Mark Chalmers

For the first time in a few years, I’m looking for a facing brick.  But not just any brick.

Last time I specified one, the choice was between an extruded brick made by Ibstock at their Uddingston plant, or a press-made brick from Caradale.  Uddingston has since closed, and Caradale went out of business a few years ago - link - leaving Raeburn Brick as the last Scottish brickmaker. 

Today I’m looking for a grey multi with character, some patterning and different tones, a little like the variation you used to get on Scotch Commons – but in grey.  On this occasion, neither Hanson Brick (now owned by Wienerberger of Austria), Michelmersh nor Ibstock have quite have the right brick, so I had to look farther afield.

However, as Britain was experiencing its Great Brick Shortage - link - with demand high, but production at low levels while mothballed brick plants were slowly brought back into production – Belgium, Holland and Germany weren’t so busy, so they were in a position to export their spare capacity to the UK. 

A decade or two ago, there were hundreds of brickworks dotted across Europe - each serving its local market.  For one thing, that kept haulage costs down, because bricks are cheap relative to their weight: unlike dressed marble, they don’t justify being sent vast distances across Europe because you can’t charge accordingly.  The fact that their clay was sourced locally, so the colour and tone of the bricks was intrinsically a good match for the local geology was an added bonus.

The latest intel from my “mole” in the brick industry is that Hanson (now known as Forterra) are thinking about slowing production down at a couple of their British brick factories, as they’ve run out of space to stockpile bricks and have even filled up a nearby haulier’s yard while they wait for orders to come in…

There are a few well-known, generic bricks:  the Scotch common, the Accrington Nori engineering brick, the London Stock brick and the Staffs blue brick.  Then you have many what you might call “housebuilder’s bricks”, which are usually colourful and rustic-looking.  In design-led projects we’re more likely to seek out the unusual, such as waterstruck or twice-fired engobed bricks, for their appearance and novelty value. 



Cruising in from across the North Sea comes Petersen’s “D29”, which is made in Denmark by artisan brickmakers in formats which are somewhere between UK bricks and Roman bricks, then given a waterstruck finish before being set in coal-fired kilns.  Petersen have gained cachet in Scotland by being specified on several Reiach & Hall projects, and have come to be perceived as the thinking man’s brick…

The Dutch and Belgians have a larger brick industry than the Danes, and much of the clay comes from the basin of the Rhine and the River Meuse.  The “Castor” by Steenbakkerij Floren (a brickworks is a “stone bakery” in Flemish), which is a small brickmaker based at Brecht in Belgium, is a subtle lilac grey multi with some kiln marks on an engobed finish.  Floren have a broad range of facing bricks, and also produce an unfired clay building block similar to the eco block which Errol Brick were developing, before they disappeared from the scene.

“Cortona”, by Vandersanden Brick, is advertised as a subtle mix of grey and anthracite, with a slightly rusticated surface and quite a variation in tone between bricks.  In reality, it looks very much like chocolate brownies - and a colleague leapt for joy when she mistook a cut brick slip for something edible…  Vandersanden is apparently the largest family-owned brickmaker in Europe with two production sites in Belgium and two in the Netherlands, making a total of around 320 million bricks a year.  The Cortona comes in the conventional 65mm metric brick format, and 50mm Continental brick, too.

There’s always the risk of inadvertently specifying something that costs £1000 per thousand, but I discovered that some of the Dutch and Belgian brickmakers have a competitive advantage: they’re paid by the government to dredge clay from the ship canals, so the raw material for their soft mud bricks comes free.  They still have to load it onto a freighter and send it across to Grangemouth Docks… but at least they know the canal is navigable…

The “Peak Multi Grey” by Edenhall – who used to be known as the concrete block manufacturer Boral Edenhall, and their website notes that they’re now Britain’s largest independent brick manufacturer and Europe’s leading supplier of concrete facing bricks.  This is more evenly textured than the D29, Castor or Cortona, but it’s a true grey rather than an anthracite, gunmetal, slate or the many other euphemisms brickmakers use for colours.

And we have the “Devonshire Grey Multi” by Crest, which is more cocoa brown than grey, reminding me of chocolate marble cake - that melange of cocoa and sponge cake which fancy coffee shops serve.  Once again my colleague got excited…  Not a grey in the real world, but the brickmaker’s grey has a great deal of latitude.  Blue bricks are more grey than blue, black bricks are usually grey, and grey bricks are often a buff colour…



Then finally the “Nevado” brick, which it turns out is the one we’ll probably select.  Along with the exotic “Kiezelgrijs” and “Rainbow Graydust”, which sound like they’re escaped from the Pokemon universe, it’s made by Façade Beek in the Netherlands.  The firm is part-owned by C.R.H., an Irish conglomerate which owned Ibstock Brick until recently and has, “been enthusiastically manufacturing unique bricks since 1912,” in the Dutch town of Beek.  The “Nevado Geel Gesmoord” brick, to give it its Flemish name, is fired twice: it’s fired with oxygen in the kiln atmosphere the first time, then with nitrogen the second time.  It’s the second firing which provides its grey tones.

Think you know the size of a brick?  Beek know better!  A British metric brick is 215 x 102 x 65mm, and Imperial bricks were around 8.5 x 4 x 2.5 inches.  However … the standard Dutch brick formats are Waal (207 x 97 x 49 mm), Waaldik (214 x 98 x 66 mm), and Hilversum (228 x 90 x 41 mm).  In addition there’s the German Bundesnormaal format (236 x 108 x 71 mm) and Dunnformat (234 x 110 x 52 mm).  Plus Danish bricks are apparently 228 x 108 x 55mm… not that we’ll ever give up on 65mm bricks, they're too engrained in the British psyche for that.

What’s interesting is that brick is on a gradual journey from low-value commodity to what economists call a differentiated product – in other words one you recognise and ask for by name, and pay a premium for.  It’s telling that we import so many bricks, despite the recent vote to turn our back on Europe and depart the Single Market.  In fact, the number of Continental bricks on the market proves how closely allied our construction industry is to Europe, and demonstrates our weakness as a manufacturing country.

Rather than keeping millions of bricks in stock, I’m told that many Continental brickmakers fire bricks to order, forcing you to call them off months in advance.  That, along with the cost of artisan-moulded, water-struck, coal-fired “clinkers” mean that we’re bricking it every time we specify a grey multi…

"…Although it is still possible, at some risk to life and limb, by climbing across railroad bridges and the like, to see Concrete Central from the other side, that is the less interesting and less familiar side of the complex, offering nothing to the view but hundreds of bins and interstitials.  The more familiar and rewarding view is the one shown in Taut [Bruno Taut's book] of its wharf side and three loose legs, though now it must be seen over a jungle of undergrowth that lies between the river and the lower reaches of Katharine Street.  Closer views are not normally to be had, unless one goes upriver to it by boat or is prepared to undertake an adventurous and circuitous safari on foot – it is completely inaccessible by wheeled vehicles these days – through thickets of red sumac bushes and along rusting rail tracks.

"The journey is worth it, however.  In lonely but not yet totally ruinous abandonment, this huge rippled cliff of concrete dominates a quarter-mile reach of the river.  It is truly enormous in scale; its capacity of four and a half million bushels made it the largest elevator in Buffalo and one of the largest ever built anywhere.  For comparison, it is about twice the bulk of recent megastructures such as Cumbernauld Town Centre or Centre Pompidou, but because it consists almost entirely of closed storage volumes to which there is no casual access, it remains impermeable, secret and aloof.  There are some elevators where one can penetrate into gigantic storage volumes – the Electric [Elevator] extensions of 1940, for instance – and marvel at their sheer dimensions, but at Concrete Central the storage volumes remain as inaccessible as the interior of an Egyptian pyramid, to use an exotic comparison…

"The first time I reached Concrete Central by land, a series of incidents emphasised its abandonment and isolation.  Shrubbery had already begun to grow out of its upper works, inviting a comparison with Roman ruins that was enhanced by the flight of a bird of prey from the head-house at the sound of my approach.  That sound was amplified when my foot crashed through a rotted plywood cover that had been laid over an open culvert.  As I extricated myself, I reflected on my folly: had I sustained an incapacitating injury, rather than mere scratches, in that fall, even those who knew approximately where I was would have no idea how to reach me, after they had finally decided they had waited too long for my return.  I remembered the fate of the Chicago architectural photographer Richard Nickell, lying dead in the ruins of the Schiller theatre for weeks before his body was discovered.

