Battersea Power Station - The strange yet persistent allure of the industrialised megalith

There was a question that persistently nagged at me whilst forming part of the inquisitive bovine line herding its way, as though into an abattoir, through Battersea Power Station during Open House London in September.....

What exactly is it that people find so consistently interesting and appealing about this hulking relic of industrialised Britain festering on the southern bank of the Thames since it was decommissioned in 1983?

It you could have conducted a straw poll amongst the 14,000 visitors to the site over the weekend, I believe the results would have been a fairly vague mish-mash of obfuscations or certainly, in the main, nothing more concrete than a sense of curious obligation.

But what is it really that prolongs the power station’s place in our affection and intrigue? What role does its slumbering presence play for the 21st century Londoner?

My strong hunch is that it stems from a sense of nostalgia for an industrial Britain that no longer exists. It is an architectural talisman that serves as a physical manifestation of the generative power that once fuelled the city. It is a monolithic relic from a by-gone era which has, in recent years, enjoyed a renaissance in terms of public opinion. Already, the beginnings of such a trend can be seen developing with regard to the post-war Brutalism period, with sites such as the Barbican and Trellick Tower acquiring a fresh verglas of appreciation.

With the ruins of Battersea Power Station representing the lapse of early-20th century modernism, it is ironic that its resuscitation should be by the electrotherapy of early-21st century post-post-modernism. That is, the predominance of banal steel-and-glass or colourfully cladded luxury accommodation; buildings whereby form very often follows miserably behind function (see the Shard, the Gherkin, et al), and the transformation of every urban space into a commercialised, highly-lucrative commodity. In this particular instance, transmogrifying the power station into some kind of gigantic Costa Coffee.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Battersea could be seen as a sort of synecdoche for the way Britain has evolved to accommodate its past – that seismic shift from producers to consumers, from being the globally competitive generators of ‘stuff’ to the proud yet backward-looking, service-providing nation of 2013.

As much as the tenor of this essay may be suffering from a subsidence into cynicism, make no mistake, I was grateful for the chance to satisfy my own curiosity when it came to the power station, even if I wasn’t really sure why. Pivoting slowly around, it felt like I was standing in the belly of some giant, desiccated animal, its four skeletal limbs still sturdy whilst the rest of its flesh and muscle tissue had withered into atrophy.

Like an awful lot of people (more, I’d be willing to wager, than would be prepared to admit it), my first association of the power station stemmed from the iconic Pink Floyd album cover for ‘Animals’.

And yet, I can’t help but remain perplexed by the way this association has almost become dyed into the socio-cultural fabric, given that the album itself stands as one of Pink Floyd’s ‘overlooked’ efforts, sandwiched chronologically between more famous works ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘The Wall’. I would have loved to have taken another straw poll of visitors to see who had actually listened to ‘Animals’ all the way through.

The album itself, which was released in the height of the ‘punk explosion’ in 1977, has always struck me as just as nihilistic, scathing or ire-inflected as anything gobbed out by punk. For all that Johnny Rotten may have declared ‘I hate Pink Floyd’, ‘Animals’ is, to my mind at least, one of the finest ‘punk albums’ of that period. The unforgettable album cover by Hipgnosis can itself be interpreted in this way. The power station is a symbol of the toiling working class of the stagnant and, by then, outdated industrial era, watched over by the despotic elite as represented by the flying pig.

My own elaboration on this reading is that it signifies that with the abandoning of industrial endeavours in pursuit of an American-style market capitalism, pigs will fly before Britain regains the strength, muscle and raw power of which Battersea Power Station is so emblematic.

This is all very well, but leaving Pink Floyd and the power of popular culture on ‘groupthink’ aside, the development and lifetime of Battersea Power Station throws up some other interesting points.

The Turbine A half of the power station became fully operational in 1935, before embryonically splitting and creating Turbine B in 1955. At this time it became the largest brick building in Europe, a title it still holds claim to today.

The apex of its prime saw it generating roughly a fifth of London’s electricity, whilst boasting the credential of thermal efficiency that surpassed all other stations. Yet by the 1970s this efficiency was on the wane, the pollution being churned out was firmly at odds with the dawning eco-consciences of the time, and the station was conclusively decommissioned in 1983.

It is this, relatively speaking, brief operational lifespan that seems slightly at odds with its resurgent claim on the public purse-strings of affection.. Its fellow South-Thames compatriot Bankside Power Station – given a transfusion of contemporary art to become the Tate Modern – was operational for a similarly ‘temporary’ 29 years before closing in 1981.

If this were the accepted useful lifespan for other notable buildings in the capital, the Gherkin would have only another 30 years or so before needing to be reassessed. Likewise, the Shard’s functionality would need serious sharpening around the year 2060, and St. Paul’s Cathedral should retrospectively have been mothballed decades ago. Daft conjecture aside, I think the point is a valid one, that placed in context Battersea Power Station’s enduring allure is seemingly at odds with its transitory utility.

Another important factor that provides an insight into the affection it inspires is, I think, its resilience as an underdog beating away countless big business investors trying to bend it to their own will. It has remained since the early 80s as London’s white elephant slumbering on the savannah of Nine Elms, batting away proposals for renovation – everything from a theme park to a football ground – as though they were little more than pesky fleas.

