Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  The following morning, raw from a sleepless night punctuated by screams, smashed glass, slammed doors, Chris discovered that his silver Merc, secure in the hotel’s basement garage, had been the venue for an unauthorized party. Night staff didn’t waste the opportunity to entertain in a motor of that vintage, in such leathery comfort. After cleaning out the kebab wraps and knotted condoms, and winding down the electric windows, we headed for the M62. Pausing only to pay tribute to John Prescott’s favourite trough, Mr Chu’s China Palace riverside restaurant. A lion-guarded, green-and-red stockade: like the set for Nicholas Ray’s epic, 55 Days at Peking. I told Chris that I couldn’t accept Will Alsop’s contention, one of the articles of faith around which his SuperCity thesis was developed.

  ‘It struck me,’ Alsop said, ‘that if Leeds and their football team fell out of the FA Cup, the natural thing would be for the supporters to cheer Manchester United or Manchester City. Then you have a regional identity, one city.’

  About as natural, I thought, as incest. And much less popular. Leeds and Manchester United as companions-in-arms? Jack Charlton and ‘our kid’ sharing a damp Woodbine in the bath? Happy-go-lucky Billy Bremner tickling the ribs of Nobby Stiles? Trans-Pennine blood feuds are often a matter of a few hundred yards of disputed ground. If there is anything that unites the whole SuperCity, it’s the quality of hatred: Liverpool–Manchester–Leeds. Badge-kissers, coin-throwers, karate-kickers: united in the obscenity of their tribal chants.

  Michael Moorcock spent several years in a rambling house at Ingleton, close to the Yorkshire/Lancashire border. ‘No question that the Wars of the Roses lived on,’ he told me. ‘The towns around Leeds all had very strong identities and a sense of superiority one to another. My friend Dave Britton says that although everything has changed on the surface in Manchester, with new council estates replacing terraces, the basic character remains the same. Markets where markets always were, violence where violence always was. The notion of supporting Leeds had him laughing like Bernard Manning.’

  The M62, Petit reckoned, along that first stretch out of Hull, was almost as good as East Germany, the run he’d made from Berlin to the Baltic. Our transit was silk-smooth, traffic-light. The cooling stacks at Selby are always worth a photo or two. We pulled off-highway at Saddleworth Moor, to take in, from this rugged tump, the hazy spread of Manchester. Once again dark history infected our perceptions. You are never free of that hideous backstory, the abused and buried children. The ones who have never been recovered. And the malignant urban picnickers with their leaking newspaper faces: bottles of cheap wine, tartan rug and spade. The satanic version of Coronation Street spoiling the ground even now. The thing they murdered was the moor itself.

  Step outside the car and everything changes. Wind cuts. A road sign for Saddleworth has the Oldham part of it peeled away like a second-degree burn, a failed graft. Limestone overwhelmed by Millstone Grit. A rough track leading to the Pennine Way. Low cloud, saturated air. Rubbish pits and tyre dumps in which un-wanted things cook and sulk. Mesh fence protecting pylons barnacled with humming disks, eavesdropping equipment. Cars that stop here are suspect, furtive; out of place until the rubber rots from the wheels and they sink into the peat.

  Coming the other way, east, as part of his television tour, Will Alsop pulled in for a comfort break. ‘What Saddleworth Moor needs,’ he said, ‘is more access roads and a fancy service station.’ He clambers from his high chariot, yawns and shakes out the creases. ‘Let’s make a beautiful rural service area at this point. With fantastic food and unbelievable shops.’ A 24-hour destination magnet appealing to the nightbirds of SuperCity. And who would they be? Entertainers, reps. Haunted solitaries. The feral underclass populating crime encyclopaedias. Gloved wheelmen in white company vans cruising a connected network of red-light districts. Tabloid monsters with claw-hammers and faulty moral wiring. Film-makers stitching swans’ wings on corpses.

