King’s Cross Stories.
Posted: October 28, 2013 Filed under: Fictional London, London on film, Transport | Tags: Andrew Martin, Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Dombey and Son, Kings Cross, Mrs Wilberforce, St. Pancras, The Ladykillers, Tim Marshall Comments Off on King’s Cross Stories.
St Pancras, Midland Road exit. © Tim Marshall.
Andrew Martin, Notes From The Railways, The Independent, Aug 31 2006:
If, like me, you cycle through King’s Cross most days, the description of Staggs’s Gardens in ‘Dombey and Son’ will seem familiar: ‘…bridges that lead nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations…’
When you remember that a Stag was a railway speculator, that Staggs’s Gardens is supposed to be in Camden, the whole scene is a remarkable prefiguring of the bringing of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link into St Pancras and the associated works, such as the transformation of the streets east of King’s Cross into ‘Regent Quarter’ (which is somehow ten times more irritating as a name than ‘Regent’s Quarter’ would have been) and the development of the old goods yards north of King’s Cross.
Corner of York Way. © Tim Marshall
The developers contend that ‘no one can be nostalgic for the old King’s Cross.’ Well, that depends what you mean by ‘old’. There was so much shilly-shallying over whether King’s Cross or St Pancras should receive the CTRL that the area has been blighted for at least twenty years. (And many locals, incidentally, still wonder why Eurostar is coming into North London at all, given that South London is closer to France, and that the Waterloo terminus seems to be doing perfectly well). Immediately before the blight, the area was, according to Albert Beale of Houseman’s book shop on Caledonian Road, ‘pleasantly seedy’, as opposed to the heart of darkness, which it became.
King’s Cross, Pancras Road exit 2. © Tim Marshall.
Pre-blight, there were dark pubs where the beer mat tended to stick to the bottom of the glass, but King’s Cross was full of interesting transients, and with a sooty, crepuscular, train-haunted feel. When coming down from York as a teenager, I would drink in two wonderful old pubs in the south end of York way. The first was the Duke of York. It’s now called ‘Offshore’. Nipping in there the other day, I asked the Antipodean barmaid if she knew what the pub had been called before. A rather cruel experiment, I admit. ‘As far as I know it’s always been called Offshore,’ she said. I wonder if she also thinks it’s always been painted sky blue, and carried the slogan ‘Backpacking the world’ as it does today. This would certainly have made it stand out in 1860.
The second pub was The Railway Tavern, which had a black and white tv as late as about 1995, and was full of railway men, with those distinctive box-like shoulder bags. It is now hidden behind a hoarding, waiting to re-emerge, hung, drawn and Regent Quartered. I suppose it’ll be a Juice Bar.
McDonalds, Pentonville Rd. © Tim Marshall.
In Staggs’s Gardens, the nice old Ham and Beef Shop suddenly becomes the Railway Eating House, and the word ‘Railway’ is imposed on everything, even buildings that have as yet only a façade. My fear for King’s Cross tends in the opposite direction. I worry it will lose its railway character. I could be wrong. Most of the old buildings on the Railway Lands are to be preserved. And many of the locations used in the Ladykillers – which was made in 1955 when getting on for forty trains a day were still coming into the goods yard – still survive.
King’s Boulevard. © Tim Marshall.
The house of the old lady, Mrs Wilberforce, tended to flit around a bit. Some of the exteriors were done in Goldington Crescent, which is just as elegant as ever. For her rear garden (from where the bodies of the crooks were dumped onto coal trains) a patch of grass on top of Copenhagen Tunnel was used, and if you go along to the end of Vale Royal, off York Way, you can see the very spot. A man keeps horses there. The top of the tunnel is all black, cracked Gothic battlements, and the trains still thunder underneath towards the mass of X’s that form the points leading into King’s Cross.
I do hope this prospect is preserved. If not…well, The Ladykillers is just out on DVD.
© Andrew Martin. His new novel The Night Train to Jamalpur is published by Faber on 7 of November. Tim Marshall‘s album King’s Cross Stories is on his Tumblr site.
