The Arcades Project #2: Westminster

[The Second part of a new project to map various parts of London, if you have any recommendations of places I should make a visit to please do let me know]

Victoria Tower Gardens is a peculiarly unprepossessing kind of a place, especially for Westminster. An anaemic slither of green between the river and the road, a thin wedge of almost-park tapering off into nothing. Unlike most of London’s other parks it isn’t big enough to revel in its own marvellous green expansiveness, instead the whole of this apologetic triangle of land seems in thrall to the great wall of Westminster palace that rises like a threat behind it. Gazing up at its smug gothic grandeur you’re liable to miss the crowded plinth that squats by its base until its right on top of you.

Rodin’s flurry of haunting dark-grey figures, The Burghers of Calais, seem every bit as clumsily placed as the park itself. What are they doing here, these abject French nobleman, cluttering up a park so close to centre of English power?

Edward III laid siege to Calais and let it devour itself from the inside out – starvation, disease. Fear. Finally the city came crawling. Edward offered to save the city if six of its leaders would present themselves to him. Inside the desolate walls six wealthy leaders came forward, stripping themselves down to their underclothes, thick Hessian nooses hung on their necks in preparation for what they assumed must happen to them now. Out of the city they traipsed towards the waiting armies, somewhere between the outfoxed, ridiculous rich men of early Chaplin films and the ashen-faced wraiths in the dock at Nuremberg.

Rodin didn’t want his figures placed on a plinth. In truth they’re imposing enough anyway, their enormous hands and their theatrical expressions of anguish and defiance dragging them away from portraiture and into myth. To stick them on a plinth anyway seems a strange thing to do. They stand there almost meekly, cast into shadow by the Palace, such a bombastic symbol of power. It’s as if the Westminster holds them up delicately in the palm of its thick gothic hand, this little band of figures a tiny example of the powerlessness of defeat, the spoils of victory. Jean d’Aire’s look of rigid defiance hardly seems to matter in the face of such smug indifference.



The same could be said of Brian Haw. His little caravan of affordable dome tents and charred baby posters seems at first almost pathetically hopeless, Haw himself sat there in the middle of it all, his jaw set firm in exactly the same way as Jean D’Aire’s. This Technicolor monstrosity and its earnest slogans seem to be treated with the same embarrassed smirks as Greenpeace protesters in dinghies trapping themselves between whaling ships, and earnest middle-aged socialists marching through the streets of London. As an anachronism. As politically naive. As a joke. As a waste of time. I have stood nonchalantly outside a theatre in Edinburgh laughing with the crowd as protesters in matching T-shirts march against the G8 through the streets of the city.


When did caring about things go out of fashion? When did not giving a shit about anything become a position of strength?

Its now of course illegal to protest outside our own parliament, unless you have a licence – effectively transforming protest into theatre, as comedian Mark Thomas has shown with a series of theatrical satires more potent than anything dreamt up at the big theatre just across the river. We have been banned from protesting in front of our own parliament – only Brian Haw left, a designated mourner for a disappearing movement.

The politicians would have us believe we are have turned from besiegers to the besieged. That there is an invisible army ever encroaching on London, on the country. An entity so terrifying our laws are not capable of coping. We need identity cards, and terror warning systems, and more time to question suspects (90 days or 42 days or whatever the government can bargain themselves into… their protestations for the importance of one figure forgotten in their acceptance of the next). We need stricter stop and search powers and less need for explanation of why someone is stopped (to cut down on the paperwork). We are facing the threat of a legion of freedom-haters (except for those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are invited to walk with Princes and dine at number 10). Yet who will be accountable for all this? Who will walk out of the gates of Westminster Palace with the noose around the thick noose hung around the neck? Not Tony Blair as he waltzes off to become a peace envoy to the region he declared war on.

Blueprint for a Show

I want this to be something incredibly simple. Something that could be done without a licence in Parliament Square. Something that slips fuzzily into the grey area between the government’s Anti-terror legislation and its obsession with its own public image – after all, half the reason for introducing the protest zone in the first place was an attempt to evict Brian Haw for largely aesthetic reasons.

I also want something that slips between the public and the protester, something that implicates the apathetic public. The protest equivalent of the opt-out organ donor system - something that turns an everyday act into an act of protest. What is the one thing (other than Brian Haw) that you can guarantee to see in Parliament Square? People taking photos.