The latest contractors are a Malaysian consortium of property developers who have already begun Phase 1 of the project to rejuvenate the site with all the glossy apparel and finement of 21st century ‘luxury apartments’. All have already been sold of course, mostly to overseas millionaires who will no doubt parachute in a handful of times each year. That or they’ve been bought for student children of elite parents so that they can study in one of London’s premier universities.

I wouldn’t say I was bitter, only that quite a large part of me hopes the ramshackle power station has one more fight left in it and manages to avoid being wrestled to the ground by yet another ambitious project proposal. Wouldn’t it be great if this stubborn London icon could maintain its status as the ‘unmanageable project’, the untameable beast lying docile on the banks of the Thames. It could be made safe and then left open for people to meander freely through as an innovative and inspiring new public space.

I fear this is pointless idealism. Soon, the pigs will no longer be flying above Battersea Power Station, instead they’ll be living inside it.

Urban Exploring - 'Kiss the Sky' event (2nd Oct 2013)

"WHY CLIMB THE SHARD WHEN YOU COULD JUST PISS ON THE BOTTOM OF IT?" - Will Self

Last week I made my way to the Barbican to listen to a discussion between urban explorer-in-chief Bradley L. Garrett and a writer I very much admire, Will Self. Garrett’s book ‘Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City’ had just been released and I was intrigued to hear more about the exploits from the man who – along with his ‘urbex’ cohorts – had scaled the Shard and all its high rise minions, abseiled up Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, wormed through abandoned tube stations, and uncoiled large sections of London’s Victorian sewer system.

The subject holds a particular interest to me, not just as I have written on this blog about the subversive potential of long-distance urban running, but also because I made my own feeble attempts at ‘urbex-ing’ whilst at university, long before I became aware either of the practice or the dedicated community behind it.

My university town of Loughborough in the East Midlands contained an abandoned Victorian-era hospital right in the town centre, hidden away amongst waste ground behind an Argos. At 5am one Sunday morning I snuck onto the site, had a rudimentary look around, took some photos and swiftly left. This inspired me to then make the 5-mile journey to locate an abandoned asylum, the directions to which had been helpfully passed on through previous years of art and photography students also making the trip. Whilst this may serve as a backdrop for my personal interest in the subject, my lone exploits were merely light callisthenics in comparison to Garrett and the wider ‘urbexing’ communities’ marathon travails.

Garrett began the discussion with the adroit and perversely accurate idea that the vast majority of our presence in the city environment is forbidden; a thought I’d hitherto not fully considered. Indeed, the city is made up of places to which entry is prohibited, most public spaces are subject to curfew, and even places of work and accommodation are subject to necessarily stringent levels of reciprocal exchange.

By undertaking the exploration of one's urban space to these extremities, Garrett argues that the strict matrices of the geography are demonstrably flouted. Anyone who lives in a city or large town will recognise that more often than not we are subject to prescribed movements synchronised at the behest of time and commercial imperatives. There are many invisible yet tacit pressures exerted on the city dweller to conform to an orthodox and routine transit; it leaves us beholden to the public transport system, to authorised rights of way, and to the commodified incentives that maintain their ceaseless barrage. Urban exploring is, Garrett seemed to stress, the most defiant means of escaping the time and fiscal pressures that mandate so many of our movements in and around the urban space.

Will Self, a bastion of the modern resurgance of that loose bundle of ideas known as 'psychogeography', expressed his admiration and support, but had several caveats with which to prise the manhole cover open on the underbelly of the urbexing movement.

He sought to question the ethnography of urbexers; why it appears to be a praxis of, in the main, white, middle-class young men? Garrett conceded that it was this perception of a 'colonial' attitude, particularly invoked through the photography produced by the community, that needed to be moved beyond in the future.

Self also levelled the charge of territoriality on the urbexers, arguing that the everyman could - and indeed, should - subvert the rigid confines of their orientational routine by as trivial a means as simply wandering through the urban space with no ulterior motive other than to experience the locality anew. With this in mind, he raised the characteristiclly acerbic and witty proposal - 'why climb the Shard when you can just piss on the bottom of it?'

The production and disseminating of visual imagery bound up in the mantra of urbexing was another dimension Self took issue with. By taking the images and spreading them online, they were contributing to the vast ocean of simulacra that we are confronted with on a continual basis. Drawing reference to the Situationist's mastermind Guy Debord, Self claimed that the urbex community was conforming to the 'society of the spectacle' by producing a digital duplication of the event and offering it up for consumption, and that the only truly subversive means of exploring the urban environment would be to do so without creating the imagistic by-product.

As Walter Benjamin astutely surmised in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ –

‘The fact is: ‘getting closer to things’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction.'

This obsessive-compulsive urge to capture and replicate for the online medium is at the forefront of my novel ‘Digital’, and something one can see evidence of all the time. Just recently, I attended the Open House London event where myself and apparently half the city’s inhabitants mooched through the carcass of Battersea Power Station; to all intents and purposes becoming a single transitory organism capturing and recapturing the same limited viewpoints on varying technological devices. And yet I succumb to this compulsion just the same, I snapped away in an identical effort to, in some way, crystallise the experience in digital time for posterity.

I can empathise completely with the urbexers, the majority of them accomplished photographers, for wanting those ‘souvenir images’ enshrining their adventures, but I also concur with Will Self, that to truly rebel the only means of so doing would be to resist and simply experience the place on its own terms.