  We looped Manchester, looped everywhere. When it works, and you float through the cinema of landscape, nobody wants to come away from the road. We’d visited Liverpool a few months earlier, to shoot a piece for the Audi Channel, driving a £60,000 luxury model from the Antony Gormley beach at Crosby into North Wales; now Petit suggested a detour to Morecambe. A detour which involved a truckstop at Carnforth that demonstrated the qualities a pop-up city should possess: efficient but unobtrusive service based around clean and functional architecture; American windows on English lethargy. Comfortable chairs, hot soup, and a silent television screen running Euro-junk football as an analgesic, a meditative panel with no emotion, no content. Electronic impressionism: lush greens, patterns forming and reforming as colour-coordinated athletes drift and sway. You can eat here, sleep here, shop here – and, best of all, park without hassle. The lorry park is a park, enclosed, muffled, with great shining transcontinental rigs as works of sculpture. In the approved SuperCity fashion, this refuge has no allegiance to the local; to Carnforth with its stagnant bookshop and its heritaged railway station, the self-denying ghosts of Brief Encounter. The truckstop was Belgium, Italy, Idaho, Oregon. In a cartography of absence, here at last was an oasis of the possible that required no intervention from planners or overexcited architects.

  Morecambe, half-resuscitated, half-choked on the karma of the drowned Chinese cockle pickers, was an unresolved argument between entropy and aspiration. With a grand sweep of bay for which the inhabitants seemed to have no particular relish. A woman, out early, dragging a blind German shepherd dog, chatted with a street cleaner in a yellow tabard. ‘He’s moulting, luv. It’s fab. Like getting new carpet for front room.’

  Nothing we found along the entire span of the road had actually been built by Alsop. He explained, when I visited him in his office, that the idea of the SuperCity emerged over a period when he was involved with a group called Yorkshire Forward. ‘The man in charge gave me Barnsley. Nobody else wanted it. I was rather hoping to get Scarborough. The M62 became part of my life. If you go by train, it’s hopeless.’

  Post-industrial muddle extended, in the London architect’s bloodshot eyes, into a single hallucinatory city. A blank canvas crying out for inspiration. The poets who clustered around Hebden Bridge, exiled figures like Jeff Nuttall and Asa Benveniste, had gone. New metropolitans, chefs, ambitious curators, took their place. Raiders of the north, reivers with laptops and digital cameras, staked out the territory. The advantage of being trapped somewhere like Huddersfield or Goole, Alsop asserted, was that you could get out, fast. Back to the road. ‘Manchester feels all right, once you’re in,’ he said. ‘But it takes a long time. Nobody is quite sure where it starts or finishes.’

  I carried a coffee-table book with me, the Will Alsop tribute compiled by Kenneth Powell in 2002. There was one surviving Alsop structure to be located: the toilet block of the Earth Centre at Conisbrough, near Doncaster. It dated from the era when New Labour was an unsullied novelty, rattling out promises without having to deliver. Slush funds, siphoned from millennial lotteries, were being channelled towards northern areas deemed fit for regeneration. Brownfield anaemia doctored with booster shots of fresh green capital.

  ‘A deal was done with the National Coal Board,’ Alsop said, ‘to re-landscape the slagheaps. They already had a vineyard. And a perfectly decent hut where you could get something to eat.’ A nice little project too successful to be left alone. The terrible thing happened: they got the loot.

  ‘I remember when they rang me up, everybody was excited. They were going to give us fifty million. Unbelievable!’

  Fifty million stretched, as these things always do, to eighty. It started to get serious. And visible.

  ‘Jennie Page was in charge of the Millennium Commission. You could see why she chose the Earth Centre: it was green, it was in the north. It was not in London.’

  A headline-making disaster was snatched from the jaws of a minor local success. ‘In retrospect, it was the worst news we could have had, the granting of lottery funds. The original group lost cont
rol. They were blamed for this failure, but it was not their fault. They never needed that huge amount of money. Our practice designed and built the millennium lavatory. That’s my only millennium project.’

  Arriving in Conisbrough with Petit, after days on the road, and finding no trace of the Earth Centre, we tried the castle. The custodians blazed and bridled: money down the drain, they reckoned. Potential customers arriving by car at the eco-park were surcharged a fiver a head for wasting fossil fuel. The centre lasted two years, while it tried to figure out its unique selling point. A consensus, after numerous meetings in motorway hotels, on the direction of travel: downhill. They offered budget archery for kids. They peddled moral fables like a Victorian Sunday school. The story the castle-keepers told us was that carpet-bagging Londoners came north, were given the best jobs and houses, milked the system, and jumped the first train as soon as the plug was pulled. The benefit of the grand project to the Conisbrough community was zilch. The strategy, as Alsop explained it, had been ‘to expound in a vivid, hands-on way, the principles of sustainable development’. And, in a negative fashion, this is exactly what the Earth Centre achieved. They proved that nature sustains itself. It abhors the despoilers of a vacuum. Abandoned mine-workings, after a few years left to themselves, have a wild beauty which includes visible traces of a previous history: the rusted rails, coils of wire, scars and fissures. The boys on bicycles. The dog-walkers.