The idea is very simple, possibly too simple - possibly still too much protest and not enough theatre. Maybe on this occasion that’s a good thing. For one day, on the hour, every hour from one in the morning, people will be invited to come to Parliament Square and as Big Ben strikes they will take a photo of the Houses of Parliament. Then they will disappear. They can come only once or they can continue to return throughout the day. What they absolutely must do is convince as many people to come with them. As many as possible. This would only ever work in large numbers.

Hopefully as the day progressed people around Parliament Square would begin to acknowledge that something strange was happening. Police would have little ability to arrest or question such a nebulous and fluctuating mass and besides, anyone can claim simply to be a tourist. It would also hopefully with enough people begin to have the same effect as those scavenging groups of Paparazzi do outside expensive London restaurants. Luring in the inquisitive and the nosy, tantalised by the fact that something is happening here and they don’t know what it is. Their attention is drawn to the object of everyone’s fascination– the houses of Parliament, implicating them in this invisible protest. More people are drawn through curiosity, each hour the crowd returning stronger, word of mouth spreading. And what stares back at them every time. Nothing.

Parliament in its own haughty indifference is a more than adequate political statement.

The Arcades Project #1: The Docklands

[As promised, the first part of a new project to map various parts of London]

Map

This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. (Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea)

I arrived at the docklands early Sunday morning, stepping off the Jubilee line at Canary Wharf tube station. The train was disappointingly busy. Where I’d quite self-consciously gone looking for an almost sinister emptiness the train was actually relatively full. Mainly with people who looked like they were going sailing.

Canary Wharf tube station is a self-consciously bombastic, the proclamations of its own importance (a half-cut city trader on a late night booty call) echoing noisily across its cavernous interior. At one end a bank of escalators tower out of the gloom, their destination bathed in sunlight. Like an irritating acquaintance at a costume party the escalators demand you acknowledge what they look like – the the stairway to heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, the gleaming tasteful edifices of Gattaca, something from that movie that you can’t quite place.

Like everything in this particular part of the docklands they feel unreal, borrowed from fiction. As you walk past 6ft high electronic billboards screen displaying CNN, the DLR glides overhead on thick, smooth rails, crunching into the station like a state-of-the-art rollercoaster. From the centre of canary Wharf you gaze out at a cinematic landscape, an anonymous near future all-too-familiar for anyone with a childhood as wasted on over-hyped movies as mine was.

In one of his books (I can't remember which) Douglas Coupland explains away the ridiculous number of mediocre action films made in Vancouver as being a consequence of its anonymous familiarity – its generically imposing skyscrapers and its cultured lawns and its city monuments that could be anywhere important. Signifiers of the flashy urbanity of New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Metropolis. The Docklands however seems to come at film from entirely the opposite angle. As it scrambles breathlessly into existence it seems desperate to quote cinema, rather than be quoted by it. It stitches itself into the shape of a finely tailored business district from an infinite patchwork of Hollywood films made between about 1985 and 2002.

It speaks of its own importance through the language of big budget multiplex cinema – a language its prospective inhabitants implicitly understand. And thus it constructs itself as a singularly modern image of aspiration. This is where you could work, this is where you could live, this is what you could become, like something from the movies.

When I was growing up, the sortof-town next to our tiny village was just about big enough to have its own miniature business park. Every time we drove into Cambridge we would pass one office that seemed to be made entirely of a glistening, sky blue glass. I was always transfixed. Imagine, I thought to myself, imagine working in a place like that; imagine staring out through a window of tinted glass at the world around you – that’s the life. As impressed as I was by a miserable-looking two story office in a meek little business park just north of Cambridge, I can barely imagine what I would have thought, at the age of about five, of the Docklands. It would have struck me with all the wonder of Disney’s tomorrowland; a freshly moulded simulacrum of what Hollywood told us the future would look like.

But of course, at that point I couldn’t have visited the Docklands. Not in the sense that it exists today. It was at that time a half-started building site. Once the biggest docks in the world. Then eight square miles of wasteland for around twenty years. Then, in complete contrast to the organic jungle described by Joseph Conrad, it was resurrected; carefully planned and consciously remade by a government-funded Quango. Born around 1980, the new docklands is only as old those people they are desperately trying to populate it with, aspiring city-workers in their late twenties. Like them it is rising fast, relaxing its still slightly awkward frame into expensive new habits. But like them it is barely even half-completed.