In many ways, urbexing is just another modern example of mainstream culture adopting rebellion for its own insatiable purposes, packaging it nicely for the consumption of the ‘chattering classes’ who in turn are enlivened by their exposure to edgy or 'controversial' symbols of the zeitgeist.

This growing trend can be seen everywhere, from Che Guevara adorning a million student T-shirts, to the shifts in rave culture giving rise to the generic ‘superclub’, to the work of guerrilla artist Banksy being stolen from the very fabric of the city to be sold for extortionate sums as though they’d been lifted straight from the Louvre.

The resurgence of interest in derelict and abandoned places and the hemisphere of artistic photography that envelopes it has become, in essence, a kind of ‘ruin porn’. In any book shop or on countless online blogs, you will find overly-processed images of Detroit (‘the mecca of urban exploring’), Pripyat and countless other abandoned asylums, stations, hospitals, industrial factories; such that any pre-existing subversive quotient becomes instantly diluted by their exposure to the bright lights of the mainstream.

Whilst the acts of urban exploring are to be commended (and, I believe, more useful information should be made available for those budding protégés seeking to join the community); the inevitable secondary tier of ‘spectacle’ that no doubt serves its purpose in attracting those protégés, is equally likely to simply serve as ample fodder for those content instead to experience the adventures of others vicariously through the portal of the internet. As Self advocated, your everyday subversion of the city need not be swinging from Battersea’s chimneys, it could be as simple as long-distance urban running, or as mundane as walking a different route to work, something that excludes no one and is possible of being realised by everyone.

Culture - September

Books Read:

John Gray - 'Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' (non-fiction)
Thomas Mann - 'Death in Venice'
Aldous Huxley - 'Brave New World' (re-read)
Charles Dickens - 'A Tale of Two Cities'
William Shakespeare - 'Macbeth' (play)

It is my view that John Gray is perhaps the most accomplished and engaging philosopher alive today, and 'Black Mass', his attempt at debunking the staid notions of utopia and religious dogma, was a most valuable read.

He tackles the fallacy of human progress and enforces just how ingrained religious and millenarian belief systems still are in modern politics - in the case of Blair and Bush he elucidates with frightening clarity just how in hoc they were when it came to Iraq to their fervent spiritual convictions in a perceived good that would triumph over evil, and the West's divine purpose to export it's brand of liberal democracy and market capitalism to the wider world (a mindset that can be seen most recently with the Syria crisis), regardless of the suitability of those systems to countries with their own unique culture, history and traditions.

In short, I would recommend this book to just about anyone for it will explode your current perceptions and challenge your way of viewing both politics and religion.


Films Watched:

'You're Next' (Adam Wingard) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'American Mary' (The Soska Sisters)
'Uncle Buck' (John Hughes)
'Final Destination' (James Wong)
'A Single Man' (Tom Ford)
'Dark Water' (Hideo Nakata)
'Wolf Creek' (Greg McLean)
'Blue Jasmine' (Woody Allen) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)

I am an unabashed horror fan and have been ever since the age of 10 or 11 when my Dad, perhaps unadvisedly, permitted the viewing of 'The Shining', which in terms of terror became the high to which every horror film since was destined to chase. Nowadays, I consider myself quite a sophisticated cineaste, but this hasn't diminished my affection for horror when achieved successfully. Having earlier in the year, lamented the state of modern horror and the fact that I hadn't seen a genuinely scary film for a long time, this September did its very best to resurrect my former fondness from its shallow grave.

Firstly, 'You're Next' was a rollicking slasher film that, whilst doing nothing more substantial than ploughing the same field as 'Scream', managed to harness the clever irony, self-awareness and referentia that made 'Scream' so successful and that subsequent imitations have all too often fallen well shy of.

When it comes to horror, Asia has stolen a considerable march on Hollywood over the last 10-15 years. 'Dark Water' from director Hideo Nakata (the man behind 'Ringu'), is just about the most sophisticated and outright chilling film I've seen in a long time. The tension escalates to a near critical mass, at which point the film swerves into a wholly surprising and unpredictable side-street. Those seeking white-knuckle shocks and scares may leave disappointed, but those in favour of more complex psychological horror will find 'Dark Water's visual and narrative techniques as well as its themes of abandonment and loss thoroughly refreshing.

By contrast, I fail to see how Australia's 'Wolf Creek' could fail to live up to even the most fright-weary horror fan's expectations. I found it to be wonderfully crafted, interweaving the psychological tension of 'Dark Water' with a near-perfect establishment of the three main characters, as well as a grisy finale to titilate any 'torture porn' aficienado. This certainly ranks as one of the most harrowing and exhilerating horror films I have ever seen and will, predictably enough, take some surpassing in the future.


Albums Played:

Nine Inch Nails - 'Hesitation Marks'
Disappears - 'Lux'
Disappears - 'Glider'
Arctic Monkeys - 'AM'
Trentemoller - 'Lost'
Kings of Leon - 'Mechanical Bull'
Manic Street Preachers - 'Rewind the Film'

The major release for me this month was the surprise new album from personal favourites Nine Inch Nails, interrupting the 'retirement' hiatus of the last 4 years. NIN mastermind Trent Reznor ranks, in my mind, as one of the most consistently innovative, imaginative and just excellent musicians working in the mainstream over the last 25 years.

