The View From the Train (19 page)

The decades either side of 1900 were a period of rapid technological and other changes, many of which involved the perception of space. It is estimated that between 1816 and 1915, as many as 52 million emigrants left Europe for overseas destinations, more than half of them for the United States, the largest numbers leaving after about 1880.
¹⁰
Among new technologies, the first ‘standard layout' car was produced in 1891, and the first projected films exhibited in 1895. The coincidence of cinema and emigration is particularly intriguing when one considers how much of cinema came from the major destination of emigrants, and that both might be seen to offer the possibility of a ‘new' or other world. The skyscraper, electrically lit and artificially ventilated, also dates from the turn of the century, arguably from Burnham and Root's Reliance Building in Chicago, of 1895. Transatlantic radio communication was first achieved in 1902, and powered flight in 1903. The first deep electric underground railway
¹¹
opened in 1890, and the electric tram,
¹²
the incandescent electric lamp, the
telephone and the phonograph were all establishing themselves during the period. Ocean-going steamships became much bigger: from Cunard's
Campania
, at 12,950 tonnes the biggest in 1893, to the Hamburg-Amerika
Vaterland
, 54,282 tonnes in 1914.

Imaginary or virtual space was familiar in the nineteenth century as the space of the novel – ‘Dickens's London', for instance – or as the spaces of photography, painting and so on; but with moving pictures, new communications technology, mass emigration and cheaper travel, virtual space became much more pervasive. The invention of cinematography began an evolution of ‘animated photographs' which includes silent and sound cinema, television, and the vast proliferation of other electronic moving images that continues today. Moving pictures combined the likeness of the photograph with the duration of consciousness and narrative, offering the possibility of a simulated experience of movement through space, as in the ‘phantom rides' that were a popular subject of early films.
¹³

During the century since, mechanisation and subsequently automation have radically transformed the availability, production and distribution of material things like food, consumer goods and other mass-produced items, especially since the widespread application of computers during the last three decades. As a result, though construction has been mechanised to a limited extent, the cost of building has increased enormously compared with that of most other artefacts, and has probably also increased when compared with average earnings, so that building has become more expensive.
¹⁴
For this and other reasons (planning constraints, for instance) the production and maintenance of built space is now a good deal more difficult than it was a century ago.

The results of both these trends are very visible, especially in the UK, as if the increased relative cost of building and the proliferation of virtual space, and of economic activity that takes place in or via virtual space, have disadvantaged the visible landscape. Although people in the UK are, on average, far better off than their predecessors of a hundred years ago, and are much better housed, the built environment is characterised by high levels of dilapidation, poor maintenance and new buildings of a far lower quality than the alleged success of the UK's economy might lead one to expect. Even inadequate property is often very expensive, as is seen in the housing market and elsewhere, as in the UK's curiously overpriced, poor-quality hotels. The building industry is perceived as an unattractive career choice, so that building skills are in short supply. There are official attempts to address the perceived inadequacies of the UK's building industry,
¹⁵
but so far without widespread success. In less deregulated, more social-democratic economies in Europe, the standard of the built environment is much higher, but the pressures are the same.

IBM advertisement,
Weekend Telegraph
, 27 May 1966

The predicament of building in advanced economies does seem to be relatively recent, dating from the early twentieth century. For example, considered as an artefact, the English vernacular house appears to have reached a kind of peak in the arts-and-crafts-influenced examples of the years between 1900 and the First World War. These houses were often more conscientiously put together than their Victorian predecessors, with improvements such as damp courses, but they were built by building tradesmen whose wages improved after the First World War,
¹⁶
so that new middle-class houses became more expensive and less sophisticated, a trend that continues today. The predicament of surviving late Victorian and Edwardian public buildings – art galleries, museums, town halls and so on – suggests a similar subsequent decline in the affordability of building since the years before the First World War.

A similar phenomenon is visible in central London. A balloon view of the area between the Strand and Battersea in 1851 shows a city with a physical form that has changed quite significantly since. In 1851, the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall still survived, and the expanse of elevated track that now dominates the landscape south of the river between Battersea and Waterloo Station was still comparatively narrow. On the opposite bank of the river stood the enormous Millbank Penitentiary. Brunel's Hungerford suspension bridge connected the south bank to Hungerford Market, the future site of Charing Cross Station. At the north-east corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, there was a brewery.

