Westfield is an extension of the Westway, that vestigial road in the sky. The landing strip of a flight simulator. A Ballard theme park from the time of Concrete Island. A teasing figment of a Bauhaus potentiality that never happened.
Escaping London, suddenly privileged drivers note Ernö Goldfinger’s 31-storey brutalist stack, the Trellick Tower: which was completed in 1972, two years before the publication of Ballard’s novel, his recasting of Daniel Defoe. Robert Maitland, prisoner of Concrete Island, suffers a blow-out to the front near-side wheel of his Jaguar, before plunging down an embankment, ‘six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway’. Taking that invented spur for the Shepherd’s Bush slip road and its connection with the western motorway, six hundred yards would land the confused motorist somewhere in the future Westfield site. Maitland is an architect. Westfield is his posthumous dream.
‘Rising above the crowded nineteenth-century squares and grim stucco terraces, this massive concrete motion-sculpture is an heroically isolated fragment of the modern city London might have become,’ Ballard wrote in his contribution to a collection of fragments known as London: City of Disappearances. ‘Westway, like Angkor Wat, is a stone dream that will never awake. As you hurtle along this concrete deck you briefly join the twentieth century and become a citizen of a virtual city-state borne on a rush of radial tyres.’
By describing what he saw before him, a vision of multiple realities, Ballard located Westfield before it was conceived, before it achieved its optimum state as a laptop doodle. Construction was unnecessary and ill advised. Fiction road-tests the future without obligation to buy. Novels, dreams that do not fade, hook themselves on the perimeter fence of the culture like flapping rook wings of black plastic. First the variants appear, consciously and subconsciously, in other books. Then films, television. And, finally, GP architecture: the art of original quotation. Robert Maitland’s Jaguar, catastrophe in suspension, surfaces (along with the Defoe reference) in Chris Petit’s 1993 novel, Robinson. The narrator, falling-down drunk, is taken into a multi-storey car park, given the keys to a Jag, and invited to put his foot down when he hits the Westway.
Questioned about this sequence, Petit said that, at the time of writing, Ballard was not a direct influence. He was remembering his own film, Radio On. Being high on a tower block, suffering from vertigo, getting the panoramic shot of a car leaving town. ‘The car,’ he wrote, ‘seemed to drive itself, responding to the merest suggestion, whispering forward with us cocooned in leather-bound silence, protected behind the cinemascope windscreen.’
Robinson opens with twin epigrams. One is from Ballard: ‘Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.’ The other is from the poet Weldon Kees, a man who vanished, perhaps jumping from a bridge, perhaps changing identity. Kees writes of: ‘Robinson alone … staring at a wall.’ At the unreadable blankness of Westfield? A barrier separating retail drifters on their elevated terraces from the ghosts of the hinterland, the crazed drivers flirting with suicide. And reading London’s disposable ruins as recovered temples in the Cambodian jungle.
‘A thin yellow light lay across the island,’ Ballard wrote, ‘an unpleasant haze that seemed to rise from the grass, festering over the ground as if over a wound that had never healed.’
A strip of land, trapped between stilted urban clearway and snarled feeder roads, ripe for the virus of investment capital. The block-building could be, but is not, a flagship hospital. A bug-breeding facility storing otherwise eliminated Victorian poverty plagues. A rumour factory like its neighbour, the White City BBC complex, where sweating politicians are being patted with powder, before going into a glass cubicle. Where they will be ventriloquized by sharp young men, outside the window, waving clipboards, nodding or miming throat-cut gestures.
Westfield does what airports do and does it better: the escalators work, you don’t lose your luggage, there’s a wide choice of near-food. And, above everything, swimming and swirling, there is: light. ‘Very eclectic, very bold, very London.’ Miniature clouds caught in the triangular panels of a celestial roof. Manufactured light. Imported light. Quotation light: waterfall-chandeliers of fizz and flash, star-fields of shimmer and glint. A ballroom of the vanities. We should be waltzing through the galleries, admiring our own reflections, not creeping like zombies in diving shoes.
