Ruin gazing: dead cities and the imagination of disaster

14 06 2013

A New Zealander gazes at the ruins of Victorian London (in 'London: A Pilgrimage', 1874)

A future visitor beholds the ruins of Victorian London in ‘London: A Pilgrimage’, 1874

I’m currently embarking on a new research project that has grown out of recent work on the legacy of Chernobyl and its ruins, particularly the abandoned town of Pripyat, which I visited in October 2007 and which has subsequently formed the subject of many talks and articles. Here’s a summary of the project I envisage…

Pripyat from the roof of the former Polissya Hotel

Pripyat from the roof of the former Polissya Hotel

Perhaps more than any other Soviet ruin, Pripyat – the ghost town near Chernobyl abandoned after the accident in 1986 – has come to embody, for the capitalist West, all the failures of state socialism in comparison with the successes of the former: a total lack of transparency; technological ineptitude; and a callous indifference to the human and environmental consequences of industrial and social exploitation. Yet, in recent years, Pripyat has been commandeered by that same West in the service of postmodern culture: as a backdrop for fantasy computer games such as Call of Pripyat (2009) and as a site of horror in the film Chernobyl Diaries (2012). What does this shift tell us about the legacy of urban ruins like Pripyat, both for the West and for those who were directly affected by their ruination? Has the collapse of communism really resulted in the uncontested rule of global capitalism, or are there still spaces that might provide alternatives to this hegemony?

Still from the computer game 'Call of Pripyat' (2007)

Still from the computer game ‘Call of Pripyat’ (2009)

Publicity poster for the film 'Chernobyl Diaries' (2012)

Publicity poster for the film ‘Chernobyl Diaries’ (2012)

This research proposes to address these questions by focusing on the wider significance of urban ruins in an age of global capitalism. It will concentrate on case studies of four pairings of socialist/capitalist sites of urban ruin that resulted from different destructive forces: ethnic conflict (Agdam, Azerbaijan and Varosha, Cyprus); technological failure (Fukushima, Japan and Pripyat, Ukraine); deferred utopianism (Keelung, Taiwan and the Oil Rocks near Baku, Azerbaijan); economic decline/surplus (Detroit and contemporary empty cities in China, for example Ordos). Relating an experiential awareness of these urban ruins with a concurrent host of fictional counterparts in visual culture (particularly in film), this research will interrogate the relationship between the real and the imagined in terms of how large-urban ruins are perceived, both from the perspective of those who were directly affected by such ruination and from those who seek to re-appropriate these ruins in other contexts, whether in post-state socialist or capitalist contexts.

Varosha in Cyprus, abandoned in 1974

Varosha in Cyprus, abandoned in 1974

Google Maps street view of Fukushima town, Japan

Google Maps street view of Fukushima town, Japan

The Oil Rocks near Baku, Azerbaijan

The Oil Rocks near Baku, Azerbaijan

The result will be to create a dialogue between state socialist, capitalist urban ruins and the wider (global), culturally-prescient theme of the imagination of disaster. If urban ruins have been commandeered by some, others – particular those who were directly affected by their abandonment – still view them as a kind of representation void: petrified places that speak only of loss, of a helplessness in the face of overwhelming forces defying comprehension. In the grip of our own apocalyptic imaginings – brought on by the prospect of unsustainable urban growth, unmanageable environmental threats, increasingly extreme social segregation, and wars and terrorists that deliberately target urban areas – if we are to represent the death of cities, what can we learn from urban sites that have already died? This research will use its analysis of state socialist and capitalist urban ruins to open up an emancipatory space that, following Slavoj Žižek, accepts the universal inevitability of ruin in order to break its ideological grasp and thus to suggest liberating alternatives.

Empty quarter in the city of Ordos, China

Empty quarter in the city of Ordos, China


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, film, ruins, tourism, war

Ghosts in the city: the ruined churches of Famagusta

18 04 2013

Remains of the Armenian church, Famagusta

Remains of the Armenian church, Famagusta

Famagusta (Gazimagusa) is a medieval walled city in north Cyprus that has changed hands many times in its long history: once a Crusader stronghold; then a Venetian fortified city, prized by Leonardo da Vinci; then, after an epic siege in 1571, an Ottoman outpost; then, from 1918 to 1960, a British colony; today, the southernmost city of Turkish-controlled north Cyprus, who seized control in 1974. From its immense walls – as impressive as any built by the Venetians – one sees the signs of Turkish militarisation everywhere: immense battleships in the industrial port; barracks sealed off by barbed wire; and, in the distance, the ghost city of Varosha, the modern formerly-Greek suburb that’s now a sealed-off forbidden zone.

