Mark Chalmers

Given my recent piece which was ostensibly about Tony Hayward, the (former) captain of industry – I thought it was also worth marking the recent death of Jimmy Reid, the shop steward at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders who became world-famous during the UCS Work-In.  Once a talisman of the Scottish economy, the shipbuilding industry was in dire trouble by the early 1970’s: we’re going through similarly straitened times at the moment, and hundreds of Scottish architects have been paid off.  The effect is as devastating to construction as the Heath government’s proposed cuts would have been to the Clydeside shipyards, had Reid not stepped forwards.

Jimmy Reid, like James Maxton and John McLean before him, was a socialist – in the true sense of that unpopular word.  Too often labelled a “Red Clydesider”, a very localised label, his legacy is perhaps better seen through the lens of his belief in internationalism, and the ability of men to organise themselves and improve their own lot.  Now, while architects have never been “unionised” – the essentially Victorian system of blue collar trades separated from white collar professions means that most architects see themselves like doctors and lawyers do, so tend to join professional associations – the shipyards were true union shops.  The subtle difference lies in how men and women are aligned: professional associations represent their members’ interests, whereas trade unions fight for their members’ livelihoods.

Being a member of a union may not save your job, if the practice you worked for runs out of commissions – but it seems to me that the architectural profession does not have, and has never had, a figure of even a fraction of Reid’s stature.  Who speaks for the construction industry when design jobs are being shed?  Regardless of his politics, Jimmy Reid’s undying contribution to the life of our country was to demonstrate how work can be reorganised by those who carry it out.  When there isn’t enough work to go around, do you try to tackle the causes (as the UCS Work-In did) or do you make “tough decisions” such as paying off junior staff, releasing contract staff, or taking a vertical slice through a practice so that the “pain” is shared?  A recent piece in Building Design acknowledges practices which have done each of the above – but none has saved jobs in the way that the Work-In did.

Rather than redistributing wealth (in society, as the socialists proposed; or within businesses, to the horror of the people who run them), Jimmy Reid’s insight was to organise work in a more equitable way, so that those who want to work, can.  This is truer to the spirit of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations than those supposed “free market” politicians realise.  The Geddes Commission on Shipbuilding and its successors had re-organised shipbuilders under state control – but the experiment failed.  Much of the shipyards’ work was Government-funded or grant-aided; drastic cuts were proposed.  Faced with 8500 men being laid off on the Upper Clyde alone, Jimmy Reid invented something entirely new: rather than a strike, the shipbuilders would take the work available and demonstrate how they could run the yards more effectively than their managers could.  They had no choice if they wanted to save their jobs – and in the end, the efforts of Reid and his compatriots helped to change government policy, and changed the way the world saw Scotland.

Construction is like shipbuilding, in several ways.  When the economy is going well, most of the workload in private practice comes from private sector developers, so it’s probably right to leave the free market to find an equilibrium in the supply of and demand for architects.  Yet when the Government steps in and in effect half our economy becomes a “command economy”, in the sense that public spending is being used as an instrument – then it’s fair to say that the commissioning of work could be organised along different lines.  The market economy works well in booms, but self-evidently it fails on every level during the busts.  Now that the construction industry is bleeding, and much of the remaining work is funded by and commissioned by government agencies – shouldn’t they step in to manage the distribution and retention of design jobs?

Jimmy Reid came to the fore during an era of firebrand politics – but whereas the students of ‘68 (such as the young Jean Nouvel) were militant but unable to organise themselves effectively; the UCS workers of ‘71 proved capable of running things better than the managers.  Reid put steel into the souls of the generation that came before mine, and he was also one of that breed of men you don’t seem to get now: a self-taught intellectual who held real political convictions.  Unlike the careerists we see on our televisions today, he read, thought and wrote for himself: his inaugural speech as rector of the university of Glasgow was carried on the front page of the New York Times.  Which other Scot has achieved international recognition like that, and for his ideas, rather than his personality or wisecracks?  Ideas are everything, after all, in politics just as in a creative industry like architecture.

Perhaps, unlike Jimmy Reid, the architectural profession’s leaders don’t realise that architecture is about buildings, but the architectural profession itself is about people.  If skills aren’t maintained, if jobs are destroyed, then the future looks bleak, and the profession becomes less attractive and eventually it fails to attract the bright and the able.  Jimmy Reid recognised this, and campaigned for decades to modernise Scotland’s economy so that it could provide more and better jobs: he championed high technology projects such as the building of Rolls-Royce’s revolutionary RB211 turbofan in Scotland, and the construction of Oceanspan, a deepwater port on the Lower Clyde which among other things would have made our manufacturing base more competitive.  These schemes would have bettered our lot, by creating and retaining tens of thousands of highly-skilled jobs – which is the aim of politicians of every stripe, isn’t it?

As someone said to me a few days ago, there are people being paid off who shouldn’t be, folk looking for jobs who deserve to be working instead to better our society – their years of prior experience and effort are being wasted.  The UCS Work-In showed the world there was another way.

RIP Jimmy Reid, a world-class man.

Text and drawing treatment © Mark Chalmers, 2010

The Highland Housing Fair has raised expectations for the rest of Inverness – just as it has brought low energy/ high ecology construction to greater prominence throughout the rest of the country.  It’s commonly held that Inverness suffered from rapid growth, as much as benefiting from it, and the city is often referred to as the fastest-growing in Europe.  Aside from this catchy strap-line, an objective look around Inverness suggests that growth has resulted in homogeneous retail and housing estates on the outskirts: whilst they’re not wonderful architecture, they are no different to what you find in every other Scottish town and city.

Stepford Wives Retail Park at the Inshes

In search of what prompted someone to nominate Inverness for the Carbuncles, you may come to the conclusion that (apart from the architectural zoo of the Housing Fair) the town suffers from a low standard of ordinariness.  The argument has been made that what urbanism – as opposed to architecture – wants are large numbers of good quality but polite buildings, which slot into a masterplan.  In so doing, they will contribute to a district or town enjoying a “high standard of ordinariness” and as a corollary, they might avoid the iconic buildings which can sometimes lift the whole area, or just as easily date quickly and become an eyesore.

