The Looming Presence of Trellick Tower.

The Brutalist concrete Trellick Tower in North Kensington seems to have received a cult status over the years and has certainly received , absurdly, a Grade II listing though it remains, in a peculiar sense fascinating in its faded and decayed futuristic way.

Built near Westway and finished by the early 70s it draws a person to it in the sense of dread best described by Soren Kierkegaard as the desire for what one dreads, that breeds anxiety as it looms sinisterly over the entire area of this part of north London,

"Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet one cannot tear himself free from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires".

Today on an urban walk towards Maida Hill down from Queens Park it drew me ever closer to it all the time almost against my will from Bravington Road down to the main Harrow Road where it was east to cross a small footbridge over the Grand Union Canal.

Clearly, the tenants do not care much for the council's regulations, as the rubbish bins where overflowing but across from Trellick stands one forlorn public house as a reminder this was one a densely built working class area of terraced housing before being smashed in the 60s.

This area is really the tail end of Notting Hill, though it is classified as North Kensington, but it stands in its own way from Kensal Way as arbitrarily positioned between the canal and the railway line close to the Westway which crunches its way towards Paddington.

Perhaps this is why it is said Ballard wrote a novel based on brutalist architecture like iit with its ability to brutalise the residents by sticking them high up in a nowhere land perched above the area. Unlike other tower blocks along towards Westbourne Grove it was a one off edifice.

As one commentator suggests,

The Trellick Tower is the largest and latest of these projects, a 31-story apartment slab, part of a complex of several buildings in North Kensington called Cheltenham Estate, built for the Greater London Council.

When it was built, Trellick was one of the tallest buildings in Europe and it came to epitomize all that was thought to be wrong with modern housing and urbanism following the wave of negative public sentiment about this kind of high-rise apartments that swept many countries in the 1970’s.

Trellick may have been the inspiration for the novel, High-Rise, written in 1975 by the English science fiction writer J.G. Ballard.

The last of a trilogy of books (Crash, 1973, Concrete Island, 1974) exploring common dystopian themes about the impact of modern technology on the human physic, High-Rise is a bleak apocalyptic tale about the social and physical disintegration of a community of 2000 people living in a 40-story apartment tower in London.

Much of the description of the tower in Ballard’s novel seem to have been derived directly from Trellick, the extended height, the facades and balconies, the articulated stairs and elevators, and the general Brutalist quality of the” concrete landscape”.

Ballard’s description of the tower as “an architecture built for war” certainly seems apropos vis-à-vis the Brutalist quality of the complex.

By the time High-Rise was published, there was already heightened public antagonism towards the typical modernist social housing development of the 1960’s and an accompanying fear of high rise buildings in general.

The questions is should the Trellick Tower have been listed. I do not think so. Rather as with large cooling towers I feel weirdly drawn to them but relieved when they get the necessary levels of TNT that level them down to the ground again.

( My own photos & more commentary tomorrow....)

The Way Towards the West has Gone West.

Welcome to Westway. It takes the driver West but only out of London. From Westfields Shopping Mall the driver drives East. The whole area is a blighted one. One passes through this zone of transience which defines the nature of the horrid area of Shepherd's Bush and the home of the BBC Television Centre.

Then again when alighting from the Shepherd's Bush Tube Station, it must be remembered that IKEA, the kind of store where riots break out as frantic consumers battle to get in first to grab the best bargains during their sales, has an advert on the Oyster Card reading "Travel is a means to an end. Home".


The most prescient of British novelists J G Ballard was correct to see Crash a dystopian version of the future in the 1970s when he used Westway, the inner city motorway which zooms into central London from Hammersmith to Paddington as an example of the 'Death of Affect'.
By this Ballard meant the deconstruction of cities and the settled life they once contained as leading to pathological reactions amongst a deracinated citizenry in which the car would become seen as a liberating means people use to overcome their sense of being detached from the city.

In Concrete Island ( 1974 ), the driver's crash off Westway into a Traffic Island he cannot escape from and who is ignored by the cars zooming their way towards Central London was a satire based on the retelling of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was a man on an Island, a metaphor Daniel Defoe used to describe as Merlin Coverley puts it in Psychogeography,

' ( that ) with its twin leitmotifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation, provides a broad outline of a character who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and amorality of the survivor'.

Merlin Coverley emphasises the Robinson, a man cast adrift in an oceanic and unknowable place with all the fear that entails comes back into Ballard thus,

"Ballard describes modern life in advanced industrialised societies as characterised by a lack of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings.

When walking along Westway from Westfields in Shepherd's Bush, a meaningless and weird zone of alienation and spiritual poverty, the reaction of the White Van men, known to drive manically through London, was one of total hostility to my decision to walk there. Pedestrians are subversive in a city dictated to by the demands of the automobile.

With St George's Flags fluttering, White Van Men screamed abuse, though the little pathway alongside it is just wide enough to allow one to pass without getting in the way. One driver screamed 'nutter' and another 'wanker'. A curious form of Road Rage. Aggressive banality was omnipresent in this zone.

Naturally, a lot of this aggression is a reaction to the sheer boredom and banality of London's descent into a large conduit for Capital, hot money and cars coursing through its veins and arteries, a City State that has become a law unto itself detached from England as a territorial nation.

