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

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

Sketching, photography and the tourist gaze

30 08 2011

Sketch of buildings at Freeland, Oxfordshire, 2004

‘Today everything exists to end in a photograph’ (Susan Sontag)

Writing in 1979, Sontag could never have anticipated the explosion of photography that came with the introduction and rapid dissemination of the digital camera. Today, to be a tourist is primally to see places and people through the lens of a digital camera. This recent shift to digital technology has resulted in an unimaginable increase in the sheer volume of pictures taken; from my own experience, in the three years after 2003 I took nearly 1500 photographs on my old Pentax SLR-camera; post-digital, I’ve amassed over 14,000 images in the past three years alone and probably taken at least double that. It’s not just the quantity of images that has changed: we also perceive the world differently through a digital camera – from the considered setting up of shots and the awareness of the finite resources of film to a faster, more throwaway kind of perception, one that tends towards amassing rather than reflection.

John Urry has reflected on the role of photography in contemporary tourism. His definition of the ‘tourist gaze’ is bound up with a certain kind of perception, one that is focused on looking at objects in a specific way. For the tourist (and we are all tourists to some extent), photography becomes part of the construction of objects to gaze at – a search for the photogenic itself which tends to turn the environment into a series of snapshot images to be recalled when we’ve returned home. Yet, as Urry states, many tourists are often disappointed with their photographs because their memories of a view or place are richer and fuller than their photographs. However, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a questioning of the ability of photography to ‘capture’ this fuller picture, or indeed of the search for an alternative.

By drawing or sketching, rather than photographing, one enters an altogether different perceptual world, one that plunges you into this fuller picture. With pencil and paper, irrespective of artistic ability or the intended quality of the drawing, you commit yourself to seeing differently – seeing for longer and in a more sustained way. The result is that, in a far more effective way than photography, sketching helps you to remember. To illustrate something of what I mean, I present a few examples of my own sketches and how I remember through them…

1. The Giralda in Seville, 2009

An hour in the square east of the Giralda in Seville on a warm afternoon at the end of October in 2009. As my drawing moved slowly down from the top to the bottom of the tower, hammering continued in the square, along with a procession of tourists arriving and leaving the city, bags on wheels and taxis coming and going. This commanding building, with such a pronounced sense of the vertical, seems to require some kind of extended contemplation, especially when the gigantic bells start ringing, which they did as I sketched, creating a sound which seems to fill the whole city.

2. The Nant Francon valley, Snowdonia, Wales, 2003

On my way back from a walk up the back of Carnedd Dafydd, to admire its cliffs, I stopped in the Nant Francon valley, just before reaching the cottage where I was staying, and decided to sketch the view. In rapidly-fading light and a plummeting temperature, I hurriedly drew the forms of the mountains that filled sides and head of the valley, their names already familiar in my mind – Carnedd Dafydd, Tryfan, the Glyders, Foel Goch. The light was crystal clear, as it had been for days, but the cold was finger-numbing and the drawing had to be done very quickly. Despite this, the result still pleases me as it reminds me of the conditions under which it was made.

3. Vernazza, Italy, 2003

A second visit to the beautiful coast of Liguria in Italy and its ‘five lands’, this sketch of Vernazza, where I was staying, was made sitting on a wall in the first hot sunshine I’d experienced that year. Here, drawing was limited by uncomfortable heat and the heavy lines indicate a rather hurried method. But I also remember a deliberate sense of slowing down in response to a time of crisis in my life – a sense of wanting to stop, to allow myself some space. Here, sketching was one of the ways I did this, in a familiar environment where the ‘sights’ had already been seen on a previous visit.

4. The Citadel, Aleppo, 2008

Here, the finished drawing is less important than the context in which it was drawn. It’s not a very good sketch, primarily because, for most of the time I was drawing the citadel, I was surrounded by a group of 20 boys celebrating with their Eid presents – replica guns which they brandished at me and at each other. They also jibed me with ridiculous questions, jostled my arms and even tried to help me with the drawing, adding bits here and there. As a result I retreated to a nearby empty cafe, ate an expensive and horribly tepid lunch and ended up in the hospital the following day with a nasty case of food poisoning that was initially and very worryingly diagnosed as an inflamed appendix.


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Categories : architecture, cities, drawing, tourism

The Vienna sewers

22 05 2011

1. The river Wien, Vienna

The prevailing image of Vienna is of a city of pleasure: the opera, waltzes, refined luxury etc. Yet, like all modern cities, it has an underside – real underground spaces that allow the city to function: from its bland yet smoothly efficient underground railway to its invisible system of sewers built at the end of the nineteenth century.

