Do Not Pass Go Page 24
And in their place? I’d looked across at the plaza: you could just see how it would have looked in the architect’s model, little plastic families enjoying little plastic picnics on little plastic benches, angular HO-gauge executives caught in stiff-legged mid-stride walking away from their Matchbox Ford Zodiacs. But in the cold light of a cold day it was scattered with people supremely ill at ease in their surroundings: an office worker battling with her newspaper in the now-traditional tower-block gale, two postmen shouting out a laboured conversation above the roar of traffic and wind. Around them all the marooned and forsaken sixties buildings were shedding grubby little mosaic tiles and weeping rust from metal panels like dreadnoughts in dry dock. You could only hope that the King’s Cross redevelopers had been brought here to see what not to do.
Trailing a huge echo we tore through the dark underpass, below another inscrutably mirrored commercial block, below a parade of low-octane government offices, below the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest charity. As well as dispensing grants for medical research – over a post-traumatic coffee Pall told me his south London psychiatric unit regularly lobbied for funds – the Wellcome Trust is also a benefactor to the arts, and was currently hosting an exhibition of works inspired by the human genome project.
One can only praise the hands-off commitment to free expression that inspires a major pharmaceutical concern to grant so prominent a soapbox to its own critics, for as I’d noted without surprise from an online exhibition catalogue the human genome project is not one fondly revered within the artistic community. ‘What is the consequence of evolution becoming a product?’ barked a strident note beneath the mock-up of a perfume box labelled ‘PROGRESSION’; another exhibit was entitled ‘The Spit of God’.
The Euston Road has always nurtured artists. From its base at No. 314, in the late thirties the Euston Road School sought to promote ‘a more natural, impressonistic portrayal of everyday life’, which would have been a lot easier then than now: predictably enough, that photo showed the Beatles dancing on 314’s grave. And Sonia Brownell, who married George Orwell shortly before he died, was known in literary London as the Venus of Euston Road.
London’s first women’s hospital, a splendid LCC-monogrammed Art Nouveau fire station – buildings I imagined we’d spend long minutes idling in front of were flying through my peripheral vision like those hyperspaced streaks in the Pearl and Dean ad. The Venus of Euston Road, I thought, wistfully mourning a lost age when even an unpromisngly semi-industrial thoroughfare could feature in such a romantic appellation. Clearly Euston Road once had a personality, but whatever it was had long since disappeared in a cloud of diesel particulates. It has been soberly predicted that the street’s traffic volume is to treble in the forthcoming decade, and struggling to envision the double-decker taxis and motorcycle-courier pyramids such a reality would necessarily entail I was presented with an apposite reminder of the most widely advocated solution. Jolting to a halt as the gaps between the lanes converged impenetrably together, there beside us, gracefully isolated in a precious sliver of parkland, were Nos 188 and 190, sole survivors of London’s first railway terminus: the entrance lodges of Euston Station.
‘The greatest public work ever executed in ancient or modern times,’ wrote one contemporary of the rail link to Birmingham, yet incredibly, the 112-mile line had been completed from scratch in just four years. Then again, a plaque I later read outside a pub by Great Portland Street told me the New Road had been knocked up in as many months. It only goes to show what you can achieve with engineering determination, compulsory purchase orders and expendable slave labour.
Not that any of this cut much ice with the powers-that-were in the sixties. Euston Station, named in common with the road that runs past it after its ground landlord, the Earl of Euston, had for years been considered antiquated and inadequate – Harold Clunn called it ‘shabby and inconvenient’. But it took another epic period of dithering before British Rail elected to break the habit of a lifetime by knocking everything down and starting again.
It was a decision that did more than anything to kick-start the architectural preservation movement. Euston’s Great Hall was still the largest waiting room in Britain and comfortably the grandest, boasting a sweeping double staircase and a 60-foot-high coffered ceiling whose extent and ornamentation were rivalled only within Buckingham Palace. But it was the proposed demolition of the arch that welcomed travellers into the terminus, a 70-foot portico supported by what had been the tallest columns in London, that excited most outrage.