"Yet the sense of distance from help and civilisation was exhilarating rather than depressing; the presence of the huge abandoned structure produced a mood more elegiac than otherwise.  Coming out of the wharf, dominated by the three largest loose legs ever built in Buffalo, now semi-transparent as the winds of the winters had blown away more and more of their rusted corrugated cladding, it was difficult not to see everything through eighteenth-century picturesque visions of ancient sites, or even Piranesi's views of the temples of Paestum…”

This long extract from Reyner Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis - US Industrial Building and Modern European Architecture 1900 - 1925, is not only a sustained piece of good writing, it also sums up many aspects of exploring derelict buildings.  Banham's experiences will be recognised by anyone who has gawped at the Leith Mills in Edinburgh, the Meadowside Granaries in Glasgow or Millennium Mills in London, then found a way inside.

Peter Reyner Banham taught in the architecture programme at the State University of New York at Buffalo between 1976 and 1980.  During his tenure at Buffalo, inspired by the daylight factories and the grain silos of the region, he conducted research that led to A Concrete Atlantis, which charts the development of North American industrial building in the early 20th Century and its influence on European architects.

The scale and abstraction of the grain elevators of Buffalo are exhilarating, and they became one of the inspirations for early Modern architects. Le Corbusier described them as “the magnificent first fruits of a new age” and went on to use them as illustrations in his 1923 book, Vers Une Architecture. Following a visit to see the silos in Buffalo, Erich Mendelsohn wrote that, “Everything else so far seemed to have been shaped interim to my silo dreams."

A Concrete Atlantis is a good book to read if you enjoy armchair exploration, and a unique history and explanation of industrial architecture from the start of the 20th century onwards – particularly grain elevators, like Concrete Central.  Patricia Bazelon's photographs of the grain silos – despite being black and white, and relatively small, are worth buying the book for in themselves – link here.

The book also shows that the more perceptive historians and architecture writers have always explored places physically, rather than writing vicariously using other folks' experiences.  Reyner Banham isn’t the first, and won’t be the last to describe the experience as, "Once you were inside, it was like being in a totally different world." That becomes a feeling you've chased ever since, but perhaps never found again in its entirety.

As I wrote in Blueprint Magazine several years ago, exploring old buildings is personal – it’s something you do to satisfy your own curiosity.  That would appear to be the very definition of a hobby; and like all hobbies, you go a bit mad with it at the start, then chill out once you’ve got over the initial passion to consume it whole.  It’s purely about the joy to be had from exploring hidden aspects of the world.  Banham’s book reminds you of that, too.

A few years ago, there were few external influences on exploring: it was just you with one or two mates, plus the odd photographic book of rusty ruins which puzzled and inspired.  When you discovered that others shared your interest it was a good day, rather than a source of forum rivalries.  Lasting friendships were forged on the rare occasions when people met up by accident in some elysian ruin of scrap iron and ferns.

The motivation for exploring these places are complex, but as John Locke believed, fear gives our lives a shove, without which we would sink into passivity.  With progress comes a mixture of hope and fear; human emotions which we need to experience, but which we rarely associate with architecture.  Instead, we accept places as we find them, unchallenged and unchallenging.

There are many things to overcome; the spiky fence is the least of them.  First is to break with our social conditioning: the mantra drummed into us from childhood to heed the warning signs.  Then there’s our 21st century fear of scrutiny, that Big Brother is watching on the CCTV system.  Next comes a fear of the unknown, accompanied by the retribution which might strike from on high.

Yet curiosity drives a few onwards, and sometimes they become consumed by recording the final throes of a building’s life.  Hopeful to discover a time capsule with intact machinery from Edwardian times; wartime posters still pasted to the walls; a secret passage leading to a hidden room.  They press on, regardless, with scratched arms, dirt under their nails, ripped clothes: mere collateral damage as their eyes gradually open.

After visiting, it may have taken a morning of digging in a faraway library to find next to nothing, and days more to understand a little of the place’s long and complex history.  A clothbound booklet in a dusty box file might be the only footnote about a great company’s past.  Where had its history gone?  Its archives, ledgers, correspondence books and catalogues?  Had no-one documented that before it shut?  What would be left once it crumbled…?

Just one piece of advice; don’t have a Grail.  Because if you’re unlucky enough to carry that Grail in your head for a few years, then finally achieve it, it kills the urge to do anything else.  Ordinary life seems wan afterwards, and other experiences pall.  That’s when it becomes dangerous…

I went to see "Solaris" last night, at the local arts centre's cinema.  It's part of a season of films made by Andrei Tarkovsky which is currently touring Scotland.  Some people are fans of the Russian director because he was an auteur; some due to the rich symbolism of his films; some thanks to the cult which has grown around him since his early passing.  In this case, Tarkovsky's profound feeling for humanity makes Solaris both inspiring and moving.



Tarkovsky is often called a visionary, and for good reason.  Along with the French film-maker Chris Marker, Tarkovsky's work reaches parts of what it means to be human which almost no other art has.  By comparison, Hollywood films seem superficial: they think desire is Sharon Stone without any underwear.  Solaris demonstrates how deeply people can feel for someone or something they've lost, and how far they'll go to reclaim a part of them which, as one of the characters in Solaris puts it, has become their conscience.

Solaris is the most profound film I've ever seen; I’ve never watched a film then thought about it constantly afterwards, gone to bed, then woken the next day with my head still full of images drawn from it and feelings evoked by it.  At a time when all we seem to hear about Russia are Putin’s hardline politics and the “Ultra” football hooligans fighting hooligans from other countries, perhaps we need to be reminded of the achievements of Russian art, literature and film-making.



All of Tarkovsky's films are about the unknowable - something we reach out towards without fully understanding.  His later film Stalker seems like a premonition of Chernobyl - it was shot ten years before the nuclear accident and captures the sense of a world destroyed by Man which has begun regenerating itself.  The strangely mutated plants and insects which grew back in the Zone of Exclusion around the reactors was foreseen by Tarkovsky as the Zona, a temperate jungle of plants into which only stalkers (in the deer stalker, or guide, sense of the word) go.

When the three travellers in Stalker finally reach the Zone, they search for and eventually find the Room - the object of their journey. The Room is a derelict industrial hall with mounds of soda ash or a similar white powder flowing like sand dunes across the floor.  In metaphysical terms, it's a place where your deepest wish can be fulfilled - but at a terrible price.  Solaris similarly tackles things deep inside human nature.



At the core of Solaris is the relationship between Kris Kelvin and his wife Hari.  It isn't a film "about" space travel, or science fiction - it's a film about what it means to be human.  How Hari came to be on the Solaris spacecraft is a piece of pure metaphysics, but what she and Kris go through, and the agonising final scene which explores how Kelvin’s life can never have a simple resolution, peers deeply into the human condition.  Tarkovsky, to use a cliché from the Seventies, was a cosmonaut of inner space.

Of course, along with its script, actors and narrative - the film relies on set and locations for its impact.  The opening sequence, a shot of a pellucid stream with water flowing over weeds, is rich in translucency and colour, with the strands of weed flowing sinuously in the current … and then a copper-coloured aspen leaf floats by, suddenly introducing depth to the image.  Presumably intended as a metaphor for life, a symbol of transience, the leaf in the stream becomes potent once you realise that Kris Kelvin is spending his final day on Earth before going into space.



First thing in the morning, he leaves the dacha or country cottage where he's staying and goes for a walk.  Sunlight slanting through the trees, water meadows, birdsong, a pond full of weed and insect life - to which mankind adds the horse and dog, his familiar companions.  Kris stands on the verandah in a thunderstorm, rivulets of rain coursing down his face: you sense that he needed to experience Earth for one last time before it was lost to him.

One hour in to a two-and-three-quarter-hour long film, you will realise, slightly amazed, this is science fiction which doesn't rely on endless special effects.  As a result, it stands head and shoulders above 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Solaris is pretty much unique in that it defies “genre” classification which critics love; Tarkovsky hunted alone.  If Solaris borrows from anyone, it's the renaissance astronomer Kepler, who dreamt of space flight, trips to the moon and what life might be like on other worlds.



Kelvin arrives at the Solaris space station, which Akira Kurosawa said was the most impressive film set he'd ever seen, somewhere quite unique which is far removed from the usual images of SciFi: Jules Verne, Bladerunner, William Gibson or the relentless hi-tech baroque of Star Wars and Star Trek.  It's an aesthetic which countless directors tried to copy but only Tarkovsky had the budget and skill to make it believable.