  An Asian security guard, doomed to spend his days invigilating a surveillance monitor on which nothing is happening, and wandering, step by laboured step, around the perimeter fence of what feels like an abandoned concentration camp, was pleased to have some company. Guard towers. A grass-thatched conical yurt. Slagheaps. The Alsop toilets are like stacked containers made from an experimental medium somewhere between metal and human skin. What disaster had overwhelmed this frontier outpost? Why had the promised highway never arrived?

  ‘Combining futuristic architecture with poignant memorabilia from a mining past.’ Said the sad notice attached to a skeletal metal tree, a surplus artwork.

  Here, at last, was a fitting monument to the SuperCity: a wilderness loud with ghosts from a noble industrial heritage. A desolate theme park conceived from the embryonic wraiths of a discontinued future. A conceptual landscape where reality was declared bankrupt.

  Will Alsop, painter of windscreens, is our Daniel Boone: a pioneer opening up territory where nobody wants to go. A grand project obsolete before it was launched. And the wrong kind of obsolete too, the junked prototype, not the soft glow of a kerosene lamp in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, as recalled by Ed Dorn; and not, certainly not, the pure obsolete status of poetry. The obsolescence that has to be earned, that has been lived through. That continues to sing and to hurt.

  Freedom Rides

  One close June evening, coming away from the corrupted geometry of a generic docklands development, down a nervy arterial road, Anna lost it: where am I? It was like emerging from a late-afternoon siesta, not knowing day from night, Hackney from Hartlepool. Was she a boarding-school pupil or a married woman? And to whose unfamiliar body, like a coat in the wrong size, was she returning? Our walk was endless, nothing fitted against anything else. The soft pornography of regeneration was challenged by minatory warehouses, cobbled alleys and the sullen, sour-canal whiff of the real. We had travelled on the diagonal across England to achieve this: a fugue, a lurch out of time, and the loss – for Anna – of present identity. There was a sudden and unexplained reconnection with her earlier child-self, a schoolgirl of this city: Liverpool. I remembered that Liverpool was the place where the young Thomas De Quincey hid away, a sabbatical in an Everton cottage, feeding his addictions, humouring amateur authors and poetasters. And inventing, by proxy, the literary festival: the writer in residence, the culture bingo at the seaside. It was from here that he set out, ‘east and west, north and south’, to scavenge ‘all known works or fragments’ by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Cold turkey, and unrecorded dérives through slave-docks and mysterious suburbs, as he braced himself for direct confrontation with the Lakeland poets. The great port was the link with every dimension.

  Our visit was the necessary second stage of the Will Alsop challenge: road-test the M62, the spinal boulevard of the SuperCity. Having driven it with Chris Petit, mile after mile, I understood that we had adopted the idiot’s approach. We rode through a geography that was never there. Nor meant to be. Any attempt to use a proposal as a working model is madness. We must respect the primacy of the imagination. Here, on the overspill of the M62, is the future we are burning up, the non-spaces we must learn to inhabit.

  On Berry Street I spotted what I took to be a notebook in a shop window. Mickey and Minnie Mouse, in relief, against a scarlet-varnish background. Chinese calligraphy. Minnie, in pink pyjamas, is riding on the moon. At £1.30 this was an item requiring a metal grille, security screens, and a hatch through which I had to gesticulate and mouse mime, by making funny-ear shapes. The counter clerk was a Scouse lad of about fifteen. He treated this senior citizen with the rodent fetish with the same wary courtesy he offered to a patron whose head did not quite reach the lip of the counter; a boy of ten or so who had dropped in to pick up his vodka ration. The shop specialized in booze, the Disney stationery was a sideline, a come-on for the juvenile trade. It looked like one of those shotgun-behind-the-counter bunkers in the Bronx, but was otherwise clean and full of surprises. Bottle pocketed, the child asked for a light, then a ciggy to go with it. My notebook turned out to be a bizarre collection of Chinese New Year envelopes: Snow White, Pooh Bear and a pair of horrible furless albino cats I didn’t recognize. The whole pack felt like sachets for very small bribes, birthday cake contracts.

