On a bitterly cold but dazzlingly-bright morning in mid-January, I took the tram from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station to the IJburg district on the city’s far eastern fringes. Here – on one of Amsterdam’s numerous reclaimed islands – a new community of floating houses has developed since 2013. Straddling the IjMeet lake are the two sections to the project: on the west side, 55 gleaming white modular two- and three-storey floating houses crowded together around purpose-built jetties; on the east, a more colourful collection of individually-designed homes, currently numbering 38 but still being added to, each box-shaped but featuring an array of bespoke elements such as colourful cladding, roof terraces and individual moorings for boats. With as many residents per hectare as the most densely population parts of Amsterdam’s old city, this floating community realises – albeit on a very small scale – a vision of urban living that has long held a fascination for many.

Modular floating houses, IJburg, Amsterdam, 2013

Floating houses, IJburg, Amsterdam, built from 2013 onwards

Floating houses, IJburg, Amsterdam

The very existence of water-based cities like Amsterdam (and its southern cousin Venice) was predicated on the reclamation and stabilisation of land formerly under the control of the sea. Yet, despite the longevity of such cities (and the continuing reclamation of land from the sea in new cities like Dubai), they are still as rooted in the ground as inland cities. The dream of floating cities is predicated on the escape from such a static existence – to set cities free to exploit the mobile nature of water. From the Japanese Metabolist architects of the 1960s, French visionaries like Jacques Rougerie from the 1970s onwards, through to contemporary design companies such as Holland-based DeltaSync, the appeal of floating cities rests on their perceived autonomy – their ability to sever ties with land-based cities and float free of all existing political and social constraints. Indeed, for groups like the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 by a trio of young entrepreneurs, floating cities are primarily about escaping ‘obsolete political systems’ into a brave new world that would ‘unleash the enormous opportunities in 21st-century innovation’.

Marine City, 1963, designed by Kikuatake

Jacques Rogueries’ Manta-Ray floating city, 2013

As most of the entries submitted to the Seasteading Institute’s 2015 Floating City Project demonstrate, such a vision of political autonomy translates into designs that emphasise a kind of corporate architecture of interconnected modules made up of luxury apartments, offices and shopping and leisure facilities. These buildings characteristically imitate marine flora and fauna, whether the lily pad-like forms of Matias Perez’s Prismatic Module Island or DeltaSync’s mixture of geodesic domes and serpentine office and apartment blocks in their design (which the Seasteading Institute has recently approved). Like vast fortress communities, these seductive designs render floating cities as exclusive havens – whether for tax avoidance or political autonomy. A far cry from the socially progressive visions of the Metabolists and Rougerie, it seems that floating cities today offer no more than an affirmation and intensification of the same neoliberal values that are already producing such fortress cities on land.

Prismatic Module Island, 2015, by Matias Perez

DeltaSync’s floating city design for the Seasteading Institute, 2015

Yet, the example of the IJburg floating community provides a different kind of future vision of water-based living. Although far from being socially hetergenous (some of the bespoke houses here are worth around 1 million Euro), the construction of the IJburg homes necessitated a close engagement with the elements that connect water and land, rather than seducing with a dream of autonomy. And through those connections – whether utilities brought in from the land in tubes suspended in mid-air, or the jetties that are anchored to the shore – each of these houses shows a delicate – and vulnerable – relationship to the environment in which they co-habit. The sea may offer the dream of an architecture that can escape the future ravages of climate change – whether ecological or political; yet, actual floating houses draw attention to the city’s interconnectedness – the points of vulnerability that require working with rather than against.

Utilities port, IJburg, Amsterdam

The air above us – the atmosphere of our planet – is usually taken for granted as a boundless and free space – after all, we often speak of it as ‘open air’; yet, the knowledge that this air is inexorably warming (and that we are responsible for this) challenges such an assumption. As Steven Connor has argued, ‘open air’ is an illusion: rather, air is fundamentally unstable, ‘characterised by turbid swirls, gusts and clusterings, grots, hotspots, pockets and epochs, sudden saltations and sluggish dissipations’. That the air’s turbulence is intensifying as it warms only reinforces its state of permanent crisis. No wonder that architecture and cities have remained firmly rooted to the ground, their foundations sunk deep to hold them to what is presumed to be static.

Map of the winds, 1650

Yet, even as we find comfort in being rooted in the ground, we nevertheless dream of flying in the air. Such dreams are part of the history of visionary architecture and urbanism, particularly in periods of crisis when the earth seemed like becoming a hostile environment. Thus, the first hot-air balloons developed by the Mongolfier brothers in 1783 came at a time when France was about to convulse in revolution; the Futurist Depero Fortunato’s proposal for an Aerial City just before Europe was ravaged by the Second World War; the experiments with pneumatic buildings by the Utopie group in France and Archigram in Britain came out of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. For some, crisis may provoke a desire to burrow; for others, to escape into the air.

The first hot-air balloon launched by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783

Jean-Paul Jungmann’s Dyodon, an experimental pneumatic dwelling conceived in 1967 and exhibited as part of the Utopie group in Paris, 1968

Overcoming what seems like the inexorable force of gravity has been central to dreams of flying cities, whether in serious proposals like Georgii Krutikov’s ‘City of the Future’, presented to his architectural tutors in Russia in 1928, in which he outlined a socialist city that would levitate by harnessing atomic energy; or more fanciful imaginings, perhaps most notably in James Blish’s Cities in Flight (1950-1962) series of novels in which whole cities, powered by antigravity devices called spindizzies, literally take off into outer space for a nomadic interstellar life. Yet, despite visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao demonstrating that mile-wide floating geodesic orbs (their 1960 Cloud Nine project) might actually be possible (kept airborne by the difference in air temperature inside the spheres), no city has yet lifted off, discounting the fictional Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) or steampunk Columbia in Bioshock: Infinite (2013).

One of Georgii Krutikov’s drawings for his flying city project, 1928

Buckinminster Fuller’s mile-wide floating geodesic spheres, Cloud Nine, c.1960

Cloud City as seen in The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Today, as cities are growing exponentially (at least, in the developing world) and many are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the likely effects of climate change (amongst other threats), the dream of flying cities has been resurrected in the work of the artist/architect Tómas Saraceno, born in Argentina and currently based in Berlin. Saraceno’s ongoing series of works Cloud Cities and Air-Port City explore how the built environment might become what the artist terms ‘aerosolar’. Far from utopian imaginings, Saraceno’s inflatable/flying structures are worked out in practise, as seen in his early installation Observatory: Air-Port City at the Hayward Gallery in 2008, in which visitors could enter a huge inflatable sphere and, when viewed from below, seemingly walk (or in my case crawl) on air. His more recent works – such as the large-scale Cloud Cities installation in Berlin in 2011 and In Orbit Dusseldorf in 2013 – offer prototypes for what could become airborne cities. Whether comprised of solar-powered balloons or inflatable spheres using cutting edge lightweight materials like Aerogel, tensile cables and netting, geodesic domes modelled on Fuller’s, or agglomerations of polyhedra that are based on scientific experiments developing optimal packing structures, Saraceno’s proposals are always grounded in practise, even as the Cloud Cities themselves remain as drawings or other imagined renderings.

Tómas Saraceno, Observatory, Air-Port City, Hayward Gallery, London, 2008

Saraceno’s In Orbit installation, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, 2013

Saracens’s Cloud City installation on the roof the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012

Why is Saraceno inviting cities – and their inhabitants – to become aerosolar? At the heart of his call is the argument that ‘less weight equals less energy consumption’ – that an aerial lifestyle will engender a new ‘ecology of mind, a social ecology and environmental ecology’ that will revolutionise how we engage with an environment that remains stubbornly resistant to inhabitation. Saraceno believes that by living in the air (and by participating in the construction of cities in the air), we will transcend human egoism and social divisions and increase our capability to share and care more. These aims may seem impossibly utopian but, as the sociologist Bruno Latour has argued, our current condition demands such a transformation: ‘no visual representation of humans as … separated from the rest of their support systems, makes any sense today’ because we know that everything in our globalised world is always interconnected. And we also know – to our cost – that the air above our heads is part of this web of connections. Saraceno’s dream of flying cities shows how those connections can be both lived and transformed into architectures that take as little as they can from an increasingly vulnerable – and turbulent – atmosphere.

One of Saraceno’s visualisations of a Cloud City

Wolf Hilbertz and Newton Fallis, Autopia Ampere

In a world where over 50% of the population is now urbanised, cities are increasingly being called to become ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’. Alongside an extraordinary acceleration in urbanisation in the developing world – where megacities of 10 million or more have come into existence in an astonishingly short period of time – the idea of sustainable growth and urban resilience has sought to temper fears about this seemingly out-of-control expansion. Since at least the 1980s, the concept of sustainability in relation to architecture has come to be understood in largely technical terms: eco-technical building solutions that are focused on how a building performs, that is, how it generates and disperses the energy it needs to function.

The Cooperative company’s headquarters in Manchester, designed by 3DReid architects. When opened in November 2013, it was declared the most environmentally-friendly building in the world.

Despite the obvious value of carbon-neutral buildings – with their energy coming from renewable sources and their materials recyclable – sustainable architecture is very rarely discussed in terms of how a building is actually made, namely the sourcing of materials and methods of construction. And this is not surprising, because in almost every case, the materials used for buildings – timber, stone, brick, iron, steel, concrete and plastic – involve subtracting from nature: timber comes from trees cut down in their prime; stones, iron and the aggregate for concrete from rocks laid down millions of years ago (ditto for the clay used for making bricks); plastics from that most unsustainable of materials, oil. Unless we return to living in structures provided by nature – the caves of our distant ancestors – can architecture and cities ever be made without destroying some part of the natural world?

Paul Cureton’s drawing of Autopia Ampere (after Newton Fallis’s 1970 sketch)

Sectional drawing of Autopia Ampere by Newton Fallis, 1970

Back in 1970 – as many became consumed with fear about grim urban future of environmental pollution and overpopulation – the architect Wolf Hilbertz and artist Newton Fallis first sketched out a proposal for their Autopia Ampere project – a marine city that would literally grow out of the sea at Seamount Ampere – shallow waters situated about halfway between the Madeira Islands and the tip of Portugal. The city would begin as a series of wire-mesh armatures anchored on top of a sea mountain. Once in place, the wire mesh would be connected to a supply of low-voltage direct current produced by solar panels. Over time, electrochemical reactions would draw minerals from the sea to the armatures, creating walls of calcium carbonate – a natural spiral-shaped dam that would both protect and contain a sizeable population from the otherwise hostile marine environment.

