The industrial sublime: Castlefield, Manchester

22 02 2012

1. The Castlefield basin and the Great Northern railway viaduct (1894).

In a rather secluded quarter of Manchester’s city centre lies Castlefield, a dramatic urban landscape that has become synonymous with collective images of Victorian urban industrialisation. With its tangle of waterways and railways, suspended on many vertical levels, it is almost as if the built environment here were deliberately created to make the human seem tiny and insignificant (1). Each successive vertical level represents a new phase of industrialisation: on the ground (and sometimes below the ground) are the canals – the Bridgewater and Rochdale – completed by the beginning of the 19th century; suspended above these, in a dizzying, seemingly unplanned formation, are the railway viaducts (2), built in periods of development in the 1840s, 1870s and 1890s, and characterised by massive brick arches in the earlier viaducts to enormous tubular steel columns in the Great Northern viaduct (1894).

2. Castlefield basin: the junction of the Bridgwater and Rochdale canals with an 1849 viaduct (centre left), a steel viaduct from the 1870s (top left) and the Great Northern viaduct from 1894 (right).

Even for early Victorian observers, such a landscape would have been associated with the idea of the sublime, that is, feelings of awe, even terror, generated by massive structures, overwhelming spectacles and a feeling of insignificance in the face of forces beyond human control. In the mid 18th century, the sublime was usually associated with a Romantic response to nature – savage storms, rough seas, great mountains – but, by the early 19th century, it was increasingly ascribed to the new wonders of industry, such as the iron furnaces at Coalbrookdale, the giant cotton mills in Ancoats, and later railway stations, viaducts and trains. Today, we have a tendency to regard these kinds of structures as rational objects, planned only according to the dictates of reason and utility; yet, here, in Castlefield, they are given rhetorical flourishes by their Victorian engineers that accentuate their sense of power: castellated turrets on the viaducts, gothic arches in the iron bridges (3), and stripped-down Egyptian capitals on the enormous steel columns.

3. Castellated towers and gothic ironwork of the Manchester South Junction & Altringham Railway viaduct (1849) with an 1870s steel lattice girder viaduct behind.

Castlefield’s vertical structure also reflects a very different conception of urban infrastructure than our own. Today, urban utilities – railways, water pipes, sewers, telecommunication cables – are generally planned to be as invisible as possible, either hidden beneath the ground or enclosed in tunnels and embankments. In the early Victorian period, new forms of urban infrastructure were unashamedly visible: canals were driven through towns and cities, railways sped over houses on viaducts, giant sewers were even built inside embankments and bridges rather than under the ground. In comparison with the sealed-off infrastructure of today’s cities, there’s something liberating – even truthful – about Castlefield’s sheer visibility, one that brings the hidden mechanisms of urban organisation out into the open in a celebration of their layered complexity.

4. View of the original shipping holes in the Middle Warehouse, built from 1828 to 1831 and converted into offices and apartments in 1988.

Today, Castlefield retains its distinct atmosphere largely as a result of careful management. Designated a conservation area in 1980, after years of neglect and dereliction, it became the UK’s first designated Urban Heritage Park in 1982. Amid the overpowering industrial structures are more recent interventions: a group of bars and restaurants taking advantage of the waterside location and dramatic views; modern footbridges which mirror in miniature the forms of the viaducts above them; and careful conversions of the canal-side warehouses into offices and apartments (4). And it’s from here that the otherwise brazenly individualistic form of the 47-storey Beetham Tower (2006) suddenly becomes a mirror of a much older industrial structure with the same visual impact – an architectural conversation across time (5).

5. An early 19th-century factory along the Rochdale Canal with the Beetham Tower (2006) behind.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, iron, Manchester, symbolism, Victorian

Absurd space: the Williamson Tunnels, Liverpool

12 01 2012

1. Entrance to the Williamson Tunnels

Around 1805, the tobacco-merchant Joseph Williamson moved with his wife to Edge Hill, a relatively undeveloped suburb of Liverpool. He began to build more houses in the area, but because this part of Edge Hill lay on top of an old sandstone quarry, the ground was uneven and Williamson decided to level the ground by building brick arches over the old quarry. These tunnels would become the first part in an extraordinary development that spread into the surrounding area (1). In the following thirty years, until Williamson’s death in 1840, many miles of tunnels would be built, employing hundreds of local men left unemployed by the recession that hit Britain in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816.