Can I suggest you see the film yourself, then judge how its director understood the need for meaning and purpose in our lives, for belief, for intimacy, and even our connection with animals and the rest of the natural world.  Solaris is visually stunning, emotionally moving, and has the moral sense of Pasternak’s masterpiece, Dr Zhivago; it’s also too good to leave to the film snobs, hipsters and other sorts who made up half the screening’s audience.

So why am I writing about it here, on what's ostensibly an architecture magazine's website, rather than doing a quick post on Facebook - Saw Solaris, was gr8, innit bruv. Like.  Well, around the same time I figured out that the best writing is about folk rather than things - because people are fundamentally interested in people - I also realised that, at their core, buildings are about people rather than architecture.

Images copyright - Curzon Artificial Eye - http://www.curzonartificialeye.com/solaris/

A few years ago, I walked into a bookshop in a small town and found a paperback copy of "Atlas Shrugged”.  It was gathering dust on a high shelf – something which had been ordered but never collected, according to the lady bookseller.  That was the beginning of my curiosity about Ayn Rand, and why some architects secretly admire her.

Born to a wealthy family which fled the early days of Bolshevik Russia, Rand is best known for “The Fountainhead”, which is the single worst piece of publicity the architectural profession has received in decades…

The Fountainhead’s main character Howard Roark was reputedly based on Frank Lloyd Wright.  His egotism and will to power are only matched in American fiction by Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ film.  But Rand’s book is much less about the genius of design, more about how he forced buildings into existence through sheer force of will. 

Rand rejected the collectivism of the USSR and instead argued that history is forged by a small élite of so-called great men who she called the “motor of the world.”  Frank Lloyd Wright neatly fits that bill.  These man (and although Rand was a woman, her protagonists are men) are set apart by their ruthlessness and possess what she charmingly terms “the virtue of selfishness”.  According to Rand, they are the “most oppressed minority” because they have to negotiate with unions, follow labour and environmental laws, and pay income taxes.

Rand’s later novel “Atlas Shrugged” tells of a few more great men, led by John Galt, joining together and withholding their contribution to society to protest against having to pay income tax, follow anti-monopoly laws and respect the right of workers to form unions.  They even go so far as to withhold their greatness from an ungrateful society.

We’ve all met people who believe they are indispensable – but indispensability is a delusion.  You struggle to find any proof from history that a business won’t live on without a specific leader or ideology.  The USSR survived Lenin, John Pierpoint Morgan has been gone for 100 years, but the bank bearing his name is still with us.  Even Jaguar Cars carried on without William Lyons, although it’s been a close run thing on several occasions. 

What is capitalism, if not a perfect example of the world moving on from Adam Smith’s time but an idea surviving?

Anyhow, it was a strange decision of Rand’s, making Roark an architect.  He wasn’t fighting intransigence: he was actually fighting against the fundamentals of what architecture is.  Design is a collegiate activity.  Unless you somehow build a house for yourself by acting as your own client, funder, architect, engineer, buyer and labourer all rolled into one, you can’t operate in a vacuum.  Architecture isn’t an act of pure creation in the way that sculpture or novel-writing can be.

Maybe if Roark had been a poet-hero figure such as Ted Hughes, or perhaps like Captain Ahab locked in his duel with the giant whale, then we could accept that the moral purpose of his life was the pursuit of pure self-interest, as Rand claimed.  “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

From an enlightened modern point of view, it’s difficult to subscribe to that.  In the hands of Rand and her modern successors such as the people behind the Adam Smith Institute and the Battle of Ideas, libertarianism – the freedom to act in a free unconstrained way – actually offers licence to a select few to do as they will, to everyone else.  They believe the only path to achieve “liberty” is by supporting laissez-faire capitalism.

But with that, “libertarian” has lost its true original meaning, just as “National Socialism” has little to do with socialism, and Neo-Liberal represents nothing like liberality.  Aside from dreadful acts of misogyny in The Fountainhead, Rand’s so-called objectivism is morally ugly.  Her underlying message – the triumph of the individual over the mass – is actually about psychological mastery.  For her, life revolves around the egotism of winning, and the need to keep score.

Interestingly, I read a while ago that in the US, sales of Atlas Shrugged go up during an economic downturn.  Perhaps its message comforts casualties of the recession.  Instead, it should anger them, because their jobs may have been destroyed by the very laissez-faire capitalists who were inspired by the book in their hands.  I’m sure that Donald Trump, if he reads books, will have a copy of Atlas Shrugged at his bedside.

Another of Rand’s assertions, “Throughout the centuries there were men who took the first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision,” is an example of incomplete thinking and faulty logic.  She suggested that some men are genuinely "self made," and that they alone were the pavers of their own "new roads," but Isaac Newton’s famous non sequitur which is inscribed into the milled edge of the £2 coin, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” comes closer to the reality.

One of those giants is Jeremy Bentham.

Rightly or wrongly, many of us believe that architects need a theoretical base, just as academics should also build things.  You may still end up with compromised buildings – but at least you’re trying to resolve all the competing demands of cost, quality, ergonomics, aesthetics, longevity, and so on by adopting an *approach*.

Utilitarianism is an approach which everyone misquotes.  “Utilitarian” gets a universally bad press.  Too often it means a low spec, plainly-finished thing which is robust rather than stylish, but the term has its roots in what Bentham called "the greatest happiness principle" or "the principle of utility", a term he borrowed from David Hume.  At its crux is the notion that we should do that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Bentham wrote, “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.”

So, where does happiness reside?  Is there, as Alain de Botton’s book suggests, an Architecture of Happiness?  If so, can we use Bentham’s ideas to measure that happiness?   Well, his abiding concern was the total reform of British society and law based on the principle of utility.  In an effort to apply it to legal reform, Bentham developed the hedonistic, or as it is sometimes called, the felicific calculus.  If the end result of that reform is happiness, then that could be an index of his success.

So referring to a building as Utilitarian Architecture should actually be a back-handed compliment, although “utilitarian” means completely different things to a philosopher and a designer.  Nonetheless, the impact of Bentham's ideas is still powerful today: the words international, maximise, minimise and codification were all coined by Bentham.

Bentham’s other connection with architecture is less obvious.  When he joined his brother Samuel in Russia in 1785, he devised a plan for the Panopticon, a model prison where prisoners would be observable by guards at all times.   The planform ensured that prisoners could never see the “inspector” who surveilled them from the centre of a radial plan.  Because the prisoner never knew whether he was being watched, he was more likely to behave.

He hoped the concept would interest the Catherine the Great but after his return to Britain in 1788, Bentham spent the next 20 years fruitlessly pursuing the idea, spending the bulk of his inheritance in the process.

Bentham also had a great influence over British politics: the Reform Bill of 1832 and the secret ballot both reflected his concerns and his influence spread to some unexpected places.  George Kinloch, the reform candidate for the Dundee constituency, marked his friendship with Jeremy Bentham in a unique way.  The village of Ardler lies in the very heart of Strathmore, and there Bentham Street, one of the shortest streets in Scotland, is named after Kinloch’s friend, the political radical. 

Remember that whereas Rand thought that a person’s own happiness was the moral purpose of their life, Bentham felt that we should do that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  Which is the fundamentally moral approach?  Just as they dreamed that a rational architecture would bring about a rational society, perhaps a "moral" architecture could improve society's moral fibre.

Of course, just as the moral choices we make are never so clear-cut as Food Bank versus Puppy Slaughter, there are subjects we're wary about tackling.  Bentham had no qualms about addressing emotive issues such as penal reform, religious adherence and egalitarianism – perhaps today we could add sex, drugs, and euthanasia.  In the modern world, Nina Hartley promotes the idea of thinking “sex positive”; Calton Athletic FC championed the harm reduction model for drug addicts, Margo MacDonald supported tolerance zones for prostitution in Edinburgh and pursued a campaign to legislate for the right to assisted suicide. 

It would be easy to condemn some of the people affected, but that spirit of moral improvement has been largely consigned to the dustbin of history.  For that reason it’s worth reading Rand’s books, such as The Fountainhead, even if you find yourself flinging them across the room in disgust.  If nothing else, they demonstrate how some people have a vacuum where the soul would be in a moral human being.

