The View From the Train (17 page)

Another early favourite was a camera at Mawson Station, an Australian research base in Antarctica. To begin with, this was a single image of the station, updated every hour. If it was dark, as it often was, the screen was black. If it was daylight, with a blizzard, it was white or grey. At other times, there was a view of huts, sometimes illuminated. It didn't occur to me at the time, but I suspect that part of the attraction of this view was the ease with which one could misconstrue it as a window looking into another time. Mawson Station is named after Sir Douglas Mawson, whose Australasian Antarctic Expedition was undertaken in the years 1911–14, and the rudimentary monochrome images were not unlike those of polar explorations of the period. They also evoked the
décor
of the Howard Hawks-produced film
The Thing from Another World
(1951).

The name of Mawson was familiar as that of the designer of Stanley Park, in Blackpool, who quoted the remark of an unidentified Lancashire businessman: ‘Blackpool stands between us and revolution'.
²
Stanley Park in Blackpool is named after a member of the family of the Earls of Derby, other members of which have given their name to Stanley Park in Liverpool and Stanley Park in Vancouver (and Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, which is not so far from Antarctica). I had visited the latter Stanley Park in 1994, in Vancouver for the film festival, and been fascinated by the view from its beach of English Bay, where there are nearly always twelve ships lying at anchor, waiting to enter the port. It is said that if there are fewer than twelve ships in English Bay, people in
Vancouver worry. Searching for an image of the bay and its ships I encountered, instead, recorded sounds: one of the park's Nine O'Clock Gun, another of a floatplane taking off from the harbour, like one I had photographed when I was there. There were a number of other sites on the Pacific coast – a view, from a first-floor window, of the car park of a scientific institution in Alaska; a view of the sea transmitted by a Santa Cruz
fogcam
, and a
baycam
in San Diego, which first offered an image of the bay, then another of the airport – all of which recalled the eeriness of a few jet-lagged days in autumn three years earlier. Once again, more or less contemporaneous views of distant places seemed to bring with them the suggestion that it was possible to see across time. One night, just after midnight, I came across Camera 58 of the Freeway Management System of the Arizona Department of Transportation, with an image of Phoenix that was presumably the most Hitchcockian of these metaphysical spaces, but when I tried to revisit the site a few days later, I couldn't find it.

As the months passed, websites generally grew bigger and more cumbersome, the PowerBook became more and more ill suited to these
plongeur
excursions, and I abandoned the habit. A few months later we moved house, and shortly afterwards bought an iMac. The telephone point was no longer in the kitchen, the images were colour and much faster-loading, and the dish-watery, time-suspended ambience of the previous situation was lost. In any case, when I attempted to revisit them, some of the sites had gone, while others had become more extensive and hence, often, less mysterious.

By this time, I had begun work on a film about the present-day predicament of the
house
. This had been under development for some time, and had arisen as a kind of pendant to its predecessor,
³
which had, for reasons I could never quite fathom, largely avoided domestic space. While photographing it, however, my colleague and I had been faced, nearly every night, with the vexed question of where to stay. One night, after a particularly bad experience, we found ourselves in one of a rapidly growing chain of what were, in effect, motels, which had opened during the previous week.
⁴
We
were, the receptionist told us, the first people ever to occupy our rooms. These were large, well furnished and equipped, warm and comfortable, with a decor which, while not entirely sympathetic, was a great deal less disconcerting than that of most of the other places we had stayed in. Before going to sleep, I turned on the television, on which there appeared an image of some young people playing music, one of them, seen in close-up, on a Fender Stratocaster. Musing on the beauty of this instrument, which I had long considered a key twentieth-century artefact, I came to the conclusion that an economy that offers an adolescent the opportunity to own such a guitar, and hence the life-changing possibility of becoming a half-decent imitator of Jimi Hendrix, for less than a couple of hundred pounds (my possibly low estimate of the then-current price of a mass-produced Stratocaster), and that could produce, in the UK, a brand new hotel bedroom of the quality of the one I was then occupying, capable of accommodating a family of five (as we later proved, returning from a day trip to Blackpool) for only £34.50 per night, could not be entirely bad. With this epiphany began a flirtation with consumerism which lasted for a couple of years. What would happen, I thought, if the capabilities of globalised, automated production and distribution, which were held to have made possible what people then sometimes referred to as
the consumer revolution
, could be applied to the production of domestic space, to
housing
?

