Did you see the amazing rediscovered photos of Canary Wharf being built, taken by the incredible Tony Brien. He’d recorded the topping out ceremony for Cesar Pelli’s One Canada Square in November 1990, and had to be on a nearby crane to take the shots. See the BBC website for more of his amazing images, which are all his copyright, obviously.
Also on the BBC site it was great to see a clip of Adam Nathaniel Furman talking about his epic mosaic currently being installed at London Bridge.
Architectural Book Awards
I was chuffed to bits to hear Iconicon had been shortlisted for the Architectural Book Awards 2023 in the history category. The awards are run by quarterly literary magazine Booklaunch, and it’s an amazing shortlist of writers to be part of. As they say on their website, ‘Unlike other book awards, the panel of judges will be anonymous, to help avoid the conflict of interest that can exist when judges and entrants are known to each-other.’ Good for them.
They also ran a review of the book, pointing out that I’m not a critic but a flâneur, and comparing it to Hunter Davies’s ‘genre of super-informed, super-informal writing’, which was very cool. Oh yes, cool. They said I was cool: ‘Grindrod talks the way insightful cool people talk when they’re outwitting laboured academics but he can do the architectural stuff too.’ That’s me being called cool in print there then. Cool. ‘It is welcome,’ they wrote, ‘when a writer looks at what we’re already familiar with from a different perspective … That’s better: someone who actually looks and sees — and is surprised. It’s such a relief.’ I’m not expecting to win, obviously, but being shortlisted is a lovely boost.
Taxi for Grindrod
Over on CabbieBlog I was grilled by David Styles on my best and worst bits of London, and I share my anxiety that I am the grim reaper of hospitality. Thanks David!
The Paint Job
Part 2 – Engelbert Humperdinck Crescent
The second in a three part essay on my family’s misadventures in decorating. Read the first part here.
One day in the school summer holidays of 1985, I sensed something was up. It was never easy discerning what, because Marjorie (‘M’) ran our family like it was MI6 – more secret than that even, because here there was no Kim Philby to blab out the upshot of conversations had behind closed doors. All I had to go on was John looking agitated and Marjorie urging him on.
At an advanced stage I was swept up in the proceedings. Little John will help, that was taken for granted apparently. Oh, would he? Little John was at a complicated moment in his life actually, busy on the one hand doing pen and ink drawings of Doctor Who and playing with Lego he was supposed to be too old for, while also fantasising about Glen from school and Paul Rutherford from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. There was a lot to be done: a lot of stories to write, a lot of rub down lettering to apply to magazine-sized notebooks from Martins, a lot of coloured pencilling, cutting out and Gloy, a lot of staring at pictures of the Page 7 Fella in The Sun.
MI6 had plans for me. Agent Little John was being redeployed in the field. And, early on Saturday morning I discovered it was, indeed, a field. North Downs to be precise, a playing field on the edge of the estate. Years later I learned of the South Downs, the national park stretching along the Sussex the countryside. And then I became aware of its Kentish cousin, the North Downs, and laughed at New Addington’s gall to call this scrappy bit of land, this steeply sloping municipal mown field edged with diagonal cherry trees and low-rise blocks of flats, North Downs Crescent. Only more recently did I realise this was no joke or coincidence. New Addington’s North Downs was indeed part of those wider north downs.
It seemed hard to fathom that New Addington was part of anything, pushed to the edge of Croydon as it was, like the unwanted vegetables on a child’s dinner plate. Surely the whole point of places like New Addington was that they existed apart from history and geography, new settlements with no past, and no connections. That was what was liberating about it. There was no sense of obligation, because, with its single road in and out, high unemployment and lack of amenities, it always felt abandoned. In some ways discovering this ancient topographic connection to the wider landscape was a massive disappointment.