Biorock reef construction in Pemuteran Bay, Bali

Although Autopia Ampere was never realised, Hilbertz’s visionary ‘growing’ architecture eventually led to his development (in collaboration with the coral scientist Thomas Goreau) of ‘Biorock’ in 1979 (also known as Seacrete or Seament), a substance formed by the electro-accumulation of materials dissolved in seawater. This material has found a viable use in the restoration of damaged coral reefs, with the Biorock grown to attract corals and other marine life in order to rebuild ecosystems and make them more resilient to changes in the constitution (and temperature) of sea water. In a world where coral will become one of the first casualties of climate change (and the recent upsurge in global temperates has already resulted in a huge ‘bleaching’ event on many coral reefs), Biorock is likely to become an important way of creating new marine environments out of the ruins of the old.

The vertical garden of the Caixa Forum, Madrid

One of Stefano Boeri’s ‘vertical forest’ buildings in Milan, completed in 2014

Rendering of Mitchell Joachim’s ‘Meat house’ project, formed by the 3D printing of extruded pig cells

We may never see Hilbertz’s growing architecture evolve into habitable buildings, let alone marine cities like Autopia Ampere, but the very fact that such an architecture is possible raises questions about what ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ cities might become in the future. Indeed, the idea of ‘living’ architecture is already being pushed beyond the rather superficial meaning of roof gardens or walls that sprout vegetation (from the green wall of the Caixa Forum in Madrid, installed in 2008 to Stefano Boeri’s skyscraper ‘forest’ recently completed in Milan). For example, in a 2010 TED Talk, urban designed Mitchell Joachim proposed using extruded pig cells to form buildings that are assembled using a 3D printer. He’s also argued for redesigning cities in radically new ways – whether demonstrated in his Fab Tree Hab (architecture grown on site out of trees) or buildings constructed from the rubbish generated by their residents. On an even more ambitious scale, Swedish architect Magnus Larsson has proposed growing a 6,000km long inhabitable green sandstone wall in the Sahara desert using bacterial organisms to transform the sand into a structure that will house the thousands of people displaced by desertification (another consequence of climate change) as well as providing a barrier to the Sahara expanding even more.

Mitchell Joachim’s 2016 Fab Tree Hab terraform project, prefabricated with Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) reusable
scaffolds to graft trees into houses

Magnus Larsson’s 2013 project to sculpt Saharan sand dunes into habitable dwellings using bacteria

Living bridges in Meghalaya, northeast India

These projects may seem fantastical and wildly optimistic in their predictions for a radically new type of urbanism; yet, they have developed from a profound change in how humanity regards its relationship with nature. As Bruno Latour has argued, in a globalized world, there is no outside, no nature that is not already a product of an interaction between humans and the world in which they live. This realisation – and the coining of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to describe it – not only changes how we might think of our buildings and our cities; it actually demands that we do so at the most fundamental level, that is, how we source or produce materials and how we combine those materials to make buildings. Radical as this transformation is, it nevertheless has many precedents: long before Hilbertz developed his structures that grow from nature, the people of Meghalaya in northeast India began an ingenious form of natural engineering: directing the roots of Indian rubber trees to grow robust bridges across rivers that are strong enough to resist frequent flooding. With some of these bridges being as old as 500 years, they show that growing architecture has long been underway; it only remains for the rest of us to catch up.

Buckminster Fuller’s 1960 project for a 3km diameter dome to protect Manhattan from air pollution and to control its climate.

‘The round cry of round being makes the sky round like a cupola’ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 238

Domes are as old as architecture itself; some of the very earliest known structures – for example, 5,000 yr-old burial sites in Scotland, Ireland, Denmark and Malta – are shallow domed mounds hewn from inside the earth. Strongly associated in religious buildings of all kinds with an image of the life hereafter, domes have always encapsulated our desire to feel comforted in the face of the enormity of the world beyond, whether that world is imagined as below or above the surface of the earth.

Megalithic burial site at Newgrange, Ireland

The central dome of the church of Haghia Sophia, Istanbul, completed in 537 and converted into a mosque in 1453.

Etienne-Louis Boullé’s proposal for a gigantic cenotaph for Isaac Newton, 1784

In the modern scientific era, the overtly religious symbolism of domes might have waned; yet that ancient craving for comfort in the face of unknown forces has persisted. Even as Etienne-Louis Boullée’s series of imaginary tombs and cenotaphs to great Enlightenment figures such as Isaac Newton used monumental domes to signify the triumph of reason over fear, the iron-and-glass domes of countless 19th-century exhibition halls both frightened and reassured visitors as to the unprecedented powers unleashed by industrial capitalism. The sense of disquiet in the face of these powers would, of course, intensify in the 20th century, the second world war concluding its orgy of violence with domes of a very different sort. Here, the miraculously preserved remains of Hiroshima’s Product Exhibition Hall (now the Genbaku Dōmu or Peace Memorial) have come to symbolise the unimaginable power of another domed structure, namely, the blast cloud from Little Boy which exploded in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Interior of the New York Crystal Palace, 1853

The remains of the Product Exhibition Hall (now the Peace Memorial) in Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the US-led atomic attack in August 1945.

Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome created for the 1967 Expo in Montreal.

Unsurprisingly, since then there’s been a strong desire to revisit the dome as a protective structure. Buckminster Fuller’s invested his innovative geodesic structures with an ecological meaning as well as a universal application, taken up by many countercultural communities such as Drop City in the US as a basic, easy-to-assemble architectural kit-of-parts. In the late-1960s, inflatable domes created by the Utopie group, Haus-Rucker-Co., and Archigram suggested the inauguration of a new womb-like architecture that could be truly nomadic, while the bio-domes in the 1972 film Silent Running inverted the optimism of the 1960s. In its bleak vision of an ecologically devastated earth, the only surviving vegetation floats in space in giant geodesic domes. The film concludes with all bar one of the domes being blown up by nuclear weapons – the lone survivor drifting in a post-human solar system.

Geodesic structures in Drop City, a community formed in southern Colorado in 1965 but abandoned by the early 1970s.

Archigram’s Cushicle project, 1966, an inflatable portable structure designed by Michael Webb

One of the giant space-travelling bio-domes in Silent Running (1973)

More recently, the Millennium Dome in London attempted, unsuccessfully, to recover an earlier spirit of optimism, while the Eden Project (2000-2003) in Cornwall created a terra firma version of the bio-domes in Silent Running. Even as the Project transformed a defunct industrial site into en ecological paradise and has become a centre for the promotion of sustainable ways of living, it cannot help but suggest a bleak future for what lies outside its series of gigantic protective domes. And what of the TV series Under the Dome, aired from 2013 to 2015, and which is premised on the mysterious appearance of a massive, transparent and indestructible dome over a small town in America, cutting the community off from the rest of the world? Here, the dome is not a protector; rather, as in the earlier film The Truman Show (1998), the reverse: namely, a structure that imprisons.

The Eden Project near St Austell, Cornwall, opened in 2003.

Still from the TV series Under the Dome (2013-2015).

Perhaps this recent image of the dome as threat reflects a fundamental shift in how we think about the world beyond the human. With the knowledge of what Timothy Morton terms ‘Hyperobjects’ – examples include global warming, nuclear bombs, planets, galaxies, even other universes – the image of the world, or the world beyond, as a dome no longer holds true. In fact, the very opposite – instead of lying beyond us, these hyperobjects envelop us at every turn. For no-one and no thing can be protected from the weather that is a symptom of global warming, from the energy emitted by radioactive particles, or from the gravity waves that we can barely comprehend, let alone feel. In our fearful times, bunkers seem safer than domes; and, as in the 2011 film Take Shelter, it is the bunker that holds out such a hope of protection, perhaps reverting back to the meaning of the earliest burial domes themselves.

This month sees the publication by Reaktion Books of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, an edited collection I’ve worked on for the past couple of years with Carlos Lopez Galviz and Bradley L. Garrett, as well as 22 other contributors from around the world. The book also features a preface by Geoff Manaugh, who runs the influential website BLDGBLOG and is the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016). Below is a short description of the book, along with some photographs of a few of the 80 subterranean sites included in it.

The river Wien beneath Vienna, featured in the film The Third Man (1949)

Former cattle bridge spanning the Irk culvert, Manchester, now used as a utility tunnel

Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck speed of twenty-first-century urbanization. But there is something else just as transformative that you won’t see: sprawling networks of tunnels rooting these cities into the earth. Global Undergrounds offers a richly illustrated exploration of these subterranean spaces, charting their global reach and the profound—but often unseen—effects they have on human life.

Recesses for housing coffins in the West Norwood catacombs, London

Paddock: the first Cabinet war rooms under Dollis Hill, London

This book documents an astonishing diversity of manmade underground environments, including subway systems, sewers, communications pipelines, storage facilities, and even shelters. It finds not only an extraordinary range of architectural approaches to underground construction but also a host of different cultural meanings. Underground places can evoke fear or hope; they can serve as sites of memory, places of work, or the hidden headquarters of resistance movements. They are places that can tell a city’s oldest stories or foresee its most distant futures. They are places—ultimately—of both incredible depth and breadth, crucial to all of us topside who work as urban planners, geographers, architects, engineers, or any of us who take subway trains or enjoy fresh water from a faucet. Indeed, as the book demonstrates, the constant flux within urban undergrounds—the nonstop circulation of people, substances, and energy—serves all city dwellers in myriad ways, not just with the logistics of day-to-day life but as a crucial part of a city’s mythology.

To buy the book, you can order it direct from Reaktion Books here, or via Amazon here

The contributors are: Caroline Bacle, Nick de Pace, Paul Dobraszczyk, Klaus Dodds, Sasha Engelmann, Carlos Lopez Galviz, Matthew Gandy, Bradley L. Garrett, Petr Gibas, Stephen Graham, Kim Gurney, Henriette Hafsaas-Tsakos, Harriet Hawkins, Marielle van der Meer, Sam Merrill, Camilla Mork Rostvik, Alex Moss, Matthew O’Brien, Mark Pendleton, David Pike, Anna Plyushteva, Darmon Ricther, Julia Solis, Alexandros Tsakos, James Wolfinger, and Dhan Zunino Singh.

Sint Petersburg Caves near Maastricht, Holland, used as shelters during the Second World War

Section of an underground tunnel linking Oxford’s courthouse with its prison

On an overcast and cool morning in early summer, I climbed aboard the X-Pilot vessel moored in the river Medway in Rochester for a 6-hr round trip to the seven Maunsell sea forts at Redsand, situated at the mouth of the Thames estuary some six miles from the Kent and Essex shorelines. Assembled in 1943, the Redsand forts were one part of a larger series of defensive marine fortifications to protect London and Liverpool from German bombing raids; these included a similar group of seven forts at nearby Shivering Sands, four naval forts also in the Thames estuary, and three more in the Mersey estuary in northwest England. The Maunsell sea forts – named after their designer Guy Maunsell – are the more striking of the structures in terms of their visual appearance. They are made up of four precast concrete legs sunk into the seabed and which support a steel box-like superstructure that used to contain all the accommodation and defence equipment, mainly large guns to bring down German aircraft. During the Second World War, each fort housed up to 265 men for weeks at a time, the seven identical structures linked by tubular steel catwalks, creating what might well have been the strangest streetscape in the world.