2. Map showing the Williamson Tunnels that are currently known

Visiting the tunnels today – only a fraction of the network created by Williamson is accessible – one is struck by the absurd quality of the whole project. Looking at a map of the tunnels so far discovered (2), one sees that some tunnels join together, while others peter out after a few metres. Further inspection of the tunnels heightens this sense of absurdity: one tunnel, barely wide enough to squeeze through, cuts through a wall and then abruptly stops; another passes vertically through the ground, its opening visible on the roof of another tunnel (3); finally, one of the large brick tunnels was built on top of another for apparently no reason.

3. Brick opening on the roof of the tunnel open to visitors

Many have speculated on the reasons for Williamson’s tunnelling obsession: that he belonged to a religious sect and designed the tunnels as a safe haven from an imminent apocalypse; that he sought solace in the underground after his wife died in 1822; or that he was a showman courting publicity by being deliberately evasive about his motives. However, one thing is clear: Williamson provided much-needed employment for men in his local community, even if that employment seemingly had no direction. He continued to take more men on, some of which apparently performed pointless duties, like moving piles of rocks from one place to another and then moving them back again, or building tunnels and then immediately sealing them up. Viewed in this way, the project seems like an elaborate joke at the expense of capitalist notions of work – far odder than a simple act of philanthropy. All the bricks lining the tunnels were made by hand rather than by machines (4), suggesting a work-ethic more akin to WIlliam Morris than other contemporaneous subterranean projects like the Thames Tunnel, begun in 1825. In Williamson’s tunnels, work becomes an end in itself, disconnected from cycles of production and consumption, just like the utopian vision of work in Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890).

4. Handmade bricks lining the tunnel arches

Today, the presence of the tunnels creates an atmosphere of mystery in the surrounding area, now a run-down inner-city suburb of Liverpool. Walking the streets near the tunnels’ visitor centre, one cannot help but notice things in the landscape that would not normally solicit attention: high fences, dead-ends, abandoned buildings, bricked-up windows and doors (5). For, with the half-known understanding of Williamson’s tunnels, everyday sights take on a mysterious and alluring quality; for everything might now be a portal to another world, one that transforms the everyday into the marvellous.

5. A portal to another world?


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Categories : abandoned space, cities, ruins, underground space, Victorian

The Dark Arches of Leeds

3 12 2011

1. One of the tunnels carrying the River Aire in Leeds' Dark Arches

Today, the entrance to Leeds’ central railway station is a rather banal building dating from the late 1960s. This replaced another station, dating from 1864 to 1866, which, in turn, was a ‘new’ station superseding a jumble of earlier buildings dating from the 1840s.  The enormous scale of the railway station today is best appreciated from below, in its aptly-named ‘Dark Arches’ – a line of immense red-brick groined vaults covering an access tunnel built beneath the station in the mid-1860s and still forming most of its substructure today (2). When it was built, this subterranean world was one of the largest man-made underground spaces in Britain, created by the engineers T. E Harrison and Robert Hodgson and using over 18 million bricks. The space is dominated by the River Aire – Leeds’ principal waterway – which crosses the west end of the Dark Arches in four immense tunnels spanned by a cast-iron bridge (1 & 3). Here, the tunnels carry the fast-moving river underneath the station where it then joins the Leeds-Liverpool Canal at Granary Wharf. Turbulent and unruly, its sounds and smells animate the atmospheric gloom of the tunnels.

2. The Dark Arches from Neville Street to Granary Wharf

3. Walkway in one of the tunnels carrying the River Aire

Lining the last tunnel is a narrow walkway, a tantalising aid for would-be explorers but sealed off by a gate and coils of threatening barbed wire (3). Other brick openings suggest more secret worlds hidden in the darkness beyond, their unknown extent emphasised by gigantic brick arches glimpsed among the shadows and receding into pitch black (4). While gleaming, transparent glass office blocks rise up from Leeds’s nineteenth-century heart, the Dark Arches remind us of the city’s foundation – namely, its murky, industrial past. Indeed, in one of the arches are reproductions of Victorian photographs of the area, stained black with soot and smoke and redolent with a sense of stygian gloom.