Balloon view of London seen from Hampstead, 1851 (detail)

During the following decades, the railways extended to Charing Cross and Victoria Stations; the Victoria and Albert embankments were built, and the construction of Admiralty Arch, Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Kingsway and the Aldwych all involved large-scale replacement of the previous fabric. By about 1910, however, this part of the city was recognisably the space it is today. Individual buildings have since been replaced (some with replicas), but it would appear that, at least in this part of London, a degree of stasis set in. Even in the City of London, where replacement of individual buildings is a continual process, the general form – the street layout, the scale of most of the buildings – is not
radically
different from that of circa 1910. London is much bigger than it was in 1910, but most of the fabric that existed then has not changed anything like as much as might have been expected early in the twentieth century. Much of inner London's housing stock is older than that of other UK and European cities, so that many Londoners spend most of their time in spaces built and formerly inhabited by previous generations, and psychogeography, and Gombrowicz's irony, suit the predicament of London very well.

Although the onset of this relative stasis in city space, such as it is, appears to date from the period of early moving pictures, it seems unlikely that there is any very direct connection (as there might be with, for example, the survival and recycling of fashions in clothing). The proliferation of moving pictures is only one of many elements in a much wider technological and economic evolution that might have disadvantaged building. In any case, during the last few decades, moving pictures themselves have been subjected to exactly the same kind of pressure as urban space. The spread of electronic image formats has pushed up the relative cost of photo-chemically originated films distributed as 35mm prints; years of low-resolution video have softened up audiences' expectations of picture quality; computer games and so on compete for cinema audiences' spending; budgets rise, and cinemas themselves, empty or nearly empty for most of the day, appear increasingly unprofitable as real estate. On the other hand, the representation of urban space in films does seem to be a factor in the current scenarios of
urban regeneration. Popular cinema is a conservative industry, so films are rarely a vehicle for the initial artistic ‘rediscovery' of a place, but the sight of a familiar space in a film can momentarily banish the sense of marginality that haunts even the most central urban locations. This transformation is enabled by the combination of fiction and
photogénie
that characterises a successful film, and is very like the attraction that led audiences to queue up to see themselves on screen in the factory-gate and other local films that were exhibited at fairgrounds all over the north of England in the 1900s.

The Surrealist sensitivity to urban space is perhaps most explicit in Louis Aragon's
Le Paysan de Paris
, first published in 1926, the book to which Walter Benjamin refers as having inspired his
Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
. Aragon's first published writing, however, was the essay ‘On
Décor'
, which appeared in September 1918 in Louis Delluc's
Le Film
, in which he wrote:

The desire for a poetic experience of ordinary, everyday phenomena was central to Surrealism and many other strands of modernism, from Baudelaire or even De Quincey onwards, but it was perhaps most readily achieved through photography and cinematography. It seems quite possible, therefore, that it was Aragon's experience of the cinema – as he describes it in ‘On
Décor' –
that led him to the Surrealist sensitivity to actual everyday surroundings explored in
Le Paysan de Paris
, a sensibility recalled by present-day writers' and artists' treatments of already-existing urban spaces.

During the 1970s, the film–architecture relationship became a fashionable subject in architectural discourse. It seemed odd that it should have taken architects so long to develop a theoretical interest in cinema, but previous attempts were probably frustrated by the relative inaccessibility of film space as a research subject before the introduction of the video recorder. Critically significant architects
such as Jean Nouvel and Bernard Tschumi have produced buildings informed by their readings of cinematic space, which seem to draw mainly on the idea of cinematic montage. In these, film space was considered as a model for architectural space, but more recently much of the discussion of film in architectural circles appears to have declined into an exploration of influences that the imageries of architecture and cinema exert on one another. The spaces of cinema are among those that Henri Lefebvre identifies as
representational
spaces,
¹⁸
and representational spaces exert an influence on architecture, but cinema is only one of many such sources among which literature, for instance, might be thought at least as important. The imagery of architecture, inevitably, influences the look of films, and the imagery of cinema might influence the look of architecture, though probably rather less than has sometimes been suggested; but such observations seem to miss the point, which is that what distinguishes film space more than anything else is the extent to which it is very
unlike
actual space as we experience it.

In
The Production of Space
, Lefebvre writes: