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An upcoming Docklands walk, a trip round Space House, and the final part of The Paint Job.
Hi there, hope you have been enjoying the ups and downs of May. In this edition there’s a trip around one of Richard Seifert’s most beloved buildings, details of a new walking tour, and the final part of my adventures in decorating.
Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space House
I was very lucky to be taken on a tour of Richard Seifert’s Space House on Kingsway in London. The building is currently being extensive refurbished by a company called Seafort, and so I was seeing it in a pretty raw state. Thanks to London Modern for organising the tour.
I worked round the corner from Space House for 20 years, and also once did a course at City Lit college, which is right next door, so I have been obsessed with it for a long time. I even spoke to one of the planners involved, John Gyford, for my book Concretopia, so getting a chance to see it in mid-transformation was a joy. Seeing the rapid evisceration of the IBM building on the South Bank in the last couple of months has been a reminder of how fragile the existence of our postwar masterpieces are.
The plan is to return the building to office space, tidying up the ground and lower ground areas with some new public space under the sky bridge and removing the car park below to create a new conference space and some shopping at street level along Kingsway. They’ve added two new circular floors to the top of the building, replacing the jumble of accretions that had crept onto the roof over time. The building has been treated very respectfully, and views from the top over London are spectacular, and surprising given it’s hardly the tallest structure around. The finished building is going to be amazing.
You can take a VR tour of the building here.
The Paint Job
Part 3 – Who Paints the Job Centre?
Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
It was only when we returned on Sunday morning that I realised there was something peculiar about this version of decorating. John wasn’t trying to do a good job. If I showed off a tricky bit I’d done he barely noticed, just carried on at high speed, slapping the thickly covered roller on the walls, watching it skid in the gloss before beginning to spin again as the paint thinned out over the surface of the walls. He was just trying to get it finished. This was new for us. But here, getting it finished was all that mattered. He didn’t care what it looked like. Instead there was a kind of mania in his eyes.
He would get like this in any situation where there was a time constraint, be it driving to the seaside for our annual holiday or rushing to the shops before they shut. So he was unbothered as cream paint dripped from the roller onto the black asbestos floor tiles beneath our feet or sprayed off in a mist as the roller skid on the walls. And so I too began to enjoy the delight in getting it wrong. No more careful application of lines along the edges, it was an anarchic joy to see the thick brushes drag along the floor or step off the line I was following and intrude rudely where it should not. In a moment my mindset went from the sober rule bound approach of an elderly relative with a nice paint by numbers to the chaos of a toddler left with some felt tips. Plus, we were running out of time, and no finished job, no money.
The strangest thing to me was that this amateurish rush was to decorate a Job Centre. The very place where one might find the correct skilled tradespeople was being bodged together by someone who used to fix up lorries and a herbert whose main skills were knowing all of the lyrics to ‘The Word Girl’ by Scritti Politti and doing a Rubik’s Cube in under two hours. More than that, why the rush? I mean, people don’t decide to move out of an old Job Centre on Friday and think, maybe we should have redecorated that new office for Monday, who can we get to do that? This suggested to me that the Job Centre was run by idiots, people who couldn’t plan for jobs or hire the right people to do them. Who paints the Job Centre felt a bit like who guards the guards, an existential problem and one which I struggled with as I slapped the gloss on like a crazed child.
No matter how hard I tried nothing in the adult world made any sense. I had been holding out that as I grew older it might begin to come into focus, yet here aged 15 with a fine speckled mist of cream paint on my flat top, face, trackies and trainers, the mysteries of life were as murky and absurd as ever. At the end there wouldn’t even be the satisfaction of a job well done, because it wouldn’t be, I knew that. It was a job: that was all. At the end we rushed out of the door, exhausted, leaving paint trails with my trainers and his slip-ons, covered in a galaxy of tiny speckles of gloss, with the odd splattered supernova.
Years later, after I finished Polytechnic, I was unemployed for six months. To sign on I had to go to New Addington Job Centre every other week. As I sat at the desk and someone bashed my details into a beige computer and asked the same questions they had asked the time before and the time before that I just wanted to bang the table, to stop them. You see that half-painted light switch? Or the big skid mark of gloss on the floor under your desk? Or the bits we missed by the ducts on the far side. That was me that was. Me and my dad. Those Gola footprints over there, captured forever in cream paint, are mine, I wanted to say. I decorated this place so you could sit here and ask me these questions. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Something something Buddhism something something circle of life something something instant Karma.
Yet all it turned out to be was a lesson in growing older, of how rather than progress formed from building on the skills of others one person’s labour is often erased by the next. A lesson in redundancy. Because by then they had clearly got the proper decorators in. The floor was clean. The woodwork was neatly picked out in white gloss paint. The walls and ceiling were covered matt white emulsion. It looked so much better, just as I knew it would. Skinny desks and aluminium framed boards of cards filled the space, sharp angles and harsh reflective surfaces turning this once lumpy, bumpy cavern into a sharp-dressed municipal office. Our mark on that building erased already, and given the state of it, for the best. Of course I never mentioned any of those things in the job centre or to my dad. Instead I repeated my name, my date of birth and my address, and when presented with various jobs I was barely capable of doing, answered with a wary shrug, aware of what I might be getting into in this strange adult world where surfaces hid all manner of faults.
A printed version of The Paint Job will be available through a new not-for-profit publisher, Ambitious Outsiders. They are doing a soft launch for their list of art and cultural projects at Hastings Book Fair on Sunday 28 May. If you aren’t local to Hastings I should have details on how to order one of these very limited editions, in one of four beautiful covers, in my next Substack.
Docklands Iconicon!
Last year I did a walking tour of Canary Wharf with Mike Althorpe, better known as The London Ambler. It sold out in no time, so we’re running one again this year, on August 19th. If hearing about the strange emergence of Docklands from the industrial ruins of the old city appeals, told through colourful stories and eye-popping arhitecture, then it promises to be a really fun tour. Tickets here. I’d also recommend any of Mike’s walks for the architecturally curious, they are a delight.