To my quiet delight, once you strike out a few streets away from Canary Wharf you are quickly engulfed by building sites and cranes, tarpaulin flapping eerily on an otherwise empty street – a different kind of movie. The docklands are still endearingly tatty round the edges, their naked, fevered ambition showing through the cracks. Black and white photos of imagined dockside complexes are plastered up in front of looming skeletal frames. I found myself walking through a shopping centre-like complex consisting entirely of estate agents, all of them decked out in dynamic, tastefully complementing primary colours – like a series of Microsoft Powerpoint templates. All of them offering for sale grown-up looking pencil drawings of expensive apartments. Ready to be snapped up by aspiring young graduates from Liverpool, Leeds, Sussex, small villages north of Cambridge; buying unbuilt houses with the six figure salaries they’re soon to be earning.

There’s something incredibly endearing for me about the docklands. As well as feeling like a 1000 films I sat and watched with my parents on a Sunday evening with a gluttonous plate of roast dinner piled on a tray in front of me, it reminds me of how I felt then. Of the reassuring vision of my elderly parents slowly coasting down a row of houses in the car, an address gripped in my mum’s hand – no, surely it couldn’t be this one, goodness – the admiring beams on their faces as I lounge in the doorway of my make-believe hollywoodised superhome. My parents who grew up in council houses or in their grandparent's terrace house in Croydon. It reminds me of the stinging ambition that used drive me to the point of distraction. That still does if I’m honest though converted by a force of will from the glossy apartments of the docklands to the nominally more worthy accolades of academia and theatre. But I still remember wandering round the motorshow at the NEC, dreaming of the car I would use to go and visit my parents.



Blueprint for a Show

Get a little way from the centre of the docklands and it still has the feel of an edgeland, as if you’ve stumbled into a half-finished makeover, revealing something authentic and endearing disappearing fast under a sea of simulated sophistication.

I found that on a Sunday morning you could wonder along empty quaysides, only seeing maybe a distant figure on the opposite side of the water. I like this. I also like that the awkwardly placed bridges make it impossible to get to that person with any great haste.

Perhaps you could create something a little like Small Metal Objects, taking advantage of the discontinuity between the great distance and the intimacy of a spoken voice. But more desolate. Not in a crowd. Perhaps you and another are connected by telephone. But with hands free headsets (a gadget that still gives me that same frisson of grown-up futuristic excitement that I once got from a cheap glass office block).

Across an empty wharf littered with building works and static cranes, you can see a figure. In your ear you can hear their fevered talking. They are looking for something.

They are a representation of everything around them. A product of bad Hollywood films. A little like Mel Wilson’s wonderful solo show Simple Girl, they are attempting to live out a borrowed ideal and are failing. But rather than longing for wistful European romance, this is the universe of the mediocre Hollywood action thriller. Demolition Man keeps springing to mind, I don’t know why. Die Hard and its imposing LA skyscraper. Yippee ki-ay motherfucker. The character's language is a patchwork of Americanisms (not even… Hollywoodisms). There is a frenzied ambition to this pulpy dream and like the docklands itself it is pretty tatty and half-formed round the edges.

What were those films always about? Saving a city from bombs or terrorists. Appropriately docklands has its own rather messy history of that. Perhaps this character, a young over-eager city boy of some kind, believes himself to be the only one able to solve an imminent threat. And here he is rushing around full of bluster and slightly hopeless Hollywood bombast, the trappings of his young success quickly sacrificed at the alter of this increasingly obsessive action plot.

Of course if it was a direct telephone link between you and this person, you’d be able to talk back. The audience member would have to be implicated in this world somehow. Maybe they see you as the cowardly side-kick, or the evil mastermind, or a love interest. Perhaps we could have all three – some kind of conference call, with three audience members co-opted into this story played out on the enormous movie set that is the docklands. In some way all three are needed to validate this absurd narrative, and their failure to live up to their roles makes this fiction increasingly fractured.

I’d like it if it ended in a very public place, with a very public scene. Lots of shouting. And in which the audience could implicate themselves – in front of the unknowing general public – with some big cinematic display fitting of their ‘character’, or from which they could quietly back away, leaving our hopelessly protagonist all the more ridiculous, a tragic broken figure lost in his own fantasy.