2. Scene from The Third Man (1949)

Vienna’s sewers transcend their everyday domain largely thanks to one defining representation: Carol Reed’s film The Third Man, made in 1949 and written by Graham Greene. Like all of Greene’s work, The Third Man explores human depths – unconscious motives, hidden political and personal treachery, and death – which are symbolised by, and return through, the ultra-rationalised spaces of the Vienna sewers just after the Second World War. It is here, in a celebrated sequence that the black marketer Harry Lime is cornered and finally shot by his one-time friend, Holly Martins (2). Throughout the film, the Vienna we know today is barely recognisable – here the city is battle-worn, barely more than a collection of ruins controlled by a disparate group of foreign occupiers.

3. Scenes from The Third Man projected on the sewer walls

Today, with the help of Vienna’s sewer authority, the Third Man tourist agency have cashed in on the film’s reputation and opened up – for paying visitors – the section of the city’s sewers that was actually used in the film. Descending the lotus-like manhole used by Harry Lime in his attempted escape, you enter the same murky world he inhabited. Here, montage from the film is literally projected onto the walls of the sewers (3), sounds from the film appear from unexpected crevices, and strategic lighting gives added drama to the spaces. It’s a themed excursion into the underworld that could be accused of hollowing out the originality of both film and sewer space.

4. Foul water meets clean water

5. Passages between the sewers

Yet, in reality, the raw brutalities of the sewers win out, with their grotesque stench, hostile spaces and foul rushing flows. In one space, chocolate-coloured water merges before one’s eyes into clean water in a mesmerising display of slowly-shifting eddies and whirlpools (4); in another, labyrinthine passages confuse in their topographical strangeness (5) (as they do so powerfully in the film); while, in the submerged river Wien – used by Lime to move swiftly and unnoticed between the city’s four occupied zones – is revealed as an astonishing, vaulted cavern, receding seemingly infinitely into the darkness (1 & 6). Here, with spectacularly appropriate lighting and ominous sounds, patches of graffiti can be made out along the walls of the tunnel: signs of the present-day successors of Harry Lime – those who yearn for freedom of movement and a brief respite from the oppressive rationality of the world above.

6. The river Wien under Vienna


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Categories : architecture, cities, death, everyday, film, sewers, tourism, underground space, Victorian, 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

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

Underground overground: London’s Victorian viaducts

13 11 2010

Subterranean Oddbins inside the Holborn viaduct

During the 1860s, London was physically transformed: gigantic new sewers were built, underground railways constructed, new streets and overground railways levelled slums, and the river Thames was embanked. What all of this new construction did was to confuse existing notions of vertical space in the city, that is, between the underground and the overground. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Holborn viaduct, built from 1866 to 1869 at the boundary of the City of Westminster and the City of London. Before it was built, traffic going to and from the City of London had to negotiate the steep-sided Holborn Hill, a road that descended into the Fleet valley before climbing Ludgate Hill on the other side. The Holborn viaduct filled in this space, completely levelling the hill and transforming the environment.

The bridge over Farringdon Street

All that is visible today is the bridge across Farrington Street, beneath which the old River Fleet is enclosed in a sewer. Lavishly decorated with ornamental cast iron, featuring the emblem of the City – the winged dragon killed by St George – the bridge is only one part of a vast network of vaults that honeycomb the spaces either side of it. Within these spaces run gas, electricity, water and sewage pipes and, when built in the 1860s, was the first attempt in Britain to unify urban infrastructure in a single space. The vaults are now used for a variety of purposes: as a cavernous wine cellar for Oddbins; as a store for a bicycle hire company; and as a novel space for wining and dining.

Bicycles for hire in the Holborn viaduct

Everything about these spaces suggest that they are underground – the musty smell, the dark brick arches, and absence of natural light; yet, you enter them on street-level. This mixing up of underground and overground space is characteristic of Victorian London, particularly in its vast stretches of railway viaducts, which created a multitude of brick arches over the city. At London Bridge station, these arches converge to form a 1/2 mile-wide viaduct that towers over the surrounding streets, and into which burrow several roadways.

Road through the London Bridge viaduct

As a testament to the enduring appeal of the Victorian underground, part of the space inside the London Bridge viaduct has been converted into three of London’s most popular tourist attractions: the London Dungeon, the London Bridge Experience and the London Tombs. Drawing on the more sensational aspects of London’s underground history – ghosts, murderers, death and torture – these themed attractions reintroduce the ancient underground into a real Victorian space created for entirely practical purposes. Such a contradiction serves to highlight both the very real differences between the imaginative associations of underground spaces and their intended function, and also the fact that both are inevitably bound up together.