One of London’s pet landmarks, the Euston Arch was also revered as a fitting monument to the world’s first inter-city railway (assuming you forgot about the one between Liverpool and Manchester). No one ever imagined they’d go through with its destruction – even BR’s deliberately pessimistic estimate that shifting the arch slightly out of the way would cost £180,000 hardly seemed exorbitant – but in 1963, down it suddenly went along with the Great Hall, 130 years of railway history demolished at a stroke. ‘But . . . but that was the largest Greek propylaeum ever constructed,’ somebody in a paisley bow tie might easily have whimpered, unaware that even worse was to come. In the same spirit of unwarranted nastiness that saw London’s last tram being burnt alive, the arch’s constituent stones – despite being numbered with a view to eventual reconstruction – were secretly disposed of like gangland victims, heaved into a lonely, stagnant East End creek known as the Channelsea River.
‘Simplicity is the keynote in design of the new Euston,’ trumpeted BR in its promotional grand reopening literature, hardly needing to add ‘what with it being a big shed’. The 1968 ceremony was presided over by the Queen, and you can just imagine her internal triumph as she snipped through the ribbon: who’s got the best coffered ceiling now, eh?
By the 1930s London had been the world’s greatest city for over a hundred years, continually expanding and improving, getting ever bigger and ever better. Londoners and their administrators had become accustomed to the idea that it didn’t matter what they knocked down, because whatever went up in its stead would be superior. London could do no wrong. Only in the sixties did it begin to dawn on residents that the city was actually in decline, that some of the old stuff might in fact be worth preserving – both as a reminder of past glories and because, in an aesthetic and perhaps even a practical sense, it was simply better than what would replace it.
The Euston Arch was the first faceful of cold water in this drawn-out wake-up call, but today we’re all decadently resigned to our current hamfisted hopelessness. It’s become rather too cosy, in fact, a bit of a cop-out: so entrenched is the mindset that blanket preservation has become the default option, that it’s better to save even a rusty old gasholder rather than contemplate the expense and inconvenience of putting something better up in its place. Where once Londoners cremated their architectural legacy, today we embalm it.
Happy to have got this off my chest but wishing I could say the same about the hydrocarbons accumulating inside my visor, we throbbed and inched towards the notorious orange-bricked mass of Euston Road’s most infamous public servant, the British Library. A soft target and an unmissably enormous one, the library took almost twenty years to complete, a phoenix yawning slowly out of hibernation from the ashes of what had been Somers Town goods depot, home to all those potato wholesalers.
It certainly isn’t difficult to criticise the unmitigated shopping-mall brickwork on aesthetic grounds: unfairly counterpointed by the beguiling Hogwarts Castle that is St Pancras, the British Library eagerly welcomes most contemporary architectural insults – windowless superstore, overgrown electricity substation, secret-police interrogation centre. But, you know, it’s rather more difficult to criticise it on library grounds. During my last visit, amongst all the school parties and academics, I’d been somehow infused by a sense of civic duty being enacted on an almost Victorian scale: shelves of new publications that grow by two miles every year, ten million importan
t historical works extending back to Ancient Egypt and, of greater immediate concern to the schoolchildren and me, all sorts of intriguingly obscure little exhibits. Messing about with an archive CD jukebox I’d blundered across a 1968 recording of John Lennon acting the goat with Kenny Everett, which had sent me back out into the perpetually simmering traffic with a smile on my face.
Pall manipulated the bike through the ignoble shambles of Euston Road’s conclusion at King’s Cross, hung an illegal right and pulled over. I held a shaking left wrist up to the visor: nine minutes twenty-eight seconds end to end, a good 50 per cent quicker than my usual four-wheel run, but at the same time hardly faster than a brisk trot along a precise mile of pavement.