Inverness railway station – the gateway to the capital of the Highlands – is rather squat and lacks the generosity you might expect when seeking the Great Highland Welcome – especially in the wake of the Homecoming.  In fact, Perth station feels much more like the gateway to the Highlands, with its many platforms and airy barrel vaults, plus Brief Encounter platform clocks.  As a result, the station at Inverness and neighbouring Falcon Square shopping mall peg your expectations at a low level: beyond them, there are several blocks’ worth of decent Victorian buildings and the inevitable pedestrian precincts which make up your typical, ordinary town centre.  None of it is remarkable, though, and the real character of Inverness only emerges when you go towards the river.

Acres of slabs and bollards.

There is Leakey’s cavernous bookshop, housed in the conversion of a former kirk, with a blazing wood stove in the centre of the nave.  Beyond lies the Ness, with a bouncy footbridge which predates Foster’s Millennium Bridge by a century: it is one of several graceful river crossings, and these differentiate Inverness from the solid masonry arches over the Tay at Perth, or the Wacky Races efforts over the Clyde in Glasgow which appeal to structural gymnasts more than structural rationalists.  Further along the bank of the Ness are a couple of neat conversions from a few years back – the former Art TM gallery, and Pask & Pask’s glass-fronted restaurant.  Apart from the concrete block underneath the castle, there are few real carbuncles in the centre.

Move further out and Inverness continues its dialogue with Perth: where the latter has its “Motor Mile” along Dunkeld Road, Inverness has a monoculture of car showrooms on Harbour Road.  Whilst their contents embody high technology, with the integration of steel, alloy and composites into expressive shapes … the containers are tin sheds dropped from outer space.  If a masterplan had been put in place, the showrooms could have been a series of pavilions in white and silver with a common eaves height, and set on the same building line, each with a colourful totem out front identifying the dealership.  I’ve seen it done in Germany, and it need not have cost any more than the random boxes on Harbour Road today.

The realm of the car, not the person

Elsewhere are stand-out buildings, both relatively bad, relatively ordinary and relatively good: Page & Park’s copper vortex-shaped Maggies Centre in the grounds of Raigmore Hospital; the nearby Gala Bingo hall at the entrance to the Beechwood Medipark; Inverness College’s blank concrete box across the road from the car showrooms; the big, dumb, abandoned sheds of Gray's Sawmill; and the burnt-out hulk of Craig Dunain Asylum, which awaits conversion into flats.  Given Inverness’s growth, and how busy the town appears even during this recession (there were no hire cars to be had mid-week, for example), perhaps investment will sort out the bad in due course, and bring it level with the standard of ordinariness in the rest of the city.  As it is, the Inshes Retail Park shown in the photos is typical of Inverness’s periphery: none of it is terrible, but if you travel even half a mile outwards, the character of the old town centre has been surrendered completely to very ordinary retail sheds and car parks.

Early in the morning, you witness a stream of charity cyclists departing from outside the derelict John o’ Groats Hotel, headed for Land’s End.  After breakfast, day trippers arrive to board the passenger ferry and make a choppy passage to Orkney across the Pentland Firth.  Later in the day, Dutch and German tourists arrive in Mondeos, mouthing – Is this it? – then wheel around in the car park and head back inland, looking for a hotel.  John o’ Groats is a point of departure: it’s a place for leaving Scotland behind, and John o’ Groats has been left behind by Scotland.  There is no sense of arrival here, nor anything to attract anyone other than the abstract notion of the edge of Scotland.

The car park at World's End

John o’ Groats threw away its natural advantages – the sublime sandstone cliffs at Duncansby Head, the rich wildlife, and the dramatic light which rakes Stroma, across the sound.  The area around the village is a low-density rubbish dump, littered with abandoned buses, rusty roadrollers and wrecked cars.  These fields are also dotted with sheep, plus a mixture of small cottar houses and overgrown bungalows: in that respect it’s exactly like the rural south-west of the Irish Republic.  These are scattered communities with no centre, afflicted instead with a rash of executive ranch-style bungalows which the crofters have built.  All of that would mean nothing if this wasn’t John o’ Groats, but this place advertises itself as a great tourist draw, hence moulding peoples’ impressions of Scotland. 

John o' Groats Hotel

The bitterest sight at John o’ Groats is the famous signpost, with fingers which should point to the North Pole, London, New York and so forth.  The pole is concreted into the ground right enough, but should you want your photo taken beside it, you call a phone number.  A while later, a “photographer” will turn up with the fingers, slot them into the pole and charge you £18 for the privilege.  A few days later, he will send you a couple of prints of the occasion – although overseas postage is extra.  That sums up the tawdry feel of John o’ Groats, and must leave a poor impression of Scotland with all those Dutch and German tourists.  It’s an insult to them, treating visitors cynically and making a fool of the Scots in the process.  Rip-off Scotland: so much for our bonhomie.

Derelict for a decade…

The backdrop to the signpost is the John o’ Groats Hotel, which must surely win an award … for being the most northerly derelict building in Scotland.  It’s surrounded by a clutter of timber huts, caravans, portacabins and untended landscaping.  The sad thing about it is that many people would like to think a better John o’ Groats exists.  This place is so much more famous than the other cardinals – Fife Ness, Ardnamurchan Point, Cape Wrath – yet in the past has been left to people like Peter de Savary to fleece visitors without putting anything back in.  A long time ago, there used to be only two buildings at John o’ Groats – the hotel, and the Last House, a neat white-painted cottage which sold a few postcards and souvenirs.  In some respects, that was enough – and rather than rip people off with a demountable signpost, it might be better to go back to that simple model. 

Hotel, and the signpost at the end of the world

Now there are plans to revamp this piece of terminal architecture, but the images released suggest that redevelopment will make things worse.  Although the hotel will be re-opened, the car park will be extended into an even larger tract of windswept tarmac, and the two will be connected with a twee “outlet village” housed in an ersatz “High Street” along the lines of the architectural parasite which clings to Gretna Green.  Robert Adam’s drawings suggest neither modern Scots Baronial (which can work well, as at the House of Bruar) nor proper vernacular (the croft houses or meal mill in the vicinity of John o’ Groats).  Instead, it appears to be the offspring of Andres Duany’s Seaside.  His current influence over the Highlands may yet do real damage to our heritage.

