by Rod Mengham
2002
Their Masters’ Voice
The megaphones of Prague. There are still a few, here and there in squares such as Namesti Mim and I.P. Pavlova, reminding the passer-by with a jolt of the ways in which social space was controlled less than fifteen years ago. The anonymous voice of officialdom, projecting its designs into every corner of the city. The individual devices belie their function, coming in all shapes and sizes, anything but standard issue. In one respect, they are more out of place here than in any other city, since the cultural history of Prague is dominated by an iconography of alleys, hideaways, dark labyrinths, places to get lost in, rather than of open spaces and boulevards hospitable to crowds. The central figure in the nineteenth-century literature is that of the solitary wanderer, the chodec, who discovers the secret recesses of each quarter. Kafka drew the map differently, inserting this isolated figure within a geography of dread, showing how the reach of the authorities extends to every last passageway, culvert, waste lot. The successive bureaucracies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and post-war communism took possession of the city of the alchemists and seized the right to speak for it, with a disembodied voice that is the ultimate expression of power whose interests are dislocated from those it claims to represent – the megaphone is the icon of the nomenklatura, political ventriloquists who do not speak with the people, but in their stead. At the same time, this mechanisation of the voice is intrinsic to a more clandestine tradition associated particularly with the area around the castle: with a belief in the golem, with a desire to create automata, with the dream of assembling a creature from disparate body parts. This rather more sinister genealogy was given official sanction by the paranoid collector, Rudolf II, who employed teams of magicians and who was delighted by any apparatus that simulated and displaced the human. Its artistic correlate can be found in the paintings of Arcimboldo, whose output is devoted to curious amalgams of objects that mimic the lineaments of the human figure. Nowadays, the electric wiring has been torn from every last speaker still in position, but it does not make any difference: the megaphones of Prague are forever earthed into a history, a memory reservoir, a cultural power supply. Easier to remove than the more obvious memorials to a future that never happened, they are mostly ignored, immobile, only rocking slightly with each change in the direction of blustering winds.
2003
End of the Line
Underground railways exist as alternative spheres to the cities they serve, they take on a character of their own, which we tend to think of in terms of rationalised space and time, as places where the unexpected is not meant to happen. The tube map with its symmetries, its rows of diagonals, its repetition of angles, is an excessive rationalisation of something that in reality is much more irregular. An accurate map would look worryingly chaotic, its proliferation of unrepeatable patterns would make the city look out of control. Where the tube ends is where the pattern most obviously unravels; it is where the dream of symmetry gives up. Most people never reach the end of the line where the idea of the city no longer obtains. Almost no one has travelled to the end of all the lines. That would mean being exposed to a degree of variety that the blueprint could never absorb. At every underground stop, people climb to the surface, emerge into the light of day, but the train goes on, the circulation continues, the Circle Line providing a visual and conceptual magnet for the way the city stays alive by pumping flows of energy around the system. At the end of the line this fiction dissolves; it is not only people but the place itself which releases its grip on the idea of the city as a closed system. Our project is an enquiry into what relates these different places apart from their entry into and exit from a system they are so iconically related to. Perhaps the termini are all portals into something other than the idea of the city we automatically link them with.
Of course, the Circle Line offers resistance, is in many ways in absolute contrast with the suburban tangents. There is no emergence, no aperture, except for those created during the Blitz, when bombs would come through the road above, or even bounce down the escalators, skip along the hallways and explode on the platforms. These violent incisions would not dispel the secrets of the entombed – the myth-making potential of all those repressed corridors – but would foster anew the sense of an alien habitat. This is caught most obviously by Quatermass and the Pit, where the breach into a deserted station uncovers the race-memory of another planet altogether. It is in the city’s centre that the largest number of abandoned stations remains; there are forty altogether, repositories of gloom, amplifying the distant vibrations, allaying the slight breezes that pulse through the labyrinth, to decelerate as they get further and further away from the rushing air of tunnels where the trains still run. The lost stations comprise one extreme; the other consists of termini on the Central, Northern, District, Metropolitan and Jubilee lines: the ones that burrow furthest into another time, or into an entirely different organisation of space. And yet the tide-line of the city’s history is indelible precisely here.
