “I know I’m right, I know I’m right” upon a dreary platform at Nottingham station, a platform which was spanned by a sturdy girder bridge until it was thoughtfully demolished a few years ago. This was the bridge that carried the Great Central from London into Nottingham Victoria and beyond. It’s now being rebuilt as the Karlsruhe Friendship Bridge, since Nottingham is twinned with Karlsruhe (along with Minsk and Harare, both exemplar cities for the democratic process). The KFB will take the unasked-for tram extension, the very system that so effectively helps to block the sensible route for HS2 up to Sheffield and Leeds. I’m glad that Thomas, or whatever his real name is, came to see it. I’m not sure exactly what the bridge is made of, but in certain lights it looks kind of irony.

Unbuilt HS2

Last night I watched the repeat of the third and last programme of Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner’s highly intelligent, well researched, superbly presented and thoroughly excellent BBC TV series on “Unbuilt Britain”. The previous two programmes included an examination of Paxton’s “Great Victorian Way” intended to circle inner London, proposals for impossibly massive canals across central Scotland to improve naval defence, and pioneering visions for a fixed crossing of the English Channel.

This week’s programme focused on unrealised plans for London and Glasgow. It was an absolute treat. First of all it compared the merits of the Wren, Evelyn and Hooke proposals for rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666. Thanks to commercial imperatives and the urgent requirement to rehouse the displaced citizens, none of these schemes came to fruition, except - in modified form - Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, and his other City churches built after the Fire. The second half of the programme was devoted to two postwar plans for the redevelopment of Glasgow, a city that had suffered greatly from the attentions of the Luftwaffe, and which long before WW2 had been a by-word for tenement living, slums, congestion, violence, and other assorted deprivations.

The two competing schemes were by Patrick Abercrombie, who advocated decanting the overcrowded inner districts to exurban New Towns (e.g. Cumbernauld and East Kilbride), and Robert Bruce, who devised a ruthlessly modernistic plan heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. Bruce’s proposal would have erased the existing city, with its wealth of varied and inspired architecture, along with its close-knit communities, and replaced it with a gridiron of concrete and glass monoliths, making the most extreme excesses of East Berlin or Novosibirsk look warm and cuddly in comparison. This monstrous idea came terrifyingly close to implementation, but by the end of the 1940s had been abandoned.

What Glasgow was left with were the New Towns, some sporadic outcrops of high rise, an urban fabric largely untouched and – once decades of grime had been blasted away – magnificent to the eye. In due course it would become the fashionable and lovely city we know today, a treasure trove of architectural gems, but last night’s programme suggested that it had had a narrow scrape. On Clydeside  in those early postwar years the crude forces of politics and finance were seemingly allowed to operate with little to check them, and scant concern was shown for the softer factors crucial to satisfactory urban life. I find it rather disturbing that Bruce’s plan, in particular, was taken so seriously, and that he wasn’t taken away by men in white coats.

Interestingly, though, it was intuited early on that both of these proposals needed some assistance if they were to have a chance of success; their victims – sorry - beneficiaries, had first to be persuaded, softened up. Thus a film was shown at local cinemas, a work of naked propaganda  said to be highly convincing as regards the merits of the Bruce plan, right up until the final few moments, when the jaw-dropping horrible reality of this abysmal scheme, illustrated by a tacky, clunky model, became all too obviously apparent. The propaganda became self-defeating at that instant, and the audience must have filed out in shock and disbelief at what was going to be done to them, to their lives, their memories, their places, their city. Meanwhile,  Patrick Abercrombie – who famously had designs upon London as well, most of them unrealised, thankfully – also made a film, a ghastly Cholmondeley-Warnerish production in which the weirdly monocled protagonist loftily assumed that the vast upheaval and experiment in social engineering that his scheme implied was unquestionably good for Glasgow and Glaswegians, and would be welcomed. Again, he was rumbled, and again – perhaps with hindsight aided by the creations of Harry Enfield – one is amazed that the whole performance wasn’t dismissed as a spoof.

However, it wasn’t. The line between good intentions and overweening arrogance is sometimes hard to discern, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on what were the standards of the time, not long after the end of a war during which the population had become inured to receiving condescending and irritating instructions on how they ought to behave. Experts and authorities were respected in those days. Sometimes. Wonder how they lost it.

In Glasgow in the 1940s – still regarded as the second city of the Empire - the likely subjective, aesthetic, social and environmental consequences of what was being suggested were ignored; only the vested interests of political power and commercial gain were deemed to be relevant to the discussion. The poor sods who would have to up sticks and go and live in filing cabinets in the sky or out in the middle of nowhere weren’t  of any real interest in the grand scheme of things. The proposals could be rationalised with vaguely socialist smarm about how cosy it would be if everyone lived equally – equally, that is (architects and planners excepted), in habitations of equal awfulness, all part of the preppy postwar zeitgeist, the weary hope for a new and better world, the adoration of all things white and cuboid and soulless, the infatuation with meaningless grassy “lungs”, all carefully, neatly, psychotically arranged - in low density angst, hygienic resentment, and fully functional right angled seething, with the added inducements of an inside loo and a 23rd storey balcony to jump off.

