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

The city as labyrinth: the medina of Fez

2 12 2010

The old city of Fez from above

Fes-el-Bali – the old city or medina of Fez in Morocco – is believed to be the world’s largest car-free urban area. Founded in the early 9th century, the medina covers only around a square mile, but contains over 9000 streets and around 150,000 residents. Virtually unchanged since the gigantic ramparts and seven monumental gates were built around it in the 16th century, the old city is a self-enclosed world, working to its own internal rhythms. Each small district within the city has its own public utilities – water fountains, mosques, baths – and the city’s streets are sharply delineated between the busy public shopping streets and the almost silent private streets of housing leading off to dead ends. Sandwiched between the endless lines of shops selling everything imaginable – from fabulous ornaments and sparkling textiles to fruit and vegetables and tourist tat – are oases of peace: richly decorated medersas built by the Merinids in the 14th century; mosque courtyards; elaborate medieval funduqs (inns for itinerant traders); and tree-filled courtyards of opulent Riyads – the traditional Moroccan home.

A private street in the medina

One of the medina's many public streets lined with shops

Not surprisingly, the medina of Fez presents problems to the first-time visitor, especially in navigating its tortuous geography. Here, the standard way of getting hold of new cities – seeing them from a high viewpoint – only serves to confuse, the streets disappearing in the extraordinary density of low-rise housing that only becomes apparent when above the city. On the ground, maps are virtually useless for the tourist as most of the streets are either unnamed or only given in Arabic script. At the very centre of the old city, conventional geography seems to stand on its head: covered streets lead around the enormous central mosque in a whirl of dense crowds and heavilly-laden donkeys, and the connecting side streets are so narrow and dark they seem to be underground.

Courtyard of a medersa in the medina

Narrow street passing from dark to light in the medina

In this place, one navigates initially by trial and error as if in a maze (getting lost, retracing one’s steps, discovering dead ends); then by remembering certain features that remind you to turn left or right; then by the gradients (down towards the centre of the city, up to get out). After a few days, certain streets begin to link up in the mind and a skeletal outline of the city is mentally constructed. Only with many weeks – even months – of exploration would the rest of the labyrinth slowly unfold itself and connect together.

For the tourist, navigating the medina of Fez inevitably brings you into contact with that peculiarly Moroccan character: the faux guide (false guide). Usually male youths, they lay in wait for tourists at strategic points in the old city (each seemingly having their own patch) and approach whenever there is a pause, hesitation or misdirected glance. After leading you to where you want to go they demand payment, usually much more than you wish to give. Most will try and divert you into a shop, presumably owned by a relative or even their employer. The only way to avoid being ensnared is to always know where you are going and thus Fes is ideal picking ground for these would-be-guides, preying on tourists’ most vulnerable weakness – their lack of environmental awareness. And so, in Fez, the tourist becomes like any other commodity being peddled in the souks, stripped of that special status that so characterises Islamic attitudes towards the ‘guest’.

Night in the medina

At night, when the shops close down and the touts go home, the medina quietens and takes on a new charm, one defined by private lives – boys kicking around a football, young girls walking with their mothers, groups of men gossiping in doorways, animals heard behind thick walls. This sharp disjunction between the public world of commerce – aggressive and male – and the private world of the family, is common to all cities, but particularly intense in a city like Fez, where the regular pulsations between these realms have been continuing unchanged for centuries.


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Categories : architecture, cities, everyday, maps, ruins, shapes, tourism

Layers of time: reading the everyday

19 11 2010

Posters on a phone box, Marylebone Road, London

Poster on the Underground, Metropolitan Line, London

On a recent journey to and from the British Library in London, I was led to reflect upon posters and the act of reading them. On one leg of the journey, I saw a poster in a tube carriage advertising an advertising company – playfully drawing attention to the fact that posters are effective tools of communication. On my return journey on foot along the Marylebone Road, remnants of posters on a phone box drew my attention for their unusual texture.

The sight of a billboard just after a poster has been removed is certainly mundane, but contains within it hidden truths about the visual culture of our towns and cities. In the decaying remnants of posters we glimpse, for a moment, the tattered layers of time, seen like rings in a tree trunk. Such remnants demonstrate the contradiction at the heart of advertising, that is, it’s focus on the always new that creates, in its wake, a vast waste-dump of the old. As long as new posters are in place, that waste is kept hidden and our focus is on the new product being advertised. However, once the old posters are exposed we are reminded, in a shockingly graphic form, that those desires have not been fulfilled and never will be. Yet, against this disillusionment, we can also rediscover new worlds: traces of the old that are constantly being either erased or concealed. Such playful curiosity forms the basis of much counter-cultural artistic activity, particularly graffiti, which makes a virtue out of these layers, creating a babel of messages that cannot easily be read but nevertheless mirror the city with its multitude of conflicting voices and histories.