Departure point: the Pentland ferry

Redevelopment could be an opportunity to break down and disperse the parking into pockets, screening each with Caithness flag fences or drystane dykes.  Picnic areas and viewing platforms could be similarly sheltered from the wind, with openings framing views out over the Pentland Firth.  Any new buildings could be clustered to create a point of arrival, a symbol of the start of Scotland, rather than its current dispersed state as the end of the line.  In such an exposed situation, traditional Scots architects built protected courtyards: why not here?  The “High Street” demonstrates ignorance of the site’s character, and the Scottish context – it will funnel the wind from the Firth and blast tourists off their feet. 

Bus graveyard on the road to the End of the World.

For me, John o’ Groats should win the Carbuncles, because not only does it have great natural advantages which nevertheless have been thrown away, but the redevelopment plans may well make things worse, rather than redeeming the signpost at the end of the world.

True fact: the approach to Denny is better than the road into Lochgelly.  What comes next, however, is a Battenburg-coloured eyesore in desperate need of revitalisation.

Lochgelly is accessed via a series of roundabouts from the A92, the West Fife Expressway, and cuts across the miles of no-man’s land which overlooks former pit tips, and the Mossmorran Gas Terminal, near the Ore valley.  Denny is reached along a road which passes through rolling countryside, between stands of mature trees and pastureland in the Carron Valley: once it reaches civilisation, the villas prove that in the past Denny didn’t lack ambition nor the will to invest money in the community.  However, today it feels like Denny has more structural unemployment than its counterpart in Fife, though it also has one major “carbuncle” building at its heart.

Inside the former Carrongrove papermill, now demolished.

Like Lochgelly, the reasons for Denny being nominated as a run-down carbuncle town could be down to pure economics.  The demise of Carrongrove papermill came in 2005: it has now been demolished to make way for a McTaggart Mickel housing development, but the wound is still tender, as we discovered when a former mill worker approached us in the street, to offer his take on the town’s problems.  Carrongrove was one of the earliest, and largest mechanised papermills in Britain.  Ironically, major investment by the Georgia Pacific company in Carrongrove during the 1980’s had transformed it, making a coated card which was profitable even to the end, and worthwhile for Tullis Russell to buy and continue manufacturing themselves.  Denny’s loss was Markinch’s gain.

The folk of Denny were freer and more voluble with their opinions than residents anywhere else we visited; there was universal agreement that the shopping parade on Church Walk and Stirling Street has to come down.  In the 1990’s, a new coat of render with a Battenburg cake colour scheme did nothing to cheer it up – especially because the parapet flashings have failed, and large sheets of render have come away from the blockwork.  Car park, shops and flats are linked with walkways straight out of A Clockwork Orange, their concrete streaming with water leaks.  On a human level, one block of flats was apparently let out to “undesirables”, and not even the MacGuyvering with bedding plants and hanging baskets manages to improve that aspect.  I can’t help feeling they are just a mudflap on the battle tank of Dereliction.

Denny shares a Town Centre Manager with other neighbouring towns, and Falkirk Council have well-developed plans to re-develop the Battenburg, working with Henry Boot as their development partner to demolish the five-storey blocks and build new two storey shopping parades in their place.  The issue of scale is one thing, but another problem which the redevelopment may not solve is that of building lines: set too far back from the street edge, the proposal feels less urban than it might.  The Council plans have been held up by the credit crunch, and meantime Keppie will revise their masterplan to suit.  So far, they have identified that there is no commercial demand for offices, nor is there a will to build flats here again, so the redevelopment will consist almost entirely of small shops with a retail anchor (perhaps an Aldi or Lidl type of supermarket) plus a library.

Inside the former Carrongrove papermill, now demolished.

So Denny’s regeneration has taken on at least two aspects: firstly a housing estate on the site of the cluster of papermills on the Carron at Fankerton, which gradually coalesced into Carrongrove over the course of two centuries.  Its cathedral-like esparto sheds, the mill’s giant power station, and the breathtaking scale of the Twinwire machine have gone, to be replaced with tattie print bungalows.  Secondly – in the town centre, the ill-suited shopping parade will come down, with new buildings and a revised road layout intended to remove traffic from Stirling Street, and focus it instead on pedestrians and shops. 

The need for redevelopment of the shopping area is far more pressing than the need for more spec. bungalows, and perhaps too important to rely on “market forces” delivering it.

The next two towns nominated for the Carbuncles were "company" towns: Lochgelly was a mining town and Denny was a mill town.  The last deep pit in the Fife coalfield shut over two decades ago, but the death of the massive Carrongrove papermill at Denny was comparatively recent, when Inveresk Paper teetered on the brink of failure.  These timelines make an interesting contrast: how long does it take to regenerate a town once its major employer leaves?

We visited both towns on a typical Scots July day.  The light smirr of rain in Glasgow transformed into torrential rain once on the M8 motorway, and although it eased before Lochgelly, the curtain of Fife drizzle soaked into clothes, cameras and folks’ spirits.  The question for the Fife town is whether earlier regeneration efforts have been successful; a couple of handsome tenements have been rejuvenated, the former Miner’s Institute has been revitalised, and the inevitable public realm improvements to the centre of town have created a small public square with a token of public art. 

Arguably the money would have been better spent immediately on improving the town’s former former civic centre, or its former cinema, with an Art Deco tower and large auditorium currently lying empty.  The little square lies at the hinge of the High Street yet offers nothing other than domestic scale bounding walls and a couple of seats.  Despite the expensive paving and International Socialist-style sculpture, it’s a recessive, negative space which might have been better served by building (or retaining?) a major building here, to assert itself as a piece of townscape.  As it is, the Kingdom Housing Association is building a new block to house business starter units just a couple of doors down – so there is economic activity, and despite the dreich weather, the streets were busy.