It has been said that Famagusta once had 365 churches, each one paid for by a man or woman intent on buying their place in heaven. That’s one church for every day of the year – an extraordinary number perhaps explained by the large number of sects that used to coexist in the city: Latin and Greek, Maronite, Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Carmelite, Nestorian, Jacobite, Abyssinian and Jewish. From the meagre 17 churches that still remain today, it’s hard to imagine the overwhelming spectacle of such a large number of churches crammed together in such a small area; yet, in some way, the remainders – most in ruins – still testify to the ghostly presences of all those other churches that have been erased from the cityscape.

1. West front of St Nicholas Cathedral/Lala Mustafa Pasa Mosque

1. West front of St Nicholas Cathedral/Lala Mustafa Pasa Mosque

St Nicholas Cathedral (1, now the Lala Mustafa Pasa Mosque) is still the architectural focus of the city, its imposing western facade, built in the 14th century likened to Reims Cathedral in France. Now, the former cathedral is a mosque, its incongruous minaret added by the Ottomans, the interior whitewashed, the altar supplanted by the minbar and mihrab, and the floor covered in soft carpets. Hearing the Azan emanating from this former church is both disorientating and strangely moving, jolting you into a place between the two hard-faced religions that still seem to face each other off in today’s divided Cyprus.

2. Interior of the Nestorian church through a crack in the door

2. Interior of the Nestorian church through a crack in the door

3. Faded frescoes, church of St George of the Greeks

3. Faded frescoes, church of St George of the Greeks

4. Weathered limestone, church of St George of the Greeks

4. Weathered limestone, church of St George of the Greeks

The other 16 churches are scattered inside the city walls, most of them in various stages of ruin; those that are not, firmly locked to curious visitors. Peering through a crack in the door of the 14th-century Nestorian Church (the most intact of the smaller churches), one sees an interior untouched by time, its pews, lectern and screen seemingly awaiting the next group of worshippers that may never come (2). In other more ruinous churches one can wander at will, the insides of these buildings now turned outwards: faded frescoes exposing the saints to the elements (3); homilies only offered by the pigeons who inhabit the vaults; the soft brown limestone eaten away into fantastical miniature worlds of coral-like formations (4).

5. Church of Ayios Nicholas

5. Church of Ayios Nicolas

6. Dome of the church of Ayios Nicolas

6. Dome of the church of Ayios Nicolas

At the southern end of the city are the two perfectly formed churches of Ayios Nicolas and Ayia Zoni: small, rustic buildings with their pleasing geometries of square, octagon and circle (5 & 6). Sitting here sketching on a windy afternoon, I was drawn, like many ruin gazers, into a reflective mode of perception. Unlike modern ruins, which sting us with their raw violence, old ruins comfort because they inhabit a different temporal realm from us. Long ago – a time which I can only imagine and not experience – these were churches; yet, they still remain as ghost churches, bearing witness in their materiality to distant traumas that remain in soft material traces. It’s as if they say to us: if you’re lucky, you might age as beautifully as we do. So, perhaps my own traumas, destructive as they are, will not end in my erasure but rather in my slow, but nevertheless inevitable, transfiguration into a silent witness.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, religion, ruins, tourism, war

Into the Forbidden Zone: Varosha, ghost city of Cyprus

30 03 2013

Varosha from Palm Beach

Varosha from Palm Beach

In 1974, the glamorous resort town of Varosha in Cyprus was abandoned by its 35,000 mainly Greek Cypriot residents after the Turkish army invaded the northern part of the island. Now fenced off and forlorn, Varosha has never been resettled, being set aside by the Turkish authorities as a possible bargaining chip should negotiations even begin with the south. Today, nearly 40 years after being abandoned, Varosha remains one of the largest modern ruins in existence, on a par with Pripyat in the contaminated zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine.