A couple of years later, the Tories had been swept from office, and the nation was led by a man who not only owns, but apparently plays, a Fender Stratocaster. A few weeks after our night in Wigan, we had stayed in a Forte Travelodge – the rival brand – in the future prime minister's Sedgefield constituency, and discovered a metal plaque which recorded that, earlier in the year, he had officiated at its opening. In the following year, Forte were taken over by Granada, whose chief executive, Gerry Robinson, subsequently appointed by the incoming government as chairman of the Arts Council of England, had stated that Forte's brands were ‘under-priced'. As a result, perhaps, of Robinson's intervention, the UK's two rival motel chains no longer offer the emancipatory,
bargain-price mobility they did in 1995, and can now be perceived as, sadly, just another aspect of
rip-off Britain
.

The idea that new technology might be about to have some impact on housing, which had occurred to me, had also occurred to others. In the spring of 1996, the architectural press reported a number of initiatives by architects and others which set out to encourage reform of the UK's unloved house-building industry, with references to post-war prefabs, Japanese factory-built houses, car production, and other industrial technologies. It was not difficult to detect the expectation that such projects might flourish under an incoming Labour government. In other parts of the world, notably Japan and North America, computer-aided manufacturing techniques had already been employed, in a variety of ways, in the production of housing. It seemed merely a matter of time before some global corporate initiative began to shake up, buy up or eliminate the UK's house-building industry, either with or without such new technology, in an echo of what had happened to the UK-owned car industry in the early 1970s. There were a number of more or less likely suspects. These included Toyota, by no means the biggest producer of factory-built houses in Japan, but a familiar name; Hutchison Whampoa, who own the port of Felixstowe and had co-founded the Orange mobile phone network, and were already involved with various developments of luxury apartments in central London; Lend Lease, the Australian developer who subsequently realised Bluewater, the last UK shopping mall of its era in the UK, and were planning large new housing developments in its vicinity; and IKEA, who were reported, wrongly, to be developing ‘flat-pack' houses to sell for £7,500.

At the same time, travelling up and down the A40, Western Avenue, in London, I had been struck by the dilapidation of many of its 1930s houses. I read a study, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which had drawn attention to the very low rate at which dwellings were being replaced in the UK (implying a future lifespan for the average house of several thousand years) and had detailed the extraordinary inadequacies of the industries that maintain, repair and ‘improve' existing owner-occupied dwellings. What,
I began to wonder, will become of the millions of ageing dwellings in the UK, if they can be neither replaced nor adequately maintained? I finished the
Robinson
film, and returned to a house full of half-unpacked cardboard boxes and piles of film cans, overcrowded, poorly decorated and furnished, my lover and our children the victims of a neglect of actual space that frequently afflicts people who give too much of their attention to a quality of space found only in films.

Having briefly reconsidered it, as at similar moments during the preceding decades, we set aside the idea of building a
house of the future
to live in (too slow, too psychologically risky: as Nietzsche remarks, ‘a truly modern person who wants to build a house has the feeling that he is entombing himself in a mausoleum'). Instead, I imagined a project in which the production of a film might include the realisation of a ‘concept' house, designed (as a film set, avoiding the need to secure planning permission and the various other traumas that accompany house-building in real life) either by me or, more likely, an established avant-garde architect. If we could find somewhere to put this, which seemed extremely unlikely, we might subsequently acquire it as a by-product of the production, but would move, in the meantime, to a more generous ready-to-wear dwelling, new or second-hand.