  We were close to the decorative arch of another phantom Chinatown, to restaurants and warehouses recalling trade connections, a city within the city. We drifted on towards the Anglican cathedral and the bistro-bars of Hope Street. My idea was to trade on decrepitude, turning the stiff-backed, liver-spotted wasteland of a 65-year-old self to advantage, by riding across England, Mersey to Humber, on my Hackney Freedom Pass. It had been announced that crumblies with their orange plastic wallets could travel anywhere in the country on local buses: gratis. The hope being that numbers of newly privileged geriatrics would forget to come back, or take themselves off to edgeland asylums (if they hadn’t been converted into gated communities). Like inner-city drinking schools, the elderly are expected to relocate to the seaside. And disappear.

  Anna joined me on this freedom ride through the back roads of Alsop’s SuperCity; she had her own agenda, memories to set against whatever we would find. As, for example, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, where we spent our first night. To Anna it represented the good place, that never-forgotten exeat in a time of austerity; afternoon tea served by white-cuffed waitresses in a high-ceilinged room as big as an opera house. The Adelphi, at the hub of the seatown’s civic centre, close to the railway station and the grand public buildings, was a comfortable watering hole for stopover celebs and expense-account industrialists. Or so the channelled schoolgirl, her prior self, remembered: ‘A magnificent lounge with its acres of armchairs and potted palms, the elegant double-staircase curving away at the far end under the vast chandeliers and the mirrored glass.’ A Palm Court orchestra. Sonar echoes of Gracie Fields, the Marx Brothers, Noël Coward, and a thousand cocktail-shakers servicing platinum blondes and local politicians returning favours.

  My own experience of the Adelphi was more recent. A very different movie: digital, collision-cut, sponsored. The hip advert disguised as yesterday’s underground road meditation. Chris Petit, by keeping his head down and not releasing any of his substantial archive of television essays, had achieved guru status as the man of the road. Radio On, newly reissued in a crisply mastered print, was well received, and accepted as a cultural landmark announcing the coming of Thatcher’s children and the slow death of art cinema. Chris was welcomed in Santiago and Buenos Aires and given the occasional off-pea
k afternoon in Richmond.

  The Audi Channel, who had squatters’ rights on the outer reaches of the Sky satellite network, hired myself and Petit to sit, for one day, in a top-of-the-range motor bristling with cameras. And to drive from Crosby Beach, through Liverpool docks and the Mersey Tunnel, into the enveloping gloom of North Wales. We contemplated the threatened Gormley duplicates, admiring their stoicism, as wind whipped up a minor sandstorm and curs pissed against the slender rusted legs. Liverpool, seen through the frame of our solid, purring car, was a sequence of disconnected quotations. Our present collaboration, and all the earlier films we had made, were not much more than an excuse to talk about cinema and sometimes football. It was my contention that Petit’s German trilogy – Flight to Berlin, Chinese Boxes and Radio On (an autobahn in disguise) – formed a significant detour for anyone interested in film history. I took the opportunity of this sponsored ride, from nowhere to nowhere, to interrogate him about those days.

  As we motored on, rivers and tunnels, Liverpool became Dublin, became Rotterdam, became Hamburg. That was another of Petit’s preoccupations, how cities are swallowing each other, pastiching, making copies of copies. What is the future for the redundant shopping mall? Do we follow Las Vegas and settle for cycles of perpetual reinvention? Novelty sets designed to vanish. Demolition as the money shot. Pop-up cities at the whim of fashion.

  ‘Kit Carson, who was brought in to beef up the dialogue of Chinese Boxes, came up with the lines about leakage across the Berlin Wall, the gangsters from east and west getting together. The plot, with its structure of drug smuggling, political connotations, the involvement of the Americans, was impenetrable. But the shoot was quite abstemious. Whole sub-plots were junked. The money was coming from Paris. By the time they realized what they were getting, it was too late to do anything about it.’