2. Fence around Varosha

1. Fence around Varosha

As part of the militarised zone between northern and southern Cyprus, Varosha is effectively off limits to all but official visitors: a ‘Forbidden Zone’ as the countless signs along the fence proclaim (1). The fence itself is a formidable barrier to any would-be explorers: a mixture of barbed wire, corrugated iron, Prickly Pear cacti, oil drums and signs warning off intruders. Yet, away from the obvious observation towers on the town’s seafront, where lone guards sit or stand in abject boredom or blow whistles at anyone trying to take photographs, there’s surprisingly little security: gaps have opened in the fence and it’s easy to slip in and out unnoticed.

2. View over Varosha from a former apartment building

2. View over Varosha from a former apartment building

3. Vegetation in Irakleus Street, Varosha

3. Vegetation in Irakleus Street, Varosha

4. Former workshop in Ermou Street, Varosha

4. Former workshop in Ermou Street, Varosha

5. Ermou Street, Varosha

5. Ermou Street, Varosha

So, my two visits inside the abandoned town were not fraught with danger; neither did they involve anything more physical than slipping through a large hole in the fence. Yet, once inside everything is different. You are at once an illegal trespasser in danger of arrest or even of being shot; an explorer of unimaginable ruins stretching as far as the eye can see (2); and the ‘Last Man’ (or woman) of Mary Shelley’s invention (and countless fictional end-of-the-world stories since). Almost 40 years without human intervention have resulted in the streets becoming overgrown with lush vegetation (3); former shops and bars disintegrating in the hot sunshine (4); signs becoming simply vacant spaces in the sky (5); and former apartments turning into the homes of pigeons and crows (6). Everyday spaces and objects left by fleeing residents now take on an uncanny or surreal quality: omnipresent peeling paint creates a new kind of interior aesthetic (7); broken chairs and rusted fridges and stoves become reminders of the accelerated redundancy of modern objects (8); a stripped motorcycle metamorphoses into a human skeleton (9); and a strange animal-like sculpture creates a mysterious presence in an empty room (10) (is it a post-abadonment intervention or just an unsalvageable leftover?)

6. Line of pigeon droppings in a former house in Varosha

6. Line of pigeon droppings in a former house in Varosha

7. Peeling paint in a former house in Varosha

7. Peeling paint in a former house in Varosha

8. Rusting 1970s fridge on a rooftop terrace in Varosha

8. Rusting 1970s fridge on a rooftop terrace in Varosha

9. Rusting bicycle

9. Dismembered motorcycle

10. Mysterious object in a room in Varosha

10. Mysterious object in a room in Varosha

Ruins on this city-like kind of scale always invite an immersive form of meditation. Sit still for a while and you hear the sounds of nature reclaiming the human environment: the cooing of pigeons, the cawing of crows, the wind rustling old curtains and rattling decrepit doors and windows (11). This, together with the obvious abolishment of what was once private property, is the emancipatory power of urban ruins: they calm, liberate and offer visions of different kinds of futures freed from the constraints of the normative present. However, ruins on this kind of scale are also always deeply unsettling, especially if we think of the violence that made them what they are. Embedded somewhere in the present peaceful spaces are traces of the tens of thousands of stories of violent rupture and loss that accompanied the abandonment of Varosha. All these silent spaces were once imbued with human qualities, whether those of the home, workplace or places of play. It is these stories that are waiting to be reconnnected with the spaces as they are now.

11. View over Varosha (video)

More of my photographs of Varosha can be found here.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, landscapes, ruins, seaside, tourism, war

Walking the girdle (part 2)

18 12 2012

1. Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in turquoise)

Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in blue)