For the visitor approaching from the Medway estuary, the Redsand forts first appear as a group of vague smudges on the horizon which very gradually grow larger and larger until, all of a sudden, one is upon them. Even in their current dilapidated condition – the walkways long collapsed, the gun placements broken off, and the steel boxes stained red with rust – they are still striking structures. They are both alien in their improbable location and uncanny similarity to the merciless tripods in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, and familiar in their anthropomorphic appearance and simple formal arrangement. For a while, the boat circled and passed between the forts in a slow dance, while the dozen or so passengers took photographs. It was a moment of shared wonder at the audacity and strangeness of these marine human habitats, long abandoned but still possessing a charismatic hold on the imagination. They summoned up both the dream of living autonomously, free from the enmeshing webs of conventional life, but also the nightmare of what must have been a prison-like existence for the hundreds of men who were once forced to live on them. With the UK Referendum on its continued membership of the European Union just around the corner, such feelings took on an especial relevance, the EU flag gracing the toilet seat in the boat indicating in no uncertain terms where the owner’s sympathies lay.

In one sense, it’s the dream of autonomy that has characterised the forts’ history since they were decommissioned at the end of the Second World War. At this time, the Mersey forts were demolished but the Thames groups were left standing, even as, from 1958, they were abandoned by the Ministry of Defence to the elements and the occasional plucky scavenger. From then on, a host of people have claimed the forts for themselves, from the pirate radio stations of the 1960s (one of the Redsand forts was occupied by Radio K.I.N.G. for 6 months in 1965) to the artist Stephen Turner, who inhabited one of the identical group of forts at Shivering Sands for 36 days in 2005, the time period corresponding to a tour of duty in the fort during the Second World War. The fate of the nearby naval fort of Roughs Tower became bound up most notoriously with such freedom-loving dreams when, in September 1967, it was declared the sovereign nation of Sealand by Roy Bates and his family. Contested by many, the family have nevertheless occupied the fort to this day and issued their own currency and passports for the world’s smallest country.

My own trip was organised by Project Redsand, a group of volunteers who have acquired the seven forts at Redsand and are now trying to secure financial backing to conserve and re-appropriate them. With plans to convert the towers into a variety of new uses – a recording studio for musicians, a wartime and broadcast museum, a base for seawater experiments, a military training facility, or even an astronomy centre – the Project has created a safe access ladder to one of the forts on which volunteers now work. In memory of the spirit of freedom that characterised the pirate radio stations, the Project carried out its first broadcast from the renovated fort in July 2007. Yet, the lure of freedom can be dangerous: on 25 February 2012, a fisherman drowned and another had to winched to safety by an RAF helicopter after the pair had tried to board the Redsand fort for an impromptu barbecue.

A recent proposal by Aros Architects to turn the derelict forts into a luxury resort, complete with executive apartments, a sea spa and helipad for guests, highlights how libertarian dreams of escape from society are always in danger of being coopted by the social elite for their own isolationist dreams. Within this elitist libertarian dream, the progressive utopian social ideals that might have taken hold in the 1960s have been hollowed out into a romanticisation of the marine environment as an inviolate retreat from the socio-political realities across the world today. It’s not that the desire for a room of one’s own is inherently regressive, but rather that we must always understand that perfect security is only ever to be found in the imagination; even miles out to sea, the world will still be connected to us. Roy Bates’s island-state Sealand shows what happens when those wider connections are severed. He may live now in inviolate isolation but, as every healthy person knows, it’s precisely our lack of a hard protective shell – our vulnerablity – that in the end draws us into a larger world that encourages us to share and allows us to grow.

Paul Dobraszczyk, ‘Armada’, 2016, ink, chalk, watercolour, gouache, and pen on paper. Inspired by China Miéville’s novel The Scar (2002).

China Miéville’s 2002 novel The Scar, the second book in his extraordinary Bas-Lag trilogy, presents a characteristic fantastical world that is rendered in exquisite detail. Borrowing from Lloyd’s Kropp’s earlier book The Drift (1969), which was set on an inhabited agglomeration of decaying ships in the Sargasso Sea, Mieville’s novel focuses on the floating pirate city of Armada. In contrast to the contemplative stillness of The Drift, Armada is a super-dense, bustling floating and mobile metropolis of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, with most of the hundreds of ships tethered together with chains and bridges long since built over with ‘tall brickwork, steeples, masts and chimneys and ancient rigging’. The underside of the city is no less vibrant – ‘wire-mesh cages tucked into hollows and dangling from chains, crowded with fair cod and tunny’ were harvested by the Cray, a hybrid race of half-human half-crayfish who live underwater in coral-like dwellings attached to the ships’ hulls. Grounded in its marine context both above and below, ‘a moving ecology and politics were tethered to the city’s calcified base’ while the buildings above the water were all ‘licked by constant damp, contoured with salt – steeped in the sounds of waves and the fresh-rot smell of the sea.’

Sketch for ‘Armada’, 2016. Watercolour, gouache and ink on paper.

Taken by force whilst sailing into exile from Miéville’s other invented city New Crobuzon, the central protagonist, academic Bellis Coldwine, becomes part of an alternative society made possible by piracy, whether stealing ships to add to the city’s fabric or people to its population. And unlike Kropp’s city, Armada moves – initially very slowly, pulled across the endless oceans by dozens of tug boats, but later much faster under the steam of a gargantuan sea creature – the avanc – that the city authorities successfully tethers. The architecture of Armada is imagined as chaotically hybrid. On the one hand, this is evident in a material sense, where ‘countless naval architectures. Stripped longships; scorpion-galleys; luggers and brigantines; massive steamers hundreds of feet long down to canoes no lager than a man’ have been reclaimed ‘from the inside out’, with ‘structures, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture’. On the other, such hybridity also extends to the social life of the city. Although ‘ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world [and] snatching new citizens from their ships’, Armada’s social codes are also fiercely egalitarian – the former Remade slaves now freed and equal to any other citizens – and democratic: like The Drift, Armada is divided up into discrete kingdoms, each controlled by powerful leaders but each with their own distinct social customs. Although one of these kingdoms – Garwater – gains control of the fate of the entire city, this power is never safe from democratic challenge, as demonstrated in the mutiny that occurs in the latter stages of the novel.

Floating city sketch, 2016. Chalk, watercolour, gouache and ink on paper.

What Miéville’s imagined floating city does so well is to provide a vivid and sustained sense of the material, mental and social life of a such a city. A fantastical creation it may be, but in fleshing it out over the course of nearly 700 pages, Mieville provides a far more convincing picture of what might mean to live in such a city than any of the 3D renderings and other images produced by architects that have proposed floating urban communities, particularly those submitted in response to a 2015 competition launched by the Seasteading Institute. Perhaps more significantly, Miéville’s Armada also reimagines the possibilities of social life in such a city as much as its urban fabric; by doing so, he stretches our imaginations to think in a broad and open way about the richness and complexity of the relationship between speculative design and social life.

When the Grain Tower – located just off the northeastern coast of the Isle of Grain in Kent – was advertised for sale in 2013, the property website Rightmove listed it as ‘No. 1, the Thames’, an almost irresistible address for a would-be-buyer with a penchant for the outlandish and unique. Effectively a tidal island, the Grain Tower was constructed in several stages, the earliest part being an oval-shaped stone tower for gun emplacements, completed in 1855 when fears about a French invasion were stoked by imperial competition between Britain and its neighbour. Repurposed as a communications tower in the early 20th century, the outbreak of the Second World War saw the structure transformed once again, with a new concrete roof and tower constructed to hold much larger guns as well as a barracks to house the gun detachment, the living quarters connected to the tower via precarious concrete catwalks. As with many Second-World War defensive structures, like the nearby Maunsell Sea Forts further out in the Thames estuary, the Grain Tower was decommissioned in the 1950s, thereafter slowly decaying whilst being periodically considered for other uses. In 2005, a private owner purchased it from the Crown Estate, but he put it up for sale again in 2010 – hence the Rightmove listing – with a new anonymous owner eventually settling for the sum of £400,000 in 2014.

View of the Grain Tower from the tidal causeway

Iron chains connected the Tower to the boom in the estuary

For a private property, the Grain Tower is surprisingly easy to access. If you’re intending to get to it by foot you must wait for the tide to recede and then follow the 500-metre causeway from the north-eastern tip of the Isle of Grain out to the Tower. It’s an exposed site – when I visited in early June this year, it was overcast, cold and windy, while the connecting causeway is comprised of sharp rocks and slippery bricks – hard on bare feet as I discovered. The Tower itself, diminutive when viewed from the shoreline, becomes ever-more commanding as one approaches it. The enormous iron chains around the 19th-century stone base, which secure the estuarine boom to the Tower, provide an immediate visual sign of security. As with all towers, there’s also a strong vertical emphasis; the four storeys that jut out from the top of the original tower lend the structure a vertiginous quality, heightened by the open concrete stairwells that are almost ceaselessly buffeted by winds. The circular gun placements are testament to the Tower’s lost function, even as, without their weaponry, they now provide stunning viewing platforms for the curious visitor.

Interior of the oldest part of the Tower, dating from 1855

Concrete stairwell in the upper section of the Tower

The Grain Tower is an unusual example of an architectural tidal island – there are many natural ones dotted around Britain’s coastline but very few that are human-built, bar lighthouses. Like all tidal islands, the Grain Tower bestrides both land and sea – a massive, inviolate presence in an otherwise ceaselessly-changing environment. The Tower’s seeming impregnability has inspired some to imagine it as an ideal refuge in a post-apocalyptic future. In a recent symposium, ‘Science Fiction meets Architecture’, held at University College London, the science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson and architect Usman Haque were invited to imagine London in 2080, when sea levels might have risen by anything up to 5 metres. Having considered purchasing the Grain Tower when it was up for sale in 2013, Hague argued that the site would become extremely desirable in the future if the Thames’s tidal waters were to submerge large areas of London. In his talk, illustrated with his design proposals, Haque imagined having bought the Tower and then, in the flooded future, sharing it with others as the structure became completely marooned from the land. Developing into a self-sufficient utopia, the countercultural Tower community would source all of its energy from renewables and hydraulic power, grow its food from locally-sourced algae, and keep virtual pets as companions in order to make sense of the new environment.

Second-World-War gun placement on the upper level of the Tower

The Grain Tower at high tide from the mouth of the River Medway

Haque’s speculative transformation of the Grain Tower demonstrates how a structure that was conceived and built entirely for military purposes can be reimagined in a wholly new way. His future utopian community may take advantage of the Tower’s impregnable structure and isolated location, but it would do so in the name of socially-progressive ideals rather than imperial paranoia. It’s as if the Tower’s ruinous state today and indeterminate status offer up much richer possibilites for reuse than those suggested by Rightmove when the Tower was up for sale – the website effusively stated that it ‘could be transformed into almost anything: a private residence, an off shore hotel, outdoor pursuit centre, film location, nightclub, casino to name a few!’.

