Sunday, November 28, 2004
I've just realised that it's the first Sunday in Advent. Drat, as this means I can't bah-humbug "It's not Christmas yet" at people who insist on being too jovial. As you can tell, I'm one of those people who betinsels and then flambés two bent coat-hangers [a la Blue Peter] at the merest suggestion of too much food. Maybe.
Or perhaps there is nothing like standing in a freezing Homebase, pondering the bewildering array of polyfiller, whilst being subjected to muzaked versions of Christmas carols, themselves being drowned out by a television playing a looped tape of the new JML whatever, to instil a bit of festive cheer. And why are the products in the JML ads always "the new JML..."? Are their products so bad that they can only sell ones that lack the taint of past failure? But at least the television ads bring a touch of unpolished rationality to the broadcasts.
Whilst other regions have news programs leading with stories about cows falling down cliffs, or even their own television channels [that Oxford one is particularly, um, different], we due to some quirk of geography (a big hill to the south) have the joys of BBC London [currently plugging St Dunstans], versus the smug couchedness of Police, Camera, Action-man and generic blonde woman. Both of which piggy-back on the national newsrooms, and so end up being like The Day Today. Which means we hear of anything happening in the West End in full, spinning-graphics Technicolor, and not much beyond that.
If Inspector Sands has thinks Charlton has it bad, he should try living in a place which occasionally is refered to as "the sticks", and that's only on the occasions when it peeks out from behind Peter "The Pantomime Dame" Cockroft's arse (The make-up people at BBC London never get it right on him).
Ok, so perhaps Tweeton isn't all that news worthy, the most recent event which got onto television news being the funeral of someone vaguely famous, but as that was when the children of the middle school weren't allowed outside at lunchtime, lest it should disturb proceedings, and as I was one of the children, it's been a while.
Perhaps the competition aren't much better either though, as I seem to remember South Today always used to object if it had to go anywhere where it couldn't still see the chimneys at Fawley. And Spotlight would only begrudgingly cross the Tamar, and it most certainly wouldn't cross Dartmoor, so while I was at university it was an endless loop of stabbings in Plymouth, problems at Derriford Hospital [Plymouth], and cow related incidents [outskirts of Plymouth, usually].
Although speaking of the lack of news in Tweeton, there is theongoing saga complete non-event [as the council sees it] of the developers who happen to sponsor the railway station (whonawhatnow?), arranging that the council break their own regulations and guidelines in granting permission for another floor to be added to to a block of flat they are building, in order that the council is able to receive money for providing affordable housing. It's all hideously complicated, I suspect half the council don't understand it, and there already were apparent improprieties before the application for the extra floor.
Why do they need the extra floor? The developers claim that the cost of decontaminating the site was so much more than they had expected that they will need the income from pre-selling the extra floor to avoid bankruptcy, and so leaving the building unfinished, and the borough council unable to claim the money and brownie points they get for providing affordable housing. There are those who wonder just how easy it is to arrange a a display of imminent bankruptcy, and suggest this could be the darkest form of post.
[Apropos of nothing: do blackmailers write in tip-ex?].
Needless to say, the extra floor was approved. The town council has now referred the borough council's dealings to the Audit Commission. It's not the like building actually fitted in well with the council's grand scheme of things anyway, being of a modern design best illustrated by Woking or Reading, and in a brick that matches nothing in the area except some other new homes up the road [and those were approved because that set of developers convinced the council that the yellow brick matched the local building stone. It doesn't remotely]. Ok, so the building on the site before hand was in yellow brick, but that was a council compound built in the 1950s, back when this part of town was the industrial bit few knew about, and not many cared about. Whereas now, thanks to a couple of convenient fires, and the car parks of the superstores built on the sites, this place is highly visible.
It was worrying when coming out of the aforementioned Homebase [bang opposite the flats], I ended up looking at the architecture of the flats, and then scanning up to the next noticeable building on the block [the buildings in between being a dwarfed nursery (the child kind), a useful cheap garage, and a couple of buildings that stood empty for years, before being squatted in by a very good nursery (the plant kind), whereupon the council got cross, evicted the squatters who had vastly improved the area, knocked down the buildings and promptly turned the site into a car-park - for council employees.
So the next building which makes an impact is a 1960's police station, in full modernist mode, and decked out in layered white concrete, with dark brown bricks, which manages to turn the entire thing into a greyer version of an unappealing Black Forest gateaux. I then realised I actually quite like the police station, with its spiralling steps, and bizarre platforms on sillily long stilts. It is an ugly building in completely the wrong context [being penned in by recent faux-vernacular offices and flats, an old stone wall holding back the trees fringing somewhere that sells farming paraphernalia, a red brick 1950's single storey industrial building and walled courtyard, and an odd selection of equipment which controls the town's gas supply]. The place is apparently now redundant and impotent [there are still police inside, as indicated by the smoke coming round the stratified brown stained windows, but they just don't answer the door]. Considering all this, it doesn't say much for the new block of flats.