Of course it isn’t like this now, is it. Is it? ‘Course not. We know better now, don’t we. We know that there has to be more to a city than this, even if Cumbernauld New Town does occasionally make it into the catalogues of crap Britain. All about money and power? What? Was it ever? Don’t be ridiculous.

In my “Tourist In Your Own Town”, currently being prepared for publication, I examine the kinds of subjective factors that feature in the appreciation of cities, factors which would have been so cruelly denied in Bruce’s Glasgow, Le Corbusier’s Paris, or Robert Moses’ Manhattan, had any of these atrocities been allowed to proceed. Atro Cities, now, there’s an apt descriptor. No, the core requirement is for a sense of place, and “Tourist” delves into that topic in detail, together with much more - in what should be a rattling good read. Watch this space.

Yes, it would be nice to think we have come a long way in our planning activities  since those flickering monochrome days of postwar austerity. Maybe we have. Certainly we have access to more convoluted wool-pulling techniques, to fancier statistical obfuscation algorithms, we are quite at home with snazzy computer simulations and dodgy data mashups, we simply lurve virtual realities and visualisations; we’re always hugely impressed by the latest software package (yes, it has to be a package, we don’t want anything that might be easy to get into). Etc, etc.

OK, I’m starting to get stroppy. Let’s turn to high speed rail. In principle, a Good Thing. Currently in the UK we have a kind of demented Thomas the Tank Engine character who keeps puffing “I know I’m right, I know I’m right”, every time more voices join the opposition to HS2 and whenever the ludicrously expensive and comprehensively daft project is shown up for what it is. The greater the opposition, the louder he chuffs. So far, he’s getting away with it. I wonder who he is?

“Is your name not Bruce, then ?” “No, it’s Patrick”. “That’s going to cause a little confusion”.

Beeching 2

Today the BBC News website reports that the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) now estimates that the extended version of High Speed 2, with its northern projections to Leeds and Manchester, will cost the British taxpayer more than £80 billion, compared with the previous comparatively trivial figure of £42.6 billion. As with all such estimates beloved of our political and financial masters - where millions so easily escalate into billions and trillions and on into completely meaningless-illions – there is a strong whiff of wetting one’s finger and sticking it up into the wind. “Ah yes, um, £80 billion, that sounds about right. It’s only the taxpayer. Pity the poor sods who live in Canterbury or Cardiff or Cornwall who will still have to fork out for HS2 at very little potential benefit to themselves. Never mind.” But to be fair, while the figures may be a bit iffy, the IEA is opposed to the current proposals and they suggest that the money could be better spent on more effective rail improvements. How absolutely true. Carefully thought-through improvements, for instance, the consequences of joined-up thinking and imaginative planning by people sympathetic to, and knowledgeable about, our railway heritage. No, not the Fat Controller.

No one has a clue how much HS2 will cost. Nor how many jobs it will create, or how much business it will generate in different parts of the country, or even if anyone will want to use it, or be able to afford to. Completion date, a couple of decades on, is a long way away. These are fast-moving and scary times. As someone once said, making predictions, especially about the future, is difficult. The big changes are the ones we didn’t see coming : the end of the Soviet bloc, the internet, 9/11 and the insanity that has followed. And so it will be; 20 years is a very long time, even if politicians can’t imagine beyond next weekend or at best beyond the next election – and, all too often, routinely can’t see beyond the tip of their steadily extending noses. Whatever the merits of the estimated figures, the IEA report does note, however, that the scheme is “incredibly poor value for money” – so, then, no different really from what indigenous longterm UK residents have come to expect in general, and fully in line with the effects of successive government policies.

The £80 billion (I’ve just checked and it hasn’t gone up since this morning, though admittedly it is a Sunday and the school holidays) apparently allows for all the bribes, hand-outs, fudges, kludges, bodges and infrastructural bandaids necessary to render the scheme halfway palatable to a captive public, or even do-able at all. The report isn’t officially released until tomorrow, so I’m not sure if the new figure takes care of the tricky bit about going where people actually want to go, e.g. city centres, or stations where there are ongoing connections to other places, rather than stations with fascinating historic columns quite near to city centres or “hubs”  in the middle of nowhere but accessible by an extended tram route with only 15 intermediate stops, just as long as you don’t mind humping your baggage and your small children across the footbridge.