View of the Isle of Grain for the former barracks

Modern graffiti inside the barracks

Yet, in at least one sense, a transformation has already happened on the derelict Grain Tower. The omnipresent graffiti on the Tower’s walls is evidence of inhabitation by many different visitors over the years. Recently, the urban explorer and academic Bradley Garrett, together with a group of friends, took over the Tower for a long summer weekend – not the first time he has spent extended time on this structure. On a previous visit, he spoke of his feelings of safety and security that stemmed from being cut off by the tide, as well as the group’s idling away of the time between the tides, listening to music, drinking whisky and sunbathing on the former gun placements. A short-term utopia no doubt, but a better one than that which awaits the Tower once the current owner decides to enforce its new status as a private property. Or perhaps he won’t and we can continue to imagine and inhabit it in other ways.

The Banqueting Hall beneath Joseph Williamson’s former home in Edge Hill, Liverpool

In 2012, I visited the Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre in the Edge Hill inner-city suburb of Liverpool and toured a small section of the labyrinth of subterranean spaces built by dozens of men under the direction of local tobacco-merchant and principal landowner Joseph Williamson. Constructed from around 1805 to 1840 – the year Williamson died – the miles of subterranean tunnels still represent something of a mystery to those who are now trying to recover them. As I discovered on a return visit last weekend, organised by Stockport’s local tunnel expert Phil Catling and the Friends of Williamson Tunnels group, the tunnels are far more extensive than I had first imagined.

Just below street level at the Paddington site

Tunnel ceiling at Level 1 of the Paddington site

There are in fact two distinct groups of volunteers that continue to excavate the tunnels – the Joseph Williamson Society and the Friends of Williamson Tunnels; and each group provides a very different insight into Williamson’s subterranean world, even as they both work towards the same end of making the tunnels publicly accessible. Whilst the Heritage Centre takes in the largest of the tunnels, it remains somewhat constrained by the dictates of health and safety – the visitor walkways tending to impede any direct apprehension of the scale of the underground spaces, even as they are necessary to embrace a broad range of visitors’ needs. That tour also focuses on the life and work of Williamson – rightly so, given the historical importance of the tunnels, but this focus tends to downplay the painstaking work that has been required to re-excavate the tunnels which, for well over a hundred years, were used as a convenient dumping ground for all sorts of waste – from tonnes of ash and coke left over from domestic fireplaces and industrial processes to a cornucopia of discarded tableware and other ceramic objects, now beautifully displayed inside the excavated tunnels themselves.

Found objects displayed inside one of the re-excavated tunnels

Found bottles and a statue of Joseph Williamson displayed in one of the re-excavated tunnels

Visiting the tunnels at the weekend, one can appreciate very clearly the work that continues to be undertaken by both groups of dedicated volunteers. Using only buckets secured on ropes, the volunteers have, since 1999, managed to excavate an extraordinary vertical world that, at the Paddington site, now extends 80 feet below the surface. In the last three years, the innumerable haulings of countless rubble-filled buckets has revealed the true extent of Williamson’s labyrinth – three levels of tunnels stacked on top of each other, descending today via an improvised scaffold supporting wooden steps. The painstaking excavation of these multiple layers of tunnels has revealed a vertiginous Piranesian world – a powerful reminder of the volumetric nature of underground space. Yet, as described in my original post here, these tunnels were seemingly built without obvious purpose, simply to provide unemployed men with much-needed work, even as that work was absurd. We may never know what Williamson was trying to achieve with his tunnels to nowhere, but that detracts in no way from their sublime grandeur.

View up from the bottom of Level 3 at the Paddington site

Hauling a bucket up from Level 3 at the Paddington site

The final site we visited was under Williamson’s house in Edge Hill; or rather, the remains of his house – a forlorn remnant of the original frontage and the only part still left standing. Yet, the cleared ground beyond has yielded several convenient access points to Williamson’s subterranean world below. A complex and decidedly confusing network of tunnels, many are still in the process of being excavated; but what has been found confirms Williamson as a master of subterranean theatrics. Entered via a very high but extremely narrow tunnel nicknamed ‘the Gash’, the so-called Banqueting Hall is as dramatic a space as the vertiginous stacked tunnels at the Paddington site. Partially filled with an enormous mound of material yet to be excavated, this high-arched space was reputedly once used by Williamson as a dining room for his house guests. Accessible today only via a 15-ft ladder, one can only guess at the reaction of Williamson’s unsuspecting visitors.

The remains of Joseph Williamson’s house on Mason Street, Edge Hill

The Banqueting Hall underneath Joseph Williamson’s house

Exiting the Banqueting Hall via the Gash

Although I had written a piece on the Williamson Tunnels for the book Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, one of 80 global underground sites described in that publication, I had based my article on my original visit and subsequent post here. Now I regard these tunnels as one of the wonders of the subterranean world, not only on account of them reputedly being the world’s largest underground ‘folly’, but also because of the extraordinary way in which a group of local people have excavated them using virtually the same basic technologies employed by Williamson’s men nearly two hundred years ago. In the work of re-excavating these tunnels, a deep connection has been established between the present moment and the past, one that seems entirely absent in more conventional heritage-led subterranean attractions. Tunnelling, it seems, is not just about creating useful spaces; it is also driven by other desires, ones that centre on forging connections between people and the ground beneath their feet.

Some of the hundreds of buckets used to remove the accumulated debris from the tunnels

Of course, I was not the first to climb London’s 1,010ft Shard: a small band of urban explorers ascended to the tip of the building a long time before I did, back in 2011 when it was still under construction. And since the Shard’s observation platform was opened in 2013, many millions have already trod that same path, or rather been herded through airport-like security and squeezed into the pristine lifts that rise effortlessly, if not continuously, to the viewing galleries that begin on the 69th floor. In fact, the only climbing involved for the tourist is the ascent by stairs to the semi-open-air platform on floor 72 – at 800ft, the highest accessible level of this outsized glass splinter. The 1,700 or so stairs that comprise the other way up and down the building are only used for emergency training – a waiter I spoke with confirmed that it took around 45 minutes to ascend this way.

The Shard viewed from the open-air terrace at level 35 of 20 Fenchurch St.

The Shard from Tooley St, outside London Bridge station

At £25.95 per person, the experience is by no means accessible to all, but its high price holds up well in comparison to other publicly-accessible super- or mega-tall buildings: for example, £28 to access One World Observatory in New York City (around 1,250ft); or £30 to ascend 1,820ft of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the World’s tallest building. Even after fours years, the View from the Shard experience still seems to be immensely popular; when I ascended the building at dusk on the shortest day of the year in 2016, there were long queues, and both viewing galleries were almost full during my hour-long visit. Indeed, during the first year of its life as a building, almost all of the Shard’s revenue came from its viewing platforms and restaurants (around £5 million in 2013), the rest of the glass-framed interior still awaiting tenants or buyers.

Tower Bridge and the Isle of Dogs beyond

Although I had booked my visit from the rather distanced perspective of a researcher (I’m currently working on the imaginative associations of very tall buildings), it was impossible not to be awed by the extraordinary view itself. There are less expensive ways of seeing London from above – the Sky Garden at floor 35 of 20 Fenchurch St (better known as the Walkie-Talkie building) is free, while the much older Monument nearby gives panoramic views from the top of its 160-ft column for only a modest £4.50; but being at the highest point in a city lends a sense of privilege to the visitor, of status even, that the lesser heights simply cannot provide. Apart from the view from an aeroplane or helicopter, this is the nearest one gets to seeing the city as a map – spread out before you as a vast canvas that gives you, the viewer, a sense of mastery.

Painted panorama of London installed in the Colosseum in Regent’s Park in 1827.

John Henry Banks’s ‘Balloon View of London’, exhibited in the Crystal Palace in 1851.

For those who know about the history of London in the nineteenth century, this experience seems remarkably similar to the mania for panoramas (enormous painted views of the city housed in specially-designed rotundas) and hot-air balloon rides that gripped the British capital – and others across Europe – in that century. As the art historian Lynda Nead has argued, the popularity of these views from above came at precisely the time when London was undergoing rapid transformation and exponential growth in the wake of the industrial revolution. Thus, when the journalist Henry Mayhew went up in a hot-air balloon in 1862, he experienced London as an exclusively visual spectacle and gained a sense of power through this: ‘for it is an exquisite treat to all minds to find that they have the power, by their mere vision’, of extending their consciousness to scenes and objects that are miles away.’ In this rapturous visual experience, the normally fragmented city experienced at ground level ‘became all combined, like the coloured fragments of the kaleidoscope, into one harmonious and varied scene.’

London Bridge station and viaduct.

Elephant & Castle redevelopment

From the transparent tapering room 800ft up the Shard, the half-light of the grey December afternoon gradually faded and London became a vast spectacle of mutlicoloured lights: a fairytale image of twinkling grandeur. Directly below, the vast viaduct of London Bridge station fanned out its innumerable lines of railway tracks southwards – onwards into the distant Surrey hills; while serpentine arteries of traffic pulsed in all directions to the horizon. Familiar illuminated shapes anchored the eyes: landmarks old and new – Tower Bridge, the London Eye, and Canary Wharf. And everywhere, startling evidence of the new: of London being transformed by tall buildings. Nearest, the cluster of new towers in the City of London, the characteristic red lights on their crowns casting an alien glow over the emerging nightscape; further away, the emerging islands of hyper-gentrification – Elephant and Castle, Stratford, and the isolated towers built by oligarchs and sheikhs all along the Thames.

City of London

The Shard from London Bridge

The contemporary transformation of London is likely to be the most extensive since the rebuilding of most of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. The current pace of change – the most visible manifestation of which are the hundreds of new towers sprouting everywhere – may not be a result of the explosive population growth witnessed in the 19th century city, or the chaos of widespread infrastructural transformation; yet, it is as equally, if not more, momentous than the city which drove Victorians to the skies both literally and metaphorically to convince themselves they could understand what was happening to the city. What is distinctive about the newfound hunger for the view from above is that it is a view only made possible by the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny global elite. When we gaze out over the city from a great height we are effectively sharing, albeit only temporarily, the viewpoint of that elite, with their inviolate office boardrooms and multimillion pound penthouse apartments high above the city. Indeed, from the top of the Shard – and only from there – we look down on them for a moment. A small price to pay perhaps for such a feeling of mastery, even if we know it’s based on a fantastic and dangerous illusion.

Bleaklow from Grinah Stones

The distinction between a hill and a mountain is not always an easy one to make. Strictly speaking, a mountain refers to a landform with a summit above 2,000ft (610m) and, in the Peak District, there are two such ‘mountains’ – Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. Both are around the same height; both have extensive plateaus of boggy peat moorland; and both sit astride Snake Pass, one of the main roads that crosses the Pennines linking Manchester with Sheffield. Yet, in other respects, they could not be more different. Kinder is unquestionably a mountain because of the rock ‘edges’ the flank it on three sides – it rises as a rampart, giving that sense of grandeur one immediately associates with mountains. Bleaklow is just as bulky but, without the rocky approaches, looks like a gently-rounded hill from a distance – and part of it is even named Bleaklow Hill. But looks can be deceptive; for all approaches to Bleaklow, even from the heights of Snake Pass, involve negotiating its notorious ‘groughs’ – dozens of water-eroded channels in the peat moorland that wind tortuously and seemingly without any guiding purpose on almost all areas of the plateau and down into the steep-sided river valleys, or ‘cloughs’ that pierce Bleaklow’s sides.

Logs placed in one of Bleaklow’s groughs to mitigate water erosion

Wooden stake on the plateau

The groughs are what make Bleaklow a mountain; they prevent any gentle ascent along well-defined paths, as might be expected on a hill; they serve no navigational purpose for the walker, plunging you into a slippery sub-surface landscape that prevents any long view. In any one of these groughs, you simply don’t know where you are; none of them seem to connect with any others, so their winding channels lead you nowhere. Only the wooden stakes that mark (human) territorial boundaries on Bleaklow serve as landmarks, or, at a stretch, the scattered groups of wind- and rain-eroded rocks on the plateau. In mist, navigation by sight is impossible; maps unhelpful – you simply follow the line of the groughs as best you can, hoping they will somehow transport you to the summit. But I have never dared climb Bleaklow in mist; even in bright sunshine, it never fails to frustrate and exhaust the walker in equal measure, the repeating ascents and descents into the groughs as wearying as any much-higher mountain ascents in Britain. And Bleaklow does not just bring walkers down, but also aircraft – the heaviest loss of life from any crash in the Peak District resulting when a USAF Boeing RB-29A Superfortress plane was brought down on Higher Shelf Stones on 3 November 1948. The scattered remains of this machine, together with a more formal plague, serve as memorials for the 13 crew members who were killed.

Remains of the aircraft at Higher Shelf Stones

Barrow Stones on the plateau

Despite living up to its name in many ways, there is something extraordinary about Bleaklow’s lack of distinction, its featureless vastness, and its mysterious cartography. Walking on Bleaklow is a unique experience, a state of mind even, one that demands a surrender to the landscape rather than an attempt to plot a course through it. Paths must be felt in the present moment rather than planned in advance; a sense of progress gained by a different measure than the summit alone. For me, intense and compensatory pleasure on Bleaklow is provided by one of its most mercurial residents, the snow hare – Lepus timidus. With only around 200 pairs scattered all over the high moorland of the Peak District, and the character of the hares living up to their Latin name, encountering one of these animals is a rare occurrence. Yet Bleaklow seems to be their favoured haunt and, on each of the four occasions I’ve been up there, I’ve seen one or two. On my most recent visit, descending from Barrow Stones in bright late-January sunlight, I spotted what I took to be a patch of snow at the edge of a grough. As I moved nearer, nothing served to dispel this illusion until, barely a few feet away, the snow hare sprung onto its haunches and bounded uphill – the black tips of its ears flashing against the sun before it disappeared. The going didn’t get any easier as I descended, but the wearying groughs were now infused with life, perhaps the only life that really knows these wild spaces.

The snow hare just before it moved

Lebbeus Woods, Quake City, 1995

In the mid-1990s, visionary architect Lebbeus Woods developed a series of projects intended to prepare the city of San Francisco for the ‘Big One’ – a hypothetical earthquake of magnitude 8+ that will almost certainly strike the city sometime in the future. In absolute opposition to the conventional policy of strengthening existing structures, Woods imagined a whole series of buildings that were constructed, transformed or completed by earthquakes themselves – ‘an architecture that uses earthquakes, converting to a human purpose the energies they release … an architecture that inhabits earthquakes, existing in their space and time’ (Radical Reconstruction, p. 21).

Lebbeus Woods, Shard Houses, 1995

Lebbeus Woods, Slip House, 1995

Woods’ characteristically exquisite series of drawings pictured the elements of his new self-penned Seismicity. Shard Houses would be built on the stable pilings of piers on the west side of San Francisco Bay, made out of the ‘scavenged shards of the industrial wasteland’. When the Big One strikes, the mud on which the Shard Houses rest would liquefy, turning the structures into floating homes. Meanwhile Slip Houses would allow for the movement of the earth by sitting on a nearly frictionless silicon surface; while Wave Houses, built from ball-jointed frames, would flex and re-flex in the quake. Fault Houses would literally inhabit the San Andreas Fault, harnessing the energy of earthquakes to determine their forms; while Horizon Houses would turn, ‘reorienting their forms and fixed interior spaces relative to the horizon’. Finally, Quake City – a gigantic structure that Woods imagined straddling a redundant industrial dock – would be an architecture without a point of origin, one that had simply accumulated over the years, with each successive quake shifting its ‘fragmented, irregular mass, reshuffling the plates that once might have been called floors, walls, or ceilings’ (Radical Reconstruction, p. 21).

Lebbeus Woods, Wave House, 1995

Lebbeus Woods, Fault House, 1995

All of these imagined structures are seemingly built from scavenged materials, whether discarded timber, corrugated iron and other sheet metal, or used piping and plastics. This turning away from conventional building materials is characteristic of Woods’ approach – he wanted architecture to be made from below, assembled by its users rather than fabricated in advance by architects and builders. For Woods, architectural salvage wasn’t just about creating a certain kind of aesthetic – a grandiose form of upcycling; rather, it deliberately shifted the power to build into the hands of users rather than architects – an anarchic architecture, or ‘anarchitecture’, as Woods described it.

Lebbeus Woods, Horizon House, 1995

Yet, self-built urban environments rarely look as beautiful as Woods’ drawings suggest they might. Instead, they aggregate on the fringes of countless cities in developing countries across the world as insanitary slums borne out of desperation rather than hope. Who indeed would choose to live in a house built entirely from salvaged materials? Woods might imagine salvaged houses as ‘freespaces’ created by citizens liberated from the shackles of authoritarian architectural modernism; yet, he presupposes that people would choose a nomadic and free-spirited urban existence in favour of the comfort and security offered by the conventional home.

Informal housing in Kibera, Nairobi

In a certain sense, Woods’ equating of salvage with freedom has its counterpart in another imagined future vision of San Francisco, post Big One, namely in William Gibson’s ‘Bridge’ trilogy of novels: Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999). The Bridge that unites these novels is a reconstituted Bay Bridge, salvaged by thousands of squatters after the quake known as the Little Grande left it unstable and derelict. In contrast to the post-quake fate of San Francisco’s tallest building – the Transamerica Pyramid – which is held together by a steel brace, the Bay Bridge has mutated into a fantastic bricolage of salvaged materials:

‘The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imagineable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style’ (Virtual Light, p. 58)

Upon the ‘steel bones’ of the bridge a vast assemblage of dream-like spaces emerged: ‘tattoo parlours, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars … while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with is unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy’ (Virtual Light, pp. 58-9). A slum by any other estimation, Gibson’s Bridge is unquestionably defined as a utopian community very much in the spirit of Woods’ drawings. Throughout the course of the three novels, the social life and practical infrastructure of the Bridge is fleshed out in extraordinary detail. We are immersed in the everyday lives of those who live in the shack-like rooms; we learn about the improvised sewage and electricity supply networks; and we inhabit the heady micro-worlds of the Bridge’s countless bars, shops, and clubs that fill its interstitial spaces.

Gibson’s reconstituted Bay Bridge as imagined by Dahlia Inosensu

Gibson is not describing an urban environment that can be planned, or perhaps even drawn in the way that Woods imagines it can be. Rather, there is no agenda, no underlying structure to the formation of the Bridge community: ‘the place had just grown; it looked like one thing patched into the next, until the whole space was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, no two pieces of it marched’ (Virtual Light, p. 163). What Gibson does so well is to contrast this anarchic form of urban growth with that envisaged by the mega-corporations who are seeking to remake San Francisco into a self-sufficient luxury enclave for the super-wealthy. What is at stake here is not how cities are made, but who is entitled to make them. Like Woods, Gibson asks us whether we truly do prefer to have our cities made for us by others, or whether we’d be willing to take matters into our own hands, joining with those who are already forced by necessity to do so.

Mixture of the informal and formal in the facade of Torre David, Caracas

For the billion-plus people that currently live in at least 200,000 informal settlements – often simply called ‘slums’ – in cities across the developing world, they are habitats of last resort that are created because of a desperate shortage of conventional housing in the rapidly urbanising global South. Whatever their local names – favelas in Brazil, barrios in Colombia, bustees in India, callejones in Peru, or gecekondus in Turkey, to name but a few – these informal settlements are characterised by both self-built housing, usually constructed illegally, and an almost total lack of basic urban infrastructure, such as sanitation, water supply and waste disposal. As urban critic Mike Davis has pointed out in Planet of Slums, if the predictions of the UN Global Urban Observatory are correct – that by 2020, up to 50% of the total population living in cities will be housed in informal settlements – then the cities of the future, particularly the new mega-cities across the developing world, will not be primarily made out of glass and steel but rather ‘crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap-wood. Instead of cities soaring upwards towards heaven, much of the 21st-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay’.

Aerial view of Dharavi slum in Mumbai, one of the largest in the world.

If critics like Davis are unapologetic in their condemnation in the political, economic and social reasons for such appalling urban conditions, then others, such as the architect John Turner and critic Justin McGuirk, have argued that informal settlements must be accepted as part of the new urban condition, ones that will likely grow to become an ever larger part of future cities whether we like them or not. For the current and future generation of architects and urban planners, the ‘rehabilitation’ of slums might mean learning how to integrate them into the city a a whole, ‘creating connections and flows, the points of communication and inclusion that will dissolve the lines of exclusion and collision’.

Torre David, Caracas

Unfinished concrete stairwell and courtyard of Torre David

One example of this collision of the formal and informal already indicates what direction this architectural meld might take in future cities, namely the Torre David in Caracas. From September 2007 until July 2014, an unfinished 52-storey skyscraper in central Caracas was home to 3,000 squatters, who had taken over what were to be prime downtown office spaces and turned them into their own apartments. As documented by the Caracas-based architectural collective, Urban Think Tank, who made a film and book about the squatters and presented it with McGuirk as an exhibit at the 2010 Venice Biennale, the occupation of Torre David was a direct result of president Hugo Chávez’s demagogic politics, whose rhetoric encouraged the appropriation of redundant property by the disadvantaged. It was Chávez’s untimely death in 2013 resulted in a change of government and the eventual eviction of the Torre David squatters in 2014 (the skyscraper subsequently renovated and returned to its original function as offices).

