The View From the Train (16 page)

Cedric once hosted breakfast, at his office, for David Allford, Bryan Henderson (also of YRM) and Alistair McAlpine. McAlpine was to bring Bath chaps, but arrived with grouse, ‘looking like the president of the Maidenhead yacht club' in someone else's clothes. He had set fire to West Green cooking the Bath chaps, as is traditional, over candles. The house was gutted.

I asked Cedric whether, given the choice, he would have preferred to live in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. In the nineteenth century, he said, everything was up for grabs, for invention: custard powder, Carter's Liver Pills, Beecham's Powders. The eighteenth century, on the other hand, was the century of slavery, of an old, Classical idea of knowledge, and established reason. He cited Dickens's admiration for America.

One of the factors in our choice of destination had been the predicament of the Thames estuary, and of north Kent in particular, as one of the few places (perhaps the only place) in the UK where a new landscape is being created. This involves both the construction of the Channel Tunnel and its rail link, and the related project for the regeneration of the estuary – the
Thames Gateway
(‘Heseltine's Valhalla in the east', Cedric called it, later) – an attempt to balance, or even reverse, the westward drift of London's prosperity and the pull of Heathrow Airport.
¹²
In the last few decades, however, the UK's east coast ports have grown much more than
those on the west coast, partly as a result of increased trade with Europe, but perhaps more because of their proximity to the world's largest port, Rotterdam. I asked Cedric if he thought it was possible to reverse centuries of westward drift in London. Without rejecting it, he didn't seem to accept the generality of westward drift, and suggested instead that the future of London was more likely to be determined by its position on the map of intercontinental air travel. Once again, Cedric referred to the English Channel as a time warp, and to Dutch faience. It was never quite clear, he said, whether the Channel was a thoroughfare, or something to be crossed. On the map of air routes, London was out on a limb. In the long run, Paris might overtake Heathrow, and London face the prospect of decline, just as Liverpool, once the major European north Atlantic port, and a world city, had done before it.

We drove to the M2 junction at Blue Bell Hill, south-east of the town, to see the Channel Tunnel Rail Link under construction. Cedric recalled the project for the Solway Barrage, whose protagonist, Dr Robert Drew, had commissioned his computer centre for the British Transport Docks Board, near Heathrow, in 1967. Cedric had had some involvement with London and Continental Railways, who are responsible for building the link between the tunnel and Ebbsfleet.

Cross-channel rail traffic is not new. Until quite recently, train ferries still ran between Dover and Dunkirk – 29,000 rail wagons in 1994. In Dover's Western Docks, where the Dunkirk ferry berthed, there was formerly a bar, The Golden Arrow, named after the passenger service which ran between London and Paris. I asked Cedric if he had ever travelled on the
Golden Arrow
. In 1953, he said, on his way to Venice: ‘I liked Venice, when I went, but it was very smelly.' He sold a lot of drawings. ‘My dad had just died, so it was quite a rough time.'

As we drove back to London, he remarked on the extent of countryside he doesn't know, because he doesn't drive. When we
reached Blackheath, where his brother lives, and where Tom Driberg lived at the Paragon, there was a Chinook, perhaps the same one we'd seen earlier, following the river.

In Rotherhithe, I said I'd only recently learnt that Marc Brunel was French, and that, in Plymouth for the car ferry, I had seen the Saltash railway bridge, for the first time. We all admired this bridge, completed in 1859. Cedric asked what sort of car ferry leaves from Plymouth. He doesn't spend much time in France, he said, but was interested in Portugal.

Crossing Tower Bridge, we saw Norman Foster's Greater London Assembly building, under construction, overlooking the river. ‘It's not very big, is it?' I said. Cedric had recently been having a look round ‘with Paul Finch, and his instant camera', when Max Neal, Foster's project architect, who used to work in Cedric's office, had spotted them. He would have laid something on, he said, if he'd known they were coming. Cedric thought it was good to have a small building for the GLA. ‘Keep it small, like a cartoon.' (A small city, he said, not like ‘Heseltine's Valhalla in the east'.)

A few minutes later, we passed the Richard Cloudesley School (in Golden Lane), then Ron Herron's GLC school (at the corner of Gray's Inn Road and Sidmouth Street, now part of Westminster Kingsway College).
*
On the opposite side of Sidmouth Street there is, I learnt, an experiment in brick and concrete panel prefabrication, an estate of flats built in the early 1950s. At about five o'clock, the car pulled up near Cedric's office, and we went our separate ways.

Most of us spend much of our time in spaces made and previously occupied by other people, usually people of the more or less distant past. We might reasonably expect our everyday surroundings to feel haunted but, by and large, they don't. Haunting is still relatively unusual. We all live, as far as we know, in the present, and the present in Nepal, in Tokyo, or on Mars, can sometimes seem nearer than yesterday morning in one's own kitchen. As it has become easier to move around in and communicate across space, have we, perhaps, become more sensitive to the fact that we are inescapably stranded, shipwrecked almost, in our own present, and are we therefore increasingly attracted to the idea of time travel?

I can remember, a few years ago, trying to imagine how subjective experience of space might change as a result of one's connection to the internet. For a long time, it had seemed that the spaces of everyday surroundings – the home, the high street and so on – were becoming more marginal in character, compared with other spaces that might be thought typically modern, or postmodern – the airport, the office tower, the big museum and so on. Local spaces, at least in the UK, then appeared, as they still appear, to be suffering a general decline: in the disempowerment of local government, for example; from physical dilapidation and decay, as trends in the wider economy make small-scale maintenance and repair of ordinary buildings increasingly problematic; and in a variety of other ways. A large proportion of housing, in particular – especially
private-sector rented housing – appeared, and still appears, to be in very poor condition.

