The View From the Train (18 page)

The idea that it might be possible to visit other times, rather than merely other places, first arose during the previously mentioned visits to virtual Antarctica, and was revived during the later lengthy preoccupation with the age and likely future of the built environment. While rewriting the
house
film's narration, in the light of perplexing comment from the client, I sometimes entertained
bad thoughts
towards my producers (there were two, which I imagine is never a good idea). I would wake early, often in the middle of the night, and got into the habit of reading Dickens's
Bleak House
to pass the hours until morning. I had not read the book before, but had owned an audiobook version, read by Paul Scofield, for several years. I had bought it to prepare for recording the narration of a film,
London
, which Paul was to read, as it is difficult to anticipate how one's words will sound when read by someone else, and the tape was extremely helpful. I have since often listened to it on long car journeys. The abridgement is very skilful, as they often are, and the story gains a degree of montage beyond that which characterises the original, for, as Eisenstein pointed out, Dickens was a pioneer of montage.

One of the strands omitted from the audiobook was the story of Caddy Jellyby's engagement and subsequent marriage to Prince Turveydrop, her dancing teacher, the fatally exploited son of old Mr Turveydrop, the proprietor of Turveydrop's Academy, a dancing school in Newman Street, in London, which is described as being ‘in a sufficiently dingy house at the corner of an archway',
and backs on to a mews. The only remaining archway in Newman Street is that above the entry to Newman Mews, which connects, via Newman Passage, a narrower archway adjacent to the Newman Arms, to Rathbone Street. On the north side of the Newman Street archway is a house which is perhaps not quite big enough to have contained Turveydrop's Academy, and is no longer dingy, being the premises of Cinecontact, where we were editing the film.

This encounter with its fictional past recalled a whole series of fateful associations with this corner of London, better known for its role in Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom
. A few doors along Rathbone Street are the former premises of the British Film Institute's now disbanded production division, where I spent months editing
London
with Larry Sider, with whom I was again working, and wrote the narration that had led me to acquire
Bleak House
. The first press interview prior to
London's
release took place at a table outside the Newman Arms. Cinecontact's move to Newman Street had been the catalyst for the producer of my two previous films, who used to sub-let a corner of their previous office, to join Illuminations (whose office had once been in Newman Mews), the company for which we were making the film, which was how I ended up with two producers, which was why, eventually, I read
Bleak House
. The discovery of Mr Turveydrop's Academy, in the small hours of a sleepless January night, brought all this vividly to mind.
Bleak House
is set, approximately, in the 1830s. We finished editing the film in a room that looked onto the backs of some of the original houses in Rathbone Street, which now appeared, in a way they had never done before, to offer the possibility of contact with another time.

In the last 150 years or so, technology has radically altered the way we communicate, but the built environment has not changed anything like as much as people used to predict it would. The way we experience space now changes much faster than the fabric of the spaces that we occupy. When looking at images of the past, I have been increasingly struck by the contrast between the familiarity of the spaces depicted and our distance from the lives of those who then inhabited them. The ease with which we now
communicate with distant spaces in the present may be a factor in this, but there is another reason, which is that the medium of film, too, has become old. The virtual past exists in many media – in the topography of novels, like
Bleak House
, in maps, paintings, photographs and so on – but film's duration, and its oneiric aspect, suggest analogies with consciousness, with lived experience. At the same time, film provokes seemingly unanswerable questions about the inner life of its human subjects in a way that the novel, for instance, does not – novelists enjoying access to the thoughts of their creations. Perhaps such questions
are
unanswerable, but perhaps, with the aid of literature and other sources, one can make the attempt. Time travel may not yet be an actual possibility, but it has long been a virtual one.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there seems to have been a relatively widespread expectation that new technologies and social structures would – or at least should – give rise to a radical transformation of urban space in the decades that were to follow. In retrospect, however, despite slum clearance in the 1930s, bombing during the Second World War, and the reconstruction and redevelopment that followed, city life has probably changed much more in other ways, often ways that involve people's perceptions. Technology has radically altered the way we communicate, but the technologies of building and construction have changed much less.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, in the UK and other older developed economies, the idea that widespread, large scale replacement of the built environment was necessary, desirable or possible lost most of whatever credibility it had previously had. Instead, it seems to be generally accepted that cities and other built landscapes typically evolve through only limited and gradual physical alteration. Rebuilding on a large scale now appears exceptional – the aftermath of disasters, war, or the sudden collapse of an industrial land use, as in the London docks.
¹
The great majority of the UK's dwellings, for instance, are the first to have been built on the sites they occupy. Redevelopment was often traumatic, and with the increase in owner-occupation, both in the UK and elsewhere, the idea of replacing ageing, unsatisfactory housing has become
difficult to contemplate.
²
Only about 70 per cent of urban land is residential, but the prospect of large-scale redevelopment is almost as unlikely for much non-residential urban space. Much of the new development that does occur today takes place on previously undeveloped or derelict land at the edges of or between existing settlements, and consists of only a narrow range of building types.
³

During the 1920s, many avant-garde groups produced radical architectural proposals for future urban forms that influenced subsequent architectural production, but Surrealism was not among them. The first Surrealists devoted a great deal of attention to urban space and architecture, but none of them was an architect, and the movement does not seem to have attracted any architects until after the Second World War, when Frederick Kiesler aligned himself with Surrealism in New York and developed a polemic for ‘magic architecture', now rather influential. Instead of producing designs for parts of Paris that called for the physical replacement of its fabric, the Surrealists' method of engaging with and arguably changing urban space was through subjective transformation. It was not necessary to design or build the Tour Saint-Jacques, for example, to include it in the canon of Surrealist architecture. It was enough to appropriate it, to declare its possession of hitherto overlooked (Surrealist) qualities.