1. Strangeways Prison from the east side

1. Strangeways prison from the east side

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall

Part 2 of my circular walk around inner Manchester and Salford begins at Strangeways prison. With its 234-ft high ventilation tower, Strangeways is an extraordinary inner-city landmark in Manchester, but one that is nevertheless barely visible from the city centre. Of course, the presence of a prison – and a notorious high-security prison at that – in any city is troublesome, signifying as it does aspects of our society that we’d rather remained hidden. Walking up close to Strangeways (1) - an enormous complex made up of Alfred Waterhouse’s original 1868 building and new additions built after the 1990 riots – one is immediately reminded, in the most graphic of terms, what a prison is for: its blank 30-ft high brick walls an overwhelming visual symbol (and spatial enforcing) of incarceration. Circling these monstrous walls I found a broken picture frame containing an iconic photograph of New York’s Grand Central Station (2), one that probably adorns the walls of thousands of rooms across the world. In this photograph, sunlight streams through the high windows of the station onto a crowd of passengers below – a visual symbol of the dreams of liberation that once attracted so many to America’s iconic metropolis. Was this photograph some remnant of protest to the prison, resting as it did at the base of its immense walls? Or perhaps it was flung out of a high window above, a sign of abandoned hope in the prison that still has the highest suicide rate of any in Britain? Or maybe just a discarded object come to rest in a random place?

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

3. The ruined Springfield mill just inside Salford

With these unsettling questions I headed away from Strangeways and across the invisible border that separates the cities of Manchester and Salford. Whilst both cities were built on the same industry – textile production – that was fated to oblivion, there’s a stronger sense of melancholy in Manchester’s lesser-known twin. Almost immediately there are ruins, such as the Springfield Mill, built in 1845 (3); ruins that are materially very different from those in Manchester. Where the mills of Ancoats seem to be awaiting some form of restitution, those in Salford seem beyond repair – cracked and crumbling and surrounded by a mixture of weeds and waste. And, walking through Salford towards Broughton and the river Irwell, the road is flanked by piles of rubbish, as if the geography of ruin has extended from individual buildings to whole districts.

4. An abandoned mill and Strangeways Prison behind, from the Broughton bridge over the river Irwell

4. Abandoned mill and Strangeways prison behind, from the Broughton bridge on the river Irwell

On this bright, crystal-clear day, finding the river Irwell seemed like a revelation – like discovering the hidden heart of both cities – where the seemingly ever-present brick of Salford’s closed-in streets suddenly opens out to reveal new vistas – the towers of abandoned mills rising in aesthetic unity with those of Strangeways beyond (4). Yet, the path along the banks of the Irwell is empty, the monotonous low-rise housing of modern Salford hidden behind newly-planted rows of trees.

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

5. Former docks at the junction of the river Irwell and the Manchester Ship Canal

Heading across the zone between Manchester and Salford, there’s an even greater sense of opening out, but here created by the vast waste-grounds that used to contain some of the terminal docks that turned Manchester into Britain’s third largest port when the ship canal to Liverpool was opened in 1894 (5).Now, these former docks are, in contrast to those at Salford Quays, filled with large expanses of rank grass and the signs of fly-tipping, their organic messiness contrasting sharply with the cluster of shiny buildings that ornament Manchester’s skyline beyond.

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

6. Railway viaducts marking the border between Salford and Manchester

7. A portal to another world?

7. A portal to another world?

Further east, I cross that invisible line back into Manchester, but here between two giant railway viaducts that divide the two cities – a genuinely unsettling and claustrophobic place made up of very dark caverns under the arches (6), some of which bear the visual marks of bottom-end habitation (filthy mattresses, empty bottles) and graffiti that suggests that others might be the entrances to an infernal place below (7).

8. New housing in Hulme

8. New housing in Hulme

The final stretch of the girdle heads across Hulme, its once dystopian housing-block ‘crescents’ of the 1960s now replaced by community-designed housing that marries individuality – an eccentric curve here and there – with the rather-more repetitive requirements of mass housing (8). A short step across Higher Cambridge Street completes the circle – the stark, almost brutalist brick of the university buildings softened to an almost lovely orange colour by the last rays of the winter sun (9).

9. The University of Manchester's Cornbrook building in Booth Street West

9. The University of Manchester’s Cornbrook House in Booth Street West


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, landscapes, Manchester, maps, railways, ruins, tourism, Victorian

The intestine of Leviathan: visiting the Paris sewers

20 07 2012

Light and darkness in the Paris sewers

The contemporary historian David Pike has drawn attention to nineteenth-century ideas about underground space, in particular the ways in which these articulated the urban underground as a symbolic space – that is, as a metaphor of society as a whole. In relation to Paris, we find this expressed most directly in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables. Society, for Hugo, is compared to geological strata with ‘upper and lower galleries’; at the bottom of society are located its most seditious elements – the ‘fearsome’ workers and the revolutionaries. The direct association of sewers and filth provided a powerful metaphor for these lowest levels of society; these spaces were more or less directly associated in the public mind with the moral filth of the city – places where, according to Hugo, ‘monsters may be born’.

