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Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
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The asphalt of London is but a gateway. Under the streets lie a chaotic warren: from the familiar rumble of the Tube, to sewers, power lines and gas lines. Somewhere within this is nestled more anomalous creations: disused Post Office transit systems, long-buried underground rivers, the 'Pindar' military citadel and the mysterious top-secret 'Q-Whitehall' complex that reportedly begins under Trafalgar Square, spans Whitehall and ends at King Charles Street.
Knowing all this is going on underfoot makes London feel more magical, and that's on top of the 2,000 years of random stuff that we don't even know is there! For example, just a couple of years ago Crossrail excavations turned up a plague pit down the road from my house.
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| The shelter in its heyday, 1944 |
And last Sunday, courtesy of a birthday surprise from my very lovely girlfriend, I got a taste of of subterranean London history. The marvellous Hidden London, run by the London Transport Museum has been hosting tours of places the public doesn't usually get to go. Way back in 2012 I went down into the disused Aldwych Tube Station, but now they've expanded to run tours of Down Street Tube Station, the 'lost tunnels' of Euston, London's first skyscraper at 55 Broadway and the Clapham South Deep Level Shelter.
Entry is by an fat pillbox now unobtrusively subsumed into a modern apartment building. Within it lie 180 stairs, spiralling down into a wonder of 1940s engineering and a frozen slice of Blitz era London.
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| Areas named for British Naval officers |
From a contemporary vantage point it's difficult to imagine life during the worst months of the Blitz. Just how are you supposed to fall asleep when you know high-explosive bombs are raining down over the city? You might wake up with most of your neighbourhood destroyed, friends and family blown to bits. Hell, you might not wake up at all. The whole city must have been sleep-deprived and pretty goddamn miserable.
Faced with that, and against the wishes of the government, many sought sanctuary in the Tube. It might not be particularly comfy bedding down on a platform, but at least you'll survive. Except you might not. In October 1940 a 1400lb bomb slammed into Balham High Road, penetrating the street surface and exploding underground. Many of those sheltering in Balham Tube station were killed instantly by falling debris. They were the lucky ones. A broken water mains then flooded the station, meaning who survived the debris were drowned in pitch darkness "like rats in a cage".
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| The northbound platform at Balham, October 1940 |
Furious protests followed, with demands for deep-level shelters be constructed immediately to prevent disasters like this happening again. The government listened, reversedits policy overnight and ordered the construction of accommodation for 100,000 people in ten shelters: five in north London, five in the south. During construction two shelters were abandoned, one at St Pauls for fear of damaging the cathedral and the other at Oval due to poor ground conditions. The remaining eight opened in 1942, though weren't pressed into full service until the advent of the 'doodlebug' in 1944.
Most have now been sold to private companies, used as archival storage, homes for telecoms equipment or, more recently, hydroponic gardens. Yet the Clapham South shelter, left under the auspices of TfL, remains largely intact, allowing for what feels like a trip back in time.
Essentially the shelter is two long underground tunnels, bisected horizontally to create an upper and lower floor.Triple-tiered bunk beds stretch off into infinity, the guests jammed in with each other like sardines, not exactly the Savoy. It must have been a hell of a weird place to fall asleep, the air filled with a fug of sweat, cigarette smoke and farts, soundtracked by the clickety-clack of passing trains and the muffled thump of bombs far aboveground.
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| A blocked off exit to Clapham South station. |
Then again, if the choice is between that and getting blown to smithereens, then I'll take the tunnel. Things weren't all austerity down here, there was a canteen that was 'off-rationing', allowing for as many meat pies and jam tarts as you could afford. Similarly (and deeply emblematic of how living conditions improved in the postwar period) there were chemical toilets which might have been somewhat of a luxury for those forced to trek to an outhouse at night.
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| A not particularly comfy looking bed. |
Aside from actually sheltering the community, the shelters also functioned as an effective piece of propaganda. Newsreel was shot showcasing their security and safety; a way to reassure Londoners that they have a safe haven and also to stick two fingers up at the Nazis to show that they can't be beaten no matter what hi-ex horrors they toss over the channel.
But the story of the shelter doesn't conclude with Hitler blowing his brains all over a bunker wall. For about a decade afterwards it was used as temporary accommodation; postwar refugees travelling through London; visitors to the 1951's Festival of Britain; and, most fascinatingly, to house those who arrived on HMS Windrush in order to assist with the reconstruction of bombed out Britain. Eventually, after a damaging fire in the Goodge Street shelter, Clapham was mothballed in the 60s and largely remains so to this day.
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| Windrush passengers spending their first few nights deep under London. |
It isn't hard at all to imagine past visitors' reactions to seeing this weird, wonderful and obscure corner of London. The place feels as if it's essentially the same as when war-tired Londoners trooped down to escape the Luftwaffe. I found myself wishing I could spend a night down here, tasting the creosote and plaster tang in the air, and rocked gently to sleep by the rumble of the Northern line meters away.