Howdens is one of the last remaining Victorian heavy engineering works in Glasgow, and towards the end of its life, this redbrick complex was the birthplace of the tunnel boring machines which dug the Channel Tunnel.  The company, now called Howden Group, is still in business but left their home of ninety years in Tradeston in 1988.  The building’s future has been in doubt ever since, and it currently lies empty.



The company began in 1856, when James Howden set up in business on his own as a consulting engineer and registered patents for machine tools.  Before that, he was apprenticed to a firm of steam engine builders.  Howden’s interests gradually moved from machine tools to improving the design of boilers and steam engines, and he began experimenting with higher pressure compound engines.

The firm was incorporated as James Howden & Co. in 1862 and began building main boilers and engines to Howden’s own design.  Howden built a factory at Scotland Street in Tradeston then began experimenting with axial flow fans to force air through marine steam engines.  That was the root of Howdens’ business for the next century: fans, blowers, compressors, turbines and other steam machinery.  Today, they also make wind tunnels, refrigeration plant, circulators for nuclear power stations and mobile breathing systems for aircraft.

The original works further along Scotland Street from the present site were outgrown in 1870, and a new works was built a couple of blocks down the road.  “Howden’s Forced Draught System” was a great success, as it improved efficiency and fuel consumption, and in the 1880’s over 1000 boilers were converted or built to Howden’s patents.  Howden then turned his attention to auxiliary steam machinery, and realised his “new” factory wasn’t suitable, so he built another factory … this one … at 195 Scotland Street.



The works and foundry were designed by Nisbet Sinclair and opened in 1898, and had handling equipment and overhead cranes built-in plus (unusual in those days) a central heating system.  By then, the boilers in many famous ocean liners used the Howden system – the Lusitania and Mauretania – and later the Queen Mary, Normandie and Queen Elizabeth.  The original machine and constructing shop consists of six smaller bays running east-west; the much larger turbine fitting shop runs north-south with its brick gables facing the street: they’re largely hidden by the various offices which front onto Scotland Street. 

Business boomed, and extensions designed by Bryden & Robertson were built in 1904 then again in 1912, and (according to Howdens’ official history) the firm went on to build the largest turbo-generator in the country for Manchester Corporation.  In fact, Howdens were pioneers in the manufacture of steam turbines, and these were used on land as well as onboard ships.  When the Great War broke out, the Admiralty decided that all ships should be fitted with Howden blowers – the idea was to give them enough performance to outrun U-boats, and that saved the lives of thousands of seafarers whose ships would otherwise have been torpedoed. 

The company built a factory in Wellsville, New York in order to export their system to America.  After the war, Howdens gradually used their expertise in forced draught fans and preheaters to win orders for power station machinery, and in 1930, they were the probably first firm to use a fax machine to transmit data – they sent working drawings to America using radio-telegraphy.  In the late ‘30’s, Howdens developed dust collectors to clean up the smoke from power stations, although the further development of these was put on hold during WW2.



From the early part of 1940, the Howden factories (Scotland St as well as Govan and Old Kilpatrick) were used to build Sunderland flying boat hulls; torpedo bomber fuselages; and fins and flaps for Lancasters.  Scotland Street employed 1700 people during the war, and also developed a gadget to eliminate visible smoke from the exhausts of steamships, which was a giveaway to the location of convoys.  During the war, Howdens took over the neighbouring Subway Power Station – it was unique, as it powered the world’s only cable-haulage subway system.  Howdens used the building as a pattern shop. 

Shortly after the war, the works received a large order of steel furniture, making use of the aircraft tooling, then orders came in from the CEGB for new power station equipment, including fans, air preheaters and dust collectors – flue gas cleaning equipment – and similar kit was fitted to a new generation of ocean liners.  Howdens supplied the massive forced draught fans at Inverkip Power Station, each of which are around three storeys high.

A new block of research labs was built around 1950 at Scotland St., and as a result of their R&D, Howdens went on to supply the fans which cooled the atomic piles at Windscale from 1956.  Howdens extended the Scotland St. works westwards with a large new Assembling Shop in 1954, then another in 1964.  These parts lay behind Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School and have since been demolished, but they were constructed as erecting shops for tunnelling machines, the next chapter in Howdens’ adventure in industry. 



Tunnel Boring Machines are a complicated mass of components and machinery.  They grow ever more sophisticated over time, but effectively the components remain the same: a boring head (usually a big rotating wheel with teeth) and the means of preventing the tunnel caving in before the permanent lining is installed (a tail shield and pressure-balancing equipment which allows the boring head to work under pressure to the stop ingress of water).

The TBM also needs a means of propelling the complete unit forward as excavation proceeds (usually hydraulic rams at the back of the shield); an equipment pack with motors, hydraulics, control cabin and so forth; a means to get the spoil away - usually conveyors but there are other solutions; and finally the mechanism for receiving and erecting the permanent lining, be that segmental or sprayed concrete.  It all has to get reach the back of the shield and be put in place before the shield is moved forwards.

The most famous artefacts to come out of Scotland Street were the “tunneliers” or tunnel boring machines (TBM’s) which excavated the Channel Tunnel.  The order was placed by Trans-Manche Link for three Howden open-face tunnelling machines of just under 8 metre diameter and weighing over 500 tons, which made the landward drives of the main running tunnels; plus two Howden-Decon machines of 5.3 metre diameter which excavated the service tunnel which lies between them.  Each of them cost £7.5m.



One of these was later used to dig a storm water sewer in Brighton, but once its sister had finished her task, she had to dig her own grave.  The machines were supplied in kit form and had to be welded together on site: when work was complete, it wasn’t practical to completely dismantle them, so the TBM which dug the seaward part of the service tunnel was steered into a 60 metre radius curve away from the alignment, bored into rock, then entombed in concrete.  It still holds the record for the longest single TBM drive, of 22,000 metres, which was achieved between December 1987 and October 1990.  The one which survived intact was on display for a while, and then auctioned on Ebay a few years ago.

SInce I wrote that in 2008, I’ve spoken to a civil engineer who suggested that TBM's have never been buried – or certainly not the complete machine.  At the end of a tunnel drive, it’s common for the machine to be dismantled and used on another drive on the same project.  By the end of the project, most of the moving parts are likely to be well past their sell-by date and will be extracted then refurbished or recycled.  On occasions its cheaper to leave the tail shield behind (which is little more than a short length of large diameter steel tube) as a tunnel lining, than to dismantle it and put a lining in its place.

Howdens later supplied TBM’s for the Storebaelt tunnel in Denmark in the mid-90’s, and also built tunnelling machines under licence from Wirth of Germany in the late-’90’s, but Scotland Street closed in 1988, so those were presumably built at Howden Group’s newer factory at Craigton … and then began the search for a new use for this massive factory.  Even with the demolition of the post-war assembly shops, the buildings left still cover 1.5 hectares.  I’ve yet to discover whether Howdens built the machines which excavated the nearby Clyde Tunnel, but it would certainly be fitting if they had done.



Scotland Street Works has been bought and sold several times since Howdens moved out, and was owned in 2008 by Tiger Developments, who reportedly bought it for £10m.  It’s passed through the hands of other developers who pondered uses for it, and at one point there were proposals to convert it into a museum of industry and technology.  Can you hear alarm bells ringing?

Anyone with a good Scots education knows that the industrial revolution owes its success to mass production, which relied on several things: the harnessing of steam by James Watt, the invention of the hot blast furnace by James Neilson and the development of the steam hammer by James Nasmyth.  The world’s greatest ironworks which belonged to the Carron Company outside Falkirk, and it benefitted from all three developments and much more besides. 

Aspects of the iron, steel and machine-making industries are preserved at Summerlee in Coatbridge (which was once the Hydrocon crane factory) but there are plenty other things to consider: the global explosives industry grew up in south-western Scotland; the UK’s paper-making machinery centre was Edinburgh, and Dundee was the capital of the world’s jute textile and jute machinery trade.  As far as I know, there are no plans to preserve a recent naval or merchant ship on Clydeside.  The QE2 sailed off to Dubai, but why not repatriate another Clydebuilt vessel? 



Yes, Howdens should be saved; yes, Scotland probably does need a museum devoted to science, industry and technology … but the two issues are independent of each other.  It might make sense to use the buildings as a museum meantime (or artists’ studios, or industrial units, or a nightclub …), but you can bet the developers will try to recover their investment by demolishing it and building flats or supermarkets on the site instead.  Now that the machinery of the economy been thrown into reverse, the owners of 195 Scotland Street will need all the ingenuity of James Howden to make a success of things.