1. ‘The sewers of Paris’, Illustrated London News, 29 January 1870, p. 128

However, in Les Misérables, Hugo also makes a clear distinction between the old sewers, seen as fearsome places – ‘the intestine of Leviathan’ – and the new sewers built from the 1850s onwards, which he describes as ‘clean, cold, straight and correct … [where] the filth is well-behaved’. According to Hugo, the transformation of the Paris sewers divested them of their older symbolic power. In 1867, a section of the Paris sewerage system was opened up to the public; visitors – both men and women – who descended into this transformed underworld admired the cleanliness of the spaces, the lack of smell, and the brilliant lighting (1). These visits challenged public understanding of sewers as fearsome places with a new mode of conception – that propagated by the engineer, who plans and builds sewers according to rational and scientific principles.

2. Stuffed rats in the Paris sewers

3. The history of Paris’s sewers as described in the Musée des Egouts

4. Jean Valjean’s escape through the Paris sewers as pictured in the Musée des Egouts

On the surface, today’s Musée des Egouts is a rather less exciting and more sanitised space than its nineteenth-century forebear. Guided by arrowed signs, visitors inspect the sewers without actually riding in the excrement, the cleaning machines are displayed as relics of the past, while stuffed rats in a glass case suggest that the sewers have been thoroughly cleansed of organic life (2). Meanwhile, the history of Paris’s underworld is described through unappealing exhibition panels inserted into the cavernous spaces of the sewers (3), while Jean Valjean’s heroics are visualised as they might be in an amateur dramatics production of Les Misérables (4). Yet, all the while, the great tide of Parisian excrement flows beneath your feet – overpoweringly smelt, heard and seen. The enormous water and gas pipes, suspended from the ceilings of the sewers, drip in the humidity while the enclosed spaces magnify sounds and create strange echoes. It is as if the spaces themselves constantly threaten to overshadow the rationalised understanding being presented to us. Indeed, looking past what is presented suggests an illimitable world beyond, at once terrifying and enchanting – passages disappear in all directions, up and down (5); tunnels recede into pitch black (6); unimaginable torrents can be heard in the far distance; shadows loom in unexpected places (7).

5. Looking up a passageway

6. Looking down a side drain

7. Shadows and light

The Paris sewers, like those in any other modern city, might have been called to order in the nineteenth century; yet, like all sewer spaces, no matter how rationalised in conception, they stubbornly resist to be perceived in this way. In providing an opportunity to experience these spaces, no matter how ‘guided’ this experience may be, the Musée des Egouts opens up a world in which the city can be re-enchanted, experienced as truly ‘other’ and offering fertile ground for the liberation of the imagination.


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Categories : cities, sewers, symbolism, tourism, underground space, Victorian

Advertising the underground: London’s first Thames Tunnel

23 06 2012

1. Fair in the Thames Tunnel, 1855, as depicted by The Illustrated London News

The Thames Tunnel was the one of the first attempts to exploit underground space in a major urban centre. Running from Wapping to Rotherhithe in the East End, it was begun in 1825 by the engineer Marc Brunel but only completed, after many setbacks, in 1843. In its early days, the Tunnel was a fashionable space for promenading by both Londoners and tourists alike, and was the site of numerous popular entertainments throughout the 1850s and 1860s.

2. The Thames Tunnel after its conversion to a railway tunnel in 1865

3. One half of the Thames Tunnel today – part of the London Underground network.

The Tunnel gradually lost its sense of glamour and was eventually sold to the East London Railway in 1865 (2), and, to this day, Transport for London uses the tunnel as part of its network of trains (3).

