Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (34 page)

A drunken man with a smashed nose was sheltering in a deep recess of Farrell’s signature regeneration project when I visited Hull’s marina at night. ‘I’ve fallen off me bike,’ he explained. Bikeless, and lacking coat or jacket, he huddled beside a hot-air vent, staring across the dock and wondering what had happened to the town he left behind that afternoon.

Hull City – for a few hours – sat at the head of football’s Premier League. It wouldn’t last, we knew that. But at this moment, Hull was on top of the world, bragging rights underwritten by New Labour’s publicity machine. Chris Petit left an important figure out of his architect, cook, stand-up comedian grouping: the claret-supping, sclerotic, millionaire football gaffer with the well-exercised jaws. The working-class champion as symbol of a managerial elite. Football is money, the Esperanto we all speak. Barber-shop babble, taxi chat. A rising city with cultural pretensions requires two things: an iconic artwork and a Premier League club. Hull hoovered up serious investment: malls, pedestrianized precincts, one of those Orwellian TV screens on a triumphalist arch, put in place to anticipate good news from the Olympics. And, as the stamp of media approval, a visitation from the architect Will Alsop in his high-wheel, off-road vehicle (with attendant film crew), to tell them where they had gone wrong.

Alsop, in Petit’s terms, was a figure of the times: architect, painter, air-miles conceptualist. Metropolitan architects, presumed to have a competence in producing new skin to cover the skull of dying industries, were parachuted into the northlands as aesthetic Gau-leiters. The political classes imagine that all an economically dysfunctional area requires is a new museum: content unimportant, style paramount. Institutes of pop music, eco-parks. They were launched with millennial seed funds and lottery loot. And they failed, withering away at the first nip of fiscal reality. What the promoters never grasped is that culture is what happens between museums, on the street, in markets and pubs. Museums are sheds in which to invade the past and make it safe, nostalgia bunkers busking for oil sponsorship. Architects, like other artists of the era, flourished as masters of the pitch. Will Alsop, a charismatic documentary presenter, was himself presented with Barnsley: to dress with haloes of light until it became a Tuscan hill town.

Alsop’s reputation was made with an award-winning library (and media centre) for Peckham. The building photographs well. Very few people will inspect the original, nobody is rushing down to Peckham: the reproduction is the story. A green storage unit propped on slim black rods, topped with the word
LIBRARY
, so that it’s not mistaken for a BMW showroom. ‘A library is an old-fashioned term,’ Alsop says, ‘which in the age of the internet, CD-ROM, fax, electronic mail, TV, videos, talking books and performing arts, seems somehow redundant.’ Privately, as a favour to a friend, he designed a more modest book depository in an Islington garden: for London’s biographer Peter Ackroyd. An elegant version of the traditional book- (and bicycle-) filled shed.

The Alsop project that concerned me now was his take on the coast-to-coast motorway, Hull to Liverpool, the M62. Hungry for a larger canvas than Barnsley, the architect proposed a SuperCity folded around the entire road. He published an illustrated book of supporting essays. And he promoted the idea, vigorously, with a television film. As a presence admitted to the intimacy of our screens, Alsop looks like a man who gives (and receives) good lunch; excellent company, reflex cigarette. Easy shirt, unstructured French-blue artisan’s jacket. Free-flowing monologues in a seductive deep-throat growl. Projects collapse, prizes are won. There is commissioned work in Germany and in France. And lottery-funded crumbs in the English badlands, marginal constituencies unlucky enough to be noticed by box-ticking central government. A topography of virtual masterpieces that will never be built. Noughties architecture is the art of getting some other sucker to take the blame.

Discovered, nozzling his jeep on a northern forecourt, Alsop can’t wait to grab a felt-tipped pen and deface the windscreen. He lights up, before taking stock of his surroundings: ‘Cheap and nasty. Horrid, revolting, evil. Complete and utter shit.’ Here is a motorway utopian, an architect accepting just enough work to fund his true passion, painting. Painting on windows. Cartoons teased from agribiz edgelands. Coloured pens rattle across the dashboard. Tobacco contrails improve the visual complexity. Thick gold signet ring on paw. An actor who can drive and talk at the same time. Man of the road. Service-station philosopher.

