Noises of home

I had a strange experience in the orchard today. I walked out, in the early evening, and the plum tree blossom was drifting slowly down, and the tree was humming.

It was the bees. When there’s a single bee near me, I can hear it; the individual quality of its buzz is clear, as if there’s a tiny silence between the infinitesimal moments of sound. It has a definite pitch, a definite texture almost.

But when there are so many bees, their sounds all mingle together into a huge hum, like the aftertone of a peal of bells, or a roomful of Tibetan singing bowls. It was magnificent. The sound of a French orchard in April.

Walls, Walls, Walls

Walls in the West have a bad name. The Berlin Wall, symbol of oppression. Prison walls (Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage). The most frightening thing for many of us is a wall without windows, a room from which you can’t see out on to the street.

In the other hand, in Morocco walls seem to be a joy and a delight. In Meknes, Moulay Ismail’s great buildings seem to be nothing but walls. Walls around the royal palace, walls around the Dar-el-Kebir. Walls that stride a kilometre without a break. Walls that are by now built into the structure of the city, so that houses are built against them, and streets flank one side, so that sometimes the only time you see the wall is in the tiny gap between two houses when you catch a sudden glimpse of crenellation. The huge open space in front of the Dar el-Kebir is hardly a real square, as it would be in Italy, say; it’s just the result of building two huge sets of walls a little apart from each other.  The walls are the point – the space is just what happens once you’ve built the walls.

Now here’s another thing where the idea of Moulay Ismail’s Meknes as the Moroccan Versailles breaks down. Nowhere at Versailles are you aware of walls, as such; indeed the front wall of the courtyard is made transparent by railings, and the frontage of the chateau is a deep U that draws you in, not a flat wall that holds you off. You are meant to see the splendour; you are meant to guess at what’s inside. And in the gardens, it’s the avenue that dominates, the panorama controlled by perspective – you are meant to see all the way to the horizon; walls are banned, as they’d impose an end to the view, implying that the King’s dominion was limited and his reign impotent.

But at Meknes the whole point is that you don’t see anything of Moulay Ismail’s palace. The walls exclude. It’s an inward-looking culture; the palace has to be guarded against attack, against impurity, against the quotidian. There are no windows in the walls; who wants to see the chaos of the streets outside? The dirtiness of the gutter?

So the symbol of Moulay Ismail’s rule is the blank wall. No windows.  Gates where the ornamentation privileges the flat surfaces of the wall, rather than the arch of the gate. Walls that surround, that blank out the exterior world. There are no vistas, no panoramas, and that may be why so many of these Moroccan walls are determinedly un-picturesque, unphotogenic. The walls at Avila make you want to take pictures; the walls at Meknes don’t.

Empty space – the mechouar

One of the things that most surprised me about Morocco was the huge empty spaces. For instance at Fes, the Mechouar (parade ground) in front of the walls, between Fes-el-Bali (old Fes) and Fel-el-Jdid (new Fes); or the Djemaa el Fna, in Marrakech; or the huge expanses of the Place el Hedim, the square containing the Qubba, and the massive area in front of Dar el-Kabir at Meknes.

Moulay Ismail’s work at Meknes is said to have been inspired by what he had heard about Versailles, and it’s often compared to Versailles. But in fact the comparison is instructive mainly because although Moulay Ismail achieved bigness, he did not achieve greatness. There appears to be be no significance to the walls and spaces he laid out; they do not create axes, do not relate to each other, do not create an organisation of space.

Place el Hedim (admittedly changed since his time) for instance appears to be a huge, regular rectangle laid out in front of the great Bab el-Mansour. But if you look carefully, Bab-el-Mansour is off-centre – it has no relation to the space.

Nor is there any attempt to regularise or articulate the space. The big square in front of the Dar el-Kabir is not given any organisation by the buildings that face on to it – there are no regular arcades, no features that could make it a focused space rather than just an empty area.

The huge long corridor that runs from past the Zaouia in Meknes is nearly a kilometer long (my reckoning, based on pacing it) – yet it runs from one little gate in the wall to a blind corner. It is not an axis; it doesn’t go anywhere. In Versailles, an alley like this would be an avenue, leading to a viewpoint, to a focal monument; here, it’s just a long dog-leg with nothing at the end.

