Westfield Develpments: Proposal for a White City by The Windowless Consultant

The first pre-echoes come in the Underground, my first visit to the station in years. Not only the posters, presumably mostly shared across the network, the sudden deafening lurches of massive speed, but also the carefully tiled stripes, systems of convex mirrors, alignments of walls and voids appear almost deliberately to stage an effect that, having as yet not