He strikes east out of Liverpool, making for the M62, heading for Hull and memories of childhood. He schmoozes the fixed camera, architecture as infotainment. ‘It’s about playing.’ He gestures towards a ravished horizon of cooling towers, no-purpose sheds and glinting rivers. ‘This is an itinerant area that you can’t define as country or city.’ There is nothing quite so agreeable as pulling on to the hard shoulder, to conjure, pen on glass, soft-sculptures from innocent ground which would otherwise be polluted by Barratt estates. Chris Petit, when we motored up and down the boulevards of Alsop’s imaginary city, admitted that, on the whole, he’d rather take up residence in a skip alongside a smoking landfill mountain on Rainham Marshes.

Alsop needs a bed for the night. What can the road offer? Patrick Keiller, reprising Daniel Defoe’s
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, for his film
Robinson in Space
, speaks with weary affection of the Travelodge franchise. You know exactly what you are going to get: minimalism. Minimal efficiency, minimal fuss, minimal satisfaction. The budget hotel, the overnight stay on expenses, is a salient feature of the SuperCity. Alsop describes the experience in terms of Chaucerian collisions.

‘People don’t actually meet or talk in hotels,’ he told me, when I visited him at the offices of his architectural practice, in a leafy and salubrious riverside quarter of London. ‘If you go to a hotel chain, it’s perfectly clean and comfortable, but the public spaces aren’t there. You’re not expected to sit around and mingle. They’re missing a trick. All these guys, particularly travelling salesmen, have a lot of stories. Hotels are not creating the stage for things to happen.’

In SuperCity, social interaction is important; partying, yarning at leisure over good food. That classic exchange between travellers, pilgrims with experiences to share. Dimly lit bars from which consenting adults walk away unscathed. One-night stands of reps, evangelists, tribute bands, traded footballers, academics without tenure, oil-company hatchet men deciding where they can close another filling station. Neon nests where transients, coming off-road with the glamour of elsewhere, make a pitch to the girl behind the counter. The nightscape of the great American Depression as reflected in film noir dreams.

With the shudder of traffic still in the vein, the hard miles between Burnley, Bradford, Pontefract, Alsop made a big decision:
they are all the same
. A specialist cheese counter, a theatre forty miles to the south, a night on the town: parochial divisions no longer play.

‘If these people live in Barnsley and they want an upmarket shop, they go to Leeds. If they want a jolly good market – they used to have one of their own, but it’s gone – they drive to Doncaster. If they feel like a good thrash in the evening, they think nothing of heading off to Manchester. They use this plethora of towns, cities and villages as one SuperCity. All I had to do was stretch the concept to take in Liverpool and Hull.’

Framed in the sunset window of his vehicle, this prophet of effervescent sprawl is a true icon. The hieratic representation of a sacred personage lasered into glass. Adrift on the M62, meditating on the death of locality, Alsop is as much a representative of an historical period as Vincent van Gogh, in that molten self-portrait
Painter on the Road to Tarascon.

‘If you take roughly twenty miles on either side of the M62, there are roughly 15.4 million people. Your journey can take for ever, because of the traffic. Or it can be clear and quick. That’s how I came to the conclusion that it would be a very good thing to
increase
the density. All those towns and cities are charged with building more houses. What they do, all the housing providers like Wimpey and Barratt, they look at the cheap option – which is to build on the edge of existent centres. This is not good practice. There are lots of places in the middle of those cities where you can build. There is no shortage of derelict sites. There are vast tracts of car parks just waiting.’

Liverpool remains a source of regret for the London architect, a European ‘City of Culture’ lacking the bottle to push through risky but potentially rewarding commissions. The offer, made to Alsop’s practice and then withdrawn, was for the Fourth Grace. An embellishment for the Pierhead, the Grace would sit on equal terms alongside three ‘iconic’ structures: the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port Authority Building. Alsop, chatting to the television writer/producer Phil Redmond, employs that degraded word. As does Redmond. It’s a Tourette’s-syndrome reflex, when there is a whiff of regeneration in the air.

‘We’re looking for an iconic statement, a beacon statement,’ Redmond delivers. When Liverpool came to sell itself to the colour supplements –
IT’S HAPPENING IN LIVERPOOL, EUROPEAN CITY OF CULTURE
2008 – it was with Gormley-Man from Crosby Beach, staring with blind eyes at the Mersey, at the Corinthian portico of William Brown’s mid nineteenth-century museum and library, and a featureless spread of CGI towers.

