Very strange to visit Television Centre a couple of weeks back, now just the old familiar doughnut surrounded by the skeletons of new build apartments and hard and hostile landscaping wrapped in astroturf. A pretty architects’ model of the original building sits in the foyer of the TV studios, a leaky, thin-skinned old Mini compared to the bulked up BMW version it has become.
This has long been an intense and relentlessly urban bit of London, but now it’s something else again, an emerging anywheresville mirroring clusters around the city and beyond. For many years this building set the avuncular tone for Britain’s postwar settlement. Now it’s just part of the background noise of relentless private wealth creation at the expense of public service. One day I would love to write something more substantial about this remarkable building, so if you have any inside knowledge or memories of it in its heyday do get in touch, and who knows what might result?
Spring Events
I have a couple of Iconicon events coming up. 15 March in Milton Keynes as part of the literary festival, in conversation with Fiona Robinson. Then on 16 May I’m giving a talk at Bath Literary Festival. You can find out about both events here. I’m also up for giving more talks, so if you’d like me to come and talk in your local bookshop, library, group or festival, do get in touch here.
The Paint Job
Part 1 – Temporary Towers
The first in a three part essay on my family’s misadventures in decorating.
Decorating was like the Olympics in our house. A massive event that seemed to hit every four years, each time with more ambitious feats to achieve, more technical difficulty to demonstrate, and new, more complicated events to learn. How we looked back on those faded efforts of previous cycles, geometric day-glo or brown florals, still proud of those distant achievements but also with a sense that their time had passed, and new feats of daring were required. When Moscow was hosting the Games in 1980 where we were matching the devastating kicks of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe with a blistering finish of our own: polystyrene on the living room ceiling where coving and alternate tiles were painted terracotta to create a checkerboard effect. The next Olympic cycle we were living in our own private Los Angeles, as the polystyrene fell to a clean sweep of unevenly applied swirls of Artex, painted pale grey, and a three-pronged brass and frosted glass light fitting like something from the lobby of a bed and breakfast. Heavily patterned wallpaper in autumnal browns and golds held sway in the late seventies, while cerise, chalky blue and pinks won all the medals in the eighties.
I grew up scraping old bits of woodchip from walls like a gymnast hothoused from an early age into long hours of repetitive action. Sometimes I held down sheets of carpet or vinyl flooring as my dad, John, sliced imprecisely along the edge with his Stanley knife, generously cursing as he did so. The extravagant concepts were my mum Marjorie’s. She was the one to fire the starting pistol on this Olympic race, with the inspiring words I think it’s time to do the front room again love. She chose the colours, the papers, the furnishings, the whole romantic concept, and would help with the paper stripping from her wheelchair. John was restlessly practical, a chronic fiddler, though his skills lay in disassembling mechanical contraptions rather than in summoning the spirit of Versailles for our council house in 50p a roll padded wallpaper from Fads (‘The Paint and Paper People’). He loved to know how things worked, and would happily take apart old stereo components or car engines and put them back together with only a few of the bits left over at the end. He was Alan Turing, British Leyland his Enigma. He was also half blind in one eye, and so his ‘by eye’ measurements were usually not to be trusted, just as often his driving could be dangerously wonky too, resulting in a couple of big crashes and numerous minor scrapes. Our house smelled of engine oil, solder and Swarfega.
There were strict rules to home decoration. Woodwork was coated with thick non-drip gloss, usually white, although not in my box room where I’d daringly chosen bright blue for the skirting and door frame to go with the diagonal swooshes of red, blue and yellow on the white wallpaper. Plasterwork, like the ceilings or kitchen and bathroom walls, were emulsioned. The satin finish gave those bumpy surfaces a sheen that perfectly showed the off the ageing municipal plastering at its worst. If you were bored on the loo you could scratch it off with a fingernail or pick it off in thick, pleasing plates. That made me popular.
The main rule to home decoration was that if Marjorie had set her mind on it then it was happening, lack of time or cash or skill no obstacle. If Marjorie wanted the living room redecorated in a combination of Wedgwood candy stripe and fine floral paper, then that is what she would have. If she wanted a woodland glade photographic mural pasted up on the long wall in the dining room, then consider it done, along with that Florentine street scene on the living room door. John would um and ah and pace about and curse and rattle through oily boxes of rusty bits, but he’d find a way. Okay, so sometimes the carpet edges were a bit too short or long or uneven, or the wallpaper a bit bubbly and wonky at the top, but he had a go because Marj wanted it.
The problem was, things never got properly finished. He would do anything for Marj, but he wouldn’t do that. Generally once begun jobs would remain in progress, with no really discernable ending. After all the planning and shopping and head shaking, teeth sucking and having a go, projects would not so much end or even fizzle out. They would enter a strange limbo, where we all ignored the fact they were unfinished and in most cases imagined they were, despite the shoddy and sometimes dangerous state they were left in. New carpet, wallpaper and paintwork would end up showing off a cabinet made of unpainted chipboard or some grey metallic Dexion shelving brought in a quick fix, an interim stage until an as yet unspecified phase two was begun. It was why Marjorie, with no malice but plenty of eye-rolling, referred to our house as Temporary Towers.
Despite all of these lofty ambitions times were tough for my family in the mid-eighties. John and Marjorie were each recovering from bouts of life-threatening illness and had both been hospitalised for long periods. John had lost his job as a lorry mechanic when the printers he had been working for, Fell & Briant, closed. He had taken casual work at the other large garages in Croydon, until one day just before Christmas 1983 he had a massive angina attack and ended up in hospital having a quadruple heart bypass operation. He recovered well, but after that he found work was hard to come by and spent periods on benefits. Garages took the piss, bringing him in for the difficult jobs that none of their regulars could manage, because they knew his obliging, tortured ever-whirring brain would solve whatever it was in the end. But none ever offered him a more permanent contract, and he was always first out when work dried up.
A heart bypass, and weeks in hospital over Christmas in 1983, took him out of the motor trade entirely. When he was recovered things had moved on. The Austin Maestro, a modest family hatchback introduced in 1983, was the death knell to a whole generation of mechanics like John. It contained a computer system to manage some of the engine’s performance, and men like my dad, who were barely literate and knew nothing of computer systems, found they were literally redundant. As car systems in the 1980s went increasingly Knight Rider so my dad and hundreds like him found themselves ill equipped for this new world of computerised control and digital diagnostics. Getting back into work was proving almost impossible, as he shambled about the estate in an oil-stained blue anorak looking increasingly lost and wild.
Plastic grass should be banned!
Regarding Temporary Towers, my dad, also a Croydon lad was an electrical fitter for the then CEGB (Now National Grid). He also had a similar attitude to decorating much to my mum's chagrin! However he did have some decorating talent, and was a perfectionist to boot so jobs took ages to complete. He also had that exact same diamond-patterned jumper..but in yellow and brown. It was the 80s after all.