4. Receding brick arches in the shadows

5. A place of safety for some...

The Dark Arches used to contain a run-down shopping centre, designed to cleanse this space of its dark associations in the early 1990s, but one that failed to entice enough people to shop, eat and enjoy themselves underground. As with many leftover Victorian subterranean spaces, the symbolic power and industrial origins of the Dark Arches remain stubbornly resistant to gentrification. Today, some of the arches facing Granary Wharf have been converted into restaurants, while the majority are now filled with parked cars – a common, acceptable use of underground space that is probably due to us feeling that our cars (if not ourselves) are safer in these sealed-off worlds (5). In between the cars, a few people use the arches as a convenient thoroughfare; others, for more nefarious activities. As early as 1892, Leeds’s chief of police was citing the Dark Arches as a centre of idling, prostitution and mugging; while in 2007, the British Transport Police uncovered a cannabis factory hidden in its recesses. It’s this twin sense of safety and danger that continues to haunt all underground spaces, particularly Victorian ones, and which prevents them from ever being fully controlled by the powers in the world above.


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Industrial ruins: abandoned slate quarries in North Wales

1 11 2011

1. Workers' houses at the Rhosydd Quarry, North Wales

Scattered throughout North Wales, and particularly concentrated in the Ffestiniog area, are a large number of abandoned slate mines and quarries. Perhaps the most evocative – and certainly one of the most isolated – is the Rhosydd Slate Quarry. Situated 1500ft above sea level between two mountain valleys, the location of the Quarry is spectacular, facing Cnicht on one side (known as the Welsh Matterhorn) and the bulky Moelwyns on the other. It’s accessible only by a mountain path, being over 2 miles from the nearest road and 4 miles from Croesor, the nearest village, itself remotely situated at the end of a minor road.

2. Fireplaces in the workers' houses

The remote site of the Rhosydd Quarry adds greatly to its potent sense of mystery. For it’s almost unbelievable to think that for 80 years from 1840, over 200 men were employed by the quarry, many of them living in purpose-built houses in this bleak location – treeless and one of the wettest spots in Wales. The workers’ cottages still stand in splendid but ruined isolation, their house-like quality just remaining in the surviving forms of the windows and chimney (1). For miles around are scattered enigmatic structures, including bits of rusting machinery and a succession of mills, barracks and adits constructed at different stages of the quarry’s development – testament to the lengths that were gone to to reach the then valuable slate, which lay in beds underneath the mountains.

3. Window in the workers' houses

4. Underground tunnel leading to the slate mine

Nearly all of the smaller Welsh slate quarries closed down in the early twentieth century due to falling demand and today only a few working quarries remain around the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The buildings of the Rhosydd Quarry express the complete dominance of just one building material: for everything that was built here was built with slate – from the window and fireplace lintels (2 & 3) (sometimes the only surviving bits of entire houses), to fences and walls that enclose and protect the buildings. Close to the houses are entrances to underground tunnels which gave access to the buried slate, hewn by hand and now made strangely beautiful by the return of nature – moss and water bringing colour to the otherwise grey walls of the tunnel (4). In the remains of the quarry buildings, architecture has been eroded into its most elemental forms: walls have bulged outwards, chimneys have collapsed in on themselves, isolated hearths are now surrounding by ruins. If these ruins are bleak and melancholic, they are also beautiful in their geometrical simplicity: in one of the buildings, the one remaining door lintel perfectly frames an enormous almost perfect cone of discarded slate above it (5).

5. Lintel and slate cone

The buildings of the Rhosyyd Quarry represent the ruins of an artificial industry naturalised by the passing of time and the brutal forces of nature – ruins that seem to be engaged in a powerful yet mysterious dialogue with their environment. In another remote abandoned slate quarry – the Prince of Wales Quarry – on the flanks of Nantlle mountains, most of the buildings have almost disappeared into the ground. Those that remain seem to testify to their submission to the larger forces that created the landscape from which they arose: the ruined roofline of one decaying building mirroring the form of the serrated mountain ridge behind (6).

