Oxford: A vile architectural abortion 01 December 06

Here’s an interesting thing. The little town where I live – Ulverston, in Cumbria – is almost completely intact. It has three chain shops, but the rest is as it should be: biweekly market, five tiny bakers, three fruit and veg shops, a butcher selling rare breed sausages, a fish man with the local catch, the best health food shop I know, eight little cafes and twenty pubs, and all in the space of four or five cobbled streets. I defy you to find a better custard slice in the world, and you can even get your organic jeans from the skate-punk shop. It a great place.

Apart from the fact that it’s an ancient market town well out of the way of anywhere and too far from the M6 to get many tourists, there are three good and rather awkward reasons for this:

The local council is incompetent at best and corrupt at worst, but it is not stupid and it knows that small traders are the bones of the town. The big-shed chains are frequently turned down when they apply to open on the edge of the town.

Booths is an excellent supermarket but it’s really very expensive so most people don’t go there.

GlaxoSmithKline have a chemical plant just outside town. I don’t know what they make there, but it looks pharmaceutical. They employ hundreds of people, so those people don’t have to drive to Barrow for work, and don’t do their shopping at Asda on their way home.

So maybe the cloning of Britain is yet another thing we can blame on the car. As well as people’s fondness for buying plastic shit in big sheds for the lowest possible price, of course. Me, I use ebay for that.

Your piece in today’s NS was very good Mark. Hereford and Oxford not the only places this is happening. Here in Enfield we have a huge new extension to the town centre “consumer experience facility”. Palace Exchange they call it! Quite why we need more shops completely escapes me. The only possible benefit is the new larger BOOK SHOP.

All that steel, all that concrete, all those those over-lit, over-heated shops with air conditioning selling all that stuff that we don’t really need and are likely to discard sooner rather than later. Bonkers! And the extra car traffic this will generate … !

A CO2 calculation on this unnecessary extravaganza would illustrate why this kind of development is an example of the unsustainable trajectory we are on.

2006 has seen some progress on AGW/CC but we still need a really dramatic breakthrough which galvanises us; citizens, business and government into really effective action.

Douglas Coker

Coming from across the atlantic to Britain after a few years abscence, I couldn’t help but notice the change. Traffic congestion way up, retail chain stores everywhere and the rise of the mega mall. I can be accused of being biased, but I didn’t like the changes. Your country is heading hell bent for a jounior America status. I mean, it is becoming an America clone. Sad to see so many small shops dead and gone. I looked in vain for many of my old shopping places. All gone, run out by chains. Bad as that may be, it was the rise of the automobile that disturbed me most! Really seeing the countryside savaged by road construction and massed traffic jams. Of course I see this here in America and also all over Europe. My grandparents home village in Sweden, once nestled in the pristine woods of Scandinavia, now has a mass motorway withing eye and earshot! The amount of woods and farmland leveled to make an interchange near the village was a real shock. Five Swedish farmers could have made a living off of the land devoted to quick entry and exit from the motorway. One feels doomed when one sees the progress , as some might call it!

My husband & I went to a academic conference in LA last month. I was excited about staying in the Sheraton, since I remember as a kid staying there with my family nearly 50 years ago. But it wasn’t the same hotel, and it seems nearly everything has been torn down and rebuilt (also the hotel where RFK was assassinated).

However, they’ve done a beautiful job with wonderful postmodern architecture, & there are lots of intriguing places in that glass&steel&artistic urban-space, and one feels tempted to wander & explore, as if in a forest. Some building complexes have beautiful fountains & ponds, layers & terraces. I was moved by the artistry put into it all, that seemed to go way above the call of the profit-motive.

Someone was playing a grand piano in a complex honey-comb food court, where we got unique & tasty omelettes (they also had McDonalds). My husband bought 3 long-sleeve dress shirts on sale at Macy’s for $12 each. The shops and stores are not expensive.

And they have a great subway system with trains every 10-15 minutes to all sorts of locations in LA, including Hollywood, etc. And it’s relatively cheap (I think $1.25).

Only problem is that except for us conference-goers the downtown was deserted, and the subways, underused. No pollution either!

Now I know a lot of people live in LA, but where were they?

Probably out in their cars driving around behind other cars’ exhaust fumes in the ugly suburbs, going from suburb to suburb, looking for parking places, so they could pay double for those dress shirts & omelettes.

AS a fellow Oxford resident I can’t help but feel the same way. The only good thing is that it won’t last. This from the poet Robinson Jeffers:

Summer Holiday

When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, Then nothing will remain of the iron age And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem Stuck in the world’s thought, splinters of glass In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain…

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Although poetry is not quite as effective if your comment facility doesn’t do line breaks…

Looks better here:

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