'Hesitation Marks' is a worthy and strong addition to his canon, and signals an exploration into an altogether barer, more naunced and funkier territory. This is no where more evident than on the track 'Everything', the closest NIN have flirted with 'throwaway pop music' since 'Maybe Just Once', a rare demo for the 'Pretty Hate Machine' album. There are shades of Prince, of 80's-era Cult and The Cure, and at times the sounds are 'glitchy' enough to be more than a little reminiscent of Thom Yorke's solo work.

The moments of sonic brilliance that one comes to expect from a Reznor record are present; for instance, the fade-in of a light airy Kraftwerk-esque synth line at the final part of 'All Time Low', and the mesmerising Indian string section that weaves its way into the brilliant 'Disappointed'.

However, unlike Reznor's 1994 masterpiece 'The Downward Spiral', there are flaws present as well. Later tracks such as 'Running' or 'The Various Methods of Escape' are deadweights and instantly forgettable when taken alongside the rest of the album. But more striking of all is the quality of the lyrics, which throughout 'HM' feel rushed, sloppy and oddly uninspired. Indeed, I found it impossible to attribute the lines -

'Hey / everything is not okay / we lost too much along the way'

with the Reznor who penned 'Hurt' or the lyrics -

'devils speak of the ways in which she'll manifest / angels bleed from the tainted touch of my caress'.

Overall though, this is an enjoyable and worthy NIN album, one that may not attain former heights but nonetheless is evidence of an ongoing artistic development that is both welcome and consistently fascinating.


Exhibitions/Events:

Hunterian Museum, Lincoln's Inn Field, London
Open House London - Battersea Power Station
Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, Malta
Tarxien temples, Malta
Hagar Qim temples, Malta
Cathedral Museum, Mdina, Malta


Theatre:

'We Will Rock You' at the Dominion Theatre, London
'Macbeth' at the Globe Theatre, London

The modern deification of Queen is an intriguing cultural phenomenon, with perhaps The Beatles being the only other British band universally revered to the level that a West End musical based around their songs could still be running after 11 years (see the recent failure of the Spice Girls musical as a case in point). Queen's songs have transcended the band to enter the domain of the public consciousness, however doggedly and often gracelessly both Brian May and Roger Taylor have tried to maintain a grip on the rope of ownership. To my mind this is the same as e work of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or L.S. Lowry, that is seen as emblematic of the best of British art.

To enter 'We Will Rock You' with a critical eye is rather defeating the point; it requires you to disengage your brain at the door and take it at face value. I have no qualms with this in principle, although I couldn't help but cringe at the Ben Elton screenplay which was fairly ropey to begin with but now appeared to be positively fraying, with some jokes that must date back some 10 years. As well as this, the production at times had a touch of the end-of-year school performance about it, with vast acres of stage space lying neglected and empty.

All things considered though, one can't deny the stagecraft of the performers and the entertainment value to be gained from hearing all those old Queen songs live and loud again. In terms of the show's theme - that of rock & roll rising up and destroying the wealth of disposable mass-produced music - I was struck by the nostalgic resonance this had for the last 10 years-or-so of British rock music; an endless resurrection of former guitar heroes dusting off their boots for one last victory lap in the face of a perceived dearth of new and original talent.

Tearing the city at the seams #14 - Ice Cold in Malta

The temperature must have been, as it had been for the whole week, wilting somewhere in the low-30s, and yet the brisk sea breeze sluicing in over the cliffs did its best to camouflage the heat. On the penultimate day of my week-long trip to Malta I decided to take the bus over to the western coastline and hike south along the top of the Dingli cliffs.

Given Malta’s comparatively diminutive scale and reliable, if frustratingly sluggish bus network, my girlfriend and I had managed to see a large amount of the island – from southern Marsaxlokk, the quaint fishing village with traditional luzzu bobbing in the harbour; to the thriving nightlife hotspot Paceville on the east coast; Golden Bay on the north-west side, and the medieval fortified city of Mdina right in the heart of the island. In fact, I realised that in terms of percentage of ground covered, I had probably seen more of Malta than I had of any other country in the world.

Starting out on my walk along the top of the Dingli cliffs, the limestone face appeared to be melting away into the sea like a wax sculpture. The path wound around the conspicuous radar tower, a bloated golf ball evidently over-struck from North Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill base, and led up to Ta’Zuta, the highest point on the Maltese islands, marked by a solitary little Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. I surveyed the view – empty farm land and sun-baked towns, the bump of the Mosta Dome in the distance. Out to sea, the uninhabited pancake islet of Filfa lay supine and bruised having been ignominiously used as target practice by the stationed British army for years.

What struck me about my hike was the refreshing sense of isolation. With a population of around 410,000 – considerably fewer than London’s 8-million-and-counting – it was possible to walk some distance along the clifftop without encountering anyone else. A local was selling fresh fruit from a stall outside the chapel; a young tourist couple progressed along the same track as I, albeit with more apparent urgency, as though they had set themselves the challenge of hiking the entire island’s perimeter and were only just realising the extent of their folly.