I started to write a letter to Ballard, describing the Westfield set in terms of Kingdom Come, and all the other fictions and essays he had produced, in anticipation of this event. But it was pointless. The space had substance as somewhere imagined, not experienced. Psychopathic potentialities, tried and tested in Ballard’s honed language formulae, made the fact of the mall seem dull and obvious. It is not that his stories prophesied a certain type of architectural folly: they made such things redundant, ridiculous. And therefore perfectly suited to the landscape into which Australian developers had brokered a loud introduction. The trick with Ballard’s invented architects, Robert Maitland in Concrete Island, Anthony Royal in High-Rise, is that they don’t build anything; they suffer the consequences of building. Materially successful, detached, they are the equivalents of the deracinated poets who populate the mythology of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Poets are speakers, silenced by the world: invisibles. Architects are watchers, connoisseurs of entropy, appreciating from a high balcony the physics of smoke and sunlight across a burning city.
‘I remembered my last moments in the dome,’ Ballard wrote in Kingdom Come, ‘looking back at the fires that raced along the high galleries from one store to the next … I watched the spectators around me, standing silently at the railing … In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.’
I’ve never been much good at recognizing a division between fiction and reality, past and future, this place and that place. Does it help to know that Chris Petit, ransacking his memory-bank for Robinson, recalled the Jaguar he bought, second hand, on the day of his son’s birth in 1984? Does the tyre that blew on Ballard’s Ford Zephyr lose legitimacy by being shifted from Chiswick to the Westway? Photographs taken, after the crash, leave the vehicle, according to the author, looking fit for Athens or Havana. Petit, speaking of days riding around East Berlin in a white Jaguar, the only one in town, is smoothing the routine for a future novel. Ballard has frequently credited his friend and partner, Claire Walsh, as something more than the inspiration for the character Catherine in Crash: Claire is Catherine. ‘Shall I call her Claire?’ he asked. ‘Better not.’ But the narrator remains: James Ballard.
Now, after more than forty years in Shepperton, after numerous interviews, accounts of deckchair, Delvaux duplicates, overgrown yucca in window, Ballard was unwell. Sick enough to relocate to Claire’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush, in the lee of Westfield. Closer to hospital and oncologist for those unforgiving sessions of chemo, less therapy than stoically borne endurance test. A memoir, Miracles of Life, is an elegantly composed realignment, generous in spirit, of the accidents of autobiography, the tricks and tropes of a long career. In organizing so much material, paying tribute to so many dead colleagues and loves, reconciling hurt, dissolving feuds, he crafted the most perfect fiction of them all: the imitation of truth.
A number of Ballard’s favoured restaurants, where he entertained family and friends, were hit hard by the advent of the Westfield monster. And by the strategic relocation of BBC staff to Salford, a banishment many found hard to endure. The Hilton Hotel, close to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, was a conveniently neutral site for interviews and public debriefings. ‘The biggest problem facing civilization,’ Ballard observed, ‘is finding somewhere to park.’ There was a slot, on the other side of the road, opposite the hotel. The only occasion I can remember when he became a little tetchy and abrupt, suspending his reflex bonhomie, happened in a late-season deluge. A broadsheet portraitist, oblivious of Ballard’s age and frailty, pushed
him to pose on the concrete island of the roundabout. You can see the idea: road, rain, film noir mac. ‘One more, just one more.’ The photographer grabbed him by the elbow and thrust the distinguished author into the whip of traffic. Courtesy has its limits. In turning his back, and striding away, Ballard was signalling the final dissolution of human spirit from a topography that could be abandoned to ghosts, developers, image-jockeys and architects who never go into the office.
‘But what is Westfield actually like?’ you demand. It’s like everything, as I’ve been struggling to tell you, and it is nothing. Like the stuff we used to call money. Forty minutes, palms sweating, teeth on edge, is my record in the Bluewater quarry. In Westfield, it’s a comfortable two hours before the over-cranked heating system and the low-level electronic hum saps my energy to the point where a jolt from one of the twenty-two coffee outlets won’t mend it. That’s the really disturbing thing, Westfield is like everywhere.
‘Boutique restaurants. Eat anywhere in the world without leaving West London.’