But then I'm odd, and wonder if one could adapt David Sucher's magic troika to include the proviso that no building should be more than one storey higher than its neighbour. But this might lead to two buildings eloping as it were, and bounding up two storeys at a time, each time overtaking the neighbour. So how could one stop that? By amending the last word to be neighbours? Possibly, although that might create chevrons where someone won't budge. Maybe it could be based on the average for the street, the block or the frontage. Perhaps one person might pay for his neighbour to raise the facade on his building.
But this all blocks the emergence of skyscrapers, and of towers and spires. Perhaps there ought to be exemptions. What would Oxford be like if it was the city of dreaming four storeys buildings and nothing higher? There ought to be simple ways of creating built landscapes that feel right. It seems like the more uniformly designed somewhere is, the less it feels right (I am aware that "feels right" is about as vague and subjective as descriptions come, but I haven't got the time to arrange something more suitable). Having said that, the places I'm thinking of tend to be the functionalist visions of anywhere from the 1940s onwards. Places which were designed to be thoroughly utilitarian, and thus devoid of architectural details [and often integrity]. Such places which were usually designed to exactly match a vision of the needs of users, only the vision was never quite good enough, and needs change.
So one has paths taking one to a place that no-one wants to go to. The route to place one does want to go to has been closed since the IRA started. People are spread out in barricaded towers, and sprawling single-storey barrios, both in the same unbending concrete, and with doors, windows and cladding that have long since begun to degrade and obsolesce. Too often the designers knew what the users want, and so the users must now do that, regardless of whether it is what they now want. One spends one's time battling the assumptions of the designers.
Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Based on a recent[ish] visit, here's question for anyone who would care to answer it. Actually make that two questions.
[Using this Map]
What is the best way of getting from the sports hall to the health centre?
And what is the best way of getting [on foot] to the cathedral from the exit of car park 2?
By the way, there are at least two other footpaths leaving the campus to the south which are not shown on the university map. There are bridges between buildings AC and BC, and BB to AA [I think]. The site slopes down towards the north. Anything which isn't marked as a road has steps in.
Perhaps the reason I dislike such uniformly modern places, all part of the same coherent plan, is that although piecemeal building is very limiting, it does limit to size and permanence of mistakes. Who would admit they got a town wrong? Who might happen to knock down and rebuild an extension that wasn't what they wanted? I think there is far too much power bestowed on impressions and reputations.
All of which is a long way from where I meant to go today, not that I can remember what that is by now.
Oh, by the way, how common would you say the phrase "a feather in my cap" is? Reading a rubbishy book [Soho, Keith Waterhouse] and it suddenly hit me. It didn't help that I think he uses "a real feather in my cap". I ought to explain at this point that I am also reading Catch-22 at the moment, in which one of the characters [Cathcart?] looks at everything in terms of them being "a real feather in my cap" and "a real black eye". Hence collapsing into giggles at an undeserving book.
Anyhoo,
Or perhaps there is nothing like standing in a freezing Homebase, pondering the bewildering array of polyfiller, whilst being subjected to muzaked versions of Christmas carols, themselves being drowned out by a television playing a looped tape of the new JML whatever, to instil a bit of festive cheer. And why are the products in the JML ads always "the new JML..."? Are their products so bad that they can only sell ones that lack the taint of past failure? But at least the television ads bring a touch of unpolished rationality to the broadcasts.
Whilst other regions have news programs leading with stories about cows falling down cliffs, or even their own television channels [that Oxford one is particularly, um, different], we due to some quirk of geography (a big hill to the south) have the joys of BBC London [currently plugging St Dunstans], versus the smug couchedness of Police, Camera, Action-man and generic blonde woman. Both of which piggy-back on the national newsrooms, and so end up being like The Day Today. Which means we hear of anything happening in the West End in full, spinning-graphics Technicolor, and not much beyond that.
If Inspector Sands has thinks Charlton has it bad, he should try living in a place which occasionally is refered to as "the sticks", and that's only on the occasions when it peeks out from behind Peter "The Pantomime Dame" Cockroft's arse (The make-up people at BBC London never get it right on him).
Ok, so perhaps Tweeton isn't all that news worthy, the most recent event which got onto television news being the funeral of someone vaguely famous, but as that was when the children of the middle school weren't allowed outside at lunchtime, lest it should disturb proceedings, and as I was one of the children, it's been a while.
Perhaps the competition aren't much better either though, as I seem to remember South Today always used to object if it had to go anywhere where it couldn't still see the chimneys at Fawley. And Spotlight would only begrudgingly cross the Tamar, and it most certainly wouldn't cross Dartmoor, so while I was at university it was an endless loop of stabbings in Plymouth, problems at Derriford Hospital [Plymouth], and cow related incidents [outskirts of Plymouth, usually].
Although speaking of the lack of news in Tweeton, there is the
Why do they need the extra floor? The developers claim that the cost of decontaminating the site was so much more than they had expected that they will need the income from pre-selling the extra floor to avoid bankruptcy, and so leaving the building unfinished, and the borough council unable to claim the money and brownie points they get for providing affordable housing. There are those who wonder just how easy it is to arrange a a display of imminent bankruptcy, and suggest this could be the darkest form of post.