At this point I diverted inland away from the cliffs in search of the mysterious site of Clapham Junction. Named by British tourists, as you might expect, this is a busy intersection of strange prehistoric ‘cart ruts’ scored into the limestone rocks. Archaeologists are still puzzled as to the precise nature of these ruts, believed to have been made not by cart wheels but rather by a travois – a form of sled with two parallel poles that would have been hauled along the ground. Theories also abound as to what exactly they were transporting, whether stone, salt or topsoil. I stood to admire this cross-stitch of tracks scarring the stone, looking as they did like a cobweb of plane contrails spun across a clear blue sky.

Having retraced my steps back to the coastline, my hike gradually became diverted inland away from the cliffs and before long I found myself to be quite lost. I skirted round the edge of a large limestone quarry, which appeared to be fully functional despite the absence of any human operatives. Reluctantly, I had to concede defeat and head back on myself to catch a bus that would be able to place me again on the headland near the Hagar Qim temples.

Walking round these ancient megalithic temples, among the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t suffering from a kind of ‘awe fatigue’. I had already in the week been transcended by the incredible Hal Salfieni Hypogeum, visited the prehistoric Tarxien temples, and been enraptured by the baroque splendour of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta.

In terms of ‘Cathedral Top Trumps’, I think St. John’s might just cast all others I have visited into the shade. It beats St. Paul’s in London, trounces Paris’ Notre Dame, and makes St. Peter’s basilica in Rome look like a cavernous empty space. The concept of the ‘sublime’ was originated by the Romantics and was traditionally apportioned to natural wonders; and yet ‘sublime’ is truly the only term to adequately describe St. John’s. Every wall, pillar and rib is intricately decorated, with rippling marble, brocades and gilt; it is a supernova explosion of gold.

As impressive a sight as the Hagar Qim temple ruins undoubtedly were, I felt I had already spent my quota of reverential awe for the week; the difficulty in visiting such a place is that, whilst we may feel humbled and inspired, the scale of time encapsulated there so surpasses our comprehension, that there is also the risk of leaving with a sense of feeling alienated or oddly detached.

I had experienced a similarly odd mixture of emotions upon taking a boat from the Maltese mainland over to the island of Comino to see its famous ‘Blue Lagoon’. The water is so serene and, indeed, blue that it feels like you’ve stepped into a travel agent advert or a billboard hoarding displaying cheap flight deals.

Predictably, this is Malta’s tourism piece de resistance, a fact that gradually assumes more and more weight as you approach the landing dock and start to see the hordes of people perched on the rocky slope like birds, almost on top of one another desperately trying to cling to their patch, each umbrella a different marker post in the sand. Climbing up the slope from the boat, you are presented with trailers selling fish ‘n’ chips, burger ‘n’ fries, ice cold lager and god knows what other familiar comforts of the British tourist abroad.

What I found baffling is that by walking some five minutes away from the Blue Lagoon you come across several other far quieter bays of equal beauty. The sparks of my confusion were fanned further once we sat down overlooking a small cluster of people frolicking in the azure waters that flowed around and through a picturesque archway of rock. I suddenly began to notice the scattered items of litter that had been left here and there; an old water bottle stranded amidst some dry shrubs, a crisp packet wedged between some rocks as though it were a pub beer garden, and cigarette butts peppering the dusty ground. It was as though I’d walked up to a fantastic painting, close enough to see the cracks in the paint and the ageing of the canvas, and once I’d noticed it there was no ignoring it.

For all the marvellous achievements humans are capable of realising – the hypogeum and St. John’s being two great examples from the last week – I often recoil stunned at the ignorance, hypocrisy and inanity of humans that runs in conjunction. To come to Comino, a site of unarguable natural beauty, and wilfully pollute it, is a mind-boggling example of the inherent superiority complex of the human species.

As we boarded the boat back to Malta, I pondered the idea that a permanent official should be posted to Comino to spot anyone discarding rubbish and place a lifetime ban on them as punishment. I think such a draconian measure should stand, for the reason that if you can’t respect such an idyllic place then you simply don’t deserve to visit it ever again.

Continuing my walk away from the temples, the heat and exertion of the day was beginning to take its toll. The misleading sea breeze from the clifftops had allowed me to burn a little, and the mosquitoes seemed to sense my exhaustion and persist in their aerial assault. Earlier that week, a pharmacist had explained how these large mosquitoes had been brought over to the island in container ships from Asia 3 or 4 years ago, and she ruefully speculated that this may have been a ‘happy accident’ engineered by the companies who manufacture repellent and other anti-mosquito products. I thought it amusing that even on the apparently easy-going island of Malta there was still the willingness to indulge in sinister conspiracy theories.

The end of my walk was the tiny harbour of Wied iz-Zurrieq, a charming inlet into the cliffs known as the Blue Grotto, where local teenagers swam and played with that smug abandon of those who know the tourist hordes still haven’t quite discovered their turf yet. My victory beer, a can of ice cold Cisk lager, was almost as glorious as John Mills’ upon reaching Alexandria, and I felt a sense of joy that Malta had, over the last week, yielded so many of its wonders to me. It is a place I would thoroughly recommend visiting, only remember to stock up on the repellent spray.

Tearing the city at the seams #13 - Malta's Hal Saflieni Hypogeum

Attempting to wrestle psychologically with the concept of ancient time and of prehistory is a quandary that we are seldom faced with day-to-day and yet when we are, the only genuine emotion is one of intoxicating reverie and incomprehension.