This process of discovery, or rediscovery, of urban spaces closely resembles a now-familiar characteristic of the property markets of established cities. With increasing predictability, undervalued neighbourhoods are ‘discovered' by artists and other creative types in search of cheap space, whose perception of aesthetic and other value becomes the basis for fashion, so that property values subsequently rise. Buildings attract new, more profitable uses, and hence sometimes refurbishment and alteration. Some buildings might even be replaced, but rarely with anything radically different, so that the general pattern of the city is not much altered, or is at least not much altered by altering the buildings. Since the 1970s, in much of the developed world, this kind of scenario has become popular with governments seeking strategies for urban regeneration.

Apart from the Surrealists, others have addressed the qualities of already-existing urban fabric more directly. In Chapter 10 of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961), Jane Jacobs wrote: ‘Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.'
⁴
This statement was invoked by the recent UK government-appointed Urban Task Force, and is rarely questioned, although at least one of the assumptions behind it – that old buildings are cheaper to occupy than new buildings – probably no longer applies to anything like the extent that it did in the early 1960s. In London, the institutionalisation of Jacobs's insight is demonstrated by Tate Modern, the former power station that exemplifies the widely held preference of artists for working and exhibiting in spaces with a previous, often industrial use, which was explicitly referred to in the brief for the architectural competition for the design of its conversion. Inside Tate Modern, one finds aspects of this sensibility in works of art,
⁵
which perhaps also helped legitimise the idea that it would be possible to re-use the building successfully. Jacobs was writing in a context when neighbourhood renewal was still a frequent and grave threat to the well-being – even, as must have transpired more often than we will ever know, to the life-expectancy – of inhabitants of inner-city neighbourhoods. Since her book was first published, the redevelopment of large areas of existing cities has become rare, and it has become much more difficult to demolish buildings. This is partly due to the change in culture that her book signalled, and to another attitude that is not so much innate conservatism as an understandable belief that any replacement structure is likely to be even more architecturally impoverished than its predecessor.

A more recent phenomenon, particularly in the UK, has been the revival of the Situationist idea of psychogeography. This, and the
dérive
, were techniques to explore and extend the imaginative, experiential qualities of urban and other landscapes, as part of a wider attempt to achieve a revolutionary transformation of everyday life. As such, it continued the efforts of the Surrealists, but the Situationist group did include architects and others who produced radical architectural proposals to which psychogeography and so
on were seen, at least by some, as preliminary. In 1990s London, however, psychogeography seems to have been an end in itself, and as such to have lost much of this character and purpose. Instead of avant-garde architecture, we have the
Time Out Book of London Walks
.

A similar ‘procedure of everyday creativity' was identified more positively by Michel de Certeau who wrote, as long ago as 1974, in the introduction to his
The Practice of Everyday Life
:

De Certeau emphasises the positive side to this, comparing it to ‘the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers' “success” in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians', but Gombrowicz's character's motto is a reminder of how tactless it would be today to retain any expectation of everyday experience of utopian, revolutionary, ‘magic' or even
progressive
architecture. Progressive architecture is still produced by, and to some extent for, an international élite, but in circumstances that increasingly resemble those of a reservation (from market forces, ‘philistinism' and so on) protected by a cultural establishment. New housing architecture, for example, has not been produced on any scale in the UK for decades, since the elimination of the public-sector housing programme. Most present-day predictions of the spaces of the ‘city of the future' are found in fiction (often in the cinema), where they are largely dystopian. In any case, were anyone now to attempt to envisage a radically improved future, it is unlikely that it would be formulated as an architectural proposal.

Instead, in the UK and elsewhere, cities might now be distinguished not so much by the merits of their spatial form, their society, culture and so on, but by how successfully they negotiate continual social, economic and technological change. This often seems to involve finding ways of getting the best out of predicaments characterised by opposition or conflict, such as that already mentioned between the relative merits of old and new buildings. One might compose a list of similar oppositions, which would include those between art and architecture;
⁷
between creativity and domesticity (between thinking and dwelling);
⁸
between centralisation and decentralisation; between globalised finance and globalised production
⁹
– and many others, not least of which would be that between wealth and poverty. One wonders whether, perhaps, old buildings, art, creativity, centralisation, globalised finance and wealth might have something in common, as might new buildings, architecture, domesticity, decentralisation, globalised production and poverty. If such a distinction is at least partly valid, it might be further examined in terms of an underlying shift in the balance between virtuality and materiality over the last hundred years or so.