4. Thames Tunnel watchpaper, c.1840s (Rickards Collection, University of Reading)

Tunnel souvenirs, like these commemorative watch papers (4 & 5), introduced a new iconography of underground space to London’s populace, reproduced on a wide variety of other goods such as cups, plates, snuffboxes, posters and guidebooks. Typical representations of the Tunnel were of the construction process, shown above (4). Here a split-level view depicts a scene on the river rendered in perspective, beneath which an outsized cross-sectional view of the twin shafts shows the tunnel being built by the miners, rendered in blue and red. Below (5) is a perspective view of the inside of the tunnel, its arches seemingly receding infinitely, their scale emphasised by the diminutive visitors. In the borders of both watchpapers are Tunnel statistics: above (4), explanatory text as to the location of the image; below (5), information on the cost of the project and the materials employed in its construction. These combination views of underground space – on the one hand, technological, on the other picturesque – would become commonplace as London developed its subterranean infrastructure of sewers, railways and subways from the 1860s onwards.

5. Thames Tunnel watchpaper, c.1840s (Rickards Collection, University of Reading)

Watchpapers were small printed round paper inserts placed in pocket watches to protect their inner workings from rust. They were also employed by watchmakers as product labels, that is, as a way of advertising their wares. The use of this medium for advertising the Thames Tunnel demonstrates how the popular appeal of a particular sight might displace conventional forms of advertising. Although not an organised advertising campaign as we understand it today, the marketing of the Thames Tunnel nevertheless represents an early example of ‘total’ advertising, one that organises itself around a particular spectacle in the city rather than an individual commodity.


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Categories : cities, everyday, London, tourism, underground space, Victorian

Communal reading and everyday life

13 04 2012

Taking an everyday journey on the London Underground in August this year, I witnessed many different types of reading; in the carriage in which I travelled, a middle-aged couple jointly consulted a London guidebook; a man next to me perused a map of the Underground; a young woman opposite studied some hand-written notes; two passengers read the newspaper; while one was engrossed in a novel. Finally, whilst observing my fellow passengers, I scanned the advertisements on the walls of the carriage. In short, I witnessed and engaged in varied kinds of reading at work on equally varied kinds of reading material.

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On the same day I took this photograph of a group sitting on a bench along the South Bank. These three Italian visitors were engaged in an act of shared reading common to any group visiting a new city: in the centre the older female holds a London guidebook so that the other two people can read it. She looks down at the text, as does the male figure to the left, presumably her partner. Meanwhile the girl on the right, presumably her daughter, looks ahead, not reading the guide, but nevertheless closely tied in with the act of reading by the other two figures. This kind of reading would almost certainly be interrupted by other activities: conversation about decisions to be made or unrelated matters, or observations of surroundings. Finally, we can imagine this kind of shared reading replicated countless times across London at every moment of the day, perhaps more numerous and visible in areas popular with tourists.

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When studying readers of the past, such shared reading must be considered alongside the traditional emphasis on readers of literature, absorbed in their books in splendid isolation, such as those seen in David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (1982), which states that ‘reading is a solitary activity’ (p. 125) despite the cover illustration showing a group of Victorian working men collectively reading a newspaper. Bringing to light the experience of shared reading, such as that seen in this photograph, might tell us much about reading as a ‘functional’ activity, that is, one that presupposes concrete acts in the world. By studying such experiences in the past, and analysing the relationship between reading and action, we will uncover varieties of everyday experience that have so far remained ignored by historians, but, like other forms of reading, warrant our close attention.

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Categories : cities, everyday, information design, London, tourism, Victorian

Measuring Victorian London: Mogg’s cab fare map

3 01 2012

1. Mogg’s Postal-District and Cab-Fare Map, 1859. Drawn by Edward Mogg, lithographed by C. Whittingham, London, published by William Mogg, London. 532 x 720 mm (Paul Dobraszczyk)

Running parallel to the development of fare books in the nineteenth century (like Mogg’s Ten Thousand Cab Fares) was the publication of what might be described as ‘at a glance’ information: that is, information contained on one sheet of paper in the form of comprehensive fare tables or maps. Books of fares, no matter how well designed, were clearly problematic to use, whether carried in a pocket or consulted in a cab: in a book format information could never be ascertained ‘at a glance’; pages had to be turned, indexes consulted, destinations and cab stands memorised.