This is characteristic of the Moroccan city – though I’d hesitate to say it is a characteristic of Arab cityscapes as a whole. Only in the work of Moroccan architects post-colonisation, borrowing from the repertoire of the French-designed villes nouvelles, do you find regular spaces, articulated by the architecture that surrounds them.

The big squares are empty spaces. They come alive, as the name of Djemaa el Fna (‘assembly of the dead’) suggests, only when people assemble in them. No people, no meaning. No people, no articulation. No people, no need. It’s the people who define the space, and not the other way around.

Glimpses of Morocco

Just back from three weeks in Morocco – and it was a fascinating visit, not least in glimpses of a different cityscape.

The European city is a city of open spaces, that don’t change their character, that relate to each other logically. Since the Renaissance, there’s been a rationality to the way cities are put together.

That logic doesn’t happen in Arab cities. Seville, for instance, is the one city I always get lost in, even with the best map I can get.

Arab cities seem to be built around private spaces. The streets are simply the gaps between the buildings. They don’t run straight – they run via crooked corners; one street near Dar Si Said, in Marrakech, goes round five right angle bends in less than a hundred yards. Where the map shows them running straight across a grid, in fact you’ll find a staggered junction, with a little kink in the street.

The idea of following the ‘main street’ becomes ludicrous. A main street can simply filter away into tiny passageways leading to the dead ends of a kasbah. It’s only wider because it leads from the individual houses to the souk – but it does not go from A to B, so to speak; it simply feeds a drainage system, so that the flood of people going down the street turns into a number of trickles feeding into impasses that contain two or three house doors, and that’s all.

And you see the buildings, the real heart of the city, only in glimpses and glances. For instance in Fes, as a non -Muslim, you’ll only see the Kairouine mosque or the central Zaouia through gateways, obliquely. You can walk round them and trace their pattern, but you cannot enter; and they are intended to remain private spaces, unlike the western Cathedral with its open parvis, its facade, its spires and towers, or the baroque church which announces itself with a facade that is a piece of public drama.

It’s this that marks the mysterious appeal of Moroccan cities. Morocco takes this strand of Arab architecture to its extreme – far more so, say, than Oman. Everything is secrecy and indirection.

Where does it change?

I’ve taken to using the Norwich-Cambridge-King’s Cross rather than Norwich-Liverpool street connectiion recently, since it gets me directly to Eurostar, even if it does take a bit longer. And looking out of the window, I’ve been wondered; where does Breckland end, and Fenland start? Where does the landscape change?

Breckland is unmistakable. Scots pines stride across the landscape, straggly lines, their branches akimbo, gaunt and angular trees. Heath and furze and huge arable fields give the land its texture; there are dark pine forests, work of the Forestry Commission, and open cornland, patchworking the landscape.

Then coming towards Ely there is the fen. It’s not the flatness that always amazes me, though true, it is flat; it’s the blackness of the soil. Not dark brown but absolutely black, velvety black like a pint of Guinness or a pair of black suede gloves. It’s a hard land, the wind keens everywhere and the air is cold; but the soil is luxury compared to the sand of the Breck. Telegraph poles march across the Fen, but while once they were uniform, neat and pressed, now every other one leans one way or another, out of true, out of line, out of kilter. Lonely houses stand in their tiny patches of green, not pretty cottages but foursquare boxes, four brick walls against the immensity of the sky and the force of the wind.

The train and the river run above the fields, embanked, embattled. This was sea once, and the land doesn’t let you forget it. From time to time it floods, and the fields are silvered or mirrored over with the inundation, and you feel as if the train is chugging on an embankment through an inland sea.

But where does it change? I’ve never managed to work it out. I turn my attention to the newspaper for a bare minute, and the landscape has changed already…

Gainsborough vs Constable

I visited the National Gallery again to take a good look at the sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian works there. Once I’d done with these – I’ll be writing a podtour up in due course – I decided to move along and try to overcome one of my long-term, irrational loathings – Constable.

Now you have to understand that I really ought to like Constable. I’m a Norfolk girl, and I keep being told that Constable is the great artist of the East Anglian landscape.

So: The Hay Wain. (Yes, I know Flatford is on the Essex/Suffolk border and not in Norfolk.)  I looked at it for a good fifteen minutes. And I still hate it.

