Open sewer
Sep. 22nd, 2014 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millionreasonsOpen House weekend once more. We travelled east to Poplar, land of industry, motorways and the DLR. Balfron Tower, little sis of Trellick, is being decanted, refurbed and sold to people who work at Canary Wharf. Even Labour councils are getting rid of council housing.
The tower has been turned into an art gallery for a month - some artists have used the estate only as an exhibition space, but some have engaged more with its history: one scary room is wholly decorated in stills from a clause 28 speech film by Margaret Thatcher. The stuff of nightmares. Another has glass mice running up the cupboard in the kitchen. We have booked to see Home on High, a short film about the original occupant of Flat 135 on the 24th floor, who moved in in 1968 and is still alive (87) today, although he has not lived in the flat for 35 years. As well as interviewing him as he revisits the flat, the film shows his collection of knick knacks and gee gaws (which, in a different environment, would be called outsider art): a Charles and Di egg in a cupola, a sort of gnome lego clock, a collage of postcards and clippings from magazines.
The views are marvellous, if misty, and how strange it would have been to live here whilst the Docklands were being redeveloped, watching the vista go from brownfield site to big commerce. Apart from a converted Victorian corner pub, everything in Poplar is new (or rather post-war) build. History wiped away by bombs and slum clearance and now, council sell-offs.
We walked up the canal to Limehouse and on to Abbey Mills Pumping station, a beautiful high Victorian edifice, used now as a back up sewage sorter. It is known as the cathedral of sewage, but it's more of an Alhambra with its decorated doors and intricate tile work. The place was mooted to be a museum and there are industrial bits and bobs around, various tidal level recorders, pumping machines that look like Dr Who baddies, an olde fire extinguisher, 1980s computer stuff that reminds me of Bletchley park, a literal trunk line, and a sewer map that shows that Stoke Newington's effluence flows through to Beckon. I'm more interested in the ceiling.
It's odd to be in an unfamiliar place. I assume what turn out to be smithies are cottages and stunted chimneys are the tombs of the unknown sewage worker. It's beautiful though and the grounds are tree-lined. Who'd have thought shit work could be so peaceful?
Sunday was St Pancras Chambers. What I didn't realise is that most of the building is now apartments, the hotel is 'round the side. However, we aren't allowed up the grand staircase, we have to take the servants' stairs up to the flat under the clock tower, which has the original maintenance stairs although the mechanical bits are now a mezzanine library. I had also never looked closely at the building detail. To save money, the statues that were to be on the frontage were cancelled, but you can still see where they should be. There are also gargoyles on the outside of the building (and on bas relief in the inside) featuring the wyvern, the mythical half-dragon half-gryphon that is the heraldic image of Mercia, home of the Midland railway, which built the hotel.
You can see the train station through the hotel, including the old booking office, which is now in reception. Progress is swings and roundabouts, you used to be able to walk into St Pancras and be on the train in 5 mins, now it's a long walk through a shopping centre. But there is a Sourced food market instead of a Pumpkins.
it's all a bit lovelier than Balfron Tower. Tasteful ostentation. Money is wasted on the rich, they just spend it making their lives easier and not more beautiful.
Afterwards, we wandered up to St Pancras Old Church, home to the Hardy tree, now a gnarled gothic gravestone-suffocated thing. If it were lashing with rain and someone was having a crisis, throw in a dead sheep and we could almost be in one of Hardy's books. We find Mary Wollstonecraft's grave and Sir John Soane's rather small mausoleum - I'd say his Lincoln's Inn house is a better memorial. The church is spartan, puritan almost, but conversely, has a statue of Mary (the virgin, not the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women) and smells of incense.
We walk through Kings Cross station to the bus stop. Foreign tourists queue up to have their photo taken at the Harry Potter 9 3/4 trolley, which they then buy in the Harry Potter shop (the statue used to be between platforms 9 and 10, hidden away in the East Anglia section and there was no queue and no fee). Nobody is looking at the Philip Larkin plaque, the last lines of the Whitsun Weddings. The first lines are on a similar plaque in Hull station. If there's a better reason for visiting Hull, I can't think of it.