Asserting one's" identity", the desire to feel radical and transgressive is not just connected with cocky attitudes and the empowerment of having an SUV, those "Gated Communities on wheels" but also in pseudo-libertarian proponents of the Great Car Economy such as the BBC's populist presenter on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, who advocated knocking down cyclists.

The fact that this mutton headed dolt has books are best sellers shows the need to tap into the aggressive and liberating aspects of the car from the world surrounding atomised individuals. It appeals to those for who the banalisation of everyday life requires aggression as a marketing tool. Including stunts like ramming an SUV into a tree to show "toughness".

Indeed outside Westfields, there were utterly moronic adverts with an underlying mood of implicit aggression. Gym Box, soon to open at Westfields, seemed to advertise aggression as the only way of maintaining one's freedom. As only losers could think that being on the straight and narrow was the way forward.

Yet even weirder was the advert that shows the "drivenness" of contemporary Britain in 2010 where the same Gym Box, informs Westfields consumers that they have a human right given them by God to be absolutely beautiful, something again which gives credence to Ballard's notion in Kingdom Come about a similar Mall where it is seen as a religious experience.


Bibliography

Merlin Coverly. Psychogeography.
J G Ballard, Concrete Island.
J G Ballard, Kingdom Come

No Photos in Westfields or outside the BBC-Could Consumerism Lead to Fascism ?

This is Westfields Shopping Mall in Shepherds' Bush, one of the largest, if not the largest, in London. I had passed it several times on the overland train down from Willesden Junction down to West Brompton, where I alight to then to get the District Line Tube Train to Putney Bridge where I work. I had it on my mind to see what it was all about.

On this hot summer day in July 2010 I finally got off the train from Clapham Junction after seeing the immense magnitude of the new Westfields shopping Centre in Shepherd's Bush. This horrible temple of mass consumerism might as well have been the inspiration for J G Ballard's Kingdom Come.

One of the greatest chroniclers of our age wrote in the last years of his life about the idea that consumerism could lead to Fascism.

I entered this vacuous shopping Utopia and took at least 30 pictures before a black female security guard rushed up to me. She said "You cannot take photographs here in Westfields".

I replied "Um, er...Why not, it's a free country isn't it ? And this is a kind of public space I suppose where people would surely want to take photographs of their wonderful day out in Westfields"

"Not taking photos in Westfields is Westfields policy"? she said emphatically

Yes, but why ? I'm not harming anybody. I find the architecture and the design most intriguing as it looks like a vision of Heaven to me. I really love it here." I said with an airy indifference, as consumers shot glances at me with hostility.


"Yes. Westfield's policy is quite clear. No photos".

"Does Westfields then have different laws from the rest of England ?

"No, this is Westfield own private policy."

"So I can't bring my wife here to enjoy a lovely day out here. It's just so airy and bright here that I wanted to show here what it really looks like so we could make a trip here".

"I'm not going to repeat myself again sir, Westfield's does not allow photos without people. So yeah, you can take photos of your wife here"

Um, ok but what's the difference as she'd be in a picture with Wesfiel's clealy shown in the photo, I just don't understand".

"It's Westfield's policy sir. I'm just doing my job. Please I'm busy".

"Ok, now just really I understand everything".

" Thanks sir".

At least she did not actually grab the camera off me.

But after leaving Westfields I walked up the road to the BBC Television Centre. There was more bad news. No cameras were allowed there either, which a curious position for a TV channel to maintain-if this indeed BBC Policy these days.

Just further up the road the old 1950s BBC Television Centre were the new wierd "post modern" steel metallic buildings to the north of it . It had flagpoles blowing in the soft breeze. I started snapping when, after five minutes, a security guard aggressively rushed up into my face and snapped at me angrily,

" You can't take photos here Sir!"

"Why not , it's not gated. I like the steel metallic architecture ?. It very futuristic you see".

"No, put your camera away now. No photos of the BBC". He glared at me with anger but, even more disturbingly with agonised hatred mingled with pure incomprehension. This man though it was almost insane to take photos of the BBC.

I just somewhat wearily and sarcastically looked him directly in the eyes and said in my drollest fashion "Now I understand. But I just love the BBC for representing the best of British liberal culture that we promote worldwide. I was just admiring the BBC. Don't you ?".

"Can you just go away please"?

"Don't worry. I've been in Eastern Europe too long and didn't realise the situation had changed so much in the UK. In Moscow I was allowed to take photos of the Kremlin, a really sinister place that was a bastion of totalitarianism in the USSR. That's why Kenny Everett of the BBC in the 1980s wanted to bomb Russia".

"I've just told you to get away from the buildings and go away. Will you just do that immediately I won't ask you again Sir?" as he looked with hostility at the digital camera.

"Yes.....Ok then....Sir".

The heat was blazing down on me. I was giddy and feeling deeply estranged, so I then tried to head West of Westfields along the Westway heading towards Paddington. Drivers in white vans honked at me as I walked along the narrow path without any exits.

Someone in a white van whizzed past and loudly shouted "nutter". Pedestrians are subversive when they walk along Westway somehow. They clearly though that this was a place where I should not be walking. But I was.

I had not done anything wrong but the fact that someone would walk along Westway must have seemed insane for them. But again, I was taking pictures and glaring at the high rise blocks and the hideous Trellick Tower in Notting Hill.