I had wondered whether the increasing scope and availability of new technology, especially mobile communications technology, would make any difference to the apparently marginal character of much everyday experience, especially urban experience. For much of the twentieth century, artists, writers and revolutionaries had attempted to deal with this and similar predicaments by employing more or less explicit strategies to poeticise or otherwise transform experience of everyday surroundings. The Surrealists and their followers were probably the leading exponents of this, and the Surrealist encounter with everyday experience generally involved the cultivation of subjectivities that revealed previously unappreciated value and meanings in ordinary things. The found object, being portable, is the most familiar result of this revelatory process, but the Surrealists also discovered examples of found architecture and found space. Photography, in the most general way, has also offered similar transformations since its invention. In life, this kind of experiential change, which sometimes involves a heightened awareness of events and appearances not unlike that produced by certain drugs, is (in the absence of continuous revolution) generally ephemeral; but in art, literature, cinema and so on, such glimpses, conventionally experienced in isolation, or perhaps with another or others to whom one is very close, can be reconstituted and shared with a suitably receptive viewer, reader or audience. Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Man of the Crowd' offers an early prototype for this kind of modernist
flâneur
text, and was written at about the time when the modern paradox of visibility and isolation – the convention of silence in public between strangers – was beginning to dominate in cities such as Paris and London.

In the early 1990s, it had seemed to me that the growth of virtual space, and the migration into it of all kinds of economic activity, would speed the decline of some kinds of actual, public space. The closing of bank premises was sometimes referred to as an example of this trend, banking activities being increasingly conducted via cash machines, and by post or telephone. With only slight
exaggeration, one could imagine that in some kinds of public space – the less frequented streets of the City of London, say – the sense of their being conventionally public places had all but disappeared, there being so few people about outdoors; while indoors, people were more likely to be peering into the virtual space of their computer screens than looking out of the window. These exterior spaces seemed to be developing something of the feel of other kinds of space that, while not inaccessible, are largely hidden from view – the space behind a television, perhaps, or on top of a wardrobe. In the rural landscape, too, there was a similar quality. With a bit of effort, one could imagine that parts of it were as unexperienced as if they were merely access space for the maintenance engineers of mobile telephone networks.

By the mid 1990s however, it appeared that this new aridity, while it undoubtedly existed, was not all that widespread. I had noticed that our local high street, for example, despite its increasing dilapidation, was a site of still-flourishing economic activity and increasingly visible global connectedness. The newsagent's window displayed cards offering cut-price telephone deals to many distant territories. Other shops offered cheap flights, both to emigrant and tourist destinations. New ‘ethnic' restaurants and shops were opening all the time, most recently (then) a Russian delicatessen. It also turned out to be the locale of an internationally successful pop group. In many ways, this local, physically decaying space was more pervasively and successfully
global
than the average airport, and certainly much more so than the nearby business park, built on what was previously the site of a car factory, and owned by the property development subsidiary of British Aerospace, which I had been previously inclined to read as a typical spatial outcome of the contemporary economy, and was certainly characterised by the aridity previously identified, despite its electric fountains.

Perhaps the condition of the
local
was beginning to evolve in a different, more positive way. Perhaps we were on the verge of a new, electronic
flânerie
, in which experience of place was enhanced by the possibility of immediate connection, via the virtual realm, to people, both friends and strangers, in other places. Perhaps the era
of visibility and isolation, of silence between strangers in public, was coming to an end. Perhaps these new predicaments would give rise to a kind of radical subjectivity, which might even be less ephemeral than those of the Surrealists, the Situationists or their latterday adherents, and would somehow install itself in the street, transcending its marginality and dilapidation. For some reason, I first encountered these thoughts while riding a bicycle. For a week or so afterwards, I experienced a mild e-euphoria, a quasi-surrealist frisson, though when I finally got round to signing up with Demon (then a leading provider), this soon disappeared. A few years later, however, many of the former banks that briefly exemplified the evacuation of economic activity from the high street have reopened as bars,
¹
and in most of them there are people talking on mobile phones. A kind of electronic
flânerie
has arrived, though, as with so many predicted phenomena, not in quite the way it was anticipated.

One of the internet's most intriguing capabilities, for a topographical film-maker, was that it offered contemporaneous views of distant landscapes. During 1996, I had heard that there were websites where one could access the cameras that observe traffic on UK motorways, and immediately conceived a strong desire to explore, and perhaps to sample, what I imagined would be a large and increasing number of real-time moving images of landscapes throughout the world. I wondered if perhaps, one day, I might be able to make a film without having to leave the house. In fact, at the time, there seemed to be hardly any real-time outdoor web cameras operating anywhere in the world – most of the topographical camera sites only offered a still, updated daily or perhaps hourly, or not at all – but somehow the scarcity of this imagery, its poor resolution, and the way that the images trickled, very slowly, into the monochrome screen of my already obsolete PowerBook made it all the more attractive. In the house in which we then lived, the telephone socket was in the kitchen, and I used to let the pictures load while I was doing the washing up. I never found any views of UK motorways.

The first site I came across that offered anything approaching real-time moving pictures was that of a company called Actual Size
Internet Solutions, who had a camera in a first-floor office overlooking Trinity Square, Colchester, in Essex. This showed a fresh still every two or three seconds, and was particularly impressive at night, when occasional figures passing along the pavement suggested an Essex
noir
. The site became briefly newsworthy when it was revealed that the Neuhoff family, formerly of New Mexico, had moved to Colchester as a result of having seen it, attracted by the apparent absence of crime. They were not, they said, disappointed by the reality of the town, despite its garrison of 4,000 soldiers, and streets patrolled by military police.