Modern Colonnades
An epic journey from Portmeirion to Croydon via Oswestry Services, and a tale of three colonnades.
A recent holiday in Criccieth, with its dinky castle and astonishing views, involved a spectacular drive through Snowdonia, a trip to Portmeirion and a stop off at Oswestry Services… Criccieth has a beautiful art deco restaurant on the beach designed by Clough Williams Ellis, more famous for his work at Portmeirion. Completed in the 1950s it was already a style out of time, and so therefore more like the rest of his work.
Picturing Portmeirion
I guess the thing I hadn’t remembered from my viewing of The Prisoner was how vertical the landscape was. This was my first time in Portmeirion. We arrived in the morning and it was packed, sightseers trekking down the path from the car park to the fantasia. Architects in the twentieth century were obsessed with Italian hill towns. Almost no grand project goes by without reference to them, so deeply had the thought and memory of them captured the imagination of a generation. The resulting schemes were often entirely unlike an Italian hill town – brightly modernist, or built on such gentle slopes as to be essentially flat. Here at Portmeirion Clough Williams Ellis took that reference point and created a jolly holiday camp version of it, in bright blues, golds, pinks and terracotta. The whole place is absurd and wonderful. Partly because it is an astonishing work of salvage. Windows from great houses, ornamental chimney pots, mouldings and sculptures all rescued from certain destruction and repurposed here to add instant age and bygone craftsmanship to the bright new buildings.
Very soon it became obvious that making this the setting of The Prisoner was not a wilful choice. Its circular nature meant we encountered the same people over and over again. In the end we made friends with Marianne from Cheshire, who had great tales about betting shops and her dad’s work as a builder. Together we sat on a wall and watched people photograph each other in archways and colonnades, on steps and on balconies, every set piece as carefully assembled as an Instagram selfie-spot. We chatted briefly to a couple from Kent, but then they turned out to be racists, so we gave them the Paddington hard stare instead. Through the woods to the tiny lighthouse we were befriended by a very tame great tit, and witnessed the disappointment of each of the passers-by at the structure they had trekked to, usually in unsuitable shoes.
By early afternoon the visitors had thinned out, and Portmeirion felt a little strange without people. Because these buildings serve no function other than to be admired. Without visitors at the close of every day it takes on the air of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, needy, tragic and desperate for a comeback. But no less glorious for it. And then every day it is reborn to new visitors, and the place is given meaning again by their phones and their posing and their delighted confusion.
Othering Oswestry Services
Have you ever stopped at Oswestry Services? We got there on our way out of Wales through a rough lunar-scape of giant unfinished roundabouts and embankments, the kind of unknown that sent our aged satnav into panic mode, the screen showing our arrow departing from the roads and travelling through a blank 8-bit vista, like the spaceship in a game of Defender. The place is called Mile End, and it was hard not to hear Jarvis Cocker singing his ode to the district of East London as we attempted to find the car park and toilets.
Spat out of that colour field, we converged again with roads it recognised, and were circling into the service station. There were globe lights on lampposts, long tile-covered porches and colonnades, and brown brick and smoky-glass Tescobethan units bring the undiluted 1980s to the modern day – a little piece of Milton Keynes in Shropshire. The largest structure is a Travelodge, which showed little evidence of habitation. Hard not to fantastise about staying there, in this defiant non-place, like an episode of Sapphire and Steel or a failed BBC3 sitcom pilot.
Connected by the craft centre-style porch, and the planters of brick rising at a diagonal from the ground, was a deserted Tourist Information Office. The sign above the door read ou infor ion beside a disconnected down pipe that would gush rainwater on you if you stopped to read it in bad weather. Through the mildly mirrored bronzed glass I could make out the glossy flat pack desks and drab office chairs, some empty spinners for leaflets and maps, empty pin boards and unwanted pen pots. It looked like it had been vacated in a hurry, as if tourists not only did not require information here, but urgently needed to be set adrift. The Burger King next door was small and relentlessly busy. It must have been a strange place to work, but then increasingly isn’t everywhere? Especially since fewer of us have a place we could call work that isn’t just our own home. Outside the shell of an alarmingly designed orange telephone box stood sealed off behind a crash barrier, as if being empty was not enough.
While the design cues were entirely Milton Keynes, the atmosphere was very different. It felt almost abandoned, partially ruined, a glimpse of MK after an apocalypse, perhaps, when all we had was need for was a burger and cheap temporary night’s stay. Here would be the perfect spot for a contemporary version of The Prisoner, no longer the baroque LSD vision of Clough Williams Ellis, but the hopeless nowhere of a place on the edge, somewhere ignored and slowly dying. In many ways it was as strange a place as Portmeirion, a very different but equally curious total landscape of archaic design. Here you might be a number, but that number could have long since fallen from the signage. You might be ‘a free man’ but here the freedom is of a post-eighties variety, free from state interference (or help), free from obligations (or fellow feeling). The Tourist Information Office, with its scant clues to location or human habits, feels like the perfect place for our latter day Prisoner to be located.
Celebrating Croydon
Thanks to everyone who came along on my two Croydon walks and my talk at South Norwood Library as part of Open House, it was lovely to meet so many enthusiastic and interesting people.
Two highlights for me were visiting the Brutalist Library, designed by Hugh Lea the Borough Architect and opened in 1968. 100% cutealism. Because it was designed with the chief librarian it has the air that so many post-war schools and civic buildings do, of being fit for purpose, and of being careful in its execution and function. It’s been well looked after, the original thick wooden bannisters and large windows all still going strong. Congratulations to the team who saved this place, getting it protected and bringing it back to life has been an amazing feat.
Another amazing feat is Adam Nathaniel Furman’s Croydon Colonnade, built at the foot of HTA’s white modular skyscraper directly opposite Boxpark at East Croydon. Furman is, among many things, a ceramicist, and here cues have been taken from many different sources, but most notably Richard Seifert’s One Croydon (the 50p building) and some of those curious geometries have made their way into Furman’s chunky chevron tiles. The patterns and the ombre effect of them, blue at the bottom rising to white at the top, gives the effect of feathers, or of flames, a sense of light and movement on this enormous tower. The result is generous colonnade every bit as selfie-worthy as the ones in Portmeirion.
Upcoming events
I have a fair few events coming up this autumn, most of which haven’t been formally announced. One thing that has is an online (Zoom) writing masterclass for Arvon, Britain’s foremost creative writing school. It’s on one evening, December 5th.
In this Masterclass I’ll help you think of new ways to help write yourself into buildings and landscapes, working out what makes a great setting to write about, and how to find a new angle to explore in the most familiar of locations. We’ll think about how we can synthesize research with on-the-ground responses and will try some exercises to help us think differently about place: how to evoke its mood, character and strangeness, to make it exciting afresh for the reader. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll free ourselves from the expectations of how certain places ‘should’ be written about and responded to. Instead, we’ll find new ways of expressing our own voices and personalities through our experience of different landscapes – and to help turn those disparate responses and places into a strong idea for a book. More information here.
This autumn is also ten years since the publication of Concretopia. To celebrate I’m going to do two events looking at behind the scenes of writing the book, and some reflections of the buildings and places I wrote about. One talk will be at Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, the other with the Modernists in Manchester. Keep an eye on their websites for news when they get announced properly.
I’m also repeating the talk I gave in South Norwood’s Brutalist Library about Croydon’s postwar architecture, this time in Croydon’s central library. Again, keep an eye out for the date and announcement, like all of these I’ll add to the events page on my site.
Finally I’m part of a Milton Keynes Lit Fest panel about getting published, which is on 26th September, details here.
Otherwise I’m just trying to stay in and get some writing done.