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| Graffiti by bored Belgians. |
Though places are limited on the Hidden London tours, word is the shelter may be opened to the public in the next few years as a Blitz museum. So watch this space. In the meantime, if you're spending a quiet summer's day dozing on Clapham Common be sure imagine the thousands of people who once huddled in safety deep below your head. Who knows, the way things are going we might be thankful that these bomb shelters remain in working order...
Hidden London tour details here.
Friday, January 29, 2016
Friday, January 29, 2016
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When I first arrived in London, sparkly eyed, bushy tailed and fresh faced, I thought of the the tube was impossibly romantic. The very names of stations were pregnant with possibility; after all who knew what wonders took place like at mysteriously named places like Seven Sisters, Temple or Elephant and Castle?
On top of that is the pleasant, reassuring clunkiness of the thing; all snapping doors, robo-voiced announcements and that whoosh of ozone-tinged air as a train rushes out from the inky blackness beyond the platform.
A week of commuting on the Circle Line soon got rid of that sense of wonder; it's difficult summon that sense of metropolitan grandeur when you're desperately trying to maneuver your face out of a sweaty banker's armpit.
Isla van Tricht's Underground sets out to restore that mystery, exploring the tubeas a place hermetically sealed away from the outside world, where human relationships twist and warp, time stretches and the world becomes just a little softer.
Set in a faraway future where TFL have resolved their dispute with the drivers and the night tube is up and running, the play is set somewhere on the Northern Line near Kennington, where Claire (Bebe Sanders) and James (Michael Jinks) are returning from a reasonably successful online date.
Then the train judders to a halt. Minutes pass with no explanation, until an apologetic announcement that the train has broken down and maintenance staff are being dispatched. Claire and James are stuck underground, their only company each other and an obliviously snoozing fellow passenger (Adrian Wheeler). As minutes turn into hours, the two conversationally dance around one another, mutual attraction blooming. But the longer they stay here, the more surreal the tannoy announcements get. Just how long will they be trapped?
Modest, modern and perceptive, van Tricht displays a firm grasp of both contemporary relationships and the Greater London public transport network. As the play unfolds, the two pleasingly dovetail together. Underground's dating world is one of Tindr and Happn, each indispensible to the urban dater. Spotting someone you like the look of in a bar and striking up a conversation is a bit passe these days - far better to coolly sit in judgment behind your smartphone and swipe left and right.
Similarly, the tube network treats human beings as bytes to be efficiently shuffled down a series of pipes to their destinations. Once you press your Oyster card through the barrier, you become a blip on TFL's system, tracked around the network. The two systems share a preoccupation with cleanly digitally processing analogue humanity. So, by trapping a couple together in this system, Underground gently critiques the sleek ease of modern dating by creating a situation in which no-one can casually swipe someone into the abyss.
While this all rumbles away in the background, the foreground is taken up with a very well-written romance. From moment one, Wheeler and Sanders demonstrate an enviable romantic chemistry. Wheeler accentuates awkwardness and fake bravado, unsure of how much of himself to reveal, while Sanders hides behind a sarcastic and spikiness. Both characters are eminently likeable and believable - whether they're casually smoking outside a crowded bar or ravenously ripping each other's clothes off in an erotic muddle.
Frankly it's straightforwardly nice to see an on-stage romance that works. Mutual attraction is a difficult thing to convey in performance and writing without the billowing whiff of cheese, so full credit to all involved.
Matters are helped by the smart decision to exploit the atmosphere in the Leake Street tunnels. We're ensconced underneath Waterloo station and the ceiling is periodically shaken by the doomy knocking of trains overhead. I've seen a lot of shows here and this can be distracting, but in Underground it creates a distinctly subterranean London Underground vibe that'd be hard to create anywhere else.
The only place things come a little unstuck are the more surreal segues. Sleep-deprived and disorientated, the tannoy announcements descend into a mix of free-wheeling poetry and snatches of overheard conversations. The sleeping man in the corner of the train proves to be an agitator of the fourth wall, adding a weird metafictional element to proceedings. I don't think Underground needs these distractions, at any rate, neither I nor my plus one could work out what they were trying to communicate.
At just an hour long, Underground is an eminently breezy experience, speckled with beautifully observed and played fragments of human interaction. It's got obvious heart, brains to back it up and captures that elusive, easily forgotten thrill of romance underground.
Swipe right.
★★★★
Underground is at Vault Festival:
Performances: 27th - 31st January 2016
Wednesday - Sunday, 18.00, + Saturday matinee, 14.30
Tickets: £12
For full programme and ticket information, visit vaultfestival.com
Friday, October 3, 2014
Friday, October 3, 2014
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There's a pleasing harmony in venturing down a great big hole to view works by female artists – especially when you discover a gigantic sugary clit nestled within. Brunel's shaft, a hop, skip and jump from Rotherhithe overground station, throbs with a weirdly compelling electricity, as if you're uncovering secrets just by being there. Clambering down on hands and knees through a claustrophobic doorway, you emerge at the top of a neon-lit scaffolding staircase. Below you lies a perfect circle of stained brick and rough concrete, the walls bisected by 150 year old pipes that rise like veins to the ceiling, swollen with rust and blackened by time. As you gingerly make your way down to the floor level you feel the gentle vibration and *whoosh* of the Overground passing just below you.