6. Ruined building at the Prince of Wales Quarry


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, landscapes, mountains, ruins, underground space, Victorian

The Ancoats Peeps

3 10 2011

1. Peep 9, 'Clocking Off'

In 2002, the artist Dan Dubowitz was commissioned to contribute to the regeneration of Ancoats – an old and dilapidated industrial quarter of inner-city Manchester. Over the next eight years, he made a series of ‘Peeps’ – twelve brass peepholes in the walls of buildings viewed from the streets which revealed installations constructed in steel boxes embedded in the cavities behind. In addition, Dubowitz also helped create the area’s first public square – the Cutting Room – opened in 2010.

2. Peep 3, 'Mary's Room'

As documented in the 2011 book The Presence of Absence, the Ancoats Peeps offer ‘a fleeting glimpse of a walled-in space; a tunnel, a disused toilet, a spinning governor, a bell tower, a gauge.’ The worlds seen through the Peeps are intimately connected with Ancoats’ industrial past. It was once the first industrial suburb of the centre of the world’s cotton industry – that is, early Victorian Manchester – and the Peeps are saturated with nostalgic images of heavy industry: strange machines (2), dials, dirt and the toil of incessant work governed by the clock (1). Yet, despite being grounded in the history of the area, they are enigmatic images, strongly suggestive of former lives but ultimately mysterious in their meanings.

3. The Beach Club in Ancoats

4. The patina of decay on a wall in Ancoats

As an integral part in the planned regeneration of Ancoats, the Peeps are also much more than isolated visual reminders of the area’s industrial past; rather, they’re very much part of a projected image of a future for this now run-down and virtually silent part of the city. Walking around Ancoats on a grey Sunday afternoon with my wife and daughter, searching for the Peeps was bound up with experiencing the city in a new way. Ancoats is not an area of Manchester one would visit for any reason: it’s a forbidding place, almost devoid of people, its buildings seemingly in an interminable state of decay apart from a few pockets of gentrification. In the courtyard of one former warehouse, now converted into apartments, a makeshift nightclub is walled-in by images of the sea, its floor covered in sand (3); the wholesale decay of other buildings offering strange patterns that are sometimes mirrored in the forms of the peeps themselves (4); while a single tile on a wall is stencilled with the word ‘DEFECT’ (5). Are these also artists’ interventions, bits of history, or simply the result of natural processes of decay?

5. Defective tile or artist's intervention?

In one sense, the creation of the Peeps and the activity of looking for them makes you see urban space in a different way, one that makes everyday things suddenly seem like art (and vice versa). This re-enchantment of urban space has a long history, often bound up with densely theoretical texts and practices, but the way it happens here is disarmingly simple and bound up with an experience that is open to all (6).

6. Peeping in Ancoats


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, art, cities, everyday, Manchester, ruins, Victorian

Tallinn,Tarkovsky and Stalker

13 09 2011

1. The Flora chemical factory with the old city of Tallinn behind

Stalker, released in 1979, is a Russian science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s an enigmatic film, almost devoid of special effects and characterised by long takes and even longer silences, punctuated by strange images and philosophical dialogue. It’s creation was a troubled affair – the original film was damaged beyond repair and it had to be reshot by Tarkovsky and his crew. In addition, the setting of the film – mainly abandoned but toxic industrial powerplants – was said to have contributed to the early deaths of many of the film’s creators, including Tarkovsky himself.

2. The entrance to the Zone in Stalker

3. The old Flora chemical factory, Tallinn

Much of the film was shot in and around Tallinn – today, the capital city of Estonia, but back then still part of the Soviet Union. The city is famous for its remarkably well-preserved medieval core; but Tarkovsky used another aspect of Tallinn for his film, that is, the effects of the Soviet policy of rapid urban industrialisation. Beyond the old city walls, the Soviet city remains – brutally modernist tower blocks infilled with countless brick and red-and-white striped chimneys. One of these – part of the Flora chemical factory – looms aggressively directly in front of the church towers of the old city (1 & 3). This was the site chosen by Tarkovsky for the heavily-fortified entrance to the Zone – a restricted area in Stalker where supernatural forces are at work (2). The factory has now been taken over by an artists’ collective, who use its decaying spaces for exhibitions, studio space and cultural events that draw on the iconography of Stalker in relation to contemporary life in Estonia.