Graffiti in Leake Street, Waterloo

Reading graffiti or layers of posters is like grasping a hidden language of the city, one that normally evades everyday perception. Yet, once we start looking, new worlds open up at every turn: in the ceaseless flows above and below ground; in the obscure stains upon the pavement; or even in the marks on shop shutters, opened and closed every day. In short, everyday life produces its own visual marks that remind us that in the city, like Freud’s definition of the mind, ‘nothing that has once taken shape can be lost, that everything is somehow preserved and can be retrieved under the right circumstances’.

Shop shutter in Seville, Spain


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Categories : cities, everyday, London, ruins, shapes, underground space

England’s desert: Orford Ness

5 11 2010

Twelve miles long and up to two miles wide, Orford Ness is a desert – a vast shingle spit lying just off the Suffolk coast. One of a series of similar landforms along the coastlines of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, Orford Ness was – and still is – created by the ceaseless action of tides, currents and seasonal storms, its undulating ridges of shingle marking the passing of time. Accessible only by boat across the river from the picturesque village of Orford, the Ness is as bleak a place as one can imagine – devoid of shelter, battered by winds, and where the only animate objects are hares, birds and the sea wind.

From the First World War until 1993, Orford Ness was owned by Ministry of Defence and, for 70 years, was the site of intense military experimentation. During this period, activities on the Ness were subject to complete secrecy: for the inhabitants of Orford, it was like a foreign land, the stark but oddly beautiful military structures the only indicators of its sinister provenance.

The 'pagodas' from across the river in Orford

Now owned by the National Trust, and opened to the public in 1995, its series of coloured trails delineate a small area where it is safe to wander – for the vast shingle banks are littered with unexploded ordnance and other military objects, strewn across the landscape like obscure clues to an unknown riddle. Here, ‘lethality and vulnerability’ trials were carried out: aeroplanes were lined up and shot to pieces with rifles to ruthlessly expose their weaknesses; and, in half-submerged bunkers nearby, detonation devices for Atomic bombs were tested with extremes of vibration, temperature and other shocks.

The 'red trail' on Orford Ness

Rusting object on the shingle

From the top of a building known as ‘The Barracks’ – used to photograph the trials carried out on the site – the vast extent of the Ness becomes clear, as do more inexplicable forms: huge shingle-covered bunkers; the off-limits ‘pagodas’, part of the Atomic weapons site; a vast circle inscribed on the shingle; and, all around, almost motionless and hunkering down in the wind, birds of all kinds – gulls, plovers, avocets, redshank.

The Atomic Weapons site from the top of 'The Barracks'

Circle in the shingle

Very gradually, the site is being reclaimed by the National Trust and the birds, but it’s hard to imagine them ever taming its bleakness. The almost overpowering sense of melancholy is generated not by any past human tragedy but by the senseless absurdity of its function as a vast arena for the systematic torture of objects. In a kind of surreal irony, objects of destruction were themselves destroyed in the game of real and imagined warfare. If we are moved by the suffering of people, can we not also be moved by the suffering of objects?

Exploded boiler on the red trail


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Petrified ruin: exploring the abandoned city of Pripyat

27 09 2010

Entering Pripyat

Pripyat was built in 1970 to house workers at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant. It’s now an empty city, abandoned in 1986 after the worst nuclear accident in history. Recently, Chernobyl and Pripyat have become unlikely tourist destinations and my visit in October 2007 was arranged through a travel agency in Kiev. Visiting Pripyat is a disconcerting experience: because it is the largest post-War ruin in existence, the empty streets and buildings feel like a real-life version of countless ruined cities in post-apocalyptic cinema.