2. Detail of Mogg's Cab-Fare map, 1859

Mogg attempted to address this problem with his series of Postal-District and Cab-Fare maps (1 & 2), drawn by his brother Edward. Superimposed onto a conventional topographic map of London are grid squares at half-mile intervals, labels of the postal districts, and the four-mile radius from Charing Cross (shown as a dark circle) that marked the transition from a sixpence to a shilling fare per mile. In addition, referencing aids are included around the edges of the map: letters along the top and bottom; numbers on the sides. In the 33-page index that accompanied the map and listed 3,000 places, readers were instructed on how use the map (3): first, they were to locate their required destination in the index, and, second, to memorise the letter and figure of the square required (4). By then consulting the map and matching the letter and figure to those given around its edges, the user could find the required place ‘instantly’.

3. Explanation of how to use Mogg's map

4. Index to Mogg's Cab-Fare map

Whether cab maps were indeed ‘useful’ to visitors to London is difficult to ascertain. Punch, in 1851, provided its own satirical image of a map like Mogg’s being used (5). It showed two visitors to London engaged in a ‘topographic problem’, that is, trying to use a similar map to find their way from Seven Dials to the Eastern Counties Railway Station (now Liverpool Street), a distance of about 3 miles. With one visitor holding the map securely while the other squints up close at the obviously far too detailed map to try and measure the distance with his fingers, Punch mocks the optimistic claims publishers like Mogg generally made of their maps.

4. 'Topographical problem', Punch, 1851


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Categories : cities, everyday, information design, London, maps, tourism, Victorian

A seaside icon: the Blackpool Tower

14 11 2011

1. The Blackpool Tower in 2011

By the 1890s, Blackpool was one of the fastest-growing resorts in Britain, with its working-class reputation firmly established. More than any other of its buildings, the Blackpool Tower (1; 1891-94) came to embody the town’s sense of itself as pre-eminently modern. The 500-ft high tower, constructed from a mixture of cast and wrought iron, was inspired by Gustave Eiffel’s tower built in Paris in 1889 and, like its Parisian model, the iron construction of the Tower was essentially structural and utilitarian, the only decorative part being the Tower’s crown (2), a vestige of orientalism that, up close, reveals itself to be a series of unornamented iron beams crudely bolted together.

2. The crown of the Tower

For the Tower’s first visitors, the panoramic view from the platform at the base of the crown, reached by an electric lift, was ‘simply indescribable’ where, on the ground, ‘people look[ed] like fleas’ (3). The lift was one of many other entertainments that were housed between the Tower’s four iron legs, including a circus, ballroom (4), terraced gardens, and promenades, all of which were characterised by exotic decoration in iron (5), terracotta and opulent low-relief tiles (6). The Blackpool Herald focused on the other-worldly ‘atmospheric transformation scene’ that formed part of each circus performance, when a unique flooding mechanism allowed the vast floor of the circus to be filled with water in a matter of minutes, transforming it into an arena for swimming and aquatic displays. Here, then, was a ‘fairy-like’ image of nature controlled by technology, the ‘interface between land and sea … mastered and controlled before the very eyes of the visitor’.

3. View north from the crown of the Tower

4. The Tower ballroom

More than any other seaside building – perhaps even any other building in Britain – the Blackpool Tower has come to symbolise both the town and British seaside experience as a whole. As John Urry has argued, Blackpool’s tower, just like its model in Paris, is no normal spectacle because of the original view it offers of urban space, that is, by turning it into a ‘natural’ landscape. The tower, in a similar way to piers, enables people to see the world as a whole and ‘to celebrate the participation within, and the victory of, human agency over nature’. Going even further, seaside historians have argued that the Blackpool Tower is variously a democratic space, freely available to all; a site of the carnivalesque, that is a complete release from – and reversal of – the norms and conventions of everyday working life; or a utopian symbol of hope for all those who visited Blackpool.