4. The abandoned terraces near the harbour in Tallinn

5. The empty hall inside the terraces

I came into Tallinn on a high-speed ferry from Helsinki, landing at a makeshift harbour and walking into the old city via the chemical factory. Between these two spaces lies a vast, concrete wilderness – an enormous abandoned multi-level terrace that links the sea with the city centre, but which has long since been abandoned to the elements (4). Inside the concrete walls is an enormous empty hall without any obvious function (5). As enigmatic as any of the locations in Stalker, it is an inexplicable place: was it built long ago in preparation for a flood of visitors that never materialised? Or a relic of Soviet propaganda now left to rot? Whatever the explanation, it’s now a place where people wait to board the ferry back to Helsinki and viewing platforms have been recently constructed to mitigate this waiting time (6). In this space, the spirit of Stalker still resides – its meaning is incomplete, leading to reverie, which is only heightened by the activity of waiting.

6. Viewing platform on one of the terraces


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, film, ruins, symbolism

The aesthetics of decay: rust

5 07 2011

Railings, South Parade Pier, Southsea, c.1879

One result of the post-modern turn in architecture has been a fashion for ‘distressed’ materials – weathered wood, stripped beams, broken bricks – that supposedly invest a new building with some sense of historical authenticity. Decayed materials speak of processes over time, their patina the result of a unique history. However, one sign of material decay – rust – has largely remained outside the pale of this recent appreciation of decay in building materials. In almost all cases, rust devalues the object and as a result we fight a constant battle to protect our possessions and buildings from it – painting and repainting, sanding, filing, and soaking – to ward off oxidation.

Capital, Madeira Drive, Brighton, 1888-95

Yet, there have always been those attracted to rust. In 1890, the architect William Lethaby expressed his delight in iron’s appeal to the imagination. A material that spoke of strength, simplicity and severity, Lethaby argued that rust allowed nature to return to this artificial building material, giving it a ‘magnificent patina which was a true colour of iron’ and which contributed to its ‘mysterious appeal’. Today, a whole gamut of photography groups on Flickr testify to this strange fascination with decaying metal: ‘Wonders of Oxidation’, ‘Rusty and Crusty’, ‘The Rust Bucket’, to name only a few.

Railing, Victoria Pier, Colwyn Bay, 1900

According to Dylan Trigg, the contemplation of material decay, like rust, offers an escape from the illusion of progress that dominates our everyday perceptions. Taking the time to look at decaying objects means stepping back from onward rush to a slower time, that of gradual accumulations and imperceptible losses. In decaying materials, we are reminded that, at the root of things, entropy governs the material world – the unstoppable movement from order to disorder, form to formlessness. Of course, realising this produces melancholy, but a rich sadness that knows the fragility of life and perhaps even liberation from the need to impose order and clarity on it.

Columns and brackets of the derelict pier pavilion, Llandudno, 1883-84

Seating on Blackpool's North Pier, 1863

Perhaps nowhere is this sense of melancholy more powerful than in Britain’s seaside resorts, where rusting Victorian cast ironwork epitomises their long decline from opulent places of escape attracting millions of pleasure-seekers to the often-derelict and lonely places they are today. Here, rust speaks directly of both material and social processes of decay, and with it a mixture of pleasure and sadness. There’s no denying the rich lovely colours of cast iron created from decades of exposure to wild untamed nature, but the exotic ornamental forms, disfigured by years of neglect, also speak of long-distant dreams and desires that have either been cast aside or long-since transferred elsewhere.