The floating mall is a pristine Dubai air terminal. A motorway university in Uxbridge. The headquarters of Channel 4. A private hospital on the Peterborough ring road. A canalside arts venue in King’s Cross. A David Adjaye Idea Store (ex-library) in Whitechapel. A sleek logistics bunker in Beckton, low enough not to be a hazard to incoming aircraft. Westfield is copywriting made manifest. A template for faux-Ballardian prose. The hype is the truth: the only secret. In smoothly curated non-space, you operate below (or above) the level of ordinary human experience. You are inside the art and you are the art. Step on the elevator to retail heaven and you are making a political decision: pro-Olympic Park, blue-sky thinking. You have cast your phone-in vote for politics without alignment. You are a premature coalitionist, as rubber-smooth as Cameronclegg. The only building in London with greater dissociation from the surrounding landscape is the new council property in Hillman Street, Hackney. Westfield has a warmer welcome: they can’t wait to swipe your credit cards.
My journey from Liverpool Street on the Central Line was swift and uneventful. (Which was, in itself, an event.) I took the scatter of white stone eggs at the entrance, where you might expect benches, to be a sculptural gesture, the Brancusi head lice of an aspirational icon: before weary shopper-performers stumbled out of the hangar to straddle them. The stones are exhibits on which to perch, but not sprawl (no vagrants, no readers, no drinking schools). At Westfield, inside is outside and outside is inside. Live green hedges authenticate enclosure, while metallic trees, frosted with silver ball bearings, dress the avenue of approach. The premature gush of a water feature duplicates the wave patterns of an undulating roof.
The proper response, stepping through the mall entrance, is a happy slap of enchantment: a great tree of the world with dancing shadows. Friendly personnel at check-in stations will give you a map if you’re too dumb to operate the touch-screen features. Westfield has an abundance of choice: if you are after handbags or knickers. I have a shopping list with four items. An inkjet for my printer. Contact lens sterilizing solution for my wife. A foodie book by Richard Corrigan for a relative. And one-hour development for the rolls of 35mm analogue film that I’ve been shooting so promiscuously. One out of four isn’t bad. Travelling on to Oxford, I got the rest, in seven minutes, on the High Street. But in the Shepherd’s Bush retail cornucopia? No inkjets (no Ryman). Contact lens fluid only available in bumper packs. Corrigan: not in stock. One branded photo outlet is exclusively digital and the Boots processing counter is unmanned. ‘Our store colleagues are happy to help.’ If you can track them down. I do, eventually, and get my rapid service (but not in the size I request). ‘Do you have a Boots card?’
The Westfield hangar, in which customers do their own harvesting, is themed around an ersatz otherness. Reality is spun like sugar: PR made actual. Kiosks and ‘concierge desks’ soothe the flow of aimless pedestrianism. Comfort stations are plentiful, a lot of space for ablutions, but only three male troughs per unit. My soap dispenser wasn’t working and had been replaced by a self-squeeze plastic bottle. The Ladies’ cubicles, also in groups of three, are in dark wood, and reach to the ceiling. A claustrophobic experience, so I’m told. Theatrical, intimidating, and attended by first-night queues.
With uniformed police walking around in couples, with controlled exits, floors above floors, figures endlessly processing, there is a suggestion of the Panopticon prison. Relieved to be back outside, in the damp air, I rested for a moment on one of the steps. When I arrived home, I found lines of black lead striped across my pale trousers: a penitential metaphor. Every day the narrow trenches on these steps are refilled. You have to be spry to avoid a soaking from the cascade that can suddenly erupt from another ledge under a screen of genuine-fake greenery. Retail athleticism and Westfield are the perfect marriage. The Shepherd’s Bush fortress is a memorial to a humbler event, the 1908 White City Olympics, marketed on heritage postcards as ‘The Great Stadium’.