An underground necropolis over 5000 years old

So it was, that on my recent holiday to Malta – the stone of an island skipped across the surface of the Med between Europe and Africa – I found myself inside possibly the most awe-inspiring man-made structure I’ve yet been fortunate enough to visit.

The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum is a subterranean necropolis, a series of levelled chambers and passages hewn out of the hill-top limestone rock of Paolo, dating back to between 3600 and 3000 BC. It was believed to have been constructed at the behest of some kind of pagan civilisation who used the chambers as a repository for the bodies of their ancestors and loved ones. It has been estimated that as many as 7000 bodies were interred there. But this was more than just an underground burial site; it appeared to have represented a spiritual epicentre for the worshipping of mortality, immortality, death and sacrifice.

Visiting the Hypogeum is itself a challenge; only 80 people are admitted per day, 10 at a time, with places selling out long in advance and the entry fee reflecting the exclusivity. These protective measures have been enforced to limit the carbon dioxide damage to the limestone, and light levels are controlled to prevent the spread of algae.

Edging your way through the narrow chambers, the notion that you are passing through a monument so old that it predates the Egyptian pyramids (surely the emblems of ancient history in the common consciousness) by around 500 years, is both mind-boggling and jarring, in a sense that the sheer weight of time embedded there acts as a magnifying lens which brings into sharp focus the profound insignificance of your own existence.

Equally astonishing is the antiquated construction techniques and their sophistry; baffling not just in that they were built at all, but rather their resilience in being conserved so well over millennia, withstanding seismic activity and a myriad conflicts throughout Malta’s turbulent history.

The ‘Main Hall’, positioned some 10 metres below ground, is perhaps the most beguiling feature. It is believed to have been used as a place for ritual sacrifices or other ‘performances’, with its carved trilithons and corbelled ceiling that were constructed as a below-ground replication of the above ground temples which now stand in a far more degraded state. Not only this, but the hall was intended to incorporate a ‘fish bowl’ effect, giving the impression of its dimensions expanding out in size from a fixed point.

The discovery of the Hypogeum in itself is also rather intriguing. In 1902, workers constructing a new set of houses stumbled upon the top level, causing irreparable damage in the process. The discovery was not made public straight away, in fact they actually attempted to cover it up before a full archaeological investigation was instigated several years later. My speculations on this are that the accidental finding must have come as a most unwelcome and unplanned hindrance for the house builders who perhaps saw it as a fatal derailing of their work project and subsequently tried to quell any rising public interest until it could be hushed up no longer.

What struck me most was in trying to comprehend the scale of the unassailable and single-minded spiritual conviction that must have had a hold on these people in compelling them forwards with the construction. To meticulously carve out such intricate niches and alcoves using tools as rudimentary as flint or antler bone, with next-to-no natural light, and to pass on this sacred task through generations and over centuries is most inspiring, and, arguably, utterly unparalleled in our 21st century western civilisation.

Compounding the mystery still further is the fact that any work attended to the Hypogeum, along with any significance attached to it, abruptly ended without explanation around the time of 2400 BC. The theories behind this – as well as the ending of all temple building across Malta – are contested; but is most commonly attributed to a plague or pestilence or invasion from external forces.

These are all viable scenarios but I can’t help but wonder whether the reality might have been a reflection of an altogether more complex shifting in the societal sands of the day. History denotes that when sufficient pressure is exerted, societies contort and subvert their natural course very drastically; shedding the skin of former traditions and allowing a whole new set of rules and convictions to apply.

Could the sudden abandoning of this prehistoric pagan religion be due to the forces of demographics; of younger generations collectively subverting from the orthodox order of things and finding their own way forward? Or, perhaps some event took place which precipitated a wholesale rejection of the old faith, under the influence of some despotic shaman or messiah-like prophet who heralded the arrival of an irresistible and alternative way of life?

In any case, shuffling through the catacombs of prehistoric man got me thinking about what types of monuments humans might reverentially pore over in awe and amazement thousands of years from now. Structures that are recognised as holding a pivotal and crucial place in our civilisation; shrines to the collective imagination and ingrained belief systems of the masses.

Perhaps, future humans will be teeming with questions as to the precise nature of these uniform and homogeneous structures, their forms so rigid and ubiquitous, the repetitive patterns of their geographical coordinates across the urban landscape. As we marvel at the mystery and intrigue of the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum and what possible significance it could have held for those ancient civilians; so too might a future race of people wonder at the symbolic meaning behind the terms ‘Tesco Express’….

On Writing a Novel

If you would like a free electronic copy of 'Digital' simply send me a request message.

This summer I managed to complete my first novel 'Digital'. Its completion, after almost 2-and-a-half years of biding my time in thoughts and around 7 months of reeling it in, leaves me with a chorus of disparate views about what this achievement means in any real terms, and what potential it has going forth from the jetty of my creative imagination into the turbulent sea of the publishing world.

Set at an undisclosed point in the near future, 'Digital' depicts a nightmarish dystopian society in which cyberspace and internet technologies have assumed an autocratic predominance. It is the story of one man’s initial acceptance of and coalition with this world, before circumstances provoke a sense of creeping discontent and a pivotal moral dilemma, the repercussions of which eventually lead to him spiralling into madness.

It is a novel that pre-empts the means by which humans have subverted their natural tendencies – for privacy, intimacy, social interaction – to exist in this virtualised hyper-reality. It examines how, in the face of limitless information and simulacra, conventional morality has been sublimated and basic humanity eroded.