I just can’t get on with Constable’s use of paint. He seems to think it’s some kind of chocolate sauce or treacle, daubing it all over the canvas. You could read the painting like braille. The heavy white highlights on the water, to me, look like knobs of white paint or putty, not like light on a stream. It just looks muddy. I actually feel less well disposed to the painting now that I’ve seen it in the flesh than I did before; the churned up surface prevents me actually looking at the subject.

Dispirited, I wandered round the corner and found myself amazed by the luminous poise of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. What a gorgeous painting this is! There’s a real sense of space; the sitters are on the left, and to the right we see their fields extending into the distance. In the first field, sheaves are neatly stacked; there’s a white gate at the end of the field, and beyond this, sheep grazing. This is a working landscape, just like Constable’s.

But what I love is the play of light. On Mrs Andrews’s satin dress – which is plain, compared to the dresses of many of Gainsborough’s other sitters, but on which the play of light makes up for the plainness of the cut. On the tree trunks. On Mr Andrews’s rumpled jacket.

And Gainsborough doesn’t beautify this remarkably plain couple, with their sulky faces and almost insolently relaxed posture.  There’s a storm coming over, too, giving a strangely ruthless edge to the light. But it’s not a menacing painting; the slight sense of menace just offsets the poise and elegance.

I’ve always been told Constable is the greater painter (that may reflect an out of date appreciation, but that’s what my art teachers always said). Yet out of these two paintings, the Gainsborough is the one that does it for me.

Les belles Eoliennes – wind turbine tourism

I adore wind turbines.

I know, that’s an odd thing to say. Lots of people hate them. Perhaps I’m different because I come from Norfolk, where the people of Swaffham seem to have adopted their turbine as a mascot (and now have a second one).

One of my favourite sights on the motorway up from Rouen to Boulogne is the little turbine farm above the cliffs at Wimereux.  I stopped one night there for a quick stroll to loosen my legs before I drove the final few kilometres to Boulogne for the late ferry, and heard the weird whining of the blades high above.

I’m glad to report that someone else feels the attraction – Patrick Barkham hitched a ride with Centrica, which owns a huge windfarm off the Lincolnshire coast.

Not everyone can get a lift with Centrica, but if you take a boat trip from Yarmouth to see the seals on Scroby sands, you can also visit the windfarm there. There’s a small onshore farm not far from Yarmouth, too, at Winterton – an intriguing place with towering sand dunes, England’s biggest desert according to some.

And rather nicely, my friends Lesley and Carlos at Norfolk Square brewery have named one of their beers Scroby and given it a highly appropriate pump clip.

How gentrification destroys the past

In some ways I have nothing against gentrification. I suppose you could have seen me as one of the gentrifiers of Stoke Newington when I moved in, during the 1990s – wealthy enough to buy a house and do it up, which I suppose counted as ‘gentry’.

And I have nothing against regeneration, either. But when it’s implemented in such a way that it resembles Stalin’s forced migrations, rather than trying to improve the existing life of an area, I worry. I worry, for instance, that we’re losing a lot of real history and local culture in the East End to the London Olympics – and that those things can never be replaced. The allotments, the mixed housing estates, the refuseniks of the old council flats, are never going to be renewed.

So I was sad to see what is happening to Sulukule, a district of Istanbul by the Theodosian walls. First of all, it’s one of those rather downbeat areas where little wooden houses shelter under Byzantine ruins; part of the continuing history of Constantinople, Byzantium, Istanbul.

Secondly, it’s where the Roma of Istanbul now live. (Apparently they’ve already been chased out of Beyoglu and Fener by high rents. Fener isn’t exactly swish.) And they are being forcibly evicted, and sent to live in (expensive) flats 40 km out of the city. Presumbly with the rather cynical expectation that they won’t be able to pay the rent.

We saw this kind of thing happening in the UK in the 1960s – the destruction of working class communities in favour of idealistic modern housing. Governments find their working class and Romany citizens embarrassing, and the places they live demeaning – so they want to build utopian projects. Not in order to help their citizens, but so the city looks modern. So it impresses the middle classes, the investors, and (perhaps) foreigners who will invest here.

It’s sad. Sulukule isn’t just any old community either – it’s one of the world’s oldest Romany communities, and it’s the place where most of Istanbul’s gypsy music scene happens.

Sign the petition for what it’s worth. I was number 3026.

