It’s an ill wind – or as the Dutch say, "De een zijn dood, is de ander zijn brood", the translation of which is "One’s dead, is the other one's bread" meaning that someone’s misery or death is another’s money or pleasure. That’s the common portrayal of demolition: a one-way process with an obvious outcome. However, the story of a building’s demise is more complex than that.
Just like young married people sometimes glance wistfully at strangers, wondering idly what their life might have been like had they chosen differently, we look at the shells of old buildings and speculate how their story might have continued if they hadn’t been earmarked for redevelopment. Architecture falls in and out of use – but its end can come quickly, or be subjected to a long drawn-out knell. Demolition for salvage is a gradual operation, the unlayering of history as a building is gradually un-built, recounting its story on rewind. The demo contractor has to do a risk assessment, then the area has to be securely fenced to prevent folk straying into a machine's swing or the "danger" area where rubble might fall. The hoarding also discourages his equipment from sprouting little legs and wandering off into the night. Asbestos remediation can hold up work for months: outwardly nothing happens, but inside, Wombles in spacesuits work in a polythene tent to remove the white candy-floss wrapped around pipes and boilers.
On the other hand, the grim reaper sometimes wears fluorescent yellow, and instead of a scythe, he wields a 40-ton full-slew with a wrecking arm. In that case, the demo process is swift and unrelenting. Of course, the end to end all ends is explosive demolition. The blowdown is terminal: chimneys and tower blocks are imploded using Dr. Nobel’s chemical linctus, atomising masonry in the process. The techniques go back hundreds of years to the first engineers – military as opposed to civil engineers – who under-mined enemy strongholds and planted gunpowder in their burrowings. Once the charges were set, they ran like the Earl of Hell himself was on their heels, in case the gunpowder fuse burned faster than it should. Today, firms like Safedem and Controlled Demolition use modern plastic explosives, whose performance is a little more predictable.
Very few people appreciate destruction for its own sake: its connotations are almost always negative, but the Dadaists and other art movements knew that there is a special energy released by smashing things up. Wee boys enjoying smashing things up, too, and it gives them pleasure. Yet the habit of destroying stuff is drummed out of them by parents and authority figures: it’s anti-social because it conflicts with the values of the society they’re being trained to live in. If creativity is overseen by sensitive souls in polo-neck jumpers and designer glasses, destruction is orchestrated by chortling demons in top hats. It embodies all the stereotypes we’re taught to vilify: the evil developer destroying our heritage; the slum landlord having his lackey burn down a tenement for the insurance money; the mindless neds venting their frustrations by smashing things up. Empty pubs are occasionally hit by “brewer’s lightning”, a selective bolt from the blue which burns out licensed premises while leaving their neighbours intact.
Nevertheless, the process of destruction can be fascinating, and it can have positive, aesthetic qualities. One of the more thought-provoking books I’ve read is “Memento Mori” by Peter Mitchell, a photographic journal of the slow death of the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds. It was a huge block of council flats built in the 1930’s as an early experiment in concrete prefabrication: by the late 1970’s, it had been condemned, and Mitchell began making trips into the empty buildings with his camera. At first unofficially and then with the demolition company’s sanction, he produced a series of square, medium format photographs with a melancholy beauty to them: most of all they capture an atmosphere. The feeling is that evoked by Joy Division’s song “Decades”, recorded around the same time in a similarly run-down Northern city. 
These images of destruction may seem antithetical to creativity, but you need to see both sides, and de-generation is the necessary precursor to re-generation. “And decay proceeds as inevitably as growth,” as Louis Sullivan wrote. “Function is declined, structures disintegrate, differentiation is blurred, the fabric dissolves, life disappears, death appears, time engulfed. The eternal life falls. Out of oblivion into oblivion, so goes the drama of creative things.” Often we’re too close to the subject matter to see that it’s part of a cycle which has been changing our cities for over a thousand years.
Set against this personal vision of decay, and mourning over the loss of our memories as buildings disappear, are the demo men. They have less regard for aesthetics – instead, they have an especial kind of gallows humour. They’re easy to spot: in plaid shirts, clorty jeans and rigger boots, their hard hats decorated with JCB stickers, they make their way to Greasy Shiela’s mobile death van for their midser. A chip roll, or a fried egg trapped between two Aberdeen butteries, both liberally spread with bacon dripping. Health food! I can hear their furry arteries screaming from here. In time they return to giant Tonka toys, climb into the caged cabs, fire up V8 turbo-diesels – and as the hydraulic pumps whine into action, they cross-hair their target. The joystick is tipped forwards, 500 horsepower roars at 2500rpm, and a giant steel arm slices through a leaf of brickwork – spilling copings, windposts and mortar dust onto a smoking heap.
This is the experience which architectural critics – noted for their Italian suits and lily-white hands – scrupulously avoid. They have not experienced the sensation of scrambling up a mound of demolition arisings – or put on a harness and climbed on top of a crane cab for a better view. As a result, they miss the essence of what a building is. They miss out on the asbestos survey; the metal salvagers with beat-up Sherpa vans and flame cutters; the hydraulic peckers and breakers moving across the landscape like prehistoric predators; and the mobile crusher which renders architectural history into dust.
The effort is worthwhile, as the endnotes of a building’s history reveal things which everyone, including the building’s architects, forgot long ago.
The photos portray the last days of an industrial foundry in the English Midlands which I recorded prior to its demolition. They will hopefully form the basis of a longer article about the foundry’s history, and the building’s parallel evolution.