Admittedly, it is a bleak and pessimistic prophecy of the near future, but the further into the work I progressed, the more external events seemed to lend it an odd credence. Initially, I had judged my notion of a neuroprosthetic lens being affixed over everyone's eye, allowing cognitive processing of online data over reality, to be too fanciful and far-fetched. Midway through writing, Google Glass was unveiled and I felt a real sense of vindication, that this was indeed a major step along the road to inevitable implantation of cyber technologies.

The pervading sense of foreboding regarding the abstract faceless online conglomerates and web providers was leant further legitimacy by the NSA/Edward Snowden revelations, that demonstrate the heavy losses to the concept of the Internet as a truly universal democracy, free from overt corporate infringement, however benevolent the facade.

Many of the changes in human behaviour that future in the book are capable of being seen today. The extent to which people are subservient to digital technologies, and exhibit almost compulsive obsessive tendencies in their engagement with them. Before long, any time that is not spent online in some guise or other will be deemed wasted time. The proliferation of explicit and uncensored material; the fact that anyone can view hardcore pornography within a few seconds of entering a search request, all of this will, and can be seen already, to be altering human perceptions. My claim that child pornography will have become passé is not altogether too elaborate when you consider recent reports of under-16s creating sexual imagery using their own easily-accessible and abundant technology.

The fact is, as I consistently claim when talking about these issues, the Internet, social media and other digital technologies have only been widely present since the mid-90s, their dominance has sky-rocketed since then and shows no signs whatsoever of abating or altering trajectory. This has to, in some marked way, effect human behaviour and individual psychologies in terms of how to relate to each other as well as ourselves. There is no precedent for this change, but it is happening.

Some may argue against my view of humans becoming less sociable in the wake of these developments. I would say that humans will only become less social in a physical sense. It is human nature to be social towards one another, I am not arguing against that; instead I believe that the forms and platforms on which we socialise may very well evolve irrevocably. Surely, it is far more sociable to be communicating with innumerable people from disparate geographic locations all at once, rather than be limited to the arcane tradition of face-to-face physical interaction with one or a small group of people? To test this notion, ask yourself how many times you have been in a social situation where the other person hasn't been able to resist checking a digital gadget of one kind or another?

When attempting to write any kind of dystopian fiction or present a vision of some alternate society, the writer is inevitably strait-jacketed by the legacy of Orwell and ‘1984’; in fact so dominant is his imprint on the sub-genre that it almost embodies the character of Big Brother looming over the writer’s shoulder and keeping a stringent eye on the page. Having finished the novel though, a friend of mine commented that it seemed to him more redolent of the other parent novel of dystopia, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Having just re-read Huxley’s book again for the first time since the age of 17, this is a view with which I would have to concur.

As opposed to ‘1984’, Huxley’s vision of a utopian society in which sex and state-prescribed drugs (or soma) are encouraged instead of repressed, and the idea of privacy and secrecy has been mired in taboo and ostracism. Citizens are kept docile by the synthetic and artificial nature of their environment and control systems; in a way that much more accurately foretells the wish fulfilment and limitless distracting quotients of my ‘cyber nightmare’ society.

In terms of other dystopian literary influences on ‘Digital’, it is Yevgeny Zemyatin’s ‘We’ that is perhaps more of a direct ancestor, or E.M. Forster’s novella ‘The Machine Stops’, a remarkably prescient work that in 1928 depicted a ‘book of the machine’ containing unlimited knowledge, instructions against every possible contingency, and leaves everyone isolated from another in private cells.

Technically, this isn’t the first novel I’ve written. I wrote my first ‘Doves Will Rust’ during a year spent in Manchester from 2009 to 2010, which was, to all intents and purposes, an immature and inferior blueprint for ‘Digital’. Nonetheless, it was a critically important exercise in endurance and perspicacity; the disciplining of oneself to see such a project through to completion. Naturally, my 20-year-old self thought it was the defining book of our time; and just as naturally, given its demonstrably amateurish prose, the publisher’s rejection slips came in as reliably as utility bills.

All of this reflection brings me to ponder the actual achievement of writing a novel and what merit is warrants in the early 21st century. Since finishing ‘Digital’, I have noticed a palpable lack of some sentient form from my consciousness, of course attributable to not having to subconsciously ruminate about it for the first time in 2 or 3 years. Naturally, I’m now starting to cultivate the field of imagination ready for my next novel, although god knows when I will again start up the heavy machinery of application and routine.

On a more general level, is the written novel even a viable or worthwhile art form any longer in the 21st century? If the developments that I describe are realised – the diminishing of attentive faculties and interest in an imaginative narrative or story; the repackaging and rebranding of pre-existing works of literature, music, film, etc. – then that would tend to indicate that it is not. And yet, I don’t think all hope is quite lost. Despite experiential evidence to the contrary, reports suggest that reading is still a popular pastime; book sales (physical as well as electronic) are still strong. But the publishing industry is currently entering, very slowly and cautiously, the rough waters of piracy and threat to business model stability, that drowned the music industry so quickly and irreversibly. It remains to be seen whether it will similarly flounder or instead remain buoyant in a new and perhaps stronger model for the future of literature.