Morden has only been in pole-position as the southern end of the Northern Line since 1924, the year when Charles Holden crafted seven stations reaching out into the fields of Surrey. Now the terminus is under siege, filled up from within by a creeping lattice of iron scaffold poles, an infestation of plasterboard and yellow and black tape, which forces a savage geometry into the calm and carefully legislated spaces of Northern Line house style, the endless adaptations of white, green and black porcelain tiles. The platform indicators are bronze-edged lanterns, redolent of BBC Heritage, the reassurance of a Dock Green opening credit. But the lettering is both older and more modern than that post-Second World War community survivalism. The Johnston Sans typeface was first introduced in 1916, year of catastrophes, and yet seems to hold the clue to an ordered existence as economically and inevitably as a Bauhaus doctor’s prescription. The real reason for journeying here is to visit the octagonal booking hall; and to leave here for any other destination is to unsettle a rare composure. People come and go looking down and straight ahead; but the space beckons upwards with a series of gestures, past the broad horizontal fluting of the gently pitched ceiling to a pinnacled skylight, whose glass panes are leaded in the form of a giant snowflake, a symmetry that has formed on its own. The entrance hall is made ceremonial by a startling, immensely simple, chandelier: a great brass circlet suspended by twenty-foot chains. The facade of Portland stone hints subtly at the ritual importance of setting forth, the commencement of a journey to the Underworld. Its two bas-relief columns share facets of Doric and Egyptian styles; but they are only allusions, not direct quotations like the stage-set pastiche down the road. The station came first, the rest of Morden curved away from it, but never quite matched up to the dignified arc of its approach road. Direct competition came from above – Holden’s design was totally crushed by three hideous stories added in the sixties – and from the corner of the road opposite, where the Portland stone was echoed, or rather amplified, in 1936, when a futuristic bulwark of a building was incised defiantly with a series of fasces; like the Party badge of a local financier dreamily hedging his bets.
Epping is not so much the end of the Central Line as the beginning of the Essex Way, that bucolic footpath winding a course as far as Harwich. The station wall sports a plaque celebrating the twenty-first birthday of this simulated Ancient Track. It has never been easy to decide where the Central Line should yield to the Forest. The Great Eastern Line (land-grabbed in the New Works Programme of 1935–40) had beached up in Ongar – three stops further out from Epping – in 1865; the first retrenchment came after the Second World War, when passengers for the Ongar outpost had to slip a loop in time, walking from one Epping platform to another to exchange their electric tube trains for steam. This concession vanished in 1970, when the last trails of coal-smoke disappeared with the surgical removal of Ongar, Blake Hall and North Weald – names redolent of the Squire’s Last Stand and the primeval impasse. Epping represented a compromise between th
ese feral sidings and an unidentifiable point nearer to Liverpool Street and the urban climax. Modernity was at the top of its bent with Gants Hill, whose concourse was modelled directly on the stations of the Moscow Metro – but Epping is already on the compost heap. It is a rural halt: convolvulus on wire netting, heavy laburnum, climbing roses, hanging baskets, blackberries. Local boys help old ladies with their suitcases. The old red-brick Victorian overland station is flanked by horse chestnuts, greenhouses and an allotment garden with runner beans and cabbages. It does not do to stand still for very long in Epping: spiders wander over my hands as I write on the parapet; a ladybird alights on my mobile phone. The line is closed off, but there is nothing to stop the trains from plunging forward in a rerun of Edward Upward’s 1928 story, ‘The Railway Accident’ (Upward grew up in nearby Romford), except four red lamps planted – everything here is planted – on spindly metal poles in the middle of the tracks. One hundred yards further on, tall ragwort forms a screen as the rails begin to curve out of sight. The waiting room is different. It is the antechamber to a system that classifies everything in its vicinity. The suburbs as Mending Apparatus. The room possesses a single bench that faces a passport photo booth. Which is what the passengers wait for: their criminal typology; their Lombroso credentials. In Epping, the inhabitants conspire against the Greenwich Meridian.
