Ornament and memory

27 03 2012

Cast-iron capital, Skipton station, Yorkshire, 1880

‘All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy … was the idea that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself.’

For Austerlitz, the eponymous narrator of W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel, the repressed memories of his traumatic childhood in Nazi Germany keep resurfacing in unexpected and disturbing contexts. These memories form the basis for the novel’s narrative structure – a kind of stream-of-consciousness text with no chapter or even paragraph breaks. But why might an ornamental cast-iron column in a provincial Czech railway station stir long-submerged memories?

Liverpool Street Station, London, 1875

Sebald, of course, doesn’t give an answer, but it’s something to do with the ‘puce-tinged encrustation’ on the iron capital which makes it seems almost alive and therefore conscious and capable of memory – of remembering Austerlitz when he was a child. A ridiculous idea, no doubt, but one that I find has strong resonances with radical notions of ornament developed by the German theorist Siegfried Kracauer just at the beginning of the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930s.

Paddington Station, London, 1852-55

Like other intellectuals of his generation (particularly Walter Benjamin), Kracauer was worried that the modernists’ banishment of ornament would lead to it returning in a ‘dislocated, unmediated’ form that could be utilised for the strengthening of totalitarian power – think the Nuremburg Rally or Nazi propaganda films. Yet, Kracauer also saw a radical potential in ornament. In his autobiographical novel Ginster (1928), the protagonist – an architect – challenges his own sense of alienation in modern Berlin with a developing notion of ornament – encompassing much more than conventional visual decoration and including accidental ornament (creating by the smudging of a window), schoolboy doodles, or the patterns in decaying walls. Kracauer’s broad notion of ornament allows the individual to ‘resubjectivize’ the increasingly objective and rationalised modern city by fixed visual images that mediate the present and the past, thus breaking down the distance between the individual and the whole.

York Station, 1877

It’s precisely this function of ornament that infuses Sebald’s Austerlitz with its narrative potency. Without him knowing it consciously, the cast-iron column in the railway station mediates present and past, partly because its visual appearance – covered in the encrustations of decay – provokes its appropriation as an object that is both present and bears witness to its history. And cast iron seems peculiarly suited to this kind of mediation. In countless railway stations, Victorian cast-iron ornament remains part of  structures that are at once powerfully present and also connected to a past, nebulous as that connection may be.

Preston station, 1880

From their inception in the 1830s, railway stations have functioned as potent symbols of modernity – the onward rush of technology – but also places of immense stillness – of waiting, where time past flows into time present. And, within these spaces, if one cares to stand and look, as Austerlitz did, the cast-iron ornament (especially if it’s rusted or stained) reminds us of these slippages in the sleek image of the modern. They are places where the whole is perceived – the milling crowds, the endless departures and arrivals of modern life – and, paradoxically, where we feel our individuality most strongly and the deep well of memories that we all carry.

Hellifield station, Yorkshire, 1880


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Categories : architecture, cities, everyday, iron, ornament, ruins, symbolism, Victorian

Utopian ruins: Fountain Gardens, Paisley

19 03 2012

Fountain Gardens, Paisley in March 2012

Paisley is a satellite town of Glasgow that has all the characteristics of post-industrial grimness: soot-blackened buildings, ruins of its once-thriving textile industry, and a grand Victorian High Street now in sad decline, with boarded-up shops the most recent reminder of its precarious fortunes. I headed out there on a train from Glasgow Central on a bright March morning; fifteen minutes later in Paisley, rain-sodden clouds had gathered, whipped up by a ferocious westerly.

The fountain when it was built in 1868

I had come to see the town’s Fountain Gardens, a philanthropic gift to the citizens of Paisley in 1868 by a local resident, Thomas Coats, made wealthy by the manufacturing industries that had seen the town grow rapidly in the mid-19th century. Coats had purchased the gardens from their private owners and then remodelled them as a civic space: ‘where the toil-worn mechanic may breath the fresh air’ or more refined citizens be reminded of the ‘public gardens of continental countries’. Such an ‘interchange of civilities’ between classes would enhance social harmony in the town, guided by the example of Coats himself in his munificent act of generosity.

Upper part of the fountain, March 2012

This kind of private philanthropy was common in Victorian towns and cities, particularly where industrialisation had perhaps led to feelings of guilt among the wealthy manufacturing elite about the often appalling social conditions of their workers. In Fountain Gardens, Coats wanted to create a new form of civility – a reconciliation of worker and master – symbolised by the central feature of the gardens, the fountains themselves. As described in a lavish publication celebrating the opening of the Gardens, the fountain was an exceptional example of ornamental cast-iron manufacture, made by the Sun Foundry (George Smith & Co) in Glasgow and unlike any other example produced before or since.

The opening of Fountain Gardens, as depicted in 1868

Described as ‘Franco Italian’ in character, the fountain was 30-ft high with a 12-ft basin on the ground supporting four further basins, divided into sections by four heavy buttresses and a series of ‘bold and well-defined’ curves. As described in The Builder, the wealth of ornament was extravagant and included, from bottom to top, a circular border cast in imitation of huge blocks of rock thrown together, inside which sit four life-size representations of walruses; in the basin above are cherubs holding crocodiles; those above are encrusted with crystals, floriated capitals, sea-horses, bulrushes, and dolphins and, at the top, a group of herons surmounted by a cluster of aquatic plants.