I originally posted this at the tail end of 2008 on The Lighthouse’s now-defunct website … I’m posting it again here because things haven’t improved for Howdens’ building.  Finally, here’s a comment which was posted in response on the Lighthouse website:

I and a fellow plater Tam built the front section of the services tunnel machine.  It was built in quadrants etc.  Our names are on one of the conical plates at the front of the machine.  It was a great achievement and I was proud to be part of it, but are we forgotten me and Tam? Peter Thompson came and got me out of Govan to do the Borie - Orly tunnel machine.  In Renfrew I met a girl who was a PR on Borie project.  She found out I was the fabricator and wondered why we the builders were forgotten.  I'm the Wombat, my nickname means nothing.  Did James Watt build the steam engine?  No, he prepared the engineering drawings etc.  So scottish platers and fabricators are not even remembered for this great feat of building the Channel Tunnel.

Yours Willie McLennan, The Wombat

Detroit, home of Henry Ford and the motor car, and of Motown and punk, was once the US’s fourth biggest city.  It lay at the centre of what was once the cradle of mass production, of what became known, in Huxley’s Brave New World as “Fordism”.



It’s there, at the intersection of Manchester and Woodward in Highland Park that Henry Ford perfected mass production.  The Model T Automobile Plant, built in 1909, housed the world’s first moving assembly line.  At its peak, the plant built 1000 “Tin Lizzies” each day.  Today it stands semi-derelict, probably the most important factory in automotive history.



An American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, coined the famous phrase “I’ve seen the future, and it works”, after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921.  Steffens was an early campaigner against the corporate corruption that dominated America’s industrial cities, and he took Detroit as a prime example.  However, in his enthusiasm for an alternative, he failed to spot that the Soviet system had adopted some of the dehumanising aspects of Fordism.



Car assembly typically took place from top to bottom, with raw material on the top floor, and a car rolling out on the ground floor, ready to be fired up.  Car chassis travelled down in huge electrically-powered lifts.  Machines were arranged according to their function in the manufacturing process rather than by type; overhead conveyors, gravity chutes, and belts were used to transport materials from one work station to another.



Body-building, upholstering and panel-beating were carried out on the second floor.  There were also machine shops which made pistons, water pumps and brake drums.  The linking range may have been used as stores and quality control areas.  The car’s “body in white” travelled down to the first floor where it was attached to the chassis and fitted out.  Final assembly was carried out on the ground floor, then finished cars were loaded onto rail wagons on the factory’s own sidings.



Today, Detroit’s great temples to the motor car – the iconic factories of Ford, General Motors, Cadillac, Fisher Body, Packard and many others – lie in ruins.  The architect who conceived them was Albert Kahn: most famously, he designed the plant at Highland Park in Detroit where the Ford Model “T” was produced but over the course of his career, he pioneered reinforced concrete frames and built many hundreds of other factories.



Arguably, Albert Kahn was The Architect of the 20th Century: his buildings made a greater impact on the world than Le Corbusier’s or Frank Lloyd Wright’s.  These photos show one of Kahn’s buildings, which survives despite the ravages of time and the defeat of Fordist thinking.

Technology is spurred on by war, which in turn speeds up the process of its evolution.  It's fitting, in this case, that raw materials for salvage can be found in the cast-off pile of the Ministry of Defence.

Perhaps the first spur to this salvage culture was the Ministry of War's vast Disposals Sale at Great Missenden in Oxfordshire in 1946.  The War Department is the MoD’s predecessor, and to recoup war debts, everything from Churchill tanks to Bailey bridges was sold.  The lots covered 20 acres and the sale continued for two solid weeks.

Not only cheap vehicles and generators but also structural parts of bridges, tents and temporary structures were available; some of the Bailey bridges exist in use to this day.  When WW2 ended, the Attlee government also instigated a programme to use the no-longer required corrugated iron which had been made for air-raid shelters, as prefabricated housing.



All the things scrapmen acquire were originally produced to do a job, but they were thrown out when their usefulness in that role expired.   The scrapmen use a malefic alchemy by which they turn the products of the Cold War into ploughshares.  The process rests upon the hunter/gatherer instincts of the skip-rakers: people who go to vehicle auctions, rake in scrapyards and dig in tips.

With dozens of shipbuilding yards, and a heavy naval presence in Scotland – vast naval bases at Scapa Flow, Invergordon and Rosyth – there was never any shortage of ship parts.  That continues today, with Faslane on the west coast plus Rosyth (now run by Babcock) with its submarine graveyard.

We also have an aviation industry: with Vector at Almondbank, BAE Systems at Prestwick and Rolls-Royce at Hillington all of whose predecessors contributed to the junk pile.  For example, military aircraft breakers supplied the Dakota passenger seat which Gavin Maxwell had in his cottage at Camusfearna, along with fish boxes and butter barrels fashioned into furniture.

Likewise, old and knackered road vehicles are destined for their own specialist scrapyards, such as the locally famous CWS bus breakers in Barnsley: several firms share a fifty hectare site, covered in hundreds of reduced chassis and littered with mangled wrecks, burst engine blocks and piles of impacted body parts.



Each of these sectors – metal recyclers who break down ships, aircraft and vehicles – is controlled by SEPA.  In contrast to these official operations is the approach of the inhabitants of the remote Hebridean islandsI who harvest what scrap they can and build it into their houses.  Everything is used many more times than it might be elsewhere, particularly things which have had to come across at great expense on The Boat.

On South Uist, among the ruins of the black and white houses many crofts boast a caravan, either in use as additional living space or as storage overspill.  Caravans are often left in situ for such long periods that blockwork walls are built around them, to protect them from the winter storms.  The notionally temporary actually becomes permanent.  Abandoned buses and coaches are also used for storage. 

Most islanders keep their wrecked old cars, which make the inhabited areas of the island look like a low density rubbish tip.  In fact, when the Atlantic began to wash away parts of the beach at Middlequarter Dunes on North Uist, the Army was enlisted to plant old cars into the ground to act as sea defences.  Of course, the constant Gulfstream current also brings a constant stream of driftwood and flotsam to shore to be used for fences and firewood.

The Hebridean approach has a lot to do with the paucity of material; but expediency can also grow up around an abundant source of scrap, such as along the northern shore of Montrose Basin.  As someone wrote, travellers and their elaborate mobile homes have been settled alongside the municipal tip to crop its waste: they often park up in roadside lay-bys, to set out and sort through their gleanings. 



Tourists arrive for the short summer season and also camp alongside on the older middens, from where a residue of demolished homes spews out onto the south shore, now clad in wild flowers. 

Sometimes, an ideological viewpoint emerges from salvage culture.  Travellers’ camps exist at Glastonbury, the New Forest, the Rhythm of Life camp in the Forest of Dean, and between 1992-4 there was a camp at Glen Shiel, which evaded not only building legislation but also anti-traveller laws.  Around twenty vehicles were parked up on flat land where the old Wade road to Kyle separated from the new, skirting a disused two hundred year old bridge and the track parallel to it. 

Their trucks had been narrowly saved from the breakers, the sheet alloy roofs of the caravans flapped in the wind and windows were patched with insulating tape.  The vehicles were surrounded by dogs in polythene tunnel kennels, and “benders” – small yurt-like domes of plastic sheet over bent wood, with a chimney at the apex – had been erected on the grassy flood shelf of the river.

I originally wrote the passage above as part of my dissertation at architecture school, and amongst other things drew a comparison between the travellers’ benders, and the green timber diagrids then recently erected at Hooke Park College by Frei Otto, ABK and Ted Happold.  Having rescued the dissertation from a 3 1/2 inch floppy disc and read through it again for the first time in years, I realised that somewhere I visited a few years after graduating actually fitted the ethos better – although not an impressive piece of contemporary architecture, more as a demonstration of an un-self-conscious way of life.



The military cast-offs, Highland canniness and New Age travellers’ sensibility merged at Balnakeil: a former RAF radar station near Cape Wrath in Sutherland.  It was built in 1954 to cater for a new radar station on the nearby promontory, Faraid Head.  There were barracks, mess rooms, a medical centre, canteen and so forth.  But the planned ROTOR radar became obsolete before it had even been completed, so the buildings at Balnakeil lay abandoned for several years, until local artists colonised them.