From 29 July to 14 August 1948, this part of London was the focus for the post-war Olympics, the ‘Austerity Games’. A triumph of bodging and fudging, making do. We were bankrupt anyway. Competitors slept in Nissen huts, camped in RAF barracks, rode on buses. They slogged through mud and clay. The whole flickering black-and-white affair ran like an Ealing Comedy sports day. The human element was visible, unsmothered by corporate interventions. Nothing was torn down, there were no primary strategic objectives, no directions of travel. The city was already in ruins and athletes arriving here from around the world, sharing the lean times, helped to bring London back to life. Athletes were still within the compass of ordinary experience: survivors of war, schoolgirls, housewives, students, factory workers taking time off. The cult of elitism – fat-cat officials, slipstreaming politicians, reserved traffic lanes, Mayfair hotels – was not yet established and endemic. Nobody realized that the presentation of the event was bigger than the event itself: that gold medals were a measure of development potential. That the labouring competitors were tramping the ground flat for Westfield.
As 2012 approached, the GP mindset exhibited itself in a series of funded debates, seminars and ‘Urban Laboratory’ manifestations. I attended several of these, sometimes being invited to perform as a token dissident. The shocking aspect was quite how large the regiment of fixers, puffers, bagmen, and conceptualizers, parasitical upon the Olympics, actually was. Correspondents were appointed years before the stadium started to rise from the radioactive soil. Design for London imagineers. Legacy Masterplan magicians. Parks and Public Realm core philosophers. Leisure space enablers. Sustainable development consultants. Team leaders for integrated solutions. And, worst of all, weasel subversives, such as myself, enjoying their status as sanctioned critics corrupt enough to accept a fee for preaching disaster.
One show trial, under the appropriately resurrectionist title of ‘Growing a New Piece of City: Designing an Olympic Legacy for 21st Century London’, took place in an anatomy theatre. We were under instruction to talk for no more than ten minutes. All of the participants were on the payroll, deeply mortgaged to the vision of the Olympic Park. They were smooth, lean, smart. They didn’t get their hands dirty. They were uncontaminated by any kind of dust. I pictured: open-plan offices, ethically sourced coffee, foldaway bicycles. These were not bad people, they had families, friends. They went out for meals. They talked about war, poverty, music, films, property prices and eco-apocalypse (especially that). But they would not, and could not, do time.
I was convinced that my earlier hunch was right: buried inside the oval of the stadium was a particle accelerator. Relativity, the old Lea Valley space–time mush, was being scrambled. Outside the circuit of the blue fence, voodoo snakes, big-mouth crocodiles and eviscerated chickens were screaming on walls: Berlin ’36. Mexico City ’68. Munich ’72.
Every speaker, words lost as they lisp into a defective sound system, has a laptop presentation. ‘Big ideas delivered in 100 pieces.’ They show the message on a screen. T
hen read it out. Ten minutes become twenty-five. The same maps, charts, projections. Lavender beds. Water features. No mention of money, toxic waste, dust clouds. The GP bureaucrats are hypnotized by banality, the abdication of content, infinitely obliging statistics. They can’t stop until the computer programme runs out. Nanoseconds expand to deny oxygen to screaming brain cells. Systems closing down. You don’t drift out into a contemplative reverie, seeing the Lea Valley as it once was: the state I achieved by sitting on a chair for the artists of the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick. We die into the inevitability of this horror, looping dead images until we begin to believe them.
People came up afterwards, none of them British, exiles living in Hackney, Tottenham, Walthamstow, with versions of the same question. ‘What can we do?’ ‘How can we stop it?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘The fix is in and it goes all the way. Bear witness. Record and remember.’
China Watchers
The history of contradiction lies in the ground of the body image as a co-ordinate of the written sound-play, so calibrated with signifying exchange that every part offers an assembly ‘in the swim’.
– J. H. Prynne
Ben Watson, who juggled identities as late-punk poet and card-carrying member of the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP, accused me of promoting no values in the contemporary world beyond a belief in poetry. And he was right. Although that ragged umbrella kept the rain out, some of the time, it was never as cunning a device as the tarpaulin hood Ben used to stop himself going blind from the leakage of a stone-crazy theology: Frank Zappa, J. H. Prynne, William Burroughs, Walter Benjamin, free-jazz improvisation, language-hallucination, orthodox and unorthodox Cambridge Marxism, and (of late), with some tenderness, family. Which is to say that whatever knots, ethically, philosophically, you tie in the tongue, it comes down to the pattern of words on the page. The grunt of performance. The shape absence leaves on the landscape. Poets were dying too fast and it hurt.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 15