And on a slightly different subject, I was sad to see the demise of Woolworths in the UK. ‘Woolies’ didn’t have a raison d’être any more, it’s true – its variety store format was deeply outmoded. It sold CDs and pick’n'mix, and an assortment of other stuff that kept changing and never really included anything you needed.

But it was part of English life. And some of the stores were classics, Art Deco style 1930s buildings which were defiantly modernist in a still very Victorian-Edwardian style high street. There’s one in Ilford that looks like something out of Flash Gordon.

I don’t miss the smelly vinyl floor and flickering strip lighting of the most recent stores. But I wonder if somewhere, there isn’t a Woolies that could be spot listed, or preserved as a sort of Museum-of-Woolies, so we don’t entirely lose our heritage?

(Apropos of Woolies, why is it that every time I have a good idea for something to write about, Jonathan Glancey has it first. I’m getting quite fed up…)

Industrial heritage – breweries

Jonathan Glancey has written a nice little piece lamenting the closure of our ancient breweries in the Guardian today.

It certainly has resonance for me… I’ve seen Greene King close down Ridley’s, I’ve seen Gales’ Horndean Brewery, whose honest ugly bulk welcomed me off the motorway every time I drove down to Portsmouth, closed by Fullers, and I’ve seen old maltings and breweries destroyed all over East Anglia.

Breweries are a bit like railway stations. They’re functional buildings that have some very special requirements to meet. The Victorian tower brewery  was a marvellous piece of architecture and engineering combined to make the brewing of huge amounts of beer streamlined and easy.

The ‘beerage’, immensely wealthy families owning breweries, dignified their industrial buildings with baronial style or Renaissance references. The Cliff Brewery at Ipswich was the home of Tolly Cobbold – apparently it’s shortly to house brewing operations again as Earl Soham brewery moves in. (Ironically, it was Ridleys that put this brewery out of action when they acquired Tolly.)  Hook Norton still uses its fine tower brewery – so does Highgate Brewery in Walsall. (Both these breweries offer group tours.)

Nowadays, breweries are less romantic – but need equally specialised buildings. I visited Adnams’ new brewery a while back (they don’t offer tours to the general public, but local CAMRA organised a visit). While the street frontage is exactly the same as it always was, behind the cobbles and the cottages a sparkling new stainless steel brewery has been erected. It’s like something out of James Bond; you open a little eighteenth century door and behind it is the Adnams plan for world domination. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the production manager had a white Persian cat sitting on his desk…

Some breweries are still being demolished, which is a crying shame. Others, like the Anchor Brewery in Norwich and the old Trumans and Watneys breweries in the East End, are being refurbished for use as housing or commercial space. But there’s nothing quite like a real brewery being used for real brewing…

Geocaching – ‘letterboxing’ meets GPS

I always enjoyed orienteering – the mixed challenges of running over rugged terrain together with high speed mapreading and running a compass bearing.

And ever since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by ‘time capsules’ and buried treasure. I remember hiding a Horlicks jar in the garden once, filling it with a couple of old penny pieces and a tea-stained bit of paper masquerading as parchment with a treasure map of Ipswich.

Letterboxing on Dartmoor is a pursuit that goes back at least a century, as far as I know – it’s a sort of mixture of the two. You go off hiking among the peat bogs and granite tors, and aim to find one of the ‘letterboxes’, which has a stamp inside it – you stamp your card, or exercise book, to say you passed this way. I’ve no idea why there aren’t letterboxes in the Lake District or on the Yorkshire moors… but there aren’t. AFAIK.

Now I’ve just discovered geocaching, which is basically letterboxing plus technology. Youlook up a cache you want to find on the geocaching site, then you follow your own handheld GPS to find the cache – a hidden container with various goodies in it. The rules are; take anything out, it has to be replaced with another object of similar value. There are ‘event caches’ – parties or gigs you have to find via GPS; there are multi-stage caches, basically a sort of treasure hunt, where each cache contains a clue to the next. There are ‘earth caches’ – sites of geological significance.

While geocaching has taken off fastest in the US, there are geocaches all over… I’m going to enjoy looking for some in France. And come to think of it, what could be more fun on a holiday to another country than taking one day to do a bit of geocaching? It would give you an additional interest, show you some places you probably wouldn’t see otherwise, and maybe introduce you to local geocachers. What fun!