‘This is the western gateway,’ Alsop says. He loves the fact that you can drive to Hull, by way of the M62, in less time than it takes to cross London. The obvious conclusion, as he sees it, is to make all this disconnected stuff, all the beacon destinations – Tate Liverpool, Ikea Warrington, Trafford Park, Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum of the north, the Lowry Centre, Terry Farrell’s The Deep – into one unified smudge. A mega-development twenty miles deep.

‘We won the competition in Liverpool,’ Alsop explained, ‘but it wasn’t just architecture. There was a financial element as well. What happened was that there was another development, King’s Dock. Their own development. It went over budget. They had to raid our £70 million.’ The contract was cancelled. Leaving the regretful architect musing on betrayed visions.

‘The big asset they’ve got is the river. Fascinating streets with boarded-up pubs and wonderful sugar warehouses. If I were chief planner of Liverpool, I would be making this area as dense as possible. When you can look south over a majestic river, why do you build mediocre stuff inland, where you wouldn’t want to be? It sounds very simple, but if you wake up to a good view, you feel better.’

The M62 induces reverie, Wordsworthian recollections of childhood. Alsop grew up in Northampton. There is a moment in his television documentary when he speaks about standing on a motorway bridge with his father, gazing down on the traffic, road as river, before a family picnic in an adjacent field. His father died within a week of this epiphany.

Hull, the architect reported, was the destination for a holiday with a friend whose father was in the wet-fish trade. ‘It was thriving, a real fishing port. On the other side of the river, they took all the elements of the catch, crushed at the bottom of the hold, and turned them into pet food. The whole port was full of women in pinnies gutting fish. All these people lived in terraced houses which backed on to the river.’

Alsop spoke of Mr Bogg, an employer on the docks. ‘They’re buggers in Hull,’ this man said. ‘They steal my wooden fish boxes to make furniture. I wouldn’t mind, but whenever they go anywhere the sods ride in a taxi.’

We witnessed those taxis. Lines of them growling in the sleet. And the weekend-partying tribes of the Humberside diaspora. And the granite banks converted into lap-dancing clubs. I came to Hull, in Chris Petit’s comfortable, diesel-devouring Mercedes, to launch a test drive down Alsop’s SuperCity highway. When we strolled through the icy downpour that first evening, we were hustled by touts at the doors of hard-drinking, red-light venues loud enough not to require further advertisement. The women were dressed to please: to please themselves. A girl with bootlace-ribbons barely supporting a skimpy vest sat outside a pub, chatting on her pink mobile, watching raindrops bounce off the round metal table. ‘You pregnant, love?’ called a passing lad. ‘Your breasts is standing right out.’ She was busy, he got away with the compliment. She flicked a finger.

With its generous civic spaces, close alleys, part-developed warehouses and docks, Hull endorses the Alsop project: collision, celebration, short-term migration. A party town glorying in its Premier League status, its windfall of unaccounted dosh. Helicopters shadowed us across the Humber Bridge, as we cruised into a zone of imposing stadia, retail parks and pagoda restaurants. The clatter of blades dispersed sombre flashbacks to suicide news reports. I remembered Alison Davies, whose twelve-year-old son, Ryan, suffered from a hereditary condition called Fragile X Syndrome. Ms Davies travelled by train from Stockport, to plunge from the bridge with her son. The motorway city is also a conduit for disturbed and disadvantaged people, at the end of their tether, who have pushed themselves to the limits of a specific and unforgiving geography.

There were reasons why I didn’t visit Hull often enough in the past to appreciate its now obvious virtues. The percussionist Paul Burwell got an art gig up here on the first wave of development money. He liked it, found an abandoned boathouse, and stayed: in what proved to be a tragic exile. The story of which I recovered, much later, from contradictory and highly coloured reports. Burwell fell out with a community of travellers who shared his riverside wilderness. There were incidents, assaults. Beatings with iron bars. Returned from hospital, Paul took to his bed, keeping up his spirits with infusions of supermarket whisky, supplied for a consideration by one of the traveller kids. The lad turned a profit by cutting the cheap booze with antifreeze. Being of a strong constitution, used to running up ladders with knapsacks of petrol, Burwell lasted a few months on this toxic regime, before he was discovered on the frozen riverside, stiff as a board. That was the legend, the story peddled in London.