A Clockwork London. (3)
Posted: April 15, 2013 Filed under: Dereliction, London on film | Tags: East Ham, Full Metal Jacket, Millennium Mills, Sgt Lee Ermey, Stanley Kubrick Comments Off on A Clockwork London. (3)
Millennium Mills. © David Secombe 2013.
The Road to East Ham – Micheal MacCumiskeigh:
East Ham. I’m still only in East Ham. I walk down the cracked concrete road under an arborial sky on the road to Vietnam in all its artifice.
The derelict gas works is dressed with imported Spanish palm trees hanging their heads, famished in a cold climate. The wrong choppers and the wrong soldiers. A bellicose nest of English squaddies squat in a huge marquee, drinking tea and intermittently stuffing their faces with carbs and gravy.
Further still from here the final act is played out, the monolith that is Millennium Mills made of indestructible stuff: concrete and thick muscle-studded girders and lots and lots of asbestos. Made of all these things yet held together with an austere elegance. She casts a shadow of disdain across the ticky-tacky Barrett homes that now blister one side of the elegant watery fingers of Albert Docks.
I left the day I arrived, after a morning of basic drilling, Sgt. Lee Ermey’s venom still damp on my face. I walked back the way I came. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know Kubrick was one of my favourite directors. I kicked my heels walking slowly down the road. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.
Micheal – who was a young dance student at the time – was engaged as a ‘marine’ extra on Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket, which recreated Saigon and Hue in East Ham. The unit base was at Millennium Mills. Lee Ermey played the drill sergeant in the film, having been originally hired as a military adviser.
A Clockwork London. (2)
Posted: April 4, 2013 Filed under: Fictional London, Housing, London on film | Tags: A Clockwork Orange, Binsey Walk, Bird's Eye View, George Plemper, John Betjeman, Owen Hatherley, Stanley Kubrick, Thamesmead 1 Comment
Southmere Lake and Binsey Walk, Thamesmead. © George Plemper 1976.
George Plemper:
In late 1972 I made the journey to Leicester Square to see A Clockwork Orange. As with all Kubrick’s
films I thought the film was visually stunning and I loved the use of music throughout. The physical
and sexual violence seemed to me more theatrical than factual and I was astonished to hear a year
later the film had been banned.
All thoughts of the film had long gone when I crossed the footbridge across Yarnton Way
to Riverside School, Thamesmead in 1976. I had no idea I was entering a scene from Kubrick’s vision
of a desolate and violent Britain. My aims were simple; I was going to use the camera to show my
pupils that they were great, to show them that we were all worthwhile.
From A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley:
It’s impossible to praise the original Thamesmead without caveats. There were never enough facilities, the transport links to the centre were always appalling, and the development was always shockingly urban for its outer-suburban context. Regardless, it is something special, a truly unique place. It always was, and remains so in its current, amputated form.
Unlike its successors, it’s flood-proof and still architecturally cohesive, after decades of abuse. Around Southmere lake you can see, just about, how with some decent upkeep and with tenants being given the choice rather than being dumped here, this could have been a fantastic place … This is basically a working-class Barbican, and if it were in EC1 rather than SE28 the price of a flat would be astronomical. Today it feels beaten and downcast, and it only ever gets into the news through vaguely racist stories about the Nigerian fraudsters apparently based here; but its architectural imagination, civic coherence and thoughtful detail, its nature reserves and wild birds, have everything that the ‘luxury flats’ lack.
Southmere Lake and Binsey Walk today. © David Secombe 2013.
Where Alex walked … watch him pitch his droogs into the cold, cold waters of Southmere Lake here.
See also: Pepys Estate 1, Pepys Estate 2, Domeland, Metro-Land.
A Clockwork London. (1)
Posted: April 2, 2013 Filed under: Bohemian London, London on film, Pavements | Tags: A Clockwork Orange, Alton Estate Roehampton, Anthony Burgess, Clockwork orange locations, Fahrenheit 451, Stanley Kubrick, Wandsworth roundabout Comments Off on A Clockwork London. (1)
Stanley Kubrick on the set of A Clockwork Orange. © Dmitri Kasterine 1969.
