A New Kind of Bleak by Owen Hatherley

Author:Owen Hatherley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

A walk around this suburban metropolis would take in the once chic, now shabby tapering tower the council built for their own offices, which nicely complements their earlier, enjoyably debased Victorian halls; a couple of sub-Seifert cubist experiments; a jollily Festival of Britain Travelodge in brick and zigzag render; Hilberseimer-style Zeilenbau blocks stepping along in enfilade wherever a developer could get a big enough plot; and in the distance, the chimneys of a disused power station ornamenting a giant IKEA. The problem, or for the dedicated flâneur, the fun, is in how it interacts with the suburb all around, or rather how it doesn’t. Arrangements are totally random – a row of artisans’ terraces with skyscrapers behind, would-be secluded Tudorbethan facing giant high-rises, the sound of birdsong vying with an endless rumble of traffic. Sometimes the place seems to be mocking itself, as when a churchyard meets a concrete subway you find the sign: ‘OLD TOWN CONSERVATION AREA’. In fact, there’s a lot of pre-Victorian, never mind pre-1960s remnants in among the towers, if you know where to find them – vestiges of Croydon’s unlikely former existence as a religious centre. The Victorian buildings suggest a place that already considered itself a cut above the average suburb – large-scale department stores that belie the ability to get to Selfridges in twenty-five minutes from East Croydon station.

In its sense of chaos and drama, Croydon seems to have rather little in common with the typology of the commuter dormitory, but appears instead as a slice of Inner London on the lam. One of the more thrilling, and telling, moments is at the back-end of the mini-metropolis, where the office-block landscape suddenly meets market stalls, butchers’ shops and caffs, while a black steel walkway stretches across to connect it to a block of yuppie flats. In that tension is encapsulated what makes central Croydon feel as much a part of London proper as Peckham or Tottenham, albeit much more distant from the centre. The accidental ensemble creates an acutely surreal urban experience, taking the capital’s pre-existing aptitude for juxtaposition and amplifying it. The most memorable part of it all, comfortingly but atypically, is an enclave of public space, the St George’s Walk arcade, which emerges from behind the drab Nestlé Tower. Part is open to the air, part is shell-roofed, with the rest propped up by mosaic-clad pilotis. It’s elegant, but it doesn’t manage to meaningfully connect with anything else. The place is divided and carved up, very literally. A walk from East Croydon to West Croydon railway stations initially takes you through a Business Improvement District, one of those privately owned, privately patrolled ‘solutions’ for urban management – which in this case means clean streets and a large quantity of CCTV cameras. It ends remarkably suddenly, just by West Croydon station, where dirt, rubbish and relatively ‘unsightly’ hoardings and shop signs take over, and the mood is fractious. Waiting for a bus here provides a front-line seat for crisis, with vicious arguments between shoppers seemingly treated as normal.

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