All things considered it's a neat place to be – frankly I'd be having a good time down here even if there wasn't art about. But there is, and fortunately the artists exhibiting, Charlotte Wendy Law, Susan Beattie and Kristina Pulejkova, fit the space like a glove. All three are exhibiting work caught in moments of a transition, objects that look as if they've been startled during the process of their creation, frozen like a deer in the headlights.
Susan Beatties' Baba wants what Baba dreams sculptures rise from piles of soil on the floor, blossoming into life as if she's more gardener than artist. The roughly person-size sculptures combine biological material (fur, intestines and a familiar looking piece of cow gut) with compacted earth pressed onto wooden sculptures. These rough-hewn shapes remind me of neolithic sacrificial sculptures; I can imagine ancient artist coaxing objects like this into existence and tossing them underground to appease some kind of bog god.
The most eye-catching is a 5 foot tall vulva with lips rendered in hundreds and thousands and pink icing. There's a pleasingly frank sexuality at play, genitals divorced from prudish morality and presented as objects of delicious veneration. That they look as if they've spontaneously sprouted from the concrete floor only underlines the effect, like the very earth under our feet has thrown them up from our collective subconscious.
More artificial, yet no less organic are Charlotte Wendy Law's Experiments in E. These sculptures are chaotic tangles of detritus. Bits of burnt piano, distorted balloons and random trash collide to create weird, purposeless objects. It's as if a particularly artistically minded hurricane has swept through a junkyard, mashing stuff together in a kaleidoscopic tangle.
I had a chat to Charlotte at the beginning of the exhibition, who explained that the pieces were influenced by the early Victorian psychic Helene Smith, who had become a minor celebrity on the back of claiming to be from Mars. To back up her claim she spoke Martian as a party act (unfortunately no recordings survive). Slightly puzzled, I went back to the works and tried my best to frame them with this in mind.
What I came up with was that just as Helen Smith had invented her own grammar and syntax, so Charlotte has created a grammar and syntax of objects. These kludged together sculptures, reminiscent of s possess a weird cargo-cult logic, suffused with directionless purpose. Every little junky fragment appears to be in the 'right place', yet there is no 'right place'.
To close off the evening Charlotte gave us a demonstration of her creative process. To an avant-garde musical accompaniment by sound artist Artur Vidal she showed us creation and destruction. Throughout the night a space blanket has been lying in the centre of the room like some gigantic metal grub. Wearing a crimson boiler suit Charlotte peels it open to reveal a tangle of junk. She picks up burnt, smashed up bits of wood, planks with nails jutting out of them and a broken balloons and begins to assemble them into a sculpture. Though she's freewheelin', there's a sense of purposefulness, like she's putting together a jigsaw.
After about twenty minutes her creation towers above her, a teetering, ramshackle, nail-studded sort of thing that looks like a health and safety nightmare. A tension builds in the crowd as it wobbles with each additional piece like a particularly modish game of Buckaroo. Then, with a creak, a bit falls off, bashing the rest on the way down. The structure is suddenly imbalanced and collapses into a mashed up tangle of planks and nails – from objet d'art to yesterdays trash in about 3 seconds flat.
There's a punky sort of satire in this performance. We've spent the evening admiring Charlotte's sculptures, enjoying their complexity and trying to work out what they're trying to communicate. But here, like Helene Smiths's meaningless Martian gobbledegook the grammar behind it is revealed as pure nonsense, a blizzard of phonemes that functions at as a simulacrum of language.
Also on display was Kristina Pulejkova's O, a short, looped film projected high onto the curved wall of the shaft. This continuec the communication theme, the footage showing us mouths apparently moving in morse code, saying “hello”. Once more the art appears to emerge from deep within the earth, the projectioned image appearing as a ghostly apparition on top of the old bricks.
To the side of the scaffolding was an artist's impression of the shaft at the height of its popularity. In its day it was quite the tourist attraction; curious and elegantly dressed Victorians driven here to experience the novelty of being underneath the River Thames. This novelty was not to last and soon the dank, gas-lit tunnels became famed for their population of prostitutes and low-lives rather than for Brunel's architectural ingenuity – so were walled off and confined to industrial use.
It's interesting to compare their present, semi-decrepit state to their opulent opening. You can still see the marks on the walls where Brunel's spiral staircase was attached and imagine excited people processing down into the depths. Exhibitions like Hello Ape Eyes keep these amazing places alive, a sort of time travelling game of whispers between the was and the now.
So I had a great time. Honestly, drag me to any mysterious hole in the ground and I'm yours. All hail subterranea!
Hello Ape Eyes is at the Brunel Tunnel Shaft, next to the Brunel Museum, SE16 4LF from the 3-5 October. 12-6pm.
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