Somehow, the utilitarian buildings look rather Modernist with their Crittall windows and white rendered planes; from the distant glimpse, the cluster of rooftop water tanks stand out but don't have a scale, and their tower-like silhouettes make Balnakeil seem like a Highland version of San Gimignano. There’s an interesting history of Balnakeil craft village here, and its long-serving artists have proven to be the canniest of salvage men and women, long before artisanal skip-raking and “upcycling” became fashionable among the hipsters of Shoreditch in London or the Kreuzberg in Berlin, with their tweed caps and ironic beards.

Perhaps a shift of 700 miles between the densely urban and the extremely rural makes all the difference…

Long-distance train travel has its compensations – such as when a chance conversation with a stranger delivers a sudden insight.

One Friday in the autumn of 2007, I sat down beside a heavy-set young guy in a plaid shirt with a carry-out in front of him – he had clearly just come off the rigs on a Bristow chopper – and opposite was an old chap with slicked-back wavy hair and a face creased with laughter lines.  Looked like he'd been a Rocker in his day, and when offshore guy went to the toilet, the old chap offered me one of the beers  – "He'll never notice..."

We got talking, and I discovered that before he retired he had been a rep for Morgan Crucible, selling fire protection to the construction and offshore industries.  Before the advent of intumescent paint, Morgan Crucible, just like TAC (Turners Asbestos), was one of the main suppliers of fireproof boards, blankets and fibrous material which was sprayed onto steelwork to insulate it from high temperatures.  Now they concentrate on high-tech fire protection for ships, chemical plants and so forth.

Since retiring, he has delivered cars in order to make a bit of beer money, and today he was returning to Worcester after dropping off a Saab in Forres.  So the conversation moved from buildings to cars, and he got around to the fact that he once worked for "a little company in Coventry called Standard-Triumph".  I replied that the Stag was surely the best car Triumph ever produced, and he confided that after British Leyland took over Triumph, they quickly moved to close the Research & Development department.



Triumph Stag Mk2

After that happened, twelve of the men who designed and developed the Stag left Britain to join "a little company in Munich called the Bavarian Motor Works", and shortly afterwards BMW developed their first modern, unified range of compact sporting saloons and coupes, like the predecessors of the modern 3 and 5 series.  Until then, BMW’s range consisted of the “Neue Klasse” small saloons and coupes of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, most memorable of which was the 2002.  All of them were designed by Michelotti … who also designed the Stag.

Two little lightbulbs came on at that point.  Firstly, that confirms what I've always believed about the styling of 1980's and 1990's BMW's.  They look too much like Triumphs for the resemblance to be coincidental: for example, the lights and grille are contained in a narrow horizontal frame between bonnet and bumper; a pair of circular headlamps bracketed by arrowhead shaped light clusters which form the edge of the wing; a grille with blacked-out ribs, and a central bay which advances.  Then there’s the characteristic "C" pillar applied to each model in the range, and a fascia which curves around the driver. 

The BMW 1602 is a German version of the Triumph Herald; the original 5-Series harks back to the Triumph 2000/ 2500 family which was code-named “Innsbruck”.  Perhaps this affinity helps to explain why the Bavarians bought Rover from British Aerospace in 1994 … and by all accounts when BMW broke up and sold off Rover years later, they kept the Triumph brand with the Spitfire, Stag and Dolomite names.  From time to time there’s speculation about a Triumph revival, but rumour has it that potential claims from former Triumph dealers in the US helped kill that idea off.



BMW 5-series

The second, deeper insight is that when you cut off the head, the organism dies.  BL quickly destroyed Triumph's ability to develop cars, otherwise they would have continued to bring products forward and would have retained their own identity.  It's all about intellectual property, and the Germans understood that: this is also relevant to architects and designers, since so much of what we do falls into the realm of research and development. 

The point my companion made was that Triumph’s fate symbolises what had gone wrong with Britain.  Our purchases unwittingly trace the forces which have changed our lives – the decline of manufacturing, the rise of the service econony, the reduced tax take as a result, the shrinking public sector.  In fact, it could be said that nowadays only the richest and the poorest actually own things made in this country.  The rich because luxury goods are still made here – cashmere scarfs, sports cars, fine china.  The poor because they still own older things made before mass production ended in Britain. 

Assuming you were born a while before 1980, the car on the driveway was a Triumph or Austin.  The radio had a “Bush” badge.  The cooker was a New World.  The fridge was branded Astral, and the television was bought from the Clydesdale shop (remember them?) on the local High Street.  It may have been a 20-inch Ferguson Colourstar, with a veneered chipboard case, six channel buttons on the front, and a coaxial socket on the back but until 1982, when you were at primary school – it only received three channels.



Triumph Herald Vitesse

Back in the day, Ferguson was owned by Jules Thorn rather than Thomson of France, and made TV sets in a giant factory on the Great North Road as you headed out of Edmonton in London’s scruffy suburbs towards the Watford Gap and Scotland.  Now that Ferguson have effectively gone, along with Dynatron, Mullard, Baird and other firms whose names go back to the roots of the TV industry in the 1930’s, only the poorest or the canniest, still have British televisions.

You see this phenomenon at work when rubbish is set down at the kerbside for the scaffies to uplift – the white goods are Kelvinator, Creda, English Electric, but what replaced them is Far Eastern.  The new flat screen TV’s are on an even shorter cycle of obsolescence – and with the gradual closure of the brickmaking, steelmaking and ceramics industries in this country, soon we won’t have buildings made here, either.

That isn’t sustainable, so we need to understand construction fits into a greater economic system: I'll illustrate my point using the specification of building materials.  There are two different ways to look at building materials – the conventional way, to use Isaiah Berlin's well-worn analogy, is to be a fox, knowing lots of different things about a range of materials.  The other way is to concentrate on a Big Idea, perhaps to the exclusion of all else.  This is what the hedgehog does. 

Berlin expands on this notion by dividing thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes, who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and for whom the world cannot be boiled down into one all-encompassing system.



BMW 2002

Once, when we used a limited palette of traditional craft materials – stone, brick, lead, copper, timber – every architect had a good grasp of each one.  He was a fox.  When the systems approach burgeoned after World War Two – curtain walling, single ply roofing, cassette cladding – hundreds of new techniques and materials emerged, and it became difficult to know about every one of them.  We retreated from being foxes, and when the Green movement turned mainstream in the 1990's, it enabled some architects to metamorphose completely into hedgehogs.

Their big idea is to build sustainability, and in order to do so they have to learn a great deal about breathability, material toxicity, building biology, and so on, because there are many different ways to measure sustainability.   It isn't enough to look at the embodied energy of manufacture, or ease of reuse and recycling, or carbon footprint, exclusively.  As transportation costs rise, we need to consider where the product comes from just as much as what it's made from and how it performs in use. 

Perhaps we need to re-appraise our specifications, looking at materials which we can source locally.  We need to become more like foxes, less like hedgehogs.  Of course in order to specify locally-made products we need local factories, and if they're to last, they need to have R&D functions in Scotland.  Alternatively, inward investment from Japan, Korea or America uses Scotland as an assembly facility with profits repatriated, but no high level work or headquarters functions here.  

The British Disease is short-termism.  It's easy to close a factory which is unprofitable in the short term, especially if it lies far away from the heart of the company, whether that’s London or overseas.  A good example is the failure of Silicon Glen – several of the large silicon wafer fabrication plants like Motorola, computer assembly plants like IBM and NCR, and high end R&D firms like Calluna or going even further back, Elliott Automation, have gone.

In building component manufacturing, there’s long been a “branch office” culture and for every McAlpine Plumbing, Barrhead Sanitary and Errol Brick which was owned in Scotland, there’s a Vencil Resin or Yorkshire Imperial Metals which had a Scottish branch that succumbed to “market forces.” 

The Scottish Cure is to build up our own companies, so that we can source Scottish products, and guarantee a regular supply of jobs, too.  With that in mind, in the autumn of 2007 just after I met the effusive chap ex-Morgan Crucible and ex-Standard Triumph, I set out to "build" using only materials and products from Scotland.  Then I extended this to plant and machinery made here.  It's the type of enterprise which the Victorians willingly took on – a demonstration project  – and the results were printed in Urban Realm’s predecessor, Prospect.  I wonder how many of these are still in business?

