BEAUTY BEATEN BY THE BEAST

I worry about my brain sometimes. It seems capable of dredging up apparently random memories in apparently incoherent combinations. Yesterday Evel Knievel’s ill-fated attempt to jump thirteen double-decker buses at Wembley in 1975, and my first visit to the South East London estate of Thamesmead popped into my mind. At first I couldn’t decipher the connection. Then it emerged, the recollection of a sense of dread and excitement, of horror and euphoria. The catalyst? The sight of two extreme examples of architectural folly.

Visiting Thamesmead in 76 and seeing Knievel jump were defining moments. Up until this points my childish hunger for the escapist thrills of the unknown had contented itself with films and comics, however Knievel and Thamesmead were the real thing. Thamesmead was an urban landscape so compellingly alien that it seemed like the entire enterprise had been orchestrated with the film industry in mind. And of course in 1972, Stanley Kubrick spotted the potential when he made "A Clockwork Orange" there. Meanwhile Knievel’s ill-fated jump at Wembley was a moment of such sublime stupidity it thrilled my soul. His makeshift, crudely constructed, highly improbable ramp, which crawled its way up the banks of terrace at Wembley, remains to this day, my favourite piece of architectural nonsense. In a world of fools Knievel took stupidity to new heights and then royally landed on his rear.

Thamesmead was built in 1965, at great expense, and regarded in its time as the standout example of the new town. Designed to house 60,000 it was the ultimate planned’ idealization of how social life could be organized. Built on reclaimed marshland, next to the largest and oldest sewage plant in London, the sub soil permutation of seeping sewage and water led to the planners building the concrete towers around and on top of a network of lakes and canals. Enormous grey rectangular box flats sat upon what seemed to me as a child, improbably spindly sticks of concrete planted in the lakebeds. At school it was jokingly referred to as concrete Venice. As a child I fantasized that perhaps Knievel could orchestrate a jump there. Thamesmead appeared to possess a natural sympathy with Evels amateur spectacular. They both reveled in an embrace of incongruity; the space between the dream and the reality. In Thamesmead herons, swans and fish populated the dirty dark waters of the lakes and canals, alongside the burnt out cars, fridge’s and shopping trolleys. A boater would glide past on the lake just as a fridge was thrown out of a window into the water. In the summer the stench from the sewage processing center was so strong the council had to install twenty giant perfume dispensers to mask the pungent odour. This was the Thamesmead experience, the often alarmingly close butting up of beauty and brutality.

Although the planners patently got it badly wrong, and Knievel was a supreme moron, there was something remarkable about their joint, resolute optimism in the face of overwhelming odds of failure. Both Knievel and the Thamesmead planners failed by virtue of their excess of ambition and confidence. Today town planners and entertainers fail because of their modesty. I’d rather have my heroes dumb but ambitious and my housing excessive, not polite – whatever the consequences.

John Beagles 2002