Nurse! The Screens!
The photograph above is the delightful PFI castle that is Darent Valley Hospital, mentioned on here passim, where yesterday I was given a restitching and some other things. Amongst its many townscape-enhancing features is a strip window which looks out on some scrubland, a random lump of concrete* which may once have been a pillbox - this is a hilltop site, not far from the Thames - and near to that, in full view of goings-on inside, an equally random scattering of volume-housebuilder Noddyhomes. A bed laid alongside the strip window can provide an interesting view of invasive medical procedures, although the nurses need to have this pointed out to them.
Anyway, due to aforementioned I will be somewhat befuddled but nonetheless present at Pages of Hackney bookshop tomorrow, Wednesday the 17th from 7pm, where I will be reading - without pictures, so you'll have to draw your own - from the forthcoming Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. There will also be a post soonish on Dublin, continuing the general decline of this blog into annotated photographic documentations of where I've been.
* a phrase which will only ever be used on this blog in reference to a real, actual lump of concrete, rather than in derisive terms about buildings made of concrete.
posted by owen hatherley at 10:34 pm
7 Comments:
Sadly away and thus not able to hear you talk at Pages. Hope it all goes well though.
Found last line of your second para painfully familiar!
Owen, you should get the New Statesman to send you to Connecticut, so you can review the latest in British architecture - the new Royal Scottish bank building!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/business/18rbs.html?ref=business
'With an outdoor terrace, a gym where workers can purchase massages and one of the largest trading floors in the world, the 11-story building would probably stir the ire of British taxpayers already reeling from a government bailout of more than $71 billion at today’s exchange rate. But perhaps luckily for the workers here, those taxpayers are an ocean away.'
We in the States do appreciate Nu Labour's sacrifice of the non-essentials - education, f'rinstance - so that the hottest traders can not only make the clever securities swaps, but get the massages they deserve afterwards.
Wonderful article, very well explained.
Get well soon Owen - you are very brave, even poetically stoic, and at times, appropriately sarcastic! NB - do you loathe spammers like the above as much as I do?
In short I do, yes! Well done on yr blog award, btw.
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