Apartment interior, Torre David

Household store, Torre David

The occupation began in 2007 with refugees from Caracas’s barrios located on the edge of the city deciding to take their chances living in a city-centre building that had been left unfinished since the death of its developer in 1993; in Caracas, like most Latin American cities, the urban poor are generally denied access to city-centre housing which has a dramatic affect upon their ability to access employment in the urban core. With only a open concrete frame and unfenced stairwells completed, the structure was initially far from habitable; yet, over the years, squatters refashioned it into homes using a mixture of breeze-blocks, bricks, bed-sheet curtains, cardboard, plastic and newspaper to infill the spaces, creating a startling juxtaposition of the formal and informal, as seen in many photographs of the building. McGuirk has compared Torre David to Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino House of 1914, in which the fledgling soon-to-be arch-modernist architect attempted (unsuccessfully) to make his fortune by selling two-storey concrete frames and letting buyers fill in their own walls. In this reading, Torre David was an (accidental) flexible architecture, a model of building in which ‘citizens … complete the city, its buildings’ remaining ‘as works in projects’ and where the distinction between the informal and the formal dissolves. Here, what was to have been a beacon of finance capital was temporarily turned into one of social capital – the characteristic vertical exclusivity of the skyscraper subverted, for a time at least, into ‘horizontal redistribution’.

Le Corbusier, Dom-ino House, 1914-15

Urban Think Tank, part of their Growing House, built for the Anglican church in Caracas, 2003-05

Urban Think Tank believe that the occupation of Torre David offers a powerful model of how architecture might become more flexible in the face of increasingly chaotic and unstable urban futures. Indeed, they have seen in the building a mirror of their own Growing House project for the Anglican Church in Caracas, begun in 2003 and completed in 2005. Here, Urban Think Tank were asked to design a system of emergency housing for the parish but, given the lack of available land, they instead chose to construct a concrete frame over an existing building and allowed residents to construct their own apartments within that frame. In this sense, architecture becomes ‘a paradigm of human ingenuity, adaptability and resourcefulness’, where ‘citizens [exercise] their right to the city’ – in other words, they are allowed to create the very ‘freespaces’ that architect Lebbeus Woods first proposed in the 1990s and which I explored in an earlier post. Of course, Torre David doesn’t look anything like Woods’s angular but beautiful drawings; but it nevertheless mirrors their basis in the collision of the formal and informal, creating a messy aesthetic that would be anathema to an architectural modernist, but which reflects a utopian social vision that embraces rather than rejects ‘precariousness as a fluid, mobile force in the city’.

Cities are quite literally built on top of their own wastes; over time, as structures are demolished and rebuilt, roads resurfaced time and again, and new buildings constructed, the urban surface literally rises up, meaning that very old cities like London contain beneath their surface a rich archaeology of their own compacted detritus – a ‘ruins memory’ in the evocative words of Rebecca Solnit.

Workers atop the 100 foot tall Dhapa dumping ground (landfill), Dhapa, Kolkata, India. Dhapa is a large industrial zone that processes most of Kolkata’s garbage and recycling.

In the contemporary period of consumer capitalism, wastes have proliferated to such an extent that some informal communities are quite literally built on them, as in the ‘garbage slums’ of Quarantina outside Beirut, Hillat Kusha outside Khartoum, Santa Cruz in Mexico City, and the Dhapa dump on the outskirts of Kolkata. These infamous places flag up not only the desperate plight of some of the world’s poorest urban citizens, but also the unimaginable quantities of waste being produced by cities across the world today: around 1.3 billion tonnes a year, rising to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2025. Whilst a push towards recycling from the 1980s onwards has dominated urban policy in the West, often leading to a sense of complacency about the larger effects of unbridled capitalist consumption, vast heaps of garbage proliferate in informal communities where municipal or private disposal is at best only removing part of the accumulating wastes. Indeed, despite widespread recycling, much of the waste produced by the affluent (particularly hazardous e-waste) ends up in these poorer communities, with the 34 wealthiest nations producing more solid waste than the other 164 combined.

United Bottle, a plastic container that is designed to be reused as a building material.

The growing problem of finding suitable landfill sites for urban wastes has led some architects to develop ways of incorporating the latter into buildings, in line with the logic of a future production based on a completely closed resource cycle put forward by such organisations as the Zero Waste International Alliance and the MacArthur Foundation. As documented in the book Building from Wastes, these design strategies are highly varied and encompass five principal methods: first, densifying waste materials using a garbage press to compact it into building blocks; second, processing waste into new materials such as tiles, bricks or panels; third, transforming the molecular state of waste and mixing it with other components, an example being Nappy Roofing made from recycled sanitary products; fourth, creating products that are never thrown away, such as the United Bottle project that can be reused as a building component; and, fifth, harnessing elements of the process of decay to generate ‘growing’ architectures, such as Biorock (discussed in a earlier post here), bacteria-based self-healing concrete, and Mycofoam.

Evocative’s myco-boards – biofabricated wood for use as a building material.

Architect and entrepreneur Mitchell Joachim has taken this approach a step further in proposing the construction of entire skyscrapers in New York out of the city’s waste materials in his practice Terreform ONE’s Rapid Re(f)use project. As Joachim has stated, Manhattan’s inhabitants current discard enough paper products to fill a volume the size of the Empire State Building every two weeks; Rapid Re(f)use would collect this material and, with the assistance of automated 3D printers, quickly process it into the building blocks of new skyscrapers. These autonomous building machines would be based on existing techniques used in industrial waste compaction; but they also derive from a more unlikely source, namely the robotic trash collectors seen in the Disney/Pixar animated film Wall*E (2008).

Mitchell Joachim, Rapid Re(f)use project – a skyscraper made from compacted wastes.

In the film, a future Earth has been completely abandoned by its human population, the result of its decimation by the wastes produced by a voracious consumerism that has relocated to space colonies. In the future city depicted in the film – probably New York – the eponymous Wall*E (a Waste Allocation Load Litter Earth class robot) is left alone to collect and compact the vast quantities of waste left behind which have rendered the city, and presumably the world beyond, uninhabitable. As well as collecting certain discarded materials that appeal to the robot’s anthropocentric nostalgia and its desire to collect and organise, Wall*E builds new skyscrapers out of the blocks of compacted waste, in effect creating a new skyline for the city as its former skyscrapers succumb to the processes of decay.

Still from Wall*E (2008) showing skyscrapers made from compacted wastes

As Joachim explained, the film was released at the same time as he was conceiving of his Rapid Re(f)use project and that it ‘profoundly infused the research agenda’ of his design team. Yet, in proposing a project that imagines the future city as one ‘without an [exhaust] tail pipe’, or the zero-waste closed cycle envisaged by the MacArthur Foundation, Joachim sidesteps the principal message of Wall*E, namely, that unbridled consumerism may not be able to contain its wastes in the future, that the longed-for closed cycle is in fact a capitalist illusion. As any physicist will tell you, there is no such thing as a perfect exchange of energy; something is always lost as waste in this process. Perhaps, if we are to incorporate waste products into the architecture of the future, then it should also draw attention to the problematic status of the waste products themselves, namely, as the products of a fundamentally unsustainable ideology of accumulation that is predicated on creating wastes that need not exist in the first place.

My new book, The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay will be published at the end of this month with IB Tauris. Here’s what it’s about:

‘Cities are imagined not just as utopias, but also as ruins. In literature, film, art and popular culture, urban landscapes have been submerged by floods, razed by alien invaders, abandoned by fearful inhabitants and consumed in fire. The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.’

Here’s what the geographer and urban explorer Bradley L. Garrett said about it:

‘The Dead City is an elegantly argued and lacerating insight into our contemporary collective ‘ruin lust.’ The book binds together stunning images and carefully crafted prose in an elegy to ruin aesthetics, moving adroitly between critical commentary to personal experience and propelling the reader into unexpected introspection.’

To order a hardback copy of the book, with an exclusive 30% discount on the retail price, simply order online here and enter the discount code AN2 when prompted (see the flier below). The book is also available to order as a Kindle version here.

Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire

Recently, whilst holidaying on the northeast coast of England, I became fascinated by the vertical quality of the built environment there. In the Yorkshire coastal settlements of Staithes, Runswick Bay, Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, many of the houses are constructed on steep-sided land fronting natural bays or man-made harbours. Built mainly from the 16th century onwards, these villages and towns presented a remarkably dense built environment, presumably to take full advantage of what nature had provided – to cash in on the lucrative coming together of sea and land, whether through fishing in the case of Staithes and Whitby or smuggling at Robin Hood’s Bay.

Staithes

Whitby harbour

The density of these settlements – their small houses all connected by extremely narrow cobbled paths and steep steps – and their fascinating vertical topography reminded me of the favelas of Rio-de-Janeiro and other informal housing in Latin American cities. Of course, the scale of the favelas doesn’t compare with the compact quaintness of Robin Hood’s Bay; and the middle-class holidaymakers that now occupy many of the houses in these villages could not be more different than the vast urban poor of the favelas; yet, these settlements are connected because they all maximise population density on the barest minimum of available land. And they all achieve this through a form of vertical stacking that doesn’t sacrifice horizontal connectedness. Taking inspiration from this bringing together of the vertical and horizontal, the photographic constructions of Dionisio Gonzalez – his Favela series (2004-2007) – imagine how the vertical stacking of the favelas might transform architecture more generally. His fantastic multi-storey hybrid constructions bring together the spontaneity and vibrancy of favelas and more formal design elements that seem to have been inspired by the outrageous geometries evident in the work of architects Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid.

Favela, Rio-de-Janeiro

Dionisio Gonzalez, Nova Heliopolis II, 2006, c-print

In a sense, these kinds of vertical built environments challenge how we conventionally imagine and construct vertical cities, namely through the ubiquitous model of the skyscraper which has dominated solutions to the problem of urban density from the early twentieth-century onwards. One only has to imagine a typical skyscraper laid on its side to get a sense of just how constricted horizontal movement is in these buildings. As an illustration of this, one might imagine London’s 95-storey Shard being moved from the vertical to the horizontal axis – in other words, a ground-scraper, namely a very long and narrowing low-rise building. What results is a city of multitudinous interior cul-de-sacs with just a small number of entrance/exit points clustered on only one end of the building. Of course, a horizontal building would never be this spatially limited in reality, but the illustration serves to reveal just how different the vertical built environment is from the rest of the city. Indeed, it might be argued that skyscrapers cannot help but reduce the range of choices that are open to urban citizens in terms of how they negotiate the city’s spaces: on the ground, cities offer a fine interconnection of streets, where an almost infinite number of lateral interconnections are possible; in the vertical city, those interconnections are always much more limited and usually heavily proscribed in terms of how they can be used.