Several years later, we live in a more spacious house, built in 1902, in which I spend most of my waking life working in a room on the first floor overlooking the back garden. This backs on to the gardens of some houses in a neighbouring street, a few doors along from which live a couple who came round once to ask if we knew who owns the overgrown wilderness which backs onto their garden, which is the fenced-off gardens of a pair of large dilapidated houses, formerly a ‘hotel', owned by one of the neighbourhood's more notorious and insolent slum landlords – one of several who have, in recent years, rapidly expanded their unrestrained, super-profitable exploitation of the public sector's inability to cope with its responsibilities towards the increasing number of people in the city who find themselves in desperate housing circumstances. Before explaining this, I felt it necessary to
say that, if they had seen me looking out of the window through binoculars in the direction of their house, I had been looking, not at them, but at the birds in our garden, in which we are extremely interested, and which have from time to time included goldcrests, blackcaps, goldfinches, long-tailed tits and, unhappily, a sparrow-hawk. They said that they too sometimes watched the birds through binoculars, and he left his card, illustrated with an image of a pen and a bottle of ink, from which I inferred he was a writer. About eighteen months later, I came across a large pile of books in Tesco, in the high street, in which were several copies of his latest 601-page novel, published by Hodder, two for £5.99. Opposite Tesco are the corner-shop premises of an even more aggressive private landlord. The floor level behind the counter is raised, and cars are parked in the narrow space between the pavement and the shop windows, as if those inside were expecting ram-raiders.

All I have to show for the last couple of years are a collection of essays like this one, and a television documentary
⁵
which is, so far, the only realised fragment of the previously imagined project. Five years after embarking on this, after a second UK election during which housing was scarcely mentioned, there are few signs that any combination of computers, globalised production and consumer pressure is likely to lead to better, cheaper housing. New technology appears to stimulate demand, but does very little to improve supply – as in San Francisco, for example, where the rapid growth of the e-economy was accompanied by a house-price boom. The subsequent bursting of this bubble presumably had the opposite result, so that the overall effect may not only be to inflate prices, but also to increase market turbulence. Meanwhile, the
moment
of consumerism that inspired my project and its contemporaries seems to have passed. Instead of the housing market becoming more like a consumer market, some consumer markets have become more like the housing market, as manufacturers (of toys, for instance, or computer games) and others have remembered how to manipulate scarcity.

There are ten interviews in the film, with academics, architects, a manufacturer (the design engineer James Dyson), and the head of
research at FPD Savills, the international property consultants. Setting these up involved a certain amount of e-mail, in which I explained what the film was supposed to be about, asked preliminary questions, and reconsidered the project in the light of the answers. This was the beginning of life as a
tele-cottager
.

The narrative was only partly autobiographical. It was conceived as the document of a fictional researcher, with the voice of Tilda Swinton, who returns to the UK after twenty years ‘among a little-known nomadic people of the Arctic, who devote much of their time to the construction of enormous houses made of snow that cost nothing and are frequently rebuilt' to investigate ‘the predicament of the house in the United Kingdom' for her employer, an unnamed research organisation. Setting up ‘a small research establishment' in ‘a large Edwardian house on the outskirts of a provincial university city', she works in an office overlooking the back garden. At a particularly difficult moment towards the end of editing the film, I decided it was no longer a good idea to expect the production of a television programme to be the sole means of realising a quasi-academic project, and have since become an outstation of an academic institution, with a brief to research ‘representational space, and the future of the built environment'.

This semi-fictional reconfiguration of one's dwelling as a
think-tank
might seem an extreme reaction to the marginal predicament of domesticity, but it is not so different to the position of many households for whom the telephone, the computer and so on offer unprecedented levels of connectedness to life outside the house. While portable communication has permitted a kind of
flânerie
outdoors, the effects of electronic virtuality on domestic space seem to be more subtle. If my experience is anything to go by (which it may not be, as there are several alternative explanations), these include a renewed appreciation of ordinary, everyday phenomena. Photography, or the Surrealists' frisson, or some drugs, revealed things
as they could be
, but two-way electronic connectedness seems to enrich experience of things
as they are
. This is perhaps partly because, as an individual, one feels less isolated at home, but is also because the virtual spaces of digital
communications, unlike those of photography, are not particularly attractive, so that in contrast even the most untidy and unromantically dilapidated interior can sometimes appear to have a lucidity approaching that of a Vermeer. Being, in this way, happier at home, I have noticed that in recent years I have become less keen to travel. There are several other possible explanations for this – the difficulty of getting about as a family of five; meanness, following travel paid for by employers, etc.; a concern not to accumulate images for which I have no immediate use, and so on. In the end, however, I think it is the symptom of a more serious discontent, which is the feeling that, wherever you go, it's always
now
.