Lochgelly has a “carbuncle” building close to its heart, the old civic centre, or “Lochgelly Centre”.  The demolition man’s signage, huts and Heras fence surround it now, and its death is imminent.  When it was built; not in the 1950’s, not in the 1960’s, but in 1976, things weren’t so different to today.  There is still a need for a cohesive social centre to the community, and the functions this relatively young building housed – arts, leisure, entertainment – still need a home.  You wonder whether anyone considered adapting, rehabilitating, modernising, applying a new skin with better performance?  Demolishing it for the sake of the look of things is a waste, especially in a community without its own cinema, comprehensive sports facilities, or a community hall of a scale to accommodate the whole community.

What’s also sad is that nothing in the town centre marks the passing of the Ore Valley’s fortune.  Before nationalisation in 1948, the Fife Coal Company had some of the most ambitious pit modernisation plans in Europe.  Many of the big steps forward in coal mining, using automatic coal cutters, hydraulic props and armoured conveyors were pioneered in this part of Scotland.  Perhaps the town has turned its back on the coal industry, due to the back-breaking work and inherent dangers, and incomers don’t realise the place’s qualities.  Andres Duany apparently thought Lochgelly had ample greenbelt land on its outskirts – “This is the most developed part of Scotland and look at the amount of green land… you’re not running out” – but that completely misses the point of the urgent need to regenerate its town centre.  Mining towns still retain Victorian buildings of real quality, such as the Miner’s Institute or the Lochgelly Co-operative, and to condemn a community to a future of yet more peripheral estates with one dismissive aside shows poor faith in the Scots’ ability to regenerate the centres of our own towns.

It feels like money has been spent in Lochgelly, but on the wrong things – such as the public square, the demolition of the civic centre, and also the charette which Duany participated in, offering housebuilders a "get-out" to develop on the outskirts – when civic facilities should have been provided or upgraded instead, to increase the critical mass of the town centre.

A photo essay on East Kilbride, the first of the 2010 Carbuncles nominations – and why it wheeled our expectations around.  Words and photos by Mark Chalmers.

This year, as in previous years, I was invited to get involved with the Carbuncles.  However, I usually demurred, because I was either busy in work, or felt uneasy about the tone of the judging, which was often perceived as picking a New Town then poking it with a sharpened stick.  Locals thought so, and their newspapers usually took up the cudgels and prompted an exchange of views on what was lacking in each community.  Sometimes bad press resulted, with the judges accused of architectural snobbery.  Changed circumstances this year mean I have an opportunity to travel to see these "down towns", to take the time to consider them properly, and perhaps tackle the preconceptions, which are unfailingly negative.

Mention East Kilbride and preconceived notions come to the forefront of folk’s thoughts; in my case the preconceptions are musical rather than architectural.  EK was home to the Jesus & Mary Chain, arguably the best rock & roll band Scotland has produced in the last 50 years.  It also played host to the young Roddy Frame, late of Aztec Camera, whose lyric “from Westwood to Hollywood” alluded to his progress from a suburb in the Lanarkshire town to the music business Mecca of Los Angeles.  Better known than either, though, are Sharleen Spiteri’s group, Texas, who wrote a pop song called “Polo Mint City” … the nickname earned by East Kilbride thanks to its many roundabouts.  Polo Mint City could be EK’s anthem.

There are over 60 roundabouts in the town, according to South Lanarkshire Council, the best known being the Whirlies, with its spherical steel sculptures landed on plinths in its centre.  When we visited, the July sun was beating down on EK, and that cheered the place up from the off, glinting on the Whirly spheres.  It’s easy to attack West Coast towns for being habitually dull, grey and lifeless – when in fact the weather plays a large part in making them dreich.  The town was lifted by sunshine while we were there.  We were lucky, perhaps, but we also saw the town’s greenery at its best: aside from lots of twee hanging baskets which seem hopelessly domestic in the context of the sprawling shopping centre, we also saw how widespread and successful the belts of mature greenery around the New Town are.

Another surprise for everyone present was the former heart of East Kilbride, the “village” which sits next to the Maxwellton conservation area.  In a scene straight out of Gordon Cullen’s book “Townscape”, a curving street of Scots vernacular shops and houses is full of life and commerce, its scale perfect, and its paving immaculate.  Having anticipated dreary system-built flats, junkie-haunted underpasses, and glum hounds tied to lamp-posts, the village High Street really was a delight.  From here onwards, it became clear that although individual buildings may deserve to be called carbuncles, the town as a whole certainly doesn’t.  That was reinforced by a local architect, who we intercepted as he made his way back to his office with a mid-morning piece; he was happy to emphasise that East Kilbride works well as a pedestrian town where you can readily walk to work.  That’s despite all those roundabouts, and the perceived emphasis on the car.


One of East Kilbride’s architectural high points (literally, since the town’s key buildings were consciously sited on hilltops) is St Bride’s Church.  The largest church built by Gillespie Kidd & Coia, seating 800 parishioners, it was completed in 1963, a squat brick cube with a tall brick campanile.  It was nicknamed “Fort Apache” by locals – but that does no justice to the interior, an impressive volume with areas of both sombre and luminous light.  The campanile has been dismantled, but the remainder is in good condition, and the curate emphasised how busy the church is.  We’re used to hearing about Gillespie Kidd & Coia’s architectural failures, but St Bride’s is a success – and it is linked to the rest of the town with a hierarchy of roads, cyclepaths and footpaths.  As in other New Towns (EK was one of the earliest, founded in 1947), those on foot are kept apart from the car.


Round and round in Polo Mint City;
Isn’t it pretty in Polo Mint City?

Beside one of the polo mint roundabouts, beyond Hairmyres Hospital, is the most unlikely building in the town.  A Spanish Revival-style shopping parade, painted canary yellow, looks faintly ridiculous when viewed through architectural goggles.  Perhaps the intended effect was that of a cheerful place with allusions to warmer climes; no-one will knock you for trying to brighten up the dour Scotish winter.  However, architects might suggest it would have been better treated like its neighbour, whose glass, timber and harling sit far more happily in Lanarkshire.  You could make a case for this Hacienda being a Carbuncle – but that doesn’t extend to the rest of the town.  So, the first potential “Carbuncle Town” may turn out to be the exception against which the others are contrasted.