‘King’s Dream of New York’ (1908)

Harvey Wiley Corbett’s ‘City of the Future’ (1913)

Yet, at the dawn of the skyscraper age many speculated that future high-rise cities would incorporate multiple horizontal levels connecting tall buildings that effectively multiplied what counted as the urban ground. Thus, in the early twentieth century, numerous speculative visions of vertical cities articulated a radical vision of an enhanced sense of horizontality. These included: perspective images of multilevel cities such as ‘King’s Dream of New York’ (1908) and Corbett’s ‘City of the Future’ (1913); the novels The Sleeper Awakes (1910) and The City and the Stars (1956); the film sets of Metropolis (1927), Just Imagine (1930), and Things to Come (1936); and speculative architectural projects, from Antonio Sant’Elia’s Citta Nouva (1914) to Archigram’s Plug-in City project from 1964. Many of these visions were predicated on the rigorous separation of different forms of urban transport, ostensibly to relieve traffic congestion on the ground level; yet, they also envisaged an enriched horizontal experience for inhabitants in the future city that encompassed multiple grounds. Despite some successful attempts by urban planners to implement elevated transportation networks – for example, Chicago’s elevated railway ‘L’ and Bangkok’s Sky Train, and pedestrian skywalks linking many tall buildings in Minneapolis and Hong Kong – the radical visionary tradition of multi-level cities has mostly been sidelined in favour of the dominating paradigm of vertical stacking in tall buildings.

A future New York in Just Imagine (1930)

Skywalks in downtown Minneapolis

What old settlements like Robin Hood’s Bay and newer ones like the favelas of Rio show us is that is does not have to be this way. A whole rich web of horizontal connections are possible even in the most vertical built environments, so long as those who design, build and live in them are willing to embrace those connections. What struck me most about Robin Hood’s Bay was the lack of privacy for its residents – public paths passed through gardens and courtyards and every house seemed to connect to the next in organic assemblages. It is this sense of privacy that must be given up if the high-rise building is to become a space of connection rather than isolation. Of course, this can be done even in the most isolating of tall buildings – witness the sociability and community spirit of many high-rise social housing projects. Yet, as the horror of the recent Grenfell tower fire demonstrates, that willingness to connect must come with an architecture that nurtures and protects it, rather than turning it into a death trap.

In his 1967 article, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, the American artist Robert Smithson mused on the strange beauty that might be experienced in the decaying wastes of the post-industrial urban landscape – here, that of the artist’s own childhood in suburban New Jersey with its mixture of half-constructed motorways, industrial detritus and empty car parks. In this unsettling meditation, Smithson drew on the example of a sand-box (one of the ‘monuments’ he found on his journey) as a potent illustration of the fundamentally entropic nature of reality – imagining, as he did, a child mixing up two different colours of sand with a stick and then, in vain, trying to reverse this process. All matter, it seems, is forever headed in one direction – the arrow of time we are so often told is progress onwards and upwards in reality being the inevitable disintegration of everything.

Yet, there is consolation in entropy, especially in those places where Smithson’s quintessential entropic material, sand, dominates. One such place is the vast beach that is still growing immediately to the west of the village of Harlech in northwest Wales. Stretching over 3 miles from south to north, its northern edges eventually merge into the unstable mud and sand of the Afon Dwyryd estuary, beyond which the undulating edge of the finger-like Lleyn Peninsula begins, stretching out all the way across the north-western horizon. The cumulus clouds that build over the Lleyn’s hills often funnel directly eastwards into the higher mountains of Snowdonia which rise, from this place, seemingly straight out of the sand itself. As the dunes flatten out, their rich vegetation thins to a meagre cover, the unbroken marram grass now semi-submerged flecks of green. Here, the wind can be seen: the eastward ripples that scour the sand mirroring the funnel of cloud bank above. In this place the elements of the world – sky, wind, sand, water – are in direct conversation, as if the inert were at last allowed to express itself, free from the territorial contestations of organic life.

All that gets washed up on beaches like these is left stranded in a world without progress: an entropic world where time is measured by the endless repetitive actions of sand, water and wind that wear down matter. A profoundly unstable world that is paradoxically characterised by a deep stillness. Yet, of course, there is nowhere in the world that is not affected by organic life – and particularly human life – and here, organic detritus – necklaces of seaweed; bleached, eggshell bones of anemones; and desiccated crabs – wraps itself around plastic wastes such as a bottle, boxes and a lone washing basket. There are some beaches in the world, I am told, where plastic chokes the entire landscape, washed ashore from the vast vortexes of plastic that are increasingly accumulating in parts of the world’s oceans.

Here, the isolated plastic flotsam gives a sense of what might happen if entropy disappeared from the world, if materials never decayed and were completely immune to the weathering effects of wind, water and sand. Of course, even plastic will eventually decay, but the timescales involved are so vast as to be barely comprehensible. Is it possible to even imagine a world where the materials we make will outlive everything else, perhaps even the sun itself? In the beginning there was a void; in the end, there will be only plastic. Even as entropy produces a profound sense of melancholy, that sadness is in fact a deep consolation – a sense that if all things pass, then all things can be renewed. Once you understand the overarching power of the inert, perhaps then you can know something of true freedom, of a life lived in acceptance of mortality rather than struggle against it. By contrast, if the wastes we generate simply continue to pile up, and if they outlive everything else, then we’ll have no space left to ponder our mortality. Perhaps like the inhabitants of the waste-filled earth of Wall*E (2008), we’ll eventually have to leave the planet altogether to find a place where entropy can once again provide some consolation.

Worsley Old Hall

Perhaps the most common building type over the last hundred years or so in Britain is the Tudor style house: the dream of any self-respecting middle-class aspirant; the waking nightmare of most professional architects and critics. Unlike its other revivalist cousins – Neo-Georgian, Gothic Revival, Neoclassical – it’s never been respected enough to be called anything other than ‘Mock’ Tudor, as if it were an entirely imaginary style. Yet, just like any other copycat style, the Tudor refers back to a real form of architecture, or rather a type of building that characterised the period in Britain from 1485 to 1603, when the monarchy finally shed its Norman roots – and its basis in foreign lands – and, at least in the popular imagination, became fully British, namely during the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Mock Tudor houses, Lower Broughton Road, The Cliffe

Wythenshawe Hall after the fire of 15 March 2016

In the Manchester region, genuine Tudor buildings cling to life precariously, long since swallowed up by either industrial buildings or, later, vast housing estates. The wrecks are all too present, often the subject of plaintive appeals from local residents or the city’s newspapers. Wythenshawe Hall – a 16th-century timber-framed former manor house standing in splendid isolation in the middle of Wythenshawe Park – was badly damaged after a fire was deliberately started there on 15 March 2016; its fate is now uncertain, despite assurances from Manchester City Council and the charity group The Friends of Wythenshawe Hall that the building will be restored and put to public use. Nearby is an even older building, Baguley Hall, probably built in the 14th century, making it one of the oldest (and pre-Tudor) medieval timber-framed halls in North-West England. It stands anachronously amongst Wythenshawe’s endless residential streets, mostly built en-masse in the 1920s and 1930s as a new garden-city suburb of Manchester. After being used for many years by the Council for storage, it was acquired by the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in 1968 and is now in the care of English Heritage. Surrounded by a high fence and obscured by overgrown vegetation, Baguley Hall is both an obdurate survivor and also a poignant reminder of just how difficult it is to find new uses for old buildings, especially when their very oldness is the quality that is valued. Sadder still is Hough Hall in Manchester’s northern suburb of Moston. Probably built at the end of the 16th century, and long enveloped by Victorian terraces, it has been mostly empty for decades; only partially used by its last owner as a commercial business up until 2005. Today, its dilapidation is extraordinary: plaster is crumbling into the ground, accelarated by the plants that have found sustenance in it; while the distorted timber beams have none of the picturesque qualities we so admire in other Tudor buildings that have survived.

Baguley Hall, Hall Lane, Wythenshawe

Hough Hall, Hough Hall Lane, Moston

Of course, there are a few celebrated Tudor buildings in Greater Manchester that have gone on to find other uses that cherish rather than resist their ancientness. Ordsall Hall in Salford, built in the 15th century, was sold by its longstanding owners, the Radclyffes in 1662. It was eventually acquired by Salford Council in 1959 after centuries of use as variously a working men’s club, a school for clergy and a radio station. Refurbished between 2009 and 2011, the Hall is now a free museum that hosts exhibitions, immersive room settings and a cafe. The City of Manchester still has its most famous medieval building, Chetham’s School and Library, founded in 1421 as a priests’ college for the nearby Collegiate Church (now the cathedral). Dissolved by Henry VIII in 1547, Chetham’s was subsequently acquired by the Stanley Family and remained in their hands until the Civil War. It has been a school since 1653 until the present day – now one of the most esteemed private music schools in Britain. But perhaps the most stubborn survivor is the Old Wellington Pub, built in 1552 and located next the Cathedral in Shambles Square. Having miraculously survived the bombs of the Luftwaffe, the Pub and its 17th-century neighbour Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, only escaped demolition in the 1970s when they were raised up 15ft and literally lifted out of the ground to a new location in Shambles Square. Spared once more after the IRA bomb of 1996, they were moved again to their current location next to the Cathedral as part of the more recent redevelopment of the city centre.

Chetham’s School, Long Millgate, Manchester

Bramall Hall, Stockport

The Old Wellington Pub (left) and Sinclair’s Oyster Bar (right) in their current location in Shambles Square

Like all the medieval buildings that still stand in Greater Manchester – other examples include Bramall Hall in Stockport, Wardley Hall and Old Worsley Hall in Worsley, and Hail i’th in Bolton – their survival has not been the result of careful preservation but rather their ability to find new uses in the face of the destruction or redundancy of old ones. Because they are of relatively simple construction – brick, timber and plaster – and organic in their evolution, Tudor buildings are eminently adaptable, even as this inevitably leads to the loss of their authentic architectural identity. Indeed, it could be argued that nearly all Tudor buildings that survive are ‘Mock’ Tudor, bastardised by centuries of adaptation. And even those buildings that are seemingly irrevocably lost, like Hulme Hall that was demolished in 1840 to make way for the Bridgewater Canal, live on in other ways – the building’s 15th-century carved oak panels were saved and rehoused in Worsley Old Hall, later to be transferred to the new seat of residence of the local landowners, the Egerton family.

Ordsall Hall, Salford

Dressing up as a Tudor in Ordsall Hall

Back in 1972, when Hough Hall was scheduled for demolition under a Compulsory Purchase Order, local residents organised a one-off festival to demonstrate their resistance to the Council’s plans – children made Tudor costumes and walked around the market on Moston Lane enlisting support from shoppers. Today, children are encouraged to dress up in Tudor costumes in both Ordsall and Bramall Hall, and, on a visit to Ordsall, my daughter willingly obliged by donning chain mail. The recent popularity of Tudor histories – perhaps most notably the BBC series Wolf Hall (2015) and The Tudors (2007-10) – with all their sensational sexual and political intrigues and lavish costume design, demonstrate that the appeal of the Tudors is most definitely not limited to children. In the popular imagination, Tudor buildings and their inhabitants signal a golden age in British history – a time when the elusive but much coveted notion of Britishness revealed itself most strongly. Of course, this is mostly myth-making, and a dangerously seductive one at that in these post-Brexit times; but perhaps we can at least celebrate the Tudor in its exemplary adaptability – its seeming ability to be moulded into any shape, its very lack of authenticity its greatest strength.