A few weeks ago I voluntarily underwent the profoundly depressing experience of attending a public meeting where the aims, pros and cons of HS2 were explained, with the opportunity for the audience to ask questions and to raise objections. The responses were widely varied, across the spectrum from unquestioning acceptance to unsubtle badge-wearing “Stop HS2 !” fundamentalism, and with many shades of detail and specificity of concern in between. There’s an awful lot to weigh up which – frighteningly – appears to have been brushed under the carpet by the experts who really understand these matters. “Of course, we’ve looked at that in immense detail, and we concluded it was a non-starter. Trust us, we know best. Next?” Sadly, but by no means surprisingly, I came away feeling that the matter has already been decided and that, while there will be some sort of sham of a “consultation” process, and a few minor tweaks reluctantly permitted here and there, if the present government (or its replacement by the other lot in 2015) has anything to do with it, the biggest public transport disaster since Beeching is fully on track – and an expensive, environmentally destructive, and wrongly sited track it is absolutely determined to be.

Britain vs The Axis Powers : Round Three

It’s usually the sign of personally uneventful times and a stagnant mind when one is reduced to blogging about TV programmes. Indeed, such has been my week, despite some socialising, travel, painting, reading, and trying to persuade Microsoft Word to paginate “Tourist In Your Own Town” in the way that I want, rather than as desired by some anonymous 14-year old nerd in Seattle. Be that as it may, the overall result of my TV viewing has been a renewed sense of despair at the inadequacies of our once great nation – the one before Blair, Brown, Cameron and the other bloke who looks like a volleyball teacher, in fact, the one before most of their postwar predecessors.

This strong sense of failure has been mostly down to programmes about Germany, although their food – it has to be said – doesn’t film well, and provokes my latent tendencies towards vegetarianism. Rick Stein’s rather self-indulgent jaunts round his various relatives was thus a disappointment as far as I was concerned and - Beatle-fan though I am - you won’t catch me ordering the Hamburg analogue of scouse. However, that was just the start. Other programmes this week highlighted the superiority of the German car industry compared with our own – as if we needed it pointing it out – and of the rather more robust and thought-through German attitude towards work in general, looking after one’s children properly, drinking in public, Sunday observance, antisocial behaviour und so weiter, compared with poor, greedy, materialistic, drunken, loud, loutish, atheistic, defeatist, crippled by political correctness and elf and safety victim-status Britain – a nation that is becoming embarrassingly out of step with the rest of the civilised world. Or, in a single word, embarrassing.

And then there’s the Japanese, who these days are much like we used to be – quiet, reserved, thoughtful, respectful, industrious, clever, nice to have as tourists, and generally a bit peculiar – in an otaku-ish rather than a shed-o-centric way. The Channel 5 programme, which every several seconds repeatedly referred to Shinjuku as “the world’s busiest train station” for the benefit of viewers with ultra-short attention spans and no experience of railways, did - despite the moronic commentary - feature fascinating scenes of precision timing, crowd control and customer care. For reasons of libel-phobia one would not wish to make invidious comparisons with certain British train operating companies, except to say that the handful of trains that struggle to arrive at and depart from platforms 1 to 4 of St Pancras every hour should not be compared with the 25,000 a day that pass through Shinjuku – which has 30-odd platforms, and that’s not including the metro lines. No, it isn’t a fair comparison at all, except that one may allude vaguely perhaps to a certain difference in generic attitude. Then again, I’m not sure that I would want to be squeezed aboard, by professional squeezers, onto the last train of the evening, inserted into the armpits and other available orifices of suited sararimen rather worse for wear after a night out. Evidently, then, it’s not just the Brits who can’t drink sensibly, but at least the train travellers of greater Tokyo are more discreet about it, and puke quietly and apologetically over their fellow passengers rather than celebrating their inebriation as an intellectual  achievement.

Other depressing programmes of the week featured (1) a call centre in Swansea, run by a man who clearly rates David Brent as a role model and which – compared with a German factory that makes things - produces nothing at all, absolutely nichts that any normal person would want to hear about; and (2) Stephen Fry making an idiot of himself, oh holy moly, oh good heavens, in the City of London, while showing nothing of its monstrous new buildings and saying nothing anywhere near nasty enough about the whizzy bankers who work there. Both programmes had me squirming, especially as I have a high regard for (a) Swansea and its people and (b) Stephen Fry – although he should perhaps be encouraged to take things easy for a while.

But by far the most despair-inducing remark of the week was made by a correspondent on the BBC ten o’clock news on Thursday who – following the tragic death of a girl who had been cyber-bullied – commented that for many young people these days, virtual reality is reality. Thus for them there is no life beyond the gadget, beyond the screen. For someone like me who thrives on the visual environment and on the myriad activities available non-digitally, that is deeply worrying. I just hope it isn’t quite true.

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.