During the summer of 1755, a young Scotsman wandered among the ruins of ancient Rome.  He sketched the baths of Caracalla, picking his way through collapsed arches and fragments of temples, gradually absorbing the essence of Classical architecture.  He was taking part in the Grand Tour, heading to the other side of Europe to explore urban dereliction – always with an eye for its aesthetic qualities.

I mentioned the modern love for ruins in a previous piece, and spoke about its antecedents – Richard Nickell and John Harris are two – but the pursuit of dereliction is a far older preoccupation.  Its lineage stretches far into the past from John Piper, who avidly photographed and painted the bombsites of World War 2, through the pastoral watercolourist Cotman, to Giovanni Piranesi, whose etchings of the Carceri and views of Paestum still ignite the imagination.  That lineage also includes the young Scotsman, a chap by the name of Robert Adam who went on to design a few rickles of his own…

Ironically, modern explorers chide each other for being mere “tourists”, visiting only the most popular sites, such as the Sinteranlage in Duisburg, the Papeteries Darblay outside Paris, Millennium Mills in London’s Docks, the Forges de Clabecq in Belgium, or the Cokerie Zollverein in Essen.  Yet travelling around Europe today to exercise an aesthetic appreciation for ruins is no different to joining the Grand Tour of the 1700’s.  Then, young men of independent means visited a set of prescribed destinations in order to soak up the atmosphere: but where the 18th Century mind was taken up with the ruins of the Classical world, the modern spirit is obsessed with the decline of the Industrial Age.  Beyond that preoccupation, there is little difference in our emotional response to the symbols of a “gone world”: nostalgia, tristesse and even a certain ennui with the way of life which replaced the ruined one.

Many books about modern dereliction have been published in the last few years, and the best include Henk van Rensbergen’s “Abandoned Places”, and Marchand & Meffre’s “The Ruins of Detroit”.  Both feature locations which are well known, such as Clabecq and Du Parc Hosiery in the former, or the Grand Central Terminal and Packard factory in the latter.  There are many similarities between them, and each is essentially a collection of coffee table photography with a brief, valedictory foreword.  They have spawned many imitators, which adopted the same format but cut corners on paper stock, origination or sometimes demonstrated a failure of publishing nerve.  “Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era” which accompanies an exhibition recently hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute in London, offers something different.

The format of Kombinat is closer to Paul Virilio’s “Unknown Quantity” – an extended photo essay which remains one of my favourite books – than to an exhibition catalogue, which it effectively is.  It tells you much more about the world we live and work in than a conventional architecture book because it both represents, then discusses how things are represented.  Visually, Kombinat uses strong colour and understated graphics to make its point: there are no gimmicks to detract from the photographs.  Likewise the locations in Kombinat are fresh to Western European eyes, and the text is deeper than other titles which have come out recently to cries of “dereliction porn”.  They have too many images of lonely chairs stranded in corridors and moody shots of peeling paint.  By contrast, Serban Bonciocat, the photographer of Kombinat captures the industrial ruins of Romania using a topographic approach.  Rather than isolating details of them, he sets former foundries and chemical works into a derelict landscape, or shows their juxtaposition to the “live” world: not only does that set them into today’s context, it also helps to explain the book’s subtitle, “Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era”.

Both words and pictures discuss the unavoidable politics of the former Eastern Bloc, and one essayist touches on a couple of interesting conflicts – there is a concern that showing the rest of Europe that Romania has some ruined factories will make them think less of the country, perhaps even put people off visiting.  In fact, the hidden history and monumental scale of these places makes it more likely that some will visit especially to seek them out.  The Golden Era referred to was the expansionist phase of the Eastern Bloc countries, both during the Constructivist dawn of Communism, then the Heroes of Industry decades presided over by Stalin.  Over that period, increasing industrial production was the thing, and certain regions became centres of excellence for particular industries.  What remains is still heroic, even in its death throes.

That last point crystallises the other issue: tourism destroys because it introduces a large number of people who may have little understanding or sympathy for the place.  The rare and beautiful – because sometimes small treasures lie amidst the ruins – is corrupted by grinning fools who only want to go home with a souvenir, and a camera full of photos to prove that they visited.  It is, as Mike Harding pointed out in his book “Footloose in the Himalaya”, a Mondo cane approach to the places we visit as tourists.  It may be that an exhibition, with an accompanying catalogue like this, can help.  Yes, it alerts us to these places, but it also explains what they represent, hence offering us a chance to consider rather than merely consuming them visually.  It also marks out Romania as having foresight enough to record these ruins before they disappear, and in doing so, to weigh their worth.

With thanks to Simona Nastac at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London.

“Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era”
Photos by Serban Bonciocat
Essays by Augustin Ioan, Anca Nicoleta Otoiu, Liviu Chelcea, Gabriel Simion – in Romanian with English translations.
Published by Igloo Media, 2007
ISBN – 9789738839809

Tony Hayward of BP, an American president struggling to assert himself, and a walrus stuck miles from home: the trick is isolating transferable knowledge in amongst all the barracking.

The tone of recent criticism of Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, by the American establishment would be risible if the situation wasn’t so serious.  Rather than voicing concern about how operations to plug the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico are going, they criticised him for taking his son to yacht races on the Solent.  Before that, they helpfully told him that he would have been fired had he worked for Barack Obama.  But he doesn’t, and thankfully he appears to have some mettle, rather than skulking away like a scolded dog.  Yet the American president’s reaction to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig is an illustration of someone offering only an illusion of control, more interested in his poll ratings than in helping to fix the problem.  There’s a lesson there for us all.

The failure of a blow-out preventer resulted in a massive gas explosion, rupturing the Macondo wellhead on the seabed, and destroying the rig on the sea surface.  Perhaps Obama tacitly accepts that he and his advisors cannot understand the actual problems of plugging the wellhead (rather than understanding the spreading oil slick, which is simple to encompass but merely a symptom).  Maybe they assume that subsea engineering is beyond them, so they make things easier by personalising a complex problem, and attempting to make Tony Hayward into a scapegoat.  Yet a recent issue of New Scientist magazine explained the problem and its solutions in detail, and in such a way that any well-educated lay person could understand.  Clearly Hayward’s sangfroid unsettles the US committees: he has stuck to his line that only an inquiry will reveal what went wrong with the wellhead, hence idle speculation before the results are known wouldn’t be helpful.  Regardless of short-term unpopularity in the popular press, the most important thing is to concentrate on the fix.