At the western extremity lies Uxbridge, entombed in a future remembered by all those who were teenagers in the 1960s. The old market town, centred on a neoclassical colonnade, flagpole and clocktower, was falsified forever, rendered permanently asymmetrical, by the imposition of a concrete pavilion, the railway’s version of South Bank brutalism. Inside the station, however, are the carefully antiqued remnants of a more homely brand of utilitarianism that was always more subtly disturbing. The wooden benches conjure up the era of Harry Palmer, the Michael Caine character for whom the most familiar objects turn suddenly very strange, and vice versa. In The Ipcress File, Palmer believes he is being held captive in Albania, but makes his escape onto the streets of London. Uxbridge is the Albanian version: all the artefacts are so convincing, so precisely evocative, they have to be stage copies. There is the original wooden refreshments kiosk, advertising the alternatives of A Mars A Day or CIGARS. The clock and platform indicator have a concatenating rhythm beyond the reach of the original design. It was an age of gadgetry, but the Uxbridge streamlining looks homemade. Pride of place goes to the four stainless steel cigarette machines, boasting their provision of DAY AND NIGHT SERVICE. The one going concern here is Frank’s Coffee Shop, which still operates with the original sandwich board. Frank’s message includes a prehistoric telephone number, consisting of two-letter prefix and five digits: UX 35489. Anyone phoning that number and expecting ring back will have one hell of a wait. Nowadays, the Underground itself is art; in the sixties, art and the railways had to be formally introduced – via civic heraldry and stained glass windows, job lots from Coventry Cathedral. But the most obdurate features of the design, the most aesthetically ambitious, are two extraordinary couchant abstractions of wheel and carriage, mid-way between rolling stock and Halley’s Comet: these historical projectiles, coursing through the masonry like Hittite chariots, belong in a corridor of the Pergamon Museum, in the passage leading towards the monumental film sets of the Cold War period. The interior of the station is Portmeirion English: one of the lesser known studios of the British film industry. The props were all leased out from Shepperton in 1965.
Stanmore is way beyond the end of the line. The station is marooned, tipped into a gulley, by the constant backwash from a busy traffic artery. Its status is announced by a traffic island, covered by rampaging weeds that almost hide the entrance. There is an immensely long, incredibly steep staircase down to the platforms at the bottom of the hill. Pensioners can be seen puffing and pausing on every landing. This place was never anything but peripheral, a hill station that might be abandoned. The construction was only half-serious. Even the grandeur of the woodwork is wafer-thin. The station is surmounted by a loft conversion, with three dormer windows dressed with net curtains. But no one has ever moved into these corporate bedrooms, and further varieties of weed sprout from the chimney tops. At best, Stanmore is a depot for rolling stock, rather than a concourse for passengers. The vast shunting yards are empty, and the ten pairs of railway tracks are garnished with a thick rust. At the stroke of a pen, bureaucracy’s finest decommissioned the plans before they were ever realised. All over the network are these tokens of aporia; behind the schedules and the signalling routines are strategic exceptions: the superfluous platform, the silent stairwell. Stanmore is the annexe of uncertainty, the shrine of second thoughts. It was never made redundant, but paralysed at a fixed point in the history of the Tube’s development. Passengers climbing up and down the hill traverse the strata of transport archeology, with the platform level classified as the prehistory of railway heritage. No wonder the landings carry advertisements for the National Trust – history is no more difficult to access than boarding the train, and less of a nuisance. Nevertheless, that illusion of the British past we consent to is counterpointed by Police notices seeking help in the investigation of crimes of rape. The edifice begins to crack under the weight of these posters, blue plaques of unwillingness and immediate harm.