I was preparing myself for a kidney-bullying return leg that would slice no less than five minutes off this time when beside us a helmeted cyclist, his face already colouring up with blotches of rage, began screaming awful epithets at an adjacent van driver. A window was wound down and headgear removed, and an exchange took place which I’d love to have heard monotonically summated by the clerk of Bow Street magistrates’ number one court: fuck off; fuck you; it’s my fucking right of way; get off and I’ll fucking do you; the fuck you will.
‘Ah, the pleasantries of the world,’ trilled a little Alan Bennett of a man passing us on the pavement once the debate had been cut short by a background volley of rabidly impatient horns. It was reassuring in a way that in general the blue set was still a bit lary, that gentrification hadn’t smoothed off all its edges. But though the Islington effect would no doubt eventually seep down Pentonville Road, it was simply impossible to imagine Euston Road being any sort of community, being in fact anything other than just that: a road. We really have to do something about the traffic, you know.
CHAPTER 14
Electric Company
THINK OF A number between two and twelve. Ten, you say? Well, how remarkable – that’s only four away from what the ticket clerk said when I asked him. I’d remembered to take my board up Euston Road but had somehow mislaid token and dice, and having procured a six from my human random generator mentally moved my car from The Angel, Islington, to Electric Company.
Even someone who’s never been to London could probably tell you that Chelsea might not perhaps seem the optimum locale for the world’s largest power station. But things were different a hundred years ago: the Thames was still a working river, and the area along its western Chelsea bank was lined with wharves, foundries, gasworks and even a manure merchants, all backed by tight streets of the near-slum dwellings inhabited by their workforces.
What’s astonishing isn’t that the 275-foot chimneys of Lots Road generating station should have risen up above the west London skyline in 1905, but that they’re still there now: no longer the largest but now the oldest thermal power station in the world, Lots Road’s formidable, smutty engine-shed arched windows today look down on a street full of Porsches.
There are two chimneys now instead of the four that had contemporaries comparing it to an elephant on its back, and in place of the thick coal smoke that once belched out of them trail the wispy by-products of gas combustion. But at heart Lots Road is still doing what it’s done throughout Monopoly’s lifetime: burning decomposed prehistoric organisms to boil water to make steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Smouldering poocakes to the Crossness Sludge-Powered Generator: here was my Electric Company.
Built to power the soon-to-be-electrified Underground, Lots Road did in fact excite much local outrage. Even by the blighting standards established amongst neighbouring industrial concerns this was, after all, an enormous project: sixty-four boilers, fed on the one hand by a 450-foot-deep artesian well and on the other by coal bunkers storing 15,000 tons of the black stuff; two 5-foot-diameter pipes drawing in millions of gallons of Thames water a day for cooling purposes; a jetty where huge barges were relieved of coal by gantry cranes or filled with ashes by a narrow-gauge railway. Even without its chimneys – each very nearly twice the height of Nelson’s Column – the main building, 140 foot high and considerably longer than a football pitch, towered over the modest dwellings opposite.
Local artists, notably James Whistler, complained that the view of Chelsea Reach, as painted by Turner, had been lost for ever; children at Ashburham School over the road said they couldn’t hear themselves speak in the playground and Chelsea Borough Council sued Underground Electric Railways for ‘removing the smoke from the tunnels but, by other means, discharging it over the citizens of Battersea and Chelsea’. No one listened to Whistler or the schoolkids, and when it came to court the council not only lost but had costs awarded against it. As if to taunt Turner’s legacy, UER commissioned an impressionist to depict Lots Road looming dramatically out of a rouged dawn, and plastered this on huge posters that boasted ‘This power house burns 500 tons of coal a day . . . for the USE and BENEFIT of the people of London.’
As the Tube system expanded so did Lots Road. More powerful turbines were installed, along with extra boilers and bunkers for an additional 28,000 tons of coal. Those pipes into the Thames were supplanted by one with a frankly petrifying 9-foot girth. A more protected control room was built in the thirties following a series of exhilarating mishaps: ‘In the event of trouble the operator is exposed to flying fragments of broken machinery, and to the escape of steam,’ revealed an earlier report, before drily concluding that ‘these, in addition to the noise and commotion below him, are likely to distract the operator’s mind from his work.’
