A WAR AGAINST UGLINESS John Papworth An Open Letter to the City Fathers of Swindon in Wiltshire
(May 22nd 2002)The plans you announce for the redevelopment of the Brunel Centre fill me with alarm. The Centre was a monstrous mistake in the first place and ought never to have been built. The Brunel Tower is an eyesore and is totally out of scale with the rest of Swindon's architecture, most of which is of modest terrace houses which are pleasing to the eye even despite the disfigurements of modern alterations, often embodying large shop-like windows replacing the smaller panes of the original design.
But the major error of Swindon's central development is the way one aspect of anyone's lifestyle, that of shopping, is being blown up as though it is for all of us our major concern. We are not just 'shoppers', we are citizens with a multitude of interests and concerns and the town layout and planning should reflect all those concerns in an integrated manner, as Swindon itself once did. We don't want a Swindon which is 'the shopping hub of the South West'. The town is already choked with vehicles, saturated with vehicle fumes and depersonalised to an ultimate degree with giant chain stores.
The grotesquely socially deformed development that has made Swindon one of the ugliest towns in Wiltshire, a county with a multitude of utterly exquisite urban centres, Devizes, Wootton Bassett, Tetbury, Malmesbury, to name but a few, is surely due in part to a lack of vision of the overall human needs such centres ought to serve.
Who can view the repulsive modern structures that serve as car parks, or the bleak block that serves as a railway station, with its grotesque subterranean tunnel which is all it can boast as an entrance, without a shudder of revulsion? A building that simply shoves two fingers at the superb standards of our Victorian forbears that still stand nearby. Or view the wanton architectural wilderness of Swindon College, or the bleak functional shapes that pass as the town's Post Office, or its hospital, or its police station, or heaven preserve us, some of its schools, without a lowering of the spirit? What has gone wrong with us? Why are our standards of civic taste so mean, so lacking in pride, vision or even ordinary seemliness?
I once visited a hospital in Northern Italy where the patients were able to enjoy the remarkable 14th Century murals on its ward walls. Six centuries of unbounded delight which also attracts visitors form all over the world. Who would visit Princess Margaret Hospital except to cure a toothache? Architecturally the place is a toothache, and we may react similarly to our local schools. What ought to be splendid marble palaces in which our children would absorb an awareness of the glory of life and the splendour of life's creative possibilities, have all the grim, utilitarian ethos of abandoned detention centres for delinquent dropouts.
Why do we suffer this decadent depravity of our social institutions? Why do we tolerate it? For if we tolerate ugliness does it not suggest there is something ugly in ourselves? That perceptions of art, culture, refinement, social grace, dignity and pride, which reverberated in the lives of our forbears centuries ago, are now dead and moribund? Architecture seems to embody the guts of any civilisation, and ours seems to suggest it has merely taken us three thousand years to progress from a pyramid to a box.
And the modern uglification of Swindon goes hand in hand with a wanton disregard of our own heritage. Splendid, utterly superb Victorian buildings which grace the town with a promise of glory, such as The Mechanics Institute or the old Steam Railway Museum, are allowed to stand empty for decades whilst vandalism runs riot. The town once boasted a canal! Shades of Venice! Where was the vision and the imagination to rescue it and make it a part of a backdrop of civic splendour, with lovely canal-side walks, the pleasures of boating and angling, special parties on special boats and God wot. Instead, a combination of civic dispiritlessness, cash book economics and a paucity of joy, decided, wait for it, to bury it!
And sooner or later some blinkered owl will ask, "Where is the money to come from?" Perhaps it might be made available by ceasing to build motorways and thermonuclear bombs, and to stop giving so much of it to that corrupt, useless EUroplot. In any case, as an economics graduate I have a profound distrust of a subject which lays it down as a basic premise that the factors of production are 'land, labour and capital'. 'Labour' of course is us, human beings, made in the image of God and with immortal souls. Far from being a 'factor of production' we are the object of it!
In any case I am old enough to remember how there were millions on the dole in the thirties of the last century, and if anyone wanted to alleviate their plight the answer was always the same ungrammatical mantra, 'But where is the money to come from?' But come the war the money was found to build battleships, guns, tanks and aeroplanes galore - and millions were back in work.
Perhaps today we need a war on ugliness. Let us demolish that hateful Brunel Centre, which in the evening is deservedly dead, and recover our canal. Let us set out to make Swindon not some giant shopping mall but a joyous exercise in creating a town that is beautiful, a worthy expression of our civic pride and imbued with the vision splendid. And if we need a Swindon Lottery to fund it, for heaven's sake let us get on with it.
The trouble with the bleak dreary functionalism that dominates modern Swindon is that it is crippled by market conceptions instead of human needs. It means that money comes first and human focus nowhere. And don't people know it! Especially the young; they are aware they are expected to slot in with all this commercialised fragmentation and uglification of their lives at the expense of their human dignity and identity. And all this evil is buttressed by the non-stop consumerist propaganda of TV and the tabloids, and of course the result is they feel demeaned, outraged and fundamentally dishonoured. So when they put the boot in, metaphorically or otherwise, they are simply repaying those responsible, if the latter could but perceive it, in their own coin. They are aware, however little they may be able to articulate their awareness, that they have been degraded by modern Swindon and its emphasis on ugliness and giant, greedy commercial interests.
This is why we see a rising generation utterly contemptuous of every kind of authority, civic, educational, religious, legal or political as youngsters seek to alleviate their largely unconscious inner distress with drugs, casual sex and the boundless hedonism of constant self-regard with which the media unceasingly seeks to corrupt them to adopt. How do we respond? For life is all of a piece and to distort our shopping needs in this inane and socially disastrous manner is to vandalise the entire social structure. Do we simply sit back until some maverick extremist leader captures their allegiance?
Sowadowedo? Let us scrap these absurd commercial-orientated development plans, which can only dehumanise Swindon further by repeating and enlarging all the dreadful errors of the last five or six decades. The Swindon Councillors promoting this appalling project should be ashamed of themselves. Let us invite leading architects, artists and creative workers for commissions to beautify Swindon from one end of the town to the other. Tell the railway, hospital, educational, police, Post Office and other uglifiers that we are going to make Swindon a human centre of human life and lavish on it all the creative power of human inspiration we can achieve and that they and their dreadful buildings must be ground to dust as they toe the line of human concern. If we have the vision and the determination we can accomplish anything. Without them we can accomplish nothing. 'Without vision a people perish'!
However much money this project may make for the hard-nosed brigade it will multiply the social problems already rampant, and no amount of money thrown at the police, our schools, doctors or social workers to grapple with the consequences will have any but the most marginal effects. So let us have a plan for Swindon to enhance the lives of all its people and for future generations, not multi-million pound bits and pieces of concrete to satisfy a current bout of coldblooded commercial greed, or the latest spasm of some blinkered, bureaucratic death wish.
copies of this document may be obtained from 26 The High Street, Purton, Wiltshire SN5 4AE, UK
Tel: 01793 77 22 14 Fax: 01793 77 25 21
e-mail: john.papworth@btinternet.com