In asking whose “ass” he should kick, Obama proved he was performing for the gallery – the provincial American press corps – rather than living up to his supposed reputation as the most cerebral president America has elected since Kennedy.  Looking like you’re trying to fix a problem, especially by demonstrating pressure being applied on other people, appeals in the short term.  It’s rarely as effective than getting the problem fixed for the long term, and bear in mind that BP are operating on the limits of technology, drilling several miles down with the help of their American contractors.  There is a lesson here for architects, and it’s no startling insight, but a simple truth that bears repeating to yourself when you’re in a fix.  Clients always ask for instant results, but having to go back for a fourth or fifth time to say that we think it’s fixed now, after the initial instant fix failed … makes you look worse than taking enough time to do it once, and properly.

The people who live on the Gulf coast have a visceral response to the disaster: it has taken away their livelihoods, ruined their backyards and driven away tourists.  The same was true of the folk who lived near the Exxon Valdez oil tanker’s landfall, and the victims of hundreds of other oil-related disasters such as Piper Alpha or Amoco Cadiz.  Yet people look to their government for leadership and that means applying structured thinking.  BP can’t tell anyone what went wrong until it understands itself what went wrong – and the process of investigation and analysis has been the foundation of rational thought since the Renaissance.  Complex problems don’t yield rapid answers; knee-jerk reactions and intuitive guesses come quickly, but rationalised thought takes time, and needs the fuel of facts to power its engines.  Paradoxically, the more pressing the problem is, the more important that time is taken to make sure the answer is correct.

It’s starting to look like the American government, perhaps in their creeping acceptance of creationism, and media combines which love witch-hunts, have rejected the irrefutability of rational thought.  The modern way of looking at the world was conceived four centuries ago in Europe, and nothing has fundamentally changed about the lens we use to scrutinise the world.  Newton and Kepler helped to shape the process which European children are still taught in science classes at school: gathering facts and data, looking for evidence, analysing it, then coming up with a synthesis which yields the answer, or one possible solution out of many.  That flow chart is still the foundation of the sciences, as well as any kind of design which goes back to fundamentals to seek solutions.  It may be that Obama comes from a different tradition – certainly whoever named the well “Macondo” didn’t think about its symbolism.  Macondo was a cursed town in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel…

Sometimes, as in the Gulf of Mexico, solving a complex problem is an iterative process.  While it isn’t comparable to plugging a ruptured well one mile under the sea, a building I worked on suffered from an intermittent problem with hot and cold spots.  Although the location of the problem and its causes were identified fairly quickly, several solutions were attempted, and in the end a combination of measures began to cure the problem.  No-one has ever attempted what BP is trying to do; similarly at a lower level, the team of consultants and contractors involved with that building had never come together to build one like it before.  The client, or American government, need to understand that in the modern world, people in charge need to have structured minds, or they will fail to grasp the fundamentals required to make decisions.  They may even need to become technocrats.  However, they can’t just say “I want it fixed now!” as a petulant child would – real life can’t produce instant results, and none of us have the power of wish fulfilment.

It’s better to reinforce time and again to an unhappy client that you must understand it properly yourself, and as you make progress towards a solution, he will be kept informed.  Oversimplifying it so that it becomes associated with one person – in this case Tony Hayward – is the wrong move, since its corollary would be, fire that person and everything will fix itself.  No doubt there will be people within the US administration who understand that Obama’s unsophisticated and faux-naive tone is misleading, yet all the outside world sees is a series of press conferences in which the blame is pinned onto one man.  You could construe it as an ugly mixture of anti-British sentiment plus jealousy (BP is apparently bigger than any of the American-owned oil companies).  Yet the more the Americans attack Tony Hayward, the more likely their bullets are to ricochet.

The drilling companies who actually did the damage were American, and they were in ultimate charge of the rig.  The body who approved BP’s licence to drill was … part of the American government.  They approved the method statements, even the mitigation measures to look after any off-course walruses who found their way to the Gulf of Mexico.  Perhaps in a craven attempt to avoid implicating their own countrymen, the US administation vilify a man rather than tackling the underlying issues.  Then again, you may have come across a similar deal at site meetings: if the building turns out not to fit on the site due to setting-out problems, be careful before you point your finger at an engineer or contractor.  Go away and check the drawings, consider all the possible reasons, then check the drawings again, before you respond.  Taking 24 hours to address a crucial query like this is not a luxury.  Otherwise, the engineer or contractor will probably explain in great detail which part of your drawing is wrong, and how it generated the setting-out problem in the first place.

In that regard, a very useful book, now sadly out of print, is Ray Cecil’s “Professional Liability” (published by the Architectural Press in 1984) – it sounds dry, but it offers a lifetime of experience in the kind of things which can go wrong, and more importantly in how to avoid them.  Good for practicing architects to re-read now and again, as well as for Part 3 students, as ideally you want to learn from other folks’ mistakes rather than your own.  As for our hapless walrus: strayed inexplicably from the Alaskan or Canadian oil fields to the Gulf: he is a victim of circumstance, accidentally photocopied from place to place.  He was used by Lewis Carroll as a metaphor for the capitalist urge to acquire, (he collected as many oysters as he could in Carroll’s poem) so it’s perhaps appropriate that he’s cropped up here.  A walrus off the Florida coast is no more unlikely than putting people in charge of things without educating them in how to react rationally when those things go wrong.

Once you surmount the barriers put in place around the old Dinorwic Quarries, Llanberis to prevent folk from walking on the mountainside – the irony of putting a vertical obstacle in the way of climbers obviously didn’t occur to First Hydro, who own part of the mountain – you enter a landscape dramatically transformed by man.  The landforms are unique, and just like the last time I was in Snowdonia, the blanket of cloud burned off slowly, revealing Sinc Juliet from the top of Marchlyn Mawr.  Previously I’d climbed Elidir Fawr, and also visited the “Electric Mountain” visitor centre down in Llanberis; this time, I decided to visit the old quarries.  As I stood there, with the crows wheeling overhead, and mountain sheep grazing between blocks of blue slate, the light changed many times as the cloud base gradually rose above the tops.

