by Rod Mengham
On the front of Richmond station, the sharply angled fluting above Egyptian-style pilasters completes the web of allusions, north, south, east and west, to Middle Kingdom architecture. But this grandiosity, although heavily suggestive, is less structural, less integral, to the Tube than the hieroglyph, the graffito awaiting its Rosetta Stone. The carriages are full of cartouches which preserve a code of silence about the true names for all the destinations. Morden is really ‘Ammo City’, but there is no knowing why. The Underground is a place where we read, unceasingly, a series of mottoes impacted with meanings which do not belong there. Surreptitious, sidling, they appear with the force of revelation, but reveal only the banal, like the scribbled communiqués of the Duke of Portland in Mick Jackson’s novel The Underground Man (Picador, 1997). The Duke, who has constructed a system of tunnels beneath his estate, allowing him to travel by coach and horses for miles underground, slips an assortment of notes under the doors of his manservants and maidservants – conundra, such as ‘What is that state of mind we call “consciousness” if not the constant emerging from a tunnel?’ In the tunnels of the Victoria Line, nearly all the current advertisements are rudimentary and without entertainment value. Their most important message is the website address you can click onto to see the real advertisement. The only perspective here is a cyberspace perspective. When we emerge from the tunnel at the end of the line, we walk from terminus to terminal, enter a tunnel much longer than any we have just left. The underground from which we emerge into consciousness is unbearably private: without the freedom of the street, it fosters an intimacy with strangers that was the paradoxical ground of wartime myths of community. Travelling blind in this short space has an imagined scope unimagined in the endless suburbs of the Net. Digitised fantasy always needs to be fleshed out by actors; holograms stalk the green belt, the garden cities and country parks. Each padded cell is its own world, its own itinerary of symptoms: read your ticket for the precise aetiology, the carved channel you have travelled in secret, the time-signature of the gradients. Hold your breath until the journey ends, and your name is off the critical list.
2003
A Wild Nursery for the Arts
the site of the V&A
The V&A collections started life in places quite other than South Ken: in the Government School of Design at Somerset House in 1837, and then in the Museum of Manufactures and the Museum of Ornamental Art established at Marlborough House in 1852. It was not until the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851 began to acquire land in order to realise Prince Albert’s grand design of collecting together in one place the national museums, the headquarters of learned societies and a scientific and technical university, that the present site of the V&A was secured. The collections were boosted by exhibits from the Great Exhibition and were reopened as the South Kensington Museum in 1857, although the permutating architectural solutions to the problem of display were not stabilised until 1899.
Before the Crystal Palace, with its six million visitors, was erected on Rotten Row at the south of Hyde Park, the area comprising Brompton and Kensington had been quiet for a thousand years. At the time of the Domesday survey, it was a paradise of pigs. The inhabitants of Chenesit (Kensington) in 1086 included eighteen villeins, one priest, seven bondsmen and around two hundred hogs. The large acreage given over to pannage connoted extensive woodland, although there was also agricultural land with work for ten ploughs, and a vineyard. Property values were high even then, with Kensington almost at the top of the Saxon and Norman real estate league table. The asking price for the whole area would have been ten pounds (compare Islington at ten shillings).
According to Walter Besant, in the relevant volume of his Survey of London published in 1911, the name Brompton is derived from ‘Broom-town’, ‘carrying suggestions of a wide and heathy common’. If this is rather fanciful (at least some of the land was cultivated, since there was a Broom Farm in the vicinity in 1294) it nonetheless reflects faithfully the way in which the area was perceived up to the eighteenth century. At the time of Domesday, the land was owned by the Church (actually, the Bishop of Constance) and it remained in ecclesiastical hands throughout the Middle Ages. This almost guaranteed resistance to development, as with many London suburbs before the Reformation, and is part of the reason why the pre-nineteenth century story of Brompton (the name South Kensington was not in use until the 1850s) is less about the frontier between the urban and the rural than about the rivalry between nature unkempt and nature controlled.
After 1675, Brompton became quite literally the most cultivated place in England, with the establishment of the first nursery garden in the country. This enterprise was to dominate horticultural practices nationally, and soon achieved an international reputation. But before that, Brompton was wild. Very wild. Pepys even thought it dangerous, recounting a journey taken on 15 June 1664, from Somerset House to Kensington, in terms that are almost scare-mongering: ‘But, Lord! the fear that my lady Paulina was in every step of the way: and indeed, at this time of the night, it was no safe thing to go that road; so that I was even afraid myself, though I appeared otherwise.’ Even seventy years later, in 1734, Lord Hervey was writing to his mother in similarly melodramatic vein, giving her to understand that Kensington must be entirely cut off from the capital: ‘we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great impassable gulf of mud.’