[Apropos of nothing: do blackmailers write in tip-ex?].
Needless to say, the extra floor was approved. The town council has now referred the borough council's dealings to the Audit Commission. It's not the like building actually fitted in well with the council's grand scheme of things anyway, being of a modern design best illustrated by Woking or Reading, and in a brick that matches nothing in the area except some other new homes up the road [and those were approved because that set of developers convinced the council that the yellow brick matched the local building stone. It doesn't remotely]. Ok, so the building on the site before hand was in yellow brick, but that was a council compound built in the 1950s, back when this part of town was the industrial bit few knew about, and not many cared about. Whereas now, thanks to a couple of convenient fires, and the car parks of the superstores built on the sites, this place is highly visible.
It was worrying when coming out of the aforementioned Homebase [bang opposite the flats], I ended up looking at the architecture of the flats, and then scanning up to the next noticeable building on the block [the buildings in between being a dwarfed nursery (the child kind), a useful cheap garage, and a couple of buildings that stood empty for years, before being squatted in by a very good nursery (the plant kind), whereupon the council got cross, evicted the squatters who had vastly improved the area, knocked down the buildings and promptly turned the site into a car-park - for council employees.
So the next building which makes an impact is a 1960's police station, in full modernist mode, and decked out in layered white concrete, with dark brown bricks, which manages to turn the entire thing into a greyer version of an unappealing Black Forest gateaux. I then realised I actually quite like the police station, with its spiralling steps, and bizarre platforms on sillily long stilts. It is an ugly building in completely the wrong context [being penned in by recent faux-vernacular offices and flats, an old stone wall holding back the trees fringing somewhere that sells farming paraphernalia, a red brick 1950's single storey industrial building and walled courtyard, and an odd selection of equipment which controls the town's gas supply]. The place is apparently now redundant and impotent [there are still police inside, as indicated by the smoke coming round the stratified brown stained windows, but they just don't answer the door]. Considering all this, it doesn't say much for the new block of flats.
But then I'm odd, and wonder if one could adapt David Sucher's magic troika to include the proviso that no building should be more than one storey higher than its neighbour. But this might lead to two buildings eloping as it were, and bounding up two storeys at a time, each time overtaking the neighbour. So how could one stop that? By amending the last word to be neighbours? Possibly, although that might create chevrons where someone won't budge. Maybe it could be based on the average for the street, the block or the frontage. Perhaps one person might pay for his neighbour to raise the facade on his building.
But this all blocks the emergence of skyscrapers, and of towers and spires. Perhaps there ought to be exemptions. What would Oxford be like if it was the city of dreaming four storeys buildings and nothing higher? There ought to be simple ways of creating built landscapes that feel right. It seems like the more uniformly designed somewhere is, the less it feels right (I am aware that "feels right" is about as vague and subjective as descriptions come, but I haven't got the time to arrange something more suitable). Having said that, the places I'm thinking of tend to be the functionalist visions of anywhere from the 1940s onwards. Places which were designed to be thoroughly utilitarian, and thus devoid of architectural details [and often integrity]. Such places which were usually designed to exactly match a vision of the needs of users, only the vision was never quite good enough, and needs change.
So one has paths taking one to a place that no-one wants to go to. The route to place one does want to go to has been closed since the IRA started. People are spread out in barricaded towers, and sprawling single-storey barrios, both in the same unbending concrete, and with doors, windows and cladding that have long since begun to degrade and obsolesce. Too often the designers knew what the users want, and so the users must now do that, regardless of whether it is what they now want. One spends one's time battling the assumptions of the designers.
Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Based on a recent[ish] visit, here's question for anyone who would care to answer it. Actually make that two questions.
[Using this Map]
What is the best way of getting from the sports hall to the health centre?
And what is the best way of getting [on foot] to the cathedral from the exit of car park 2?
By the way, there are at least two other footpaths leaving the campus to the south which are not shown on the university map. There are bridges between buildings AC and BC, and BB to AA [I think]. The site slopes down towards the north. Anything which isn't marked as a road has steps in.
Perhaps the reason I dislike such uniformly modern places, all part of the same coherent plan, is that although piecemeal building is very limiting, it does limit to size and permanence of mistakes. Who would admit they got a town wrong? Who might happen to knock down and rebuild an extension that wasn't what they wanted? I think there is far too much power bestowed on impressions and reputations.
All of which is a long way from where I meant to go today, not that I can remember what that is by now.
Oh, by the way, how common would you say the phrase "a feather in my cap" is? Reading a rubbishy book [Soho, Keith Waterhouse] and it suddenly hit me. It didn't help that I think he uses "a real feather in my cap". I ought to explain at this point that I am also reading Catch-22 at the moment, in which one of the characters [Cathcart?] looks at everything in terms of them being "a real feather in my cap" and "a real black eye". Hence collapsing into giggles at an undeserving book.
Anyhoo,