Dinorwic was one of the world’s largest slate quarries, and rather like Ballachulish on Scotland’s west coast, it was worked as a series of galleries, so the mountainside now consists of twenty or so terraces linked by steep inclines, which also run around dramatic pits.  Unlike Scotland’s slate industry, which had died by the start of the 1960’s, Welsh slate was more resilient, and though Dinorwic closed in 1969, other quarries like Oakely and Penrhyn are still live (only just in the case of Oakely).  The well-known and oft-repeated statistics are that Dinorwic opened in 1787, and was second only in size to Penrhyn.  At its peak, it employed 3000 men and produced over 100,000 tons of slate each year.  The workings extend 1800 feet up the mountain, and there are about 20 levels, once linked by around 50 miles of narrow gauge rail track. 

Dinorwic really is the quarry which ate a mountain.  It sits on the face of Elidir Fach into which it bit deeply, leaving Elidir Fawr alongside it pretty much untouched.  In addition to the galleries, the most obvious parts of the quarry are the inclined planes down which the slate was sent.  The “A” inclines on the north-west or “Garret” side of Dinorwic, and the “C” inclines on the south-east or “Braich” side are mostly self-acting inclines with two sets of tables, one loaded with slate which trundled downhill by gravity, and counterbalanced by the empty one travelling back up the incline again.  A good example remains at the “New York” level.  Several of the inclines still have the winding drums and brakes in situ; likewise some of the pits still have Blondin (aerial cable crane) winders and cables in place.  The Blondin was invented by John Fyfe, the granite quarrymaster from Aberdeenshire, and many Blondin-type cable cranes were built by John Henderson of Aberdeen.

“Australia” level is where the interesting artefacts are: the sawmills with lines of rusting circular sawbeds, the powerhouse with its compressors still in place, the caban (bothy) with fleabitten jackets still hanging from pegs.  In fact, once more than 20 different mills, and almost 500 saws spread across the site, but this is the most intact set of buildings.  Incidentally, all the areas of the quarry were given names, and became its “departments”: Vivian, Wellington, Matilda and Victoria at lower level, then Braich and Garret further up the mountainside.  Some of these areas lower down are approached through tunnels cut through walls of slate, some now blocked by rockfalls.  Dinrowic’s galleries run in one direction to vast spoil heaps which bloom out over the mountainside, and end abruptly at a precipice.  Some, like Sinc Harriet, renamed “Dali’s Hole” by the rock climbers who have adopted it, are hundreds of feet deep. 

When the Welsh slate industry went into retreat, Dinorwic was still making its owners enough money for them to entertain the idea of opening a new quarry further up the mountain, at Marchlyn Mawr.  The idea was that it would continue once its parent shut, but in the end Marchlyn wasn’t a success, either.  After Dinorwic quarry closed in 1969, an auction was held to sell off all the easily-recoverable plant and machinery, such as saws, compressors and locomotives.  However, the equipment on the higher levels was too much hassle to reclaim, so it was left in place and surrendered to the elements.  By contrast the newest buildings – modern slate mills, and a concrete block and tile plant which used the quarry dust as aggregate, all of which sat beside Llyn Peris – were razed to the ground completely.  Others have been unroofed – for their slate, ironically, given the huge quantities of dressed roofing lying around the place, small heaps set against vast planes of slate scree.  Yet the artificial topography left behind at closure is only part of its attraction: what happened next is the real fascination of Dinorwic.

The process of decay is a demonstration of the power of entropy.  Anything we create exists on sufferance, as a result of continual human intervention: but once left to its own devices, it quickly returns to its natural state.  The buildings weather, roofs collapse, timber rots away, iron rusts to oxide, and the walls of hewn slate merge with the mountainside that gave birth to them.  What we think of as the “chaos” of decay and decomposition is really Nature at work, and as that happens the meaning and history Man superimposes are surrendered.  As decay strips away machinery, signage, end products, the buildings and inclines come close to being generic ruins.  Dinorwic is a powerful demonstration that nature will unmake everything we build, and eventually only the stones remain, and as Robin Hitchcock sang, the stones do not remember.

Some of Dinorwic’s heritage is preserved in a museum – the Vivian department of the quarry – but you know that it’s been cleaned up and curated whereas the castings, wire ropes and motors strewn over the mountain are more or less as the quarrymen left them.  They are living, or perhaps dying, history.  The museum is about objectivity, whereas the quarry beyond it is more about evoking “saudade”, a Portugese term which combines melancholy and a sense of life irretriveably lost.  In amongst the death of an industry, and the gradual erasing of Man’s intervention – is the power of Nature, which is revivifying the quarry and proving that nothing really dies, it is transformed or transfigured.  Dinorwic is a poignant place, and provided you respect the lethal drops and rockfalls, makes a thought-provoking day high above the tourists.

There’s a good deal of further material about Dinorwic on Dave Sallery’s excellent website about the Welsh slate industry – Penmorfa.

The jet flew a tightening arc over the Bar of the Tay, throttling back as it broke through a bank of haar.  The shape of the city resolved itself: twelve miles strung out along the river, from the Buddon to Kingoodie.  “Cabin Crew: Doors to Automatic.” We were buckled in for landing, and the aircraft overflew drilling rigs moored at Caledon Wharf, passed a cluster of high rises off the Hilltown, and lined up on the runway.  There was a whine and thunk while the landing gear locking down, then as we were within touching distance of the rail bridge, we overhauled a cleared site on Riverside Drive, a few acres of graded hardcore.

No ordinary rubble: this little patch of Dundee was the downfall of Mark Wilson, an architect-developer whose company, Duncarse Developments, bought it for £10m in 2007.  Before that, a Texas DIY store sat here, but it was reduced to rubble before redevelopment was due to begin, helping to clear what Enric Miralles described in 1999 as one of the most the most dramatic urban settings in Europe.  Wilson’s company was on the brink of starting work on a scheme of 200 luxury apartments, which would have seen Duncarse spend upwards of £40m, when the economic crash interjected.  Duncarse went bust in 2008, and 25 potential purchasers lost their deposits.  Mark Wilson got lots of bad press, but he lived to fight another day and eventually bounced back, as most developers do.

