Trellick Tower in Pop Video History

Here’s six videos that feature perhaps my favourite building, the iconic Trellick Tower in Ladbroke Grove, and one which is named after it, but obviously wasn’t filmed there.  Judging from the number of times he has featured Trellick it would appear that Damon Albarn is just as enthused by the controversial tower as I am.  At the end, there’s also a bonus cameo from a film classic.

A Pillar of Poplarism

The Memorial to George Lansbury on the corner of Bow Road and Harley Grove, Tower Hamlets.  The inscription reads:

“GEORGE LANSBURY

1859-1940

Member of the Poplar Borough Council 1903-1940

Mayor 1919-20 & 1936-37

Member of Parliament

Member of the Crown

Privy Councillor

A GREAT SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE

The house which stood here was his home for 23 years and this garden was created in his memory by public subscription 1955.”

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Judging by this trailer, this documentary on St. Louis’ infamous Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate will be excellent:

(via Entschwindet und Vergeht / “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” website)

Goodbye to Berlin

It would appear from yesterday’s Observer that the Kunsthaus Tacheles, the fantastic ruined-department-store-cum-artists-community which I previously featured in this blog, is to be torn down:

“”We are expecting to be closed any day,” says Yvonne Hildebrandt, a jewellery designer in a studio named Kalerie. After years of legal appeals, she admits, the occupants of the colourful graffiti-covered Tacheles in what was once the Jewish quarter of Berlin have finally run out of road.

When its occupants have been pushed out and the building pulled down, another Berlin landmark of the post-Wall era will have gone. All that will be left behind on Oranienburger Strasse, once at the heart of East Berlin’s counter-cultural scene, will be the C/O photography gallery, a block down from Tacheles. And its days are also numbered.

Tacheles and C/O may be the highest-profile symbols of the battle to define the shape of the new Berlin, but they are not the only ones, nor are they the most important.”

This is a awful shame. Despite obvious gentrification in areas such as Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg and parts of Mitte, there is a definite resistance in a lot of Berlin to the worst excesses of ‘urban renewal’, especially in its former DDR boroughs, and it’s this defiance which is one of the city’s most endearing qualities. Although I fear the worst, I hope this great city can hold out against the invaders at the gates.

Walking the Eye of Horus

A couple of weeks back I had a day to kill and decided to undertake something I had been wanting to do for a long time and take a walk that took in five of the six Nicholas Hawksmoor churches in London.

Nicholas Hawksmoor was a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, and his six London churches are magnificent examples of English Baroque that show a strong classical Egyptian influence.  These imposing, some would say inelegant, structures have long held a fascination for three of my favourite authors, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, who weave the churches  into their psychogeographic fiction (the title of this post refers to the fact that you can draw lines between Hawksmoor’s churches with his London obelisks on a map in the shape of the Eye of Horus).

I had visited two of the churches (St. George’s Bloomsbury and Christ Church Spitalfields) before, but wished to see them all; well five of them at least – the sixth, St. Alfege’s, is situated in Greenwich so was too far removed to incorporate into the walk.

Kunsthaus Tacheles

I love Berlin.  It’s how I imagined New York or London in the late 1970s and early 1980s – a city half Western, first-world metropolis, and part anarchic, dilapidated playground.  Berlin is a living paradox between the shiny capatilistic temples of Potsdamer Platz and the squats of Friedrichshain and communist-era housing blocks of Lichtenberg.  To me, this is illustrated best by the Kunsthaus Tacheles, something which simply couldn’t exist in the centre of  London, New York, Paris, Milan, Sydney or Tokyo.

The building now known simply as Tacheles began life in 1907 as a the Friedrichstraßenpassage, a collection of small businesses.  The building was of a neo-gothic style that was popular at the time, particular in the new-world metropolises of New York and Chicago.  By the late twenties it was the home of  the electric company AEG.  After this, its substantial space was used increasingly by the Nationalist Socialist party, which must have been galling to Berlin’s Jewish population, as this was the Jewish centre of Belin and yards from the Neue Synagoge, Berlin’s largest synagogue (that ironically survived the Nazis but was badly damaged by Allied bombing).