Yet by the time that Hervey was writing, this intimidating wilderness was cheek-by-jowl with the most systematically managed landscape anywhere. The most celebrated of the new commercial plantations was the Brompton Park Nursery, precisely on the present site of the V&A. Founded by George London, in 1681, this was reckoned to supply most of the nobility and gentry in the country with trees, shrubs and plants. By 1715, Stephen Switzer was calling it ‘the noblest Nursery of the world’. John Evelyn was a huge fan, recording in his diary for 24 April 1694 a visit undertaken to impress his acquaintance, Mr Waller, who was ‘in admiration at the store of rare plants and the method he found in that noble nursery and how well it was cultivated’. The recurrence of the epithet ‘noble’ is motivated partly by appreciation of the orderliness and grandeur that distinguished Brompton Park from its competitors, but also by association with the status of its customers. At the height of its operations, the nursery covered over a hundred acres, while the scale and variety of the stock was nothing short of ‘incredible’, according to John Bowack, writing in 1705 in his Antiquities of Middlesex: ‘if we believe some who affirm that the several plants in it were valued at 1d apiece, they would amount to above £40,000.’
It was because of this horticultural background, and the degree of its success, that Brompton was chosen as the prospective site for an architectural project that, had it been realised, would have fixed forever the character of the whole area and rendered impossible the future development of the V&A. The plans, drawn up in 1836, envisaged the construction of the largest market in the world, in the form of a huge triangle of neoclassical colonnades, wedged into the angle formed by the Brompton Road and Knightsbridge. The promoters of the Knightsbridge Market Company entered into a collaboration with the Birmingham, Bristol and Thames Junction Railway to bring the nearest railway line to a terminus at Knightsbridge Green. The idea was not simply to provide a distribution point for the produce of Brompton, but to create a nexus ‘to which the produce of the north and west of England, of Wales, and Ireland, as well as that of the market gardens about Hammersmith and its vicinity, can be brought with the greatest rapidity and at the smallest possible cost’. The prospective shareholders anticipated, eagerly, a ‘great pre-eminence over every other metropolitan market yet established’.
No museums, no concert halls, no universitie –; no South Ken. The whole of Brompton would have resembled a giant garden centre annexed to a mammoth supermarket. There is no trace of the developers’ plans today, but there is plenty of evidence o
f the burgeoning plant life that the place was once famous for. It is now corralled, isolated, dispersed, but there is still a great deal of herbaceous extravagance and variety in the streets, mews and gardens behind the V&A: in the figs and bay trees that line the approach to Holy Trinity Church; in the fuchsias, magnolias and agapanthi of the gardens behind Brompton Square; and in the dozens of terracotta tubs that line Ennismore Garden Mews. The tiniest cubic area of soil is enough to support the most ambitious of vegetable careers. Perhaps the most impressive example of plant mind over matter is the sizeable laburnum sprouting out of the top of the Corinthian capitals at the entrance to Ennismore Garden Mews.
More or less immediately west of the present Exhibition Road is where the gardens finished and the groves began. The great reformer Wilberforce, living from 1808 to 1821 at Gore House, on the site now occupied by the Albert Hall, was a world away from the busy transactions to the east: ‘We are just one mile from the turnpike at Hyde Park Corner, having about three acres of pleasure-ground around our house, or rather behind it, and several old trees, walnut and mulberry, of thick foliage. I can sit and read under their shade with as much admiration of the beauties of nature as if I were two hundred miles from the great city.’ An awareness of this atmosphere of bucolic remoteness makes it seem slightly less incongruous that Wordsworth should have married Mary Hutchinson in Brompton, on 4 October 1802. The sense of arboreal seclusion is what was cherished, and its loss lamented, when the museum-builders set to work. The newspapers of the day decried the loss of the Kensington ‘wilds’, and the destruction of their ‘green lanes! green lanes’ where various kinds of game birds could be found, especially snipe and partridge. As an alternative tactic, it was also argued that the terrain was quite unsuitable for museums, since the neighbouring ‘swamps’ with their prevailing mists would affect adversely any works of art on display. But this claim seems likely to have been exaggerated since Brompton had for some time enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most salubrious places in Britain. It was warm, but well-ventilated, and for this reason was chosen in 1841 as the site of the new Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest. We would balk nowadays on hearing the description of Brompton as the ‘Madeira of London’, but by 1871 it had achieved a mortality rate even lower than that of Cheltenham, at that time reckoned to be the healthiest place in the country.
The green lanes and the groves for contemplation seem very distant today from the Cromwell Road and Cromwell Gardens, with their scabby London planes ringed around with cigarette butts. However, there are a few hints remaining of the kind of tranquillity that Wilberforce enjoyed: in the padlocked stillness of Ennismore Gardens; in the umbrageous canopies of Rutland Gate; most of all, in the graveyard of Holy Trinity, now almost entirely stripped of graves, and pacified by an avenue of horse chestnuts and stripling beeches.