Wilson trained as an architect, and his first big success as a developer was the redevelopment of the Bastille in Aberdeen, formerly part of Richards’ textile mill at Broadford Works.  He progressed through other housing developments, eventually converting parts of Royal Dundee Liff, the former insane asylum that lies to the west of the city.  Riverside Apartments, the scheme which brought down Duncarse, would have been his largest development, and one of the biggest in the city at the time.  Wilson’s upward trajectory is similar to that of his contemporaries, although they specialised in different sectors, and the wisest among them pre-let their developments before work began on site.

Dundee’s developers have a reputation which extends far beyond the confines of their industry.  Michael Johnston, Angus Cook, Kenny Harper, the Marr brothers, Bruce Linton and many others have made their mark on the city in the past quarter of a century.  Most of them made their money in retail and commercial development, particularly in pubs and clubs, in the case of Kenny Harper and the Marrs.  However, the first-mentioned had widely-reported trouble with the tax man; three had their their fingers burned through involvement with Dundee FC; and most have experienced failure as well as success in business.  Yet it all made interesting copy, so their milieu reached the wider world through the film Jute City, and Andrew Murray Scott’s novel Estuary Blue, which feature the thinly-disguised exploits of the city’s worthies in recent years.  In fact, property development has a long pedigree in the city. 

A previous generation of Dundee developers made themselves rich men in the 1960’s, ripping down the city which Joseph McKenzie captured in his famous “City in Transition” series of photos.  It was McKenzie, incidentally, rather than Oscar Marzaroli who most completely captured the squalid final years of the old Gorbals in Glasgow, complete with snottery urchins and the last of the city’s horse lorries.  McKenzie’s photos also show us the old Hawkhill in Dundee, before it was bought up by developers, sold in parcels for clearance, and the ‘dozers moved in.  The current generation of property developers started out in the same way as every other does: by owning a pub or nightclub, buying up an old jute mill, spotting unregarded worth in a street of tenements and factories.  Years ago, a Dundee developer – a quiet, unassuming man with none of the trappings traditionally associated with his ilk – told me that during the 1980’s and early ‘90’s, you couldn’t go wrong in buying commercial property in the city.  Values were as low as they would ever reach, and could only go up.  That proved to be true – and if you bought at the bottom of the market as he did, it worked in your favour.  Arguably, Duncarse bought their site right at the top. 

However, the point of this piece is not only to provide an insight into the forces which shape Dundee, but also to highlight the sancitmonious attitude which folk reserve for property developers.  The recent news that Mark Wilson has bought part of the former Seaview Primary School and plans to convert it into flats, provoked a piece in the Courier which revealed more than just facts.  Mixed through with a hint of schadenfreude at the developer’s downfall, is a righteous moralising at his rebirth.  Never blatant, it comes across instead as silent censure, as when the reporter writes about a developer who “could not be contacted at his home yesterday” despite the fact that “a Porsche four wheel drive was parked outside the property”.

You can infer a good deal from the article’s clichés.  The depositors “did not see a penny of their money back”. The scheme “folded … before one brick was laid”. All this meets public’s preconceptions about property development, but it offers a simplistic view of a complex set of issues.  The people who lost money may nurse a sense of betrayal, but how many of those who placed their deposits to secure flats “off plan”, hoped that their new properties would rise in value before they were complete – so they could be sold on for a profit without even occupying them?  It certainly happened in other schemes, such as City Quay three years ago, the conversion of Camperdown works in the late 1990’s, and the remaking of the Thomson Shepherd carpet factory a few years before that.

The Courier reporter is hung up on the figure of £6000, but the article doesn’t explain that a £6000 deposit is worth different amounts to different people.  After all, cash is swapped for equity when you buy property, and equity can be leveraged.  It’s worth far more than its face value to a development firm on the brink of insolvency, as it provides vital cashflow and may convince a fat banker in his pinstripes not to strangle your company.  The fat banker is, of course, another media bogeyman.  £6000 is also worth more than its face value to a carpetbagging flat speculator, since it is the necessary toehold which a mortgage enables you to leverage.  However, £6000 is worth less than £6000 once it’s been handed over – and just like Mark Wilson, the deposit-placers at Riverside Apartments were speculators, who also felt risk’s downside.  They have first hand experience of what economists call the marginal value of utility. 

I’ll explain by using a maxim from Richard Whatley, a 19th century economist, who said – “it is not that pearls fetch a high price because men dive for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price.”  In other words, the value of something depends on its utility, and that is reflected in the price.  The general theory of marginal utility is that price declines at the margins – so as extra supply appears, the price of goods or services will fall.  By contrast, a shortage of land in prime locations leads to spiralling cost inflation, and increased profit margins.  Scarcity is an integral part of the utility which pushes up value, so a unique piece of land on the riverfront is worth paying more for – hence the reported site value of £10m.  Yet when the economy crashes, the prime location loses its utility as an object to speculate upon.  But the Courier doesn’t look into this.

Neither does the journalist explore the forces which impelled folk to lay down money speculatively on “paper” architecture.  For example, he could have explained that the motors which propel Dundee’s economy today are the universities, the computer games industry, biotechnology, financials, and to a lesser extent, high-tech engineering.  Plus property, of course.  If you recall the canny developer who told me that he couldn’t lose when he bought property?  That’s no longer true, certainly not of residential schemes.  Prime site values in Dundee increased by a factor of three, and that increased development risk.  Values went up hand in hand with demand, and demand is driven by … folk placing deposits on flats before they’re complete.  You could argue that some of the wronged depositors were, in fact, agents of their own downfall.  However, that would be to allow the same moral relativism that the Courier applies.  Anyhow, the article implies that someone who took money and gave nothing in return, has no business coming back to look for more.

So we leave the airport terminal and cross the windswept apron.  The jet is waiting.  After it takes off, Courier-readers and non-deposit-placers alike look out through their oval windows.  The site on Riverside Drive is still graded hardcore, but that hardcore now belongs to H&H Properties – run by Hassan al Saffar, another of Dundee’s cadre of developers.  He hopes he can do what Mark Wilson couldn’t.