One of the four life-size cast-iron walruses (minus tusks) in March 2012

Such extravagant decoration was viewed as ‘creditable to the taste and liberality of Mr Coats and the artistic skill of its constructors’. In addition to the gardens functioning as the ‘lungs’ of the town, the ornaments of the fountain would provide both a lesson in artistic taste and also a utopian representation of nature and industry reconciled, mirroring the social reconciliation that was anticipated in the Gardens themselves. Those who attended the opening of the Gardens on 26 May 1868 seemed to confirm this. The whole town rested for the day, held together in common ‘by one strong swelling impulse to do something in the way of expressing a great common feeling’. All political and personal differences were put aside and the townsfolk acted ‘harmoniously’, joining a procession through the town that culminated in the opening of the Gardens and the turning on of the fountain waters.

Rust-streaked cherub holding a crocodile, March 2012

Today, of course, the rusting fountain stands in melancholy isolation in the Gardens – now little more than a large patch of grass surrounded by bleak 1960s apartment blocks. The cast-iron walrus tusks have all been removed, as have the shells and small animals that once clung to the surrounding imitation rocks; the cherubs and crocodiles are streaked with rust; and the waters long since turned off. Like so much Victorian cast iron, this fountain is now a ruin; yet one that nevertheless reminds us, by force of its melancholy present-day situation, of its once potent utopian symbolism, expressed in 1868 by a long-time resident and notable local poetess:

‘When the daily task is done,
‘Neath the shady arbour rest
With the friend thou lovest best
Husband, father, rest thee now,
Wipe the toil-stains from your brow;
Come, with wife and children dear,
Peaceful beauty greets thee here
Here enjoy the leisure hour;
And may rock, and fount, and flower
With deep love thy soul embue
For the beautiful and the true’


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Categories : cities, abandoned space, ruins, iron, Victorian, ornament, symbolism, art

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

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

Ruins as memorials

5 06 2011

B-29 engine at Higher Shelf Stones, Peak District

England’s Peak District is a beautiful area of wild moorland and wooded valleys; but it’s also a graveyard for over 50 aircraft – mainly Second World War planes that crashed in poor visibility on the western edges of the Peak’s bare moorland. These tragic remains now attract ‘baggers’ in the same way that the Scottish mountains do and there are many websites and even books listing the wrecks and their precise positions in the often featureless landscape.

1. Wreckage of Meteor aircraft, crashed 1951 on Siddens Moss, Peak District

2, Memorial in wreckage on Siddens Moss

I came across my first wreck by accident, while trying to find my way over a desolate stretch of moorland in the area around the Black Hill in the far north of the Peak District. First, I came across single pieces of metal (1), shredded and twisted, and then, following their trail, I found recognisable parts of aircrafts – bits of wing, engine and fuselage – heaped together in a shallow gully. Finding this wreckage suddenly invested the landscape with a enigmatic sense of tragedy – an unknown story that obviously involved violent death. More striking was the discovery of a small memorial – a cross and a poppy – embedded in part of the wreckage (2). After returning home I found out the story of the wreckage: two Meteor aircraft had collided in mid-air in 1951 and crashed on the moorland, killing both pilots.

3. B-29 wreckage on Higher Shelf Stones

4. Wooden crosses in wreckage at Higher Shelf Stones

Many of the Peak District’s aircraft wrecks are also memorials. A much larger wreck at Higher Shelf Stones near Glossop is very close to a popular walker’s path and it consists of the ruins of a B-29 aircraft, which crashed in 1948 killing all 13 people on board (3). Amongst the wreckage – including almost intact engines, wings and wheels – are countless memorials, made up of a mixture of crosses, using stones gathered from the moor (4), bits of wood or even parts of the wreckage itself, and poppies arranged around the engine parts in scarlet wreaths (5).

5. Poppy wreath on an engine at Higher Shelf Stones

The iconography of these memorials is the same as those used for war memorials and many of the aircraft were used during wartime or carried veterans when they crashed. Yet, the effect of this iconography amongst these wrecks is very different from its more common counterpart – that is, cenotaphs and poppy-wreaths that form the focus for acts of civic remembrance. Here, unchanging ceremonies present the past as if it were static, undisturbed by the erasing nature of time and the duplicity of memory. In these Peak wrecks the memorials become part of the ruin: wooden crosses are scattered by the wind (6), poppies devoured by rain, stones sunk into the bog. As such, even as they bring to mind past lives obliterated by a violent event they also participate in the inevitable process of ruin itself.

6. Cross and wreckage on Mill Hill, Peak District

7. Mangled radiator at Higher Shelf Stones

We might even argue that the wreckage itself is a more powerful memorial than the later additions. Left where it fell in the landscape, it is overtaken by nature: the metal surfaces become strangely contorted by rust and weathering (7), moss and grass grow through the pierced surfaces, and sheep make use of hard surfaces as convenient places to relieve an itch (8). In its ruined state, this wreckage speaks both of a past event – one that is tragic and violently immediate – and of its subsequent return to a much slower time, where it accumulates the stories of the landscape itself.

8. Sheep's wool on an axle, Mill Hill


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Categories : death, landscapes, ruins, war

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

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