Cultural societies have always looked to writers as the commentators on the zeitgeist, as social provocateurs and documentarians of the prevailing mood of the times; and despite 21st century society leaning at increasingly drastic angles towards the world of celebrity to pacify this need, I see no reason why writers shouldn’t in some way still uphold their responsibility to this end going forwards.

To conclude on a personal level; the notion of having completed a novel, a piece of art in a sense, is a profoundly satisfying one. The novel is something that has endured for centuries, the practice of storytelling has done since the dawn of man; and though it may be only a singular grain on the shore of man’s creative endeavour and achievement, it is my contribution nonetheless.

Culture - August

Books Read:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Devils (Demons)'
Will Self - 'Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe' (short stories)
Ernest Hemingway - 'Death in the Afternoon' (non-fiction)

The first half of August was dominated by the reading of Dostoyevsky's 'The Devils', a mammoth political melodrama depicting the various ideologies, factions and personalities that together serve as a kind of prophecy for the Russian Revolution. Over 700-pages the wealth of character portraits is substantial and yet if it was sometimes hard work, Dostoyevsky's unique rendering of the machinations and deceit at the heart of the anarchist group plotting to kick-start a revolt was always engrossing. Particularly joyful was the sense of resentment burning from the page directed at the Russian author Turgenev, with whom Dostoyevsky had feuded and subsequently decided to lambast.

I had hoped that 'Death in the Afternoon' would be a fascinating insight into the culture and psychology of the practice of bull fighting, and in many ways it served that purpose, despite Hemingway's characteristic rambling prose style and laboured exploration of marginal details. Certainly I learned an awful lot about the tremendous bravery, precision and skill that a matador must possess; the strategy and processes of a fight; and found Hemingway's insights into the morality of the tradition compelling. However, I felt it to be overly protracted and far too rambling in form to really match up to my expectations.

Films Watched:

'Rec 2' (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaz)
'Finding Nemo' (Andrew Stanton)
'The Third Part of the Night' (Andrezj Zulawski)
'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' (Declan Lowney) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Mr Smith goes to Washington' (Frank Capra)
'Eastern Promises' (David Cronenberg)

Not being particularly au fait with Alan Partridge, going to see his inflation onto the big screen was always going to have its pros and cons. The pros in that, being merely an amused onlooker to the 'cult of Alan', I was able to go in with considerably lower expectations that one of the devout followers. The cons, however, being that I couldn't shirk the nagging feeling that they were getting a whole lot more out of it than I was, as though it were a film-length private joke.

That said, despite the somewhat tenuous plot line, I found it consistently entertaining; not matching up to the peaks of other recent film incarnations of TV shows (such as 'In the Loop' or 'The Inbetweeners Movie'), but more than doing itself justice.

'Eastern Promises' was more of a let-down, certainly one of the most turgid and uninspired films I've seen for a while. I could perhaps have been more forgiving had I not been expecting so much from director David Cronenberg, the mastermind behind such gems as 'Scanners', 'The Dead Zone' and 'Videodrome'.

At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Mr Smith goes to Washington’ was a delight, a fine example of the ‘golden age’ when Hollywood was capable of churning out such timeless cinematic classics. James Stewart, in his first major starring role, is as exemplary as he would consistently be from then on. He plays Senator Smith, who has his optimistic wide eyes rubbed raw with the corruption and dirt of Congressional politics. This is a must-see for anyone with even the most cursory of interests in political processes, and remains as accurate a representation of power systems in 2013 as it was in 1939.

Albums Played:

Television - 'Marquee Moon'
Miles Davis - 'Kind of Blue'
Brian Eno - 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports'
Apparat - 'Walls'
White Lies - 'BIG TV'
Crocodiles - 'Crimes of Passion'
The Violet May - 'Strange Lives (EP)'
Disappears - 'Era'

This month I enjoyed rediscovering a handful of albums I'd neglected for a while. Television's 'Marquee Moon' is a truly seminal post-punk record to which recent indie epigones such as The Libertines, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and a thousand unnameable others owe a tremendous debt. Listening to the fabulous interweaving guitar lines and the fantastical lyrics ('I saw the darkness double / I saw lightning strike itself'), on the ten-minute title track you almost get a sense that it owes as much to progressive rock as to the punk movement that was more in vogue at the time.

The Violet May are a band from Sheffield who I first saw play to around 60 people in Manchester's Night & Day bar. at the time I thought they were magnificent, with a raw urgency and, in frontman Chris McClure, a sheer sense of attitude that is seldom seen in fledgling bands. In my semi-drunken state I thought I was witnessing 'the next big thing'. Now 2 or 3 years later I find myself lamenting their unrealised potential. Frontman McClure has been replaced with a decent-enough imitator, but for some reason the 6 songs on this new EP fail to ignite in quite the same way as their earlier output. It sounds prescriptive and safe, as though the edges have all been sanded down and the swagger diluted into something perhaps more marketable but, to my ears, ultimately less promising.

The new Crocodiles album is both psychedelic and adrenalised; one of the best things I've heard so far this year. As was the new album 'Era' by noise-rock band Disappears. Sadly though, the third album by White Lies appears to demonstrate their waning inspiration and appeal. First album was great, second album was average, this is just quite dismal. A shame.


Gigs Attended:

Prom 41: Borodin, Glazunov, Gubaidulina & Mussorgsky (at the Royal Albert Hall, London)