Photos by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davidnottingham, except the Larkin plaque.
The tower has been turned into an art gallery for a month - some artists have used the estate only as an exhibition space, but some have engaged more with its history: one scary room is wholly decorated in stills from a clause 28 speech film by Margaret Thatcher. The stuff of nightmares. Another has glass mice running up the cupboard in the kitchen. We have booked to see Home on High, a short film about the original occupant of Flat 135 on the 24th floor, who moved in in 1968 and is still alive (87) today, although he has not lived in the flat for 35 years. As well as interviewing him as he revisits the flat, the film shows his collection of knick knacks and gee gaws (which, in a different environment, would be called outsider art): a Charles and Di egg in a cupola, a sort of gnome lego clock, a collage of postcards and clippings from magazines.
The views are marvellous, if misty, and how strange it would have been to live here whilst the Docklands were being redeveloped, watching the vista go from brownfield site to big commerce. Apart from a converted Victorian corner pub, everything in Poplar is new (or rather post-war) build. History wiped away by bombs and slum clearance and now, council sell-offs.
We walked up the canal to Limehouse and on to Abbey Mills Pumping station, a beautiful high Victorian edifice, used now as a back up sewage sorter. It is known as the cathedral of sewage, but it's more of an Alhambra with its decorated doors and intricate tile work. The place was mooted to be a museum and there are industrial bits and bobs around, various tidal level recorders, pumping machines that look like Dr Who baddies, an olde fire extinguisher, 1980s computer stuff that reminds me of Bletchley park, a literal trunk line, and a sewer map that shows that Stoke Newington's effluence flows through to Beckon. I'm more interested in the ceiling.
It's odd to be in an unfamiliar place. I assume what turn out to be smithies are cottages and stunted chimneys are the tombs of the unknown sewage worker. It's beautiful though and the grounds are tree-lined. Who'd have thought shit work could be so peaceful?
Sunday was St Pancras Chambers. What I didn't realise is that most of the building is now apartments, the hotel is 'round the side. However, we aren't allowed up the grand staircase, we have to take the servants' stairs up to the flat under the clock tower, which has the original maintenance stairs although the mechanical bits are now a mezzanine library. I had also never looked closely at the building detail. To save money, the statues that were to be on the frontage were cancelled, but you can still see where they should be. There are also gargoyles on the outside of the building (and on bas relief in the inside) featuring the wyvern, the mythical half-dragon half-gryphon that is the heraldic image of Mercia, home of the Midland railway, which built the hotel.
You can see the train station through the hotel, including the old booking office, which is now in reception. Progress is swings and roundabouts, you used to be able to walk into St Pancras and be on the train in 5 mins, now it's a long walk through a shopping centre. But there is a Sourced food market instead of a Pumpkins.
it's all a bit lovelier than Balfron Tower. Tasteful ostentation. Money is wasted on the rich, they just spend it making their lives easier and not more beautiful.
Afterwards, we wandered up to St Pancras Old Church, home to the Hardy tree, now a gnarled gothic gravestone-suffocated thing. If it were lashing with rain and someone was having a crisis, throw in a dead sheep and we could almost be in one of Hardy's books. We find Mary Wollstonecraft's grave and Sir John Soane's rather small mausoleum - I'd say his Lincoln's Inn house is a better memorial. The church is spartan, puritan almost, but conversely, has a statue of Mary (the virgin, not the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women) and smells of incense.
We walk through Kings Cross station to the bus stop. Foreign tourists queue up to have their photo taken at the Harry Potter 9 3/4 trolley, which they then buy in the Harry Potter shop (the statue used to be between platforms 9 and 10, hidden away in the East Anglia section and there was no queue and no fee). Nobody is looking at the Philip Larkin plaque, the last lines of the Whitsun Weddings. The first lines are on a similar plaque in Hull station. If there's a better reason for visiting Hull, I can't think of it.
Photos by
davidnottingham, except the Larkin plaque.
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