Supporting column, Lytham St Anne's Pier, 1885


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, iron, ornament, ruins, seaside, symbolism, Victorian

Architecture and history: London Bridge station

17 06 2011

1. The Shard under construction in June 2011

In its slow progress upwards, London’s Shard (1) is already Britain’s most high-profile skyscraper and, when finished, will be – at 1,017 feet – the tallest building in Europe. According to its architect, Renzo Piano, part of the inspiration for the design came from the railway tracks adjacent to the site of the new building, which centre on London Bridge station, one of London’s eighteen railway termini, and constructed mainly in the mid-1860s out of an existing jumble of buildings of several competing railway companies (2). At the present time, Network Rail are planning to remodel the entire station – an attempt to transform a notoriously cramped, messy site characterised by spatial confusion into a building that reflects the character of its new spectacular neighbour.

2. London Bridge Station from the south

The contrast between the two buildings – Shard and London Bridge Station – is startling. The Shard is the epitome of spectacular high-tech modernity in architecture, a spire entirely clad in glass panels that will create a dazzling landmark visible for miles around; while London Bridge station is Victorian bric-a-brac architecture, its bits and pieces including a brick train-shed wall fronting St Thomas Street pierced with monumental arches, and an enormous viaduct stretching for nearly a mile southwards, slicing the land in half and supported on a repeating series of  triple polychrome arches (3), pierced by tunnels that link Tooley and St Thomas’s Street (4). Today, most of the arches are in an advanced state of decay, their polychrome facades chipped and faded, the cornices awry and sunken from decades of neglect (5).

3. London Bridge viaduct from St Thomas Street in 2004

Network Rail’s plan to sweep away much of this Victorian heritage in its new design for the station has encountered opposition, mainly from local residents, channelled through the Bermondsey Village Action Group (BVAG). As Southwark Council plan to line St Thomas Street with new high-rise office buildings, the BVAG are formulating an alternative ‘heritage-based’ approach that seeks to conserve and repair the existing Victorian buildings. The central question raised by these plans is one of urban image: on the one hand, the Shard proclaims a new image for the city, centred on the idea of architecture as talismanic presence, inspiring a new spirit of urban optimism that looks forward and not to history; on the other, London Bridge station asks us to appreciate urban space shaped by the chaotic and conflicting demands of both city life and of its history, its decay prompts thoughts on what exactly should be valued in the built environment. For some, the sense of decay and mess around London Bridge station is a positive attribute in itself – a liberating alternative to the clean surfaces and ordered spaces of an increasingly dominant high-tech urbanism.

4. Tunnel under the viaduct between Tooley and St Thomas St

5. Decaying arch near Crucifix Lane

What would continue to make this site really interesting is a willingness to engage with multiple ways of imagining urban space, its future as well as its past. Despite the fears of many, the presence of the Shard may not necessarily overwhelm the long and complex history of the site; at the moment at least it serves to highlight the contradictions and juxtapositions that make big cities such fascinating places to be. Whether or not that continues to be the case depends on how much we allow our urban spaces to be shaped only by one seemingly overpowering image and not by the many that have given them their history.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, London, ornament, ruins, underground space, Victorian

Brickopolis: under Manchester

30 01 2011

Manchester walks offer an occasional tour titled ‘Underground Manchester’. From my past experiences in London, these tours promise much in their titles but usually deliver very little as regard actual subterranean space, so beset are official tours with stringent safety regulations. At its start, this Manchester tour seemed to fit the pattern: a long ramble through the city streets, with the guide talking about Manchester’s underground, now sealed off and inaccessible. However, half way through the tour, things took a dramatic turn as the party of 35 mainly elderly visitors descended an 80-ft staircase beneath the Great Northern entertainment complex, an ultra-modern, ultra-bland building housed inside what was previously the gargantuan Great Northern warehouse – a Victorian building that stored industrial quantities of cotton in the Victorian period.

The entrance chamber in the former canal

At the bottom of the stairs, we entered the former Manchester and Salford Junction Canal, built in 1829 underneath the city centre from the Rochdale Canal to the River Irwell to transport goods between the Great Northern Railway Warehouse on Deansgate to Grape Street, near to what is now Granada Studios. The 17-ft high tunnel of the former canal still visibly sweats and drips, fogging my camera lens immediately and making photography difficult. Sparsely lit, this space was where thousands of Mancunians would have entered during the Blitz to escape the German bombs that fell on the city from 1940-41. Inscribed on the wall are the remains of the official instructions to these reluctant troglodytes – rules as to how to behave in this most unusual of environments.