Just as the collections of the V&A reveal the evolution of the museum’s character, the story of its surroundings is equally palimpsestic. There are pockets of traditional usage, whether of window-box nursery cultivation, or of urban set-aside; but perhaps the most vibrant tradition is that of the Great Exhibition itself. The V&A is now home to many of the 1851 exhibits, but the internationalism of the original event is best represented outside the museum walls: in the multicultural student body of Imperial College; and in the diversity of the nearby churches. Besides the Anglican Holy Trinity, there is the towering Brompton Oratory (the land was bought in 1852, despite the objections of Cardinal Newman, who shrank from the idea of building in this ‘neighbourhood of second-rate gentry and second-rate shops’) as well as the Mormon temple with its pyramidal lightning rod, earthing the faith of the Latter Day Saints, and the wonderful golden facade of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God and All Saints, with its oddly Italianate bell-tower. Foreign consulates are thick on the ground in this area, with limocleaning chauffeurs beating their rubber floor mats against the porch of the Russian church, which is a near neighbour to both the Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman and the People’s Bureau of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The cosmopolitanism of 1851 survives, although its character has changed. In the nineteenth century it was provided mainly by waves of actors, musicians and writers colonising the streets of Brompton. One of the most notable visitors was the great French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who stayed at 6, Brompton Square in 1863. By that time the South Kensington Museum would have been fully in operation, although it would have looked quite different from what we see today, housed as it then was in the notorious ‘Brompton boilers’, constructions of corrugated metal, glass and iron girders that were eventually removed to Bethnal Green, where they still form an integral part of the Bethnal Green Museum. South Kensington was to change its shape several times before the twentieth century: no longer green or tilled or quiet, except in those odd corners that George London would have appreciated, or the author of L’aprés-midi d’un faune.
2004
Atkins/Warsaw
Marc Atkins is best known for his photographs of London. Several of these were published in the collaborations with Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory and Liquid City, but they represent only a handful of the reputed 30,000 images of the city that he has created. These urban icons should be seen alongside the other aspects of his oeuvre: portraits (eleven of these, chiefly of maverick writers, are housed in the National Portrait Gallery); and dreamed-of scenarios and narratives – the most mysterious and least well-known area of his work. With his latest publication, Warsaw, arousing huge curiosity in the Polish capital, he has returned to urban iconography in a way that clearly invites comparison and contrast with his representations of London. The choice of subjects in the later series reflects a desire to reframe the earlier work as part of a structure of correspondences. It becomes possible to pair off single images and groups of images as mutually defining.
One of the most revealing comparisons brings together the funerary traditions epitomised in studies of individual tombstones. The London variants are among Atkins’s most celebrated images; they show crumbling stone, infested with decay, absorbed into and overcome by organic growth which mimics and subverts the forms of statuary and stonemasonry. The monument’s passage through time is characterised by friction and granulation. In Warsaw, the stone is polished; marble is used, or composite emulations of marble’s smoothness, memorialising not so much the manner of death – as is common especially in eighteenth century inscriptions in Britain, recording the progress of the body’s disintegration and the soul’s resolution – but a phase of existence long before the moment of decease, during a period of health, vitality and self-possession. This aura of immunity is captured in a small portrait photograph that is sealed with a hard glaze, in a culture where the enshrining of the relic was superseded by the preservation of Lenin’s tissue. The architecture of death is cryogenic in Eastern Europe. It is the architecture of the everyday that is subject to dramatic forms of abrasion.
Image after image in the Warsaw series shows the flux and reflux of history: history hurrying in opposite directions; backwards and forwards at one and the same time. Large areas of the city are feral. Ill-kempt and overgrown farmland survives less than a mile from the city centre; Atkins focuses on an agricultural penthouse, typical of the improvised architecture of the countryside, its only gesture to modernity an array of different-sized plastic buckets, the most modern of materials being utilised for the most primitive of necessities. The land-use demonstrated in the shadow of soviet-style tower blocks and the cranes of present-day construction adheres to the traditional mixed economy of the village. While one half of Polish society prepares for global postmodernity, the other half retreats into a subsistence recess. This photograph is not so much elegiac as prophetic: of a modernity that is less and less totalised, more and more likely to be cannibalised for spare parts; of history as a setting for divergences, which seems to be the implication of Atkins’s study of the Old Town, that epitome of post-war
reconstruction, the occasion of national pride and self-confidence, portrayed here as a focus of uncertainties, a multi-perspectival grid of shifting points of view, absent vistas – a secret desire for impasse.
The Atkins obsession with infrastructure, with competing forms of transit and transport, is distilled in a portfolio of depictions of empty or under-used thoroughfares. This badly lit and vacated modernity, often jerry-built or apparently unfinished bears a family resemblance to Ilya Kabakov’s ‘We Live Here Now’, an installation in which the grandiose ambitions for a technologised future are abandoned by workers who live out their days in the prefabricated huts intended for use only during the period of construction. Atkins’s representations of Warsaw push hard at the paradox of grossly overcrowded private space absorbing a stereotypical Polish gregariousness, while a false communality is identified with the unwanted abundance of public fora and meaningless concourses. A junction of darkened boulevards, catering to buses, trams and even cycle paths, is completely deserted except for two waiting pedestrians, whose twilit vigil is at the centre of a seemingly entropic system, with the batteries of modern city life running low, and the schematic outlines of bicycles curiously miniaturised marking the foreground like police records of a presence gone forever.