From A Clockwork Orange, dir.: Stanley Kubrick, 1971:
……………………………………………………………………..ALEX:
………………………………One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie,
………………………………howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp
………………………………blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking,
………………………………rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his
………………………………age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one
………………………………was.
(… and with that, Alex and his three droogs start attacking an old tramp lying in the underpass shown below.)
This week’s offering on The London Column is a short series on Stanley Kubrick’s use of London as a giant prop basket. Dmitri Kasterine’s portrait shows the director in his pomp: extravagantly booted, Arriflex to the ready, the world-conquering auteur of 1969. Only 41, he already has The Killing, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey behind him, an amazing achievement – which might explain why he looks a little weary. But his tiny camera and huge boots suggest the nature of his new project, a film far removed from the 70mm, Cinerama world of 2001. SK’s new one is set much nearer home.
Kubrick’s withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange in the UK – a ban that lasted from the late ’70s until his death – lent the film a mystique for all those British film fans unable to see it. I bought a pirated VHS tape of it (£15 in 1991) from a stall in Greenwich market and was, inevitably, hugely disappointed. A friend who watched it with me commented ‘Whatever I expected, this isn’t it.’ It is prescient in many ways, especially in its depiction of the dissemination of sexualised imagery (even if it exhibits some old-world sexism in the process), but time has not been kind to the Kubrick/Burgess brand; Kubrick’s other films of the ’60s and ’70s stand up much better. But it remains a terrific showcase for 1960s architecture.
Kubrick shot A Clockwork Orange quickly and cheaply in found locations within easy reach of his Hertfordshire lair. Carefully chosen new builds in Wandsworth, Uxbridge, Sydenham, West Norwood, Borehamwood and, most famously, Thamesmead, served as ready-made cycloramas for the director’s realisation of Burgess. The film’s opening atrocity is committed by Alex and co. in an underpass beneath Wandsworth roundabout. Like the Westway and the approaches to the Blackwall Tunnel, the roundabout and its environs constitute a sort of Birmingham in London: an imposing 1960s circulatory system just south of Wandsworth Bridge, complete with truncated and pointless autostrada carrying traffic to and from Wandsworth Common, where the motorway peters out in despair. (Wandsworth roundabout’s other claim to cultural distinction is the Sunday in 1973 when, during a furious row with his wife Jill Bennett, John Osborne drove his Mercedes into it.)
The pedestrianised centre of the roundabout is an assemblage of geometric concrete forms, served by brooding, permanently shadowed underpasses: ideal for Kubrick’s purposes and, subsequently, anyone else seeking to create representations of urban anomie. In fact, the association of Brutalist buildings with urban hopelessness has become such a cliché that it is worth noting that A Clockwork Orange pioneered the look. Francois Truffaut had shot Fahrenheit 451 in similar fashion a couple of years earlier, using Roehampton’s Alton Estate as a setting for a future society where the printed word is forbidden; but the dreamy, otherworldly mood of his film is worlds away from Kubrick’s visceral scenario. In seeking a cinematic equivalent for Burgess, Kubrick used Brutalism to create a visual shorthand for future awfulness. One can only imagine the dismay of early seventies architects and civic engineers seeing the finished film, which simultaneously treasures and trashes the well-meaning buildings on show, and explicitly links massed concrete with looming dread.
If Kubrick were making the film now, one wonders what visual cues he would employ. The social idealism of Brutalism has been supplanted now by an aggressively ingratiating public architecture based on consumerism, a landscape pithily described by Owen Hatherley as ‘the post-1979 England of business parks, Barratt homes, riverside ‘stunning developments’, out-of-town shopping and distribution centres.’ Which locations would Kubrick use today? Bromley? Woking, maybe? Corporate faux-vernacular would offer the right look. Saturday night in a modern British provincial town offers ample scope for rape and pillage, the pedestrianised shopping precinct the perfect setting for a spot of ultra-violence. Hell is the walkway between Nando’s and Asda.
Southern underpass, Wandsworth Roundabout. © David Secombe 2012.
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