Lots Road was still dropping coal smuts on King’s Road swingers in 1967, but after a brief dalliance with heavy fuel oil in the seventies the plant switched to natural gas. Then, in the eighties, somebody calculated that the cost of generating each Lots Road kilowatt was rather dearer than the corporate rate charged by the National Grid. Coupled with the site’s ratcheting appeal to speculators busily knocking up glitzy marina developments on the surroundings badlands, this effectively doomed the plant.
Inevitably placed under the aegis of some obscure privatised division named Seeboard Powerlink, Lots Road – already sold to Taylor-Woodrow for £34 million – is being gradually wound down; by the time you read this the builders will be in, digging up the boiler house floor for a swimming pool and dividing the enormous void above into flats for 1,000 wealthy professionals. If my kids went to Ashburnham School I’d no doubt be delighted to see them running happily home without blood trickling from their ears, but as it was I felt a terrible end-of-an-era pathos suffusing me as I walked up to the razor-wired entrance.
‘Sorry about all that,’ said station boss Richard Bettany, leading me up a grand but rather neglected Edwardian staircase. The security desk had grilled me without explanation for almost half an hour, thereby diminishing my pathos along with my patience. It had been the same when I’d phoned up Seeboard Powerlink’s recalcitrant PR department: obtaining permission to visit Lots Road had proven inestimably more irksome than gaining access to Pentonville Prison. Aside from a vague mumble about ‘the current climate’, which in any case could just have been a feeble electricity-themed pun, I had no idea what the problem was.
Richard did, though. ‘It’s just that if something does, um, go wrong during your visit’ – and I now understood this was a tactful means of describing my potential for perpetrating a terrorist outrage – ‘we’ve only got battery back-up power for an hour, and even that’s only enough for a quarter of the lights.’ A covert nip with the wirecutters here, in other words, and the entire Tube network – tunnel-bound trains, deep-level stations and all – would be cast into silent darkness.
I followed Richard up deserted corridors and further echoing stairs, and at length into a panelled board room decorated with framed wiring diagrams. A lady came in with a tray of tea and biscuits, followed some time later by a bearded man in shorts, boots and a yellow hard hat, a man I was to know only as Martin. Looking at him I was fairly certain he would at some point refer to Lots Road’s end product as ‘juice’.
/> ‘Where, um, is everyone?’ I asked with reference to the Marie Celeste-ean ambience, nibbling a custard cream.
‘Well, everything’s pretty automatic these days,’ breezed Richard, whose creaseless, spotless boilersuit, particularly when teamed with Martin’s ensemble, spoke less of the village blacksmith and more of the Village People. Neither seemed certain how many people Lots Road had employed in its filthy, coal-fired prime, but we agreed it couldn’t have been less than ten times more than the current skeleton staff of fifty.
‘Monopoly?’ said Richard, after I’d outlined the purpose of what I was aware as I described it seemed a fecklessly spurious visit. ‘Oh, I love Monopoly.’ Behind large lenses his eyes began to shine. ‘“Move Directly to Jail” . . . “Bank Error in Your Favour” . . . Monopoly, Martin.’
Richard’s prompting intonation failed to rouse the man in shorts. ‘Yeah,’ said Martin. If there was one thing I had learned, it was that although almost everyone loved Monopoly, those twisted few who didn’t hated it. More so even than Marmite, Majorca or mutual masturbation, no noun in the dictionary’s central pages cleaved society quite as neatly into two camps.
‘It’s funny, you know,’ said Richard, maintaining his enhanced level of enthusiasm, ‘but I always try to get Electric Company when I play.’ He gave me a conspiratorial wink as he passed me over to Martin. ‘A very nice little earner, as it goes.’