Briggs Roofing, Dundee – roofing membranes and dampcourse
Lareine Engineering, Bathgate – rooflights
James Jones & Sons, Forres – engineered timber joists and beams
Caberboard, Cowie – OSB, chipboard

Godfreys of Dundee – geotextiles
Visqueen, Greenock – vapour barriers
Superglass Insulation, Stirling – insulation
Don & Low, Forfar – Daltex breather membranes

Blairs of Scotland, Greenock – timber external windows and doors
McTavish Ramsay, Dundee – timber internal doors
Aable, Glasgow – metal roller shutters
Chris Craft, Brechin – window blinds
Glasgow Steel Nail Co., Glasgow – nails and fasteners
McConnell Timber Products, Thornhill – timber cladding boards

Fyfestone, Kemnay – architectural masonry
Errol Brick, Perthshire – fired and unfired clay bricks
Laird Brothers, Forfar – thermal blockwork
Leith's Precast, Montrose – precast concrete stairs
Blue Circle Group, Dunbar – cement

J & D Wilkie, Kirriemuir – flooring underlays and fabrics
Forbo-Nairn, Kirkcaldy – linoleum
BMK Stoddard Templeton, Kilmarnock  – carpets
Bute Fabrics, Rothesay – upholstery fabrics
Andrew Muirhead, Glasgow – upholstery leather
Dovecote Studios, Edinburgh – tapestries

Ferguson & Menzies, Glasgow – sealers and coatings
Craig & Rose, Dunfermline – paints and varnishes
Aquafire Systems, Newhaven – intumescent coatings
Highland Galvanisers, Elgin – hot dip zinc galvanising

Barrhead Sanitaryware, Glasgow – vitreous china sanitaryware
Carron Phoenix, Falkirk – stainless steel sinks
RB Farquhar, Huntly – pre-plumbed toilet modules
Balmoral Group, Aberdeen – water and septic tanks
McAlpine Plumbing, Hillington – plastic plumbing pipework
Ozonia Triogen, Glasgow – water treatment plant
Arthur McLuckie, Dalry – iron castings
Weir Group, Glasgow – pumps

Torren Energy, Glencoe – woodchip-fuelled burners
McDonald Engineering, Glenrothes – hot water cylinders
BIB Cochran, Annan – calorifiers and steam plant
Sangamo, Port Glasgow – timer clocks and energy controls
Clyde Energy Solutions, Glasgow – heat pumps and radiators
Norfrost, Caithness – freezers

Eness Lighting, Kirkcaldy – lighting and controls
Coughtrie Lighting, Glasgow – external luminaires
BICC Brand-Rex, Glenrothes – electrical cabling
Parsons Peebles, Rosyth – electrical switchgear
Linn Products, Eaglesham – audio-visual systems

Interplan Systems, Glasgow – cubicle partitions
JTC 65, Dundee – fitted furniture
Ramsay Ladders, Forfar – extending stairs
Fife Fire, Kirkcaldy – fire extinguishers
James Ritchie & Son, Edinburgh – clockmakers
Charles Laing & Sons, Edinburgh – bronze handrails

McPhee Brothers, Blantyre – truckmixers
Albion Automotive, Scotstoun – HGV drivetrain builder
Koronka, Kinross – fuel tanks
James Cuthbertson, Biggar – HGV fittings

Meantime, next time you pore over product catalogues to select a roof tile or toilet pan, take a moment to consider what happened to the British car industry – Rover, Rootes Group and especially Triumph…

This is an expanded version of my review of City of Darkness Revisited, which was published recently in the RIAS Quarterly.

City of Darkness Revisited is an unusual book about an astonishing place.  Just over twenty years ago, Kowloon’s Walled City was demolished.  In the early 1980’s over 40,000 people lived there, although only 33,000 were officially registered, and at the time it was the most densely-populated place on the planet – all built without the input of an architect. 



The Walled City evolved from a squatter settlement near Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport.  Some 300 buildings, which ultimately rose to 17 storeys, were crammed onto a site of 200 x 100 metres.  The only building code adhered to was a height limit set by the proximity of Kai Tak’s flight path.

KWC confronted the rest of Kowloon along its north edge, the Tung Tau Tsuen Road.  The thoroughfare was lined with the illuminated signs of doctors, dentists and convenience stores; the precarious caged balconies which residents built to extend their apartments cantilevered out above them.  The city’s south and west elevations overlooked a park built after squatters’ huts were cleared in 1985, and this reduction in density introduced more sunlight into the Walled City.

The Wall consisted of a haphazard elevation of balconies, stairs and verandahs – rifts between the apartments provided the narrow pends through which you entered it.  Behind the apartments, many only one room deep, lay a maze of alleyways broiling in heat, humidity and darkness.  There, the City of Darkness lived up to its name, but most stairways led up to the roof where residents could breathe fresh air and escape the claustrophobia.



KWC’s roof was also a place from which to gaze towards Lion Rock to the north and watch the planes taking off and landing at nearby Kai Tak airport.  In fact, the most arresting images from City of Darkness Revisited show just how close the Walled City was to the final approach into Kai Tak.  Aircraft only ever flew “short finals” onto its runway: the approach was steep, followed by a banking turn after which airliners lined up on the VASI lights at the last moment.  At decision height, they were pretty much flying at rooftop level!

The Kowloon skyline is a jumble of skyscrapers and apartment blocks which make up only part of Hong Kong’s urban agglomeration.  KWC’s architectural identity lay in an extreme version of this, and from ground level the way its seemingly chaotic blocks loomed over the conventional Hong Kong streets surrounding it.

With unimaginable density and living conditions, KWC has been described elsewhere as anti-architecture.  Perhaps no architect could have dreamt it, but film designers have since attempted to re-create it.  Outsiders assumed the Walled City was entirely autonomous and lawless, a place of “drug divans, criminal hide-outs, vice dens and even cheap unlicensed dentists,” but the authorities did collect rubbish and supply power and water – although illegal connections were made whenever folk thought they could get away with it.

The Walled City was condemned in the late 1980’s, but even though Lambot and Girard spent five years photographing it, Mr Lui the postman was acknowledged as the only person who knew his way around the whole City.  A network of bridges and corridors at the higher levels meant the City could be traversed without ever touching the ground.  Photographing there, as Lambot admitted, was a constant adventure. “It was pretty easy to get lost in the maze of stairways and corridors whenever you entered the buildings, so I learnt pretty quickly to photograph anything interesting when I saw it as you might never find it again. It was always that combination of being in the right place at the right time with just the right light.”



Since its demolition in 1993, the Walled City’s influence has extended from the film Chungking Express to William Gibson’s “Bridge” novels, which gave rise to the myth of the city as cyberpunk dystopia and went on to inspire both video game designers and urban theorists.  Laurence Liauw's polemical essay, "KWC FAR 12", in MVRDV's book FARMAX, focuses on the density, fluid organisation and blurred typologies of the place. 

Much of KWC’s influence is down to the Lambot and Girards’ original City of Darkness, which was published in the 1994 and has since become a cult book.  Perhaps that has been amplified by the politics of post-colonial Hong Kong, where natives and expats alike feel sentimental towards what the colony once was.

City of Darkness Revisited is a companion volume which develops the authers’ thesis in a larger format.  It’s a 21st century book, in the sense that they funded it through a Kickstarter campaign, and it goes some way towards de-mystifying the Walled City by focussing on its daily life.  Lambot and Girdard combine oral histories, maps and essays with vivid photos which are evocative of a way of life swept away during Hong Kong’s last few years as a colony.  By fusing architectural, social, cultural and photographic material, the book provides a more rounded understanding of the Walled City.



Now to consider what I didn’t have space to discuss in the printed review: why the Walled City grips our architectural imaginations so hard.

Perhaps KWC appeals to a mindset which has outgrown the systematic, rational approach of Modernism.  The growth of the Walled City bred an intense visual complexity, and made it easy for us to view it as an organism which had somehow freed itself from human agency and taken on a life of it own.  The city as organism (bacteria, fungus, beehive, ant’s nest) is a popular metaphor amongst architectural theorists, but one man’s complexity is another’s chaos.

In KWC the many competing forces reached enough of an equilibrium for the city to work in a quotidian way – but it was forever in flux, and more importantly the human forces at work were subtle and unseen.  Even though the facts revealed in City of Darkness prove otherwise, the idea of Kowloon Walled City operating within its own rules – perhaps like a principality such as Andorra, a city statelet along the lines of Passport to Pimlico, or a micro-nation like Sealand – remains an attractive idea.  It harks back to the walled cities of medieval times, and through that, KWC has become a metaphor for some kind of workable anarchy.