If one is a lover of industrial ruins, as I am, walking through the empty, decaying buildings of Pripyat might seem to represent an opportunity for extreme pleasure – a place, in the words of Tim Edensor, ‘which offers spaces in which the interpretation and practice of the city becomes liberated from the everyday constraints which determine what should be done and where, and which encode the city with meanings’. So, for example we have surprise in the arbitrary arrangements of once ordered things – broken strip lights in a supermarket (1):

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…or the sudden reappearance of utopian objects from the past – socialist icons left in a room in the palace of culture (2):

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…or the excess of meaning generated by inexplicable objects and juxtapositions – rusted hat stands alone in a decaying room (3):

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For Edensor and others, such experiences are potentially transformative, ‘suggesting new forms of thought and comprehension, and … new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate itself, to be whole and free outside of any predetermined system’. Yet, such positive assessments of industrial ruins tend to present them as alternative spaces within the ordered, modern city. It is one thing encountering an industrial ruin in the midst of the ceaseless life of the city; it is quite another if all is ruin, if there is no counterbalancing order at all.

As one proceeds through Pripyat, the sense of ruin quickly becomes overwhelming: the very qualities of fragmentation, plenitude, discontinuity and defamiliarisation that Edensor celebrates, soon overwhelm. Scale overrides the positive attributes of these qualities: the strange beauty of peeling walls in corridors soon become only reminders of the vastness of all that is not seen; the decay of the conventional architectural signs of civilisation – hospitals, schools, supermarkets, hotels – a wearisome succession of incommensurable losses (4):

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And the decay seen is not what it seems: not a product of the return of natural processes of decomposition, but from two decades of systematic looting; a consequence of the residents being forced to leave all their belongings behind when the town was evacuated. Finally, juxtapositions of objects become unbearably poignant – children’s toys left on the decaying remains of a merry-go-round (5):

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…or simply sinister – a rusty gynaecological chair and gas mask in the grounds of the hospital (6):

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Indeed, for the ‘voices of Chernobyl’ – those who experienced the accident and its aftermath at first hand – the site represents something much more than a technological ruin: for one witness ‘Chernobyl was a way into infinity…it shattered existing boundaries’; for another ‘the World no longer seemed eternal as it had done before … we had been deprived of immortality’. For many Chernobyl represented the end of communism, even if its final collapse was delayed until 1991. Before Chernobyl they were protected by the Soviet state apparatus; after it, they were forced to become individuals again, left alone in their own private zones. The sense of Chernobyl as both technological and cosmic catastrophe is embodied in the experience of the spaces of Pripyat and more specifically, in the ‘city-like’ quality of it. With its endless blank corridors, disorientating repetition, and the evidence of violent human agency at work in its spaces, Pripyat is more ruined city than collection of industrial ruins, inviting meditation on loss on a cosmic scale.

Read more about my research on Chernobyl and Pripyat here

See more of my photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat here


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, ruins

Dead Cities

12 10 2009
Serjilla, 2008, oil pastel on chalk & ink

Serjilla, 2008, oil pastel on chalk & ink

In the Syrian countryside south of Aleppo lie the Dead Cities, a series of ancient ghost towns between the Aleppo-Hama highway in the east and the Orontes River in the west. Dating from before the 5th century, these sites – around 600 in total – range from single monuments to whole villages, as in the case of Serjilla, which is complete with houses, churches, mills, baths and even a wine press. It is a mystery why the towns were abandoned in the late-5th century but some now form part of present-day villages, with a few people even inhabiting the ancient ruins or incorporating them into their own houses.

Serjilla is the most complete site and has en eerie quality because of its extraordinary state of preservation; walking through the site it seems as if the inhabitants have only recently departed. Whole houses are preserved with clean and sharp-edged stone walls, columns and windows. All around are the scattered fragments of early Christian iconography – fishes, crosses, wheels, stars, and spirals – set against the rusty-coloured soil and close-cropped grass.

Serjilla, Syria, September 2008

Serjilla, Syria, September 2008


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Aleppo

7 09 2009
Aleppo, 2009, charcoal and watercolour on chalk and ink

Aleppo, 2009, charcoal and watercolour on chalk and ink

Syria’s second city, Aleppo (Halab) vies with Damascus as the oldest continually-inhabited city in the world – as long as 8000 years. It’s old city has long-since burst out of its once-walled confines and now merges into the surrounding newer development, creating a richly undefined palimpsest of ancient and modern. Like a series of concentric circles, historical time radiates out from the city’s massive hilltop citadel: from the grid-plan of the medieval covered souks to the impenetrable geography of the Bayada quarter in the northeast. Tracing the convoluted city plan, one relives the twists and turns of the old city, where all the senses were engaged and the mind frustrated, but now with a sense of quiet calm and detachment that comes with the view from above.

view of part of the old city, Aleppo, Sept. 2008

view of part of the old city, Aleppo, Sept. 2008


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