5. Ornamental iron in Jungle Jim's (the former Tower gardens)

6. Exotic tiles and terracotta inside the Tower

Central to all of these interpretations is the view of the tower from afar (7). As documented by the Mass-Observation research group in the 1930s, working-class visitors often described the effect of their first view of the tower from the train journey to Blackpool. It created great excitement, confirmed that you were on holiday and was a sign of the ‘other world’ of pleasure about to be entered where the ‘cotton and factory chimney are finished with’. Just like the Eiffel Tower, the distant view of Blackpool’s tower was what transformed an essentially utilitarian structure into a ornament of the town, the oriental iron crown being the most potent symbol of entering another world, one that reversed the normal associations of the factory chimneys of visitors’ home towns. The fact that the tower is still popular to this day is testament to its enduring symbolic potency, despite the terminal decline of the disciplines of industrial production that fed the desire for release. Yet, the tower’s pleasures – virtually unchanged since it was opened in 1894 – are still defiantly working-class, celebrating a collective experience that is both nostalgic for one generation and exciting and spectacular for another. Like much of what remains of Victorian seaside iron architecture, the tower experience is anathema to middle-class values, with its herded crowds, chaotic business, contrived entertainments and unashamed nostalgia. For this middle-class author, learning to see meaning in the iron tower (and in seaside ironwork in general) was one way in which this resistance can be challenged.

7. The Tower from the beach at low tide


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Categories : architecture, iron, ornament, seaside, tourism, Victorian

Seeing and being seen: seaside balconies

20 10 2011

Iron balconies proliferated in the Georgian period, when large estates of terraced housing were laid out in newly developed suburbs of cities and towns across the country. The uniformity of these terraced buildings was relieved by balconies at the first-floor level, which were both decorative embellishments and useful escape routes in the event of fire. Early balconies were constructed of wrought iron but, as their popularity grew, this was increasingly substituted for cast iron which could be reproduced far more easily and cheaply.

1. Balcony in Cheltenham, c.1820

Early cast-iron balconies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to be influenced by the prevalent architectural style of neo-classicism, a popular example being the heart and honeysuckle motif derived from designs by the architect Robert Adam in the Adelphi (1774) in London and seen in many balconies in Cheltenham and other spa towns (1). In the first decades of the nineteenth century, designs were increasingly drawn from pattern books created by architects or founders, which were effectively forerunners of iron manufacturers’ catalogues developed later in the century. Yet, even as the range of designs proliferated from the 1820s onwards, balconies attached to Georgian terraces tended to present a uniform appearance in keeping with neo-classical principles. Thus, when balconies developed into covered verandas, such as in many of those in the Clifton area of Bristol (2), they nevertheless maintained a uniformity of both design and construction, following without deviation the exacting line of the first-floor windows.

2. Balconies & verandas in Clifton, Bristol, c.1820

3. Bow windows and balconies in Kemp Town, Brighton, 1820s

The strict adherence to architectural convention seen in spa balconies was not followed in their seaside equivalents. Brighton’s Georgian estates – Kemp Town and Brunswick Town – were built in the 1820s after royal patronage of the town led to an extended building boom, attracting wealthy visitors and residents mainly from London. In Kemp Town, the balcony was developed into an architectural centrepiece, whether as part of a terrace of bow windows (3), projecting bays on the first floor level (4), or a continuous but disjointed series of railings, verandas and projections (5). In the eyes of late nineteenth-century observers, the bay window was one of the defining features of seaside architecture, which in Brighton, depending on your preference, either presented ‘a brilliant face’ to the sea or created a sense of ‘sad monotony’. In 1898, The British Architect questioned what it termed the ‘morality’ of seaside bay windows. It viewed the consequence of a desire for access to sunshine and sea air being an architecture of competition, extravagance, even excess, with the ‘amiable bellies’ of bay windows jostling to get the best view of the sea.

4. Projecting bay windows in Kemp Town, Brighton, 1820s

5. Balconies in Kemp Town, Brighton, 1820s

John Piper saw this ‘blossom and riot’ of the seaside balcony as a consequence of the primary focus of the Georgian seaside visitor: to look at the sea. This activity of looking out distinguished seaside balconies from their counterparts in spa resorts, which, as part of a unified architectural façade, were primarily to be looked at, a symbol of the occupants’ elevated social status to those who looked on from outside. With seaside balconies, the extent of one’s ability to look at the sea became the mark of status; what resulted was the competitive extravagance we see in the balconies of Brighton’s Kemp Town terraces. Such extravagance would later extend to seafront hotel buildings; when Brighton’s Grand Hotel was opened in 1865, The Building News felt unable to describe the building because its entire front was concealed by six tiers of ‘elaborate balcony railings which seem hung in rows like gilt gingerbread at a fair’ (6).

6. Balconies on Brighton's Grand Hotel, 1865


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Categories : architecture, cities, iron, ornament, seaside, tourism, Victorian

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