It is a feature of social failure in the physical built environment that it smells of urine. Walkways in Thamesmead, underpasses in Birmingham and stairwells in Stourbridge's multi-story car park all have the whiff of ammonia in my memory. In the case of Stourbridge, the Multi-storey accompanied the ringroad, the baths and a new shopping centre and library, all fitting traffic engineers models of utility, but as in so many areas, with sub-optimal social outcomes.... it, errrr, stank.
Now by the coup-de-grace of Tesco, a symbolic blowing-up/down of the multi-storey fits within a modern spectacle of demolition. Whilst 90-tonne machines with giant munchers could quickly have dealt with the demolition with less disruption, the drama of explosives is preferred as something more than popular entertainment. A quickening of the spirit perhaps, an engagement with destruction. Just as in classical Rome, executions at the Tarpeian Rock were reserved for traitors, so to for reviled examples of 1960s and 70s dystopias, their end is a public event. There is an order, a ritual, that is followed, which generally ends with the congregation (for that is the word) being anointed with choking concrete dust (and I wonder at what risk to their health). But who is it that has decided that this demolition sui generis is reserved for failed urban structures, and does it really help communities bounce back?
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Below is a mooch round Stourbridge at Yule 2011...
Now by the coup-de-grace of Tesco, a symbolic blowing-up/down of the multi-storey fits within a modern spectacle of demolition. Whilst 90-tonne machines with giant munchers could quickly have dealt with the demolition with less disruption, the drama of explosives is preferred as something more than popular entertainment. A quickening of the spirit perhaps, an engagement with destruction. Just as in classical Rome, executions at the Tarpeian Rock were reserved for traitors, so to for reviled examples of 1960s and 70s dystopias, their end is a public event. There is an order, a ritual, that is followed, which generally ends with the congregation (for that is the word) being anointed with choking concrete dust (and I wonder at what risk to their health). But who is it that has decided that this demolition sui generis is reserved for failed urban structures, and does it really help communities bounce back?
Brutalism Stourbridge style, a photo by DavidSankey on Flickr.
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Below is a mooch round Stourbridge at Yule 2011...
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Stourbridge drift (derive) Yule 2011, a set on Flickr.
A mooch round Stourbridge, where I lived in the 1970s, underlined its continued decline over the last thirty years. The thriving bits appeared to be the Job Centre+ and the Canal basin, opened by Direct Action. And yet this was a genteel well-healed town fuelled by 17th-century industrialism with the Earl of Dudley sponsoring research into smelting iron from coal
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