One of the book’s many messages is that you can’t legislate for a community like this – in fact, the authorities tried to stifle it at birth.  Another is that the Walled City’s very persistence offers hope that centrally-planned redevelopment projects, which consume vast amounts of time and resources in their assembly, aren’t necessarily the only way forward.  A third theme is that it’s possible for people to live at far greater densities that we acknowledge, but the highest cost in this case is darkness and squalor.  Like La Torre David which I previously wrote about here, the Walled City is not necessarily a “model” to apply elsewhere, but shows that doctrinal Modernism isn’t the only way to achieve high density urban development.

City of Darkness Revisited is the most engaging book I read in 2015.  If you enjoyed other things I’ve written about – such as Lebbeus Woods’ drawings, Lucien Kroll’s architecture, or what the anarchists achieved at Christiania in Copenhagen – you may well enjoy both text and images in City of Darkness Revisited.  It comes from the same vein of socially-engaged poetic inquiry into architecture in its widest sense.

City of Darkness Revisited can bought from the City of Darkness website, or if you’re in Edinburgh, from the RIAS Bookshop in Rutland Square.

All images courtesy of Ian Lambot at Watermark Publications.


Bibliographic details:
Girard, Greg and Lambot, Ian.  “City of Darkness Revisited”  London: Watermark Publications, 2014.  ISBN: 978-1873200889

Other titles about Kowloon Walled CIty include:

Girard, Greg and Lambot, Ian.  “City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City”  London: Watermark Publications, 1999

Miyamoto, Ryuji; Muramatsu, Shin.  “Kau Lung Shing Chai”  Tokyo: Atelier Peyotl, 1988
A small format photo essay about the Walled City, shot on monochrome film.  This is the first edition, and certainly the more valuable for book collectors.

A later edition was published in a different format as:
Miyamoto, Ryuji.  “Kowloon Walled City”  Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1998

Suzuki, Takayuki and Terasawa, Hitomi.  “Large-scale Illustrated Kowloon City” Japan: Suzushi Kuwabara
Large, intricately-detailed cross section drawings of KWC.

Maas, Winy and van Rijs, Jacob.  “FARMAX: Excursions on Density”  Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998
Expositionary essays about various places including the Walled City.

Happy New Year.  Traditionally, this is a time of year for reflection, and I guess we should be grateful for any stimulus which makes us examine our lives.

I never met Jon-Marc Creaney.  He studied at the Mac, practiced in Lanarkshire and was around my age.  I only became aware of him thanks to the photos, blog and the comments he posted on the net under the nom-de-guerre “Scarpadog”.  It strikes me that he would have been a great guy to strike up a friendship with, as he had many interests and enthusiasms to share with the world.  But I’ll never have the chance to do that, because he passed away in 2011.

The continuing existence of Jon-Marc’s Flickr and his blog provide an insight into his hopes and aspirations, plus his fears and concerns as he came to terms with during his cancer treatment at the Beatson in Glasgow.  I was prompted to think about Scarpadog again by what a close friend is going through at the moment.  All the time you want to help, but you can never be sure if standing back and giving space, or reaching out to give them a hug, is the right thing to do.  Often the “right” thing to do changes from day to day.

Similarly, it’s difficult to write about someone who I never knew in person, and who wasn’t a public figure – but discovering the things which Jon-Marc left behind made me ponder about the nature of the internet and anonymity in the 21st century.  I knew Scarpadog through his work, and a shared interest in contemporary architecture and abandoned places.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scarpadog/4451539528/in/dateposted/

It’s comforting to think that we’re known and remembered for life-affirming things: our passions for music, photography, travel and friends as well as the all-encompassing sense of shared humanity which Burns coined so neatly in “A Man’s a Man”.  I’m sure it’s heartening to his friends and family that Jon-Marc Creaney will be remembered for those positive things – and that strangers like me will come along occasionally and still be inspired by him.  The traces of Scarpadog which remain on the net are a tribute to him.

Hopefully some will also take heed of one of the final posts on Scarpadog’s blog, “I recalled lying on the sun-drenched slopes of Gran Paradiso feeling on top of the world, what a change in a year and I would say to everyone to grasp and enjoy these moments you get in life to the fullest – you never know when they can be taken away.” That Jon-Marc wrote this while he was seriously ill says a great deal about his self-awareness.  He was brave to share how he felt at that moment, and in a way because he posted it under the identity “Scarpadog” it somehow made what he said all the more universal.  Prompted by that, I’d like to consider how we communicate through the supposedly anonymous medium of the net.

A couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg got into a spat with internet hacktivists about the myriad of anonymous accounts that exist on Facebook.  Zuckerberg felt that folk who post anonymously portray a false and sometimes malicious reality – other figures on the internet such as “Moot” disagreed.  Moot said, “Zuckerberg equated anonymity with a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice, and I would say that's fully wrong.  I think anonymity is authenticity, it allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, unfiltered, raw way and I think that's something that's extremely valuable." Moot is correct that throughout history, free speech has depended on anonymity.

In a political sense, anonymity acts as a shield from the tyranny of the majority.  As the American First Amendment has it, anonymity can protect unpopular people from retaliation, and their ideas from suppression at the hands of an intolerant mob.  Anonymous speech was used by the likes of Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) to criticise common ignorance, and the Economist Magazine believes that keeping authorship anonymous moves the focus of discussion away from the speaker and on to the subject of the piece – which as it should be.  Sometimes authorship is vital: we like to get credit where it’s due for our work.  Sometimes anonymity is crucial: if that’s the guarantor of free speech and free expression then so be it.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/scarpadog/4438504949/in/dateposted/

On a personal level, if posting as “Scarpadog” enabled Jon-Marc to be more honest about his life and what he chose to share with the world, then that was the right thing to do.  It’s also in the original spirit of the internet, where we chose exactly what to share and what to keep private but increasingly, the decision on what to make public and what to keep private isn’t even ours to make.  Facebook and other sites manipulate your account and unless you keep checking your “privacy” settings, things are revealed to the world at large (and to their advertisers) which you never intended to share.

Ultimately you can’t guarantee the integrity of anything on the internet, but when folk like Jon-Marc post openly and honestly about themselves, that rings true despite the digital clutter.  We habitually confide in close friends because we trust them; yet occasionally we lay ourselves bare to strangers in the hope that something we thought or felt is transferrable and it may touch them.  That’s what paintings, novels and pieces of music can do – we don’t need to know who made them or why, in order to take something from them.

During the heyday of open architectural competitions in the first half of the 20th century, most entries were made anonymously – but rather than being allotted a number, each entry was identified by a chosen name.  Sometimes the name was a scrap of Latin or Greek, sometimes a nickname known only to the architect and their own circle.  Identifying yourself this way perhaps frees up creativity by allowing you to travel in a fresh direction, or to take a risk which you wouldn’t otherwise have taken for fear of harming your supposed reputation.  Thinking about yourself through an alter ego – whether Ziggy Stardust for our parents’ generation or the many noms-des-plumes which graffiti writers use – can provide a fresh outlet or some critical distance.

Of course we all have curiosity to satisfy and the internet has made it insatiable.  We peer into peoples’ lives through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and nowadays less so Bebo, DeviantArt or Friends Reunited.  Investigative reporters – when they’re not hacking into celebrities’ iPhones – can find out a great deal about folk quite legally using what we post in unguarded moments, even “public” comments on Facebook which we assumed were private.

One of Jon-Marc’s own buildings, at Wellwynd in Airdrie.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/scarpadog/5280569230/in/dateposted/

So you do have to filter what you post on the net.  You’d like to think that the millennials, as internet entrepreneurs characterise the generation now in their teens and early twenties which followed Douglas Coupland’s so-called Generation X, are more internet and privacy savvy than those of us who grew up with computers, but are old enough to remember when the net began. 

Well, perhaps.  In 2015, internet “content” is a feral thing: as soon as you post something it takes on a life of its own.  You may try to catch it and take it back – but as Mike Donnachie wrote elsewhere, the closest you’ll get is a glimpse of it howling at the moon from a distant mountaintop.  Perhaps that will discourage people from being authentic, and we’ll eventually become so guarded that life will be conducted through avatars and ciphers.

That would be a great loss.  Scarpadog carefully chose what he wanted to share, and that act of consideration was important because the internet has preserved Jon-Marc Creaney’s words and photos – just as a book, painting or piece of music lives on independently of the person who created it.

All photos are Jon-Marc Creaney’s, from his Flickr page - https://www.flickr.com/photos/scarpadog/