And so to Upminster, in the utter east. A spaghetti-junction of moving points, its visual clamour put to shame by the self-possession of a row of drainpipe boxes. Each is embossed with the date of their manufacture, 1931. This is the home of the so-called ‘Underground Signal Box’, an operations centre that oversees the migrations of millions of passengers, planning the flux and reflux of a daily cycle whose echoes reach as far as the station car park. There is a tideline of rubbish that ebbs and flows in the turning space before the main entrance. The Signal Box is a hot property, caged in, fenced off. Marc and I peer at its darkened windows, where shadows move close to the venetian blinds. These must be the shapes of the controllers, eying us up, shifting uneasily backwards and forwards, away from and towards the light. I avert my glance to the thick cast-iron of the bridge, which absorbs the last scraps of sunlight and is surprisingly warm to the touch. But Marc is pointing his camera at the tower and producing a small commotion. We do a quick march down the platform and out through the Victorian station building with its pointed brick arches and patched roof. The thing is, we already sound like anoraks, swapping choice items of information about the history of the railways; we know too much, and are going to pay for it. Visions of an airfield in southern Greece materialise suddenly. We exit smartly – past the end cottage with backdoor rowan tree – and size up the shopfronts. Upminster has a fetish for accuracy, for exact calibration: even the barber shop is called ‘Martino’s Precision Hairdressing for Men’. The first shop in the High Street proper is a joiner’s and woodturner’s, the ‘Essex Centre’ of woodcraft, from which the technology of modern transport sprang (from the work of wheelwrights, not from Essex). Britain had a radial system of carriers to London from the mid-seventeenth century, unique in Europe, and the prototype of the centrifugal/centripetal Underground network. A pristine culture of capitalism. The end of the line is always the next staging post; the culture of termini is always transitional, the organisation of space provisional. The western range of buildings on the High Street is conceived on a monumental scale, with pillars and capitals, and Egyptian details reminiscent of Morden in the south. An approach road to the metropolis, but only half of one, already half-cannibalised by thriving family businesses, just off-camera. Wealth has spilled out of the old moulds of class and profession, already a frozen memory when the architectural cousins of Howard Carter came metal-detecting in Upminster and put their finds in a living museum, evoking the earliest known urban planning tradition. We skirt a row of tethered Alsatians as each one stands up, sensing the approach of suspicious characters. There is no sanctuary in the church – the closed circuit television surveillance reaches as far as the high altar, and outside, in the chu
rchyard elms, is a chorus of paranoid birdsong, several choruses, a veritable spaghetti-junction of alarm calls. Upminster is on guard; even the wildlife is recruited. The project is to stop the migration of meanings, arrest the flow of defining characteristics, to anticipate and prevent outsiders from rearranging the buffers, one cold rainy night.
Richmond wins the competition in property prices. In Richmond, you have arrived. The concourse houses the Richmond and Surrey Auction Rooms; you jump off the train and invest before you even get to the street. But something peculiar happens as you walk down the platform: there is a strange little overgrown patch of ground between the train and the station end of the railway tracks, where the line peters out. This small deposit of neglect, with its little pockets of chalk and different-sized gravels, has accumulated indifference at specific moments of alteration and redefinition. It is a transport midden, a municipal burnt mound – by-product of energies that were focussed elsewhere. Like time-lines in the Thames foreshore, the overlapping of materials is constantly revised, realigned by the superimposing of new layers; the addition of elements reorganises the entire existing order of monuments. But the evidence of power-play is not enshrined in the canonical details of a metal-framed clerestory, or an abstracted Egyptian facade; it is preserved in a pile of detritus. Its obsolescent mass, undesigned and unamenable to design, is conspicuously ignored. It is meant to be invisible, but its formlessness is reflected, magnified and distorted by the huge mirrors at the other end of the platform, convex and enveloping like an end-of-the-pier amusement. Richmond has seven platforms. The central two, with cast iron pillars, capitals and trefoils, are original, while the rest, with forged steel equivalents, repeat the blue and grey colour scheme, but shift the tones and textures. The most dramatic recension is not only recent, it is still in process. South West Trains are installing a ‘Real Time’ Customer Information System. But the Tube journey is never in real time; it is subject to dilation, a time exposure, as Marc’s photographic activities constantly remind me. As the motion of the body through space accelerates, the mind dwells on its captivity, lapsing into the same condition between different stations. The first Underground railway carriages were called ‘padded cells’: there were no windows, because it was judged there was nothing to see. Not even the staging posts. The mind was confined within itself.