Entrance to the London Dungeon

While the London Dungeon conjures up its fabricated histories of the city’s underworld in its safe and convenient pseudo-subterranean setting, London still has its real underground spaces and communities that continue to haunt the city. If visitors to the London Dungeon want an authentic subterranean experience, they might be better advised to find a homeless person sheltering in one of London’s subways and give them the extortionate entrance fee.


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Categories : architecture, cities, death, iron, London, underground space, Victorian

Visiting London’s dead

14 10 2010

 

Visitors in the Kensal Green catacombs

 

Catacombs are underground structures, built of brick or stone in the form of a cellar, which house coffins in recesses in galleries. Altogether, ten cemeteries in nineteenth-century London were constructed with catacombs: the first at Kensal Green in 1832 with others following at Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton and Nunhead in 1840; and Tower Hamlets, City of London, Saint Mary’s and New Southgate in the 1840s and 50s. They give an important indication of London attitudes not just toward underground space and death but also toward the changing cityscape as a whole.

The oldest precedent for the catacombs of London were those built in Rome, most famously by the early Christians in the second and third centuries. However, the most recent influential precedents were those in Paris, which were established in 1786 when, in response to the overcrowding of the city’s cemeteries, the bones of the dead in the Cemetery of the Innocents were moved to what were formerly underground quarries under the Left Bank. Bones were moved throughout the early part of the nineteenth century and it is estimated that around 3 million bodies are now interred in the catacombs. What was unusual about the catacombs was that they made no distinction of social status – the bones  are arranged solely according to the cemetery from which they came. This led many to comment on the egalitarian nature of the space: the skull of an aristocrat might lie next to that of a pauper or criminal.

 

Democracy in the Paris catacombs

 

Another unusual aspect of this space was that it was open to the public. In the nineteenth century, public visits were offered twice a month to persons obtaining authorisation from the police. Even today, where visits are possible all year round, the sheer number of bones and their abstract configurations still provoke strong reactions. Visitors see only a fraction of the network of catacombs and they are a magnet for urban explorers and other groups who attempt to penetrate their secret spaces with subversive fervour.

Yet, from the start, the Paris catacombs were associated with revolution. They were constructed at the time of the first revolution in 1789 and remained indelibly tied up with the social upheavals in Paris that occurred sporadically throughout the nineteenth century. Their concealed nature and unknown extent led to a mixing of legends and facts: according to the authorities these underground spaces were used by conspirators to both hide and organize themselves. Revolutionaries even drew on the Christian precedent of the Roman catacombs: they viewed themselves as a persecuted minority, hiding in the depths of the earth, until their hour of triumph or martyrdom came.

 

The main corridor and catafalque in the Kensal Green catacombs

 

In contrast with the labyrinthine layout of their Parisian counterparts, London’s catacombs were built on grids. The galleries were constructed in arched brick, the standard architectural form of Victorian London. At Kensal Green these arches are divided into arched insets, with deep cuts at their ends to let in light from above. Within the individual arches, various arrangements occur, the most frequent being a division into separate loculi, one for each coffin, inserted lengthwise to conserve space. Some of the arches are reserved for a single family, or some are empty – never having been used.

 

Coffins in the Kensal Green catacombs

 

A key feature of the London catacombs was a hydraulic lift, or catafalque, by which the coffin would be mechanically lowered at the right moment from the chapel to the catacombs below. The mechanism would be concealed by the coffin drapery giving the illusion of a miraculous descent into the underworld. This was a piece of pure theatre and marked a combination of up-to-date technology with ancient myth. The catacomb gave the appearance of automation within an inorganic man-make environment of brick, lead and iron, with the lead-lined coffins giving the impression of an incorruptible body, even if this far from the reality – today, most of the coffins are badly decayed, infested with woodworm and mouldering in the damp. Yet, today, the Kensal Green catacombs are only three-quarter’s full and you can still buy space to inter yourself or your entire family.

 

Decaying coffin in the Kensal Green catacombs

 

The London catacombs, like those in Paris, were also visited by the public. Family members and curiosity seekers regularly descended into their spaces to revisit the dead – a practice not possible with traditional methods of burial. This subterranean visit transported visitors to another world, albeit one strictly controlled by modern technology. Today, most of London’s catacombs have been sealed off; only Kensal Green and Highgate offer regular opportunities to curiosity seekers who still want to visit London’s dead.


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Categories : abandoned space, architecture, cities, death, underground space, Victorian


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