I wanted New Addington to have existed entirely cut off from history and from the world, because that is how we had been treated. To think it actually had a place in history and geography was somehow more upsetting. That meant they knew we were here all along, and just didn’t care. So I still prefer to think of North Downs Crescent as some kind of conceptual joke, like the singer Gerry Dorsey taking the name Engelbert Humperdinck from the nineteenth century German composer and recycling it with no reference to that earlier owner. (The two Englebert Humperdincks seemed consciously from different epochs, but in fact the first died only nine years before the second was born. These things that should have no relation in time actually shockingly close.) Would North Downs make any less sense if it were called Engelbert Humperdinck Crescent? Stealing from history with an arched eyebrow.
Stranded some way into the green was our target, a brown brick box having a sulk on the edge of the estate. It could have been a former industrial unit of some sort, the kind that might have once housed the heavy mechanics of generators, water plant or an electricity substation. To enter you had to go up a few awkward fire escape steps, and through a shy narrow door that looked like the back entrance to a branch of Freeman Hardy Willis where you might find the staff having a crafty fag between fittings. But this wasn’t the back entrance, as far as I could see it was the only one. We got inside, the space barely illuminated by small windows high up near the roof like a giraffe house. John found the old brass panel of light switches and flicked them. A grid of largindustrial pendant lamps hung from above flickered to life.
It was empty, this large rectangular space filled only with an oppressive feeling of neglect and abandonment, the buzzing of the lights helping this to be the perfect horror film setting. Faded and patched paint on the immense walls showed where old fixtures had once been, a marble-patterned black asbestos tiled floor and dingy high ceilings where paint flaked and dust collected. The walls were punctured and skirted by ducts and pipework, all of it roughly falling apart. These days you’d walk in and think hipster bar, no decoration needed. Exposed brickwork, drab layers of faded paintwork, grubby steel lights, lumpy ducts, yes please. It was just dying to have a microbrewery out back and a lot of big hair and dungarees going on front of house.
My first thought back then was, wow, this would make an amazing spaceship, because that was my first and usually only consideration about anywhere I visited. Things that would have made an amazing spaceship to me back then included the spiral ramps of Croydon Whitgift Centre, some hawthorn bushes on the edge of the school playground, my English teacher’s yellow Renault 4, Fine Fare in Slough with its concrete lettering, the 130 bus, the prefabricated hut that had been our junior school music classroom, the big skips down at Fisher’s Farm – the municipal dump, and the space under some breeze blocks in our back garden, part of some home improvement never begun. Given what an improvised junkyard we have made of outer space in the last sixty years none of these thoughts seem unduly outrageous.
We heaved great tins of cream paint up the concrete steps from John’s old mustard-coloured Maxi, along with shaggy rollers, plastic trays and big brushes bristling like sheaves of wheat. No emulsion, I was worried to see. I mean, lesson one, you emulsion the walls. You don’t paint them. With paint. That was essentially illegal. I’d been told very little. All I knew was this was to be a Job Centre and we had two days to decorate it. That was it. No idea how he got the job, or who from, some subcontracting from a subcontractor lost in time. No real idea what ‘decorate’ meant in a dingy featureless box where you only had cream paint. Decoration here meant the annihilation of anything potentially decorous that might have accidentally broken out in this sealed box as it stood here brooding and silent for god knows how long. Desaturating. Decolouring. Decodifying. Desecrating.
He started off with the rollers, pouring thick paint into the tray, while I took a brush to do the edging, wodging paint the colour of cheap vanilla ice cream along the skirting, over the peeling ducts, around the round brass light switches. There was no undercoat, no differentiation between wall and woodwork, nothing that required us to break our stride or change tack. I loved everything about it, breaking the rules of decoration, the delicious milkshake texture of the paint, the strong fumes like I was being mixed in a vat of the stuff, the way the hairs of the brushes came together when I dipped them in the pot, and mostly, just getting on with it, lost in it for hours. We stopped briefly for cheese sandwiches and a big glass bottle of Corona orangeade before getting straight back to it, until a heavy feeling of exhaustion began to set in by late afternoon. As we packed up that night we were, what, a third of the way through decorating that massive space. It’ll be fine.
Thanks John for the plug, it was interesting to read about 'your' London from someone who actually observes what's around them.
https://cabbieblog.com/2023/04/04/the-london-grill-john-grindrod/