Clough is a northern English word for a steep valley or ravine cut into a hillside by fast-flowing water. The slopes of the Pennines between Manchester and Sheffield are perhaps the most obvious reference point for such nomenclature; there, cloughs provide ample opportunities for entertaining, if often very wet, scrambles up to the bleak moorland plateaus of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. Yet wooded ravines also extend into the cities that surround the Peak District – and in Manchester, cloughs in the northern suburbs of Prestwich, Blackley and Moston represent perhaps the last vestiges of ‘natural’ land left over from centuries of urban development.

Map of Boggart Hole Clough

Entrance gates, Rochdale Road

In the case of Boggart Hole Clough – an urban park bordering Blackley and Moston and roughly three miles north of Manchester city centre – that nature is very ancient indeed. Covering 171 acres, the dense woodland of birch, hazel, alder and oak that envelops several cloughs in this park has survived since at least 5000 BCE and was probably inhabited by our ancestors in the Bronze Age. Surviving the rapid growth of Manchester in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of its protection as a deer park, Boggart Hole Clough was purchased by Manchester Corporation in 1911 and now contains playgrounds, an athletics track, tennis courts and a boating lake. Yet it is still the thickly forested cloughs that characterise the park – the main thoroughfare winding its way around the edges of these dark and forbidding ravines. And it is these secretive spaces that have generated a plethora of folktales centred on the park, beautifully elaborated by folklore historians Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook.

The 99 steps

The main promenade

Originating in the early 1800s in the story of the eponymous Boggart – a mischievous, goblin-like creature that was said to inhabit a farmhouse that used to be located in the park – the folktales associated with Boggart Hole Clough have subsequently mutated into a plethora of myths, many of which still survive, as revealed by Houlbrook’s recent interviews with local residents. With an astonishing total of 39 distinct traditions emerging, the Boggarts – who are said to steal children, and particularly babies, and emerge from the park’s drainage grilles at night – are now just one of several mythical entities residing in Boggart Hole Clough. Together with the Boggarts, the devil has his own seat beneath one of the park’s bridges; the ghost of a suicide victim – the white lady – haunts the park’s woods; fairy rings litter its open spaces; and a troll lurks beneath the foot-bridge leading to the ’99 steps’, the successful ascent of the latter granting you a wish.

The giant’s tooth or toe

The abode of the Boggart

What is extraordinary about these stories is not their content, which is somewhat cliched, but rather the fact that they have flourished in recent years, against the grain of everything we might expect of contemporary life. It seems that local residents – and particularly the young – have latched onto the park as a place of myth and magic. Houlbrook has argued that this is a consequence of both the rise in stories about mythical creatures in the popular media – the shape-shifting Boggarts in the Harry Potter novels and films being the most obvious – and also the gradual re-wilding of the park itself, which has been allowed to become overgrown again after a long period of manicured respectability. Together with a perceived increase in crime – murders, muggings or molestations – Boggart Hole Clough has seemingly reverted back to its primeval state, ripe for appropriation as a place of both mystery and fear.

Drainage grille

When I visited the park on an overcast weekday afternoon, it was almost deserted – just a few solitary (male) strollers, one dog walker and a young family were making use of its spaces. Upon entering, I descended into the principal ravine (the Boggart Hole Clough itself) via the 99 steps. Surrounding on all sides by thick woodland, the park does indeed feel mysterious, the tree-lined wide concrete path that encircles the park skirts the edges of other cloughs that plunge steeply into even thicker foliage. An elderly man repeatedly ascending and descending the 99 steps (in preparation for a trip to the Great Wall of China) warned me to be careful of my camera, whilst also dismissing my Boggart enquiries. Yet, with the park’s stories still fresh in my mind, I silently made my wish on the steps, discovered the small rock known as the ‘giant’s tooth’ or ‘toe’ which marks the place where an ancient Boggart and brave human got into a fight, and peered under the bridge where the Boggart supposedly resides. Further into the woodland, in some trepidation, I came across the site of a recent camping expedition: a ramshackle bivouac and blackened stones the giveaway remains. Close by, a few beer cans had been skewered onto branches – votive offerings perhaps to ward off the evil Boggarts during what was presumably a somewhat fraught night out.

Votive offerings in the woods

Slopes of Angel Clough

In one sense, it’s not the content of these stories that matters. As Houlbrook rightly points out, folklore survives so well because it is eminently malleable: stories are passed down from generation to generation in whatever form the tellers wants them to take; there’s no dogma to folktales; rather an ever-changing relationship between the imagination of the storyteller and the places to which those stories have become attached to. What the survival – indeed, proliferation – of folklore in places like Boggart Hole Clough shows us is that there is still a vital relationship in cities between its inhabitants and its places, even as the virtual world of images seems to increasingly dominate our lives. Indeed, it is arguably those imaginary images themselves, consumed in the comforting environs of home, that have led to a richer engagement with the very real places that lie outside and beyond.

As I left the park and retreated back to safety of the busy Rochdale Road, a slightly deranged youth passed me with this lurid warning, offering up yet another myth for me to take home: ‘There’s killer snakes in there. They’ll f***k you up! You understand?’

‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, The Builder, October 1853.

In October 1853, the British architectural journal The Builder pictured Manchester ‘getting up the steam’, an image of the city’s forest of tall smoking chimneys, interspersed with large unadorned cotton mills, with their repetitive rows of identical windows, and diminutive groups of terraced houses. This engraving still sums up what for many is the dominant image of Manchester’s Victorian and more recent history as Cottonopolis: a soot-filled city of polluting industry, damp and unrelenting monotony. Within this imagined Manchester, epitomized by the paintings of L. S. Lowry, cotton mills tower over all other buildings, dominating the visual appearance of the cityscape. Today, in some parts of the Greater Manchester region, such as parts of Bolton, Oldham, and Stockport, mill buildings still dominate in this way, even if their chimneys have long since ceased belching smoke.

L. S. Lowry, The Pond, 1950

Devon Mill (1908) in the Hollinwood district of Oldham

From the late eighteenth-century onwards, over 2,400 cotton mills and cloth-finishing works were built in what would in 1974 become the Greater Manchester region: a territory approximately 25 miles north to south and 30 miles east to west. In their exhaustive survey of these structures, which was begun in 1985, David Farnie and Mike Williams found that less than half (1,112) of these factories had survived, with many either derelict or awaiting grant-aided demolition. Since then, many more mills have been lost: the sheer number and vast size of these structures make them particularly difficult to convert to non-industrial uses.

William Wyld, Manchester from Kersal Moor, 1852

Despite many losses through demolition, Manchester’s mills have long featured in postwar images of the city as a landscape of lingering dereliction and decay. As the German emigré Max Ferber recalled in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1993), his arrival in Manchester in 1942 summoned up the memory of thousands of smoking chimneys that he saw on viewing the city from the surrounding hills. Yet, by the mid-1960s, when Sebald met Frank Auerbach, the artist who had inspired the fictional Ferber, ‘almost every one of those chimneys [had] now been demolished or taken out of use.’ However, the remnants of this landscape of mills continued to persist in the city in the 1960s, as evidenced in a scene filmed in Oldham in the film Hell Is A City (Val Guest, 1960), where the town’s half-ruined millscape is revealed panoramically when a group of illegal gamblers flee from a police raid on a moor on Oldham Edge; or in a more sustained way in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), where the Victorian mills of Ancoats, Stockport and Miles Platting dominate the still-industrial landscape that frames the poignant story of young social outcasts in a bleak, half-ruined city.

Still from Hell is a City (1960) showing the mills of Oldham in the background

Still from A Taste of Honey (1961) showing Victoria Mill from the Rochdale Canal, Miles Platting

Victoria Mill today

In the 1960s and 1970s, the city and region’s mills continued to slide towards redundancy, with textile production in almost all of these buildings ceasing by the early 1980s. Whilst the move towards regeneration in the 1990s saved some of the more iconic mill structures, particularly those like Royal Mills and Murrays’ Mills in Ancoats that were listed or located near to the city centre, many others fell into disrepair, either being partially reused or succumbing to dereliction and decay. Some, like Brunswick Mill (c.1840) in Ancoats, survive in a state of suspended animation: part of this mill, once the largest in the city, houses a small-scale textile businesses and cheap practice spaces for musicians; the rest is boarded up – a bleak and forbidding wall of decaying brick as seen from the adjacent Ashton Canal.

Royal Mills (centre-left) and Murrays’ Mills (centre-right), Ancoats, as seen from the canal basin in New Islington

Brunswick Mill (c.1840) from Pollard St, Ancoats

Hartford Mill (1907) in Werneth, Oldham, currently awaiting demolition

Surviving cotton mills, whatever their state of disrepair, present opportunities for reflection on the memories of industry itself. These memories are highly valued by many in relation to Greater Manchester’s existing cotton mills, including a few textile companies that continue to use and care for these buildings, for example Kearsley Mill (1905-06) in Prestolee that is still occupied and well-maintained by its original owner, Richard Haworth Ltd. Local conservation groups, such as the Ancoats Buildings Preservation Trust, campaign to preserve historic mills, while the National Trust owns Quarry Bank Mill (1784) to the south of Manchester and the site’s many volunteers dramatically re-enact its social history for visitors. Finally, arts events like Angel Meadow, the audience-immersive theatre production held in Ancoats in June 2014, provide insights into the lives of former textile-workers (in the case of Angel Meadow, Irish immigrants who dominated the area in the nineteenth century).

Kearsley Mill (1905-6) in Prestolee

The National Trust-owned Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, built in 1784

The engine-house of Pear Mill (1907-12) in Bredbury, Stockport, now used as an indoor climbing centre

Finally, if many of Greater Manchester’s mills have either been demolished or fallen into a state of ruin, others have found alternative uses, including, in addition to heritage sites like Quarry Bank Mill: children’s and adult’s play areas (for example Run of the Mill and a climbing centre, both located in Pear Mill in Stockport); self-storage or warehousing facilities (Chadderton Mill, Oldham); nightclubs (Downtex Mill); apartments (Royal Mills); and even public sector services (a health and education centre in Victoria Mill, Miles Platting). These conversions offer insights into how otherwise defunct industrial buildings might be salvaged and reused and also how their historical development might be remembered. Manchester’s mill buildings still offer an afterimage of ‘mythic’ Manchester, the city defined by writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, in which the cotton mill represented not only a certain type of work but the entire industrial system. These mills may no longer act as a metonym of Manchester as Cottonopolis; but they nevertheless continue to hold out the possibility of integrating the city’s industrial history with its present and future development as both remainders and reminders of what has passed.

This post is adapted from my book The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (IB Tauris, 2017), available to buy as a reasonably-priced Kindle version here.