The Twilight Zone

It’s that time of year when the pulling in of the evenings accelerates noticeably. Given the right kind of weather, this can lead to some interesting qualities of the light as twilight progresses.

The perceived quality of natural light is something we rarely observe abstractly, except perhaps when we visit somewhere with noted unusual and attractive light, for example at St Ives in Cornwall, or many places in Australia or on the French Riviera. Places, typically, that have attracted artists.

On Wednesday this week, at around 6.20 pm, in the banal local setting of a road junction with an excess of traffic lights, the ambient light was such that it took me straight back to autumn evenings in childhood. The sun was setting with long pink streaks of cloud contrasting with the bright cerulean blue of the clear sky. As a child, I adored this time of the year, since it implied the suddenly decreased probability of thunderstorms, which I feared, the start of the steadily darkening and excitement-mounting season leading towards the cosiness and comforts of Christmas, and what, in Nottingham, the locals call “Goose Fair weather”. This is typically a spell of calm and sunny weather with a degree of mist and fog, which coincides with the annual funfair, traditionally held in the week of the first Thursday in October.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, gas lamps were being phased out in our district, and were replaced by sodium street lights, usually of a swan-necked variety, concrete and modern. I loved to watch them coming on while the daylight still persisted: first of all the deep red of the neon trigger, and then the intense orange so characteristic of the sodium spectrum. I started to call this magical time – which a little later in the year falls before teatime – “sodiumtime”. Later on I poeticised the idea further as “The Odeon Sky”, incorporating other associations of gentle suburban civilisation. The future would be like this, always.

 
On Wednesday, though the street lighting is no longer sodium and the suburbs are scarcely gentle or civilised any more, just for a moment I was able to recapture the precise sensation and, just for a moment, felt extremely happy.

HS2 and the Great Central : same vision, same mistake

This weekend the BBC News website for Nottingham has a story about a “secret” railway tunnel under the city. This tunnel used to convey the tracks of the Great Central south from Nottingham Victoria, beneath Thurland Street and the Lace Market area, to Weekday Cross and beyond. The only reason the tunnel is “secret” is that it has been disused and blocked off since the late 1960s, when the magnificent  Victoria station was replaced by an inglorious shopping centre of the same name. The photograph below, taken when the station was in its dying days, does not do it justice.

The Great Central was built to high engineering standards and with gentle curves and gradients in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It connected London Marylebone with Aylesbury, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and – via the Woodhead Tunnel – Manchester. Its stations were generally closer to city centres than those of its principal competitor, the Midland Railway, and many of the services it provided were excellent. The entrepreneurial vision of Sir Edward Watkins was that one day it might continue through a Channel Tunnel to Paris.

Construction came after the main boom of railway building, and while splendid in itself, and grandiose in its ultimate ambitions, the line had limited connectivity with the rest of the rail network. That – along with duplication of other routes - was among the reasons for its downfall post-Beeching, and in the late 1960s, it closed. Arguably, had its right of way been preserved rather than being encroached upon and much of its crucial infrastructure dismantled, it could have formed the backbone for HS2. For a long way north of London towards the Midlands the two routes are similar, teasing us with one of those great transport “what ifs”. Thus, half a century ago, a high speed line could have been brought into being without the massive building cost and the environmental blight – including ancient woodlands and residential areas - that the current scheme inflicts. However, it would have suffered from exactly the same problem as does today’s HS2 scheme, namely that it doesn’t connect well with the rest of the system, and much of it is in the wrong place.

To all but the most biased, the drawbacks of HS2 are glaring. Among the deficits, as proposed, are that it terminates at Curzon Street, well away from Birmingham’s cross-country hub at New Street, that its access to Sheffield is poor, to Heathrow it is awkward, and to Leicester non-existent, and above all, that the siting of its East Midlands hub at Toton is inappropriate. The projected line passes directly beneath East Midlands Airport, denying the airport rail access still, and it runs close to a large new commercial development and the major highway intersection near East Midlands Parkway - the obvious and sensible site for the local hub. As I’ve argued before, Toton is the wrong choice because, quite simply, it is in the wrong place, too far north to be of much use to passengers from Derby and Nottingham who want to travel to or from the capital faster and more easily than they can at present. As a rail transport hub for the East Midlands, Toton is a nonsense; it could only appeal to those with vested interests, or oblivious to the facts of geography, or devoid of experience of train travel.

Exactly like the Great Central, HS2 is a grandiose vision that is exciting in principle,  good in parts, and just not good enough in others.  The parallels – more than a century apart - are close.

But to return to the “secret” tunnel. Other former Great Central tunnels, still in existence but similarly “secret”, connect residential areas in the north of Nottingham (Bestwood, Basford, Carrington), with the basement of the Victoria Centre, where they link up with the tunnel that featured in the BBC report. This tunnel continues, as noted above, south to Weekday Cross and almost to Broad Marsh, which is another retail centre that is currently undergoing belated redevelopment. Also, very close by is the NET tram line, which leads to districts south and west of the city. A tram stop for Broad Marsh close to, or even in, the shopping centre, would be attractive. Besides serving the existing tram routes there could be an interchange here with an imaginative utilisation of the old Great Central tunnels. In other words, another cross-city tram route.

 
So many opportunities have been missed over the years, but here is still a chance for some daring connectivity to be exploited. Perhaps the planners from NET should be taken on a tour of the old tunnels.

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.

A puzzle in SE16

Digital photography – in all its ubiquitous availability, ease and cheapness - challenges us with the question “what to photograph?” (as opposed to “what not to photograph?”). The habit encourages us to observe, and to frame and crop our perceptions automatically. There’s no shortage of subjects – the visible world and its occupants for starters – plus a vast number of stylistic approaches, themes and tropes. Once the province of professionals and clever arty people, all these tricks and techniques are now available to us all every time we venture out of the house.

Traditionally, photographers have loved contrasts – not just visual contrasts of light and dark - but conceptual contrasts such as old and new, ugly and beautiful (which is which?), rich and poor, exceptional and normal. Absurdity, the surreality of things out of context, improbable juxtapositions, the elephant in the high street, have long been popular themes. Today, since most of us routinely go out armed with a device able to capture and record the unexpected and the startling, all we have to do is keep our eyes open, hope we get lucky, and pray that a white van doesn’t come along at the crucial moment.

I’ve long been a fan of monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana). When I was growing up there was one in a front garden at the top of our road. They are intrinsically suburban, arguably naff and of doubtful taste, and for that reason alone I love them. For I am indeed incurably suburban, and I adore the life-affirming, endlessly optimistic attitudes, ambitions, and activities of suburban man and woman. In the suburbs you can have something huge, not particularly pretty, but exotically South American in your front garden (not your back garden – what would be the point ?). Wow.

 
Rotherhithe, London SE16, is not suburban. To the extent that it has survived the Luftwaffe and the rather more determined attempts of “developers” it is intensely urban, following the winding south bank of the Thames. It lies at the southern portal of the Thames Tunnel, the work of the Brunels - father Marc and more famous son Isambard Kingdom – which is now subsumed within (perversely) the Overground network. Commemorating the twin-bore subfluvial achievement is a museum in the former engine house, as shown in the photograph above. The splendid monkey puzzle tree nearby provides, I think, one of those absurd contrasts that delight the photographer, and whose ever-present possibility makes our capital city such an endlessly fascinating territory to explore.

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.