Faded instructions to wartime shelterers

In fact, this space is but a portal into an extraordinary subterranean world, completely unlit, slippery underfoot, and filled with rubble. That the group was allowed to enter these spaces was remarkable enough, and they felt every bit as wild and alien as other underground spaces shut off from public view. With almost hostile indifference to my top-of-the-range camera, the cavernous spaces appeared and reappeared in fantastical moments of sublime architecture, such as a great brick arch spanning one of the caverns with an almost impudent sense of the outlandish.

The brick cavern

What these spaces are testament to is the fundamentally subterranean quality of the modern industrial city. For Manchester was quite literally hollowed out and refashioned by the quintessential Victorian material – brick – manufactured in such quantities as to remake the very earth itself into a space that Piranesi could but dream of. The vastness and inhuman quality of these brick spaces does not fit with their conversion to shelters for anxious wartime residents (in contrast to the rather more homely chalk tunnels of the Chislehurst caves in London, also used to shelter thousands during the Blitz). In fact, one anonymous artist – perhaps one of the unfortunate wartime shelterers – has scrawled an image of the devil on one of the walls, as if representing the being most well-suited to live in this nightmarish world. If the Victorians modernised cities like Manchester by remaking its subterranean spaces, they also created, through those very spaces, a world that seemed reminiscent of something far more ancient.

The devil's own realm


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, Manchester, ruins, tourism, underground space, Victorian, war

The underground at war

5 01 2011

Corridor in Paddock, the alternative war rooms below Dollis Hill

Underground spaces take on heightened significance during times of crisis above-ground, particularly wartime. When cities are threatened by war, subterranean spaces are mobilised in new ways: as places of shelter, secrecy and production. During the Blitz in London in 1940-41, the normal associations of the city’s underground – darkness, danger and death – were dramatically reversed: the workaday Tube became immobilised by crowds of people sleeping on the platforms; new tunnels were dug to house munitions workers; the government built underground rooms to house their war operations; and church crypts, vaults and even coffins were used as places of shelter.

Sleeping in a coffin in a church crypt in wartime London

The Cabinet war rooms – now a popular tourist attraction – were built under the Treasury in Whitehall in 1939 and remained in operation throughout the Second World War. They were in fact the successors to another set of war rooms, constructed in Dollis Hill in north London and known as ‘Paddock’, which can still be visited by the public twice a year. The original war rooms were abandoned in 1939 in favour of a more central site but they remain today in their original state, albeit in the advanced stages of decay. In contrast to the comfortable experience of visiting the Cabinet war rooms, complete with underground cafe, visiting Paddock is disconcerting. Standing empty for 70 years, stalactites now hang from the ceilings and rise from the sodden floor; piles of rubbish and mud fill the rooms, while the furnishings rot and rust unchecked. Without the explanations given in the restored Cabinet war rooms, these spaces take on a nightmarish, uncanny quality: rooms meant for equipment recede into the darkness, their odd-shapes feeling alien and disorientating; and relics from the intervening years – 1970s Coca-Cola bottles and fire extinguishers – speak of other stories of illicit exploration.

The Cabinet war rooms under Whitehall

Paddock: the first Cabinet war rooms

The battery room at Paddock

Old drinks bottles and decaying doors at Paddock

In fact, the spaces at Paddock feel more akin to the countless post-apocalyptic film sets that have defined cinema since its early-20th century beginnings. They seem to speak of a disaster that is yet to happen, where even underground spaces are no longer safe from destruction. Post-apocalyptic films such as Day of the Dead (1985), Threads (1984) and The Road (2009) provide differing causes of annihilation – zombies, nuclear war and an unidentified cosmic strike – but they all use bunkers as an initial means of escaping apocalyptic destruction. However, in these pessimistic visions of the future, the underground is eventually overwhelmed by the apocalyptic forces above or, alternatively, by social breakdown below. Experiencing the decaying spaces at Paddock reminds us forcefully that it is impossible to escape the consequences of war, even if their sanitised counterparts under Whitehall continue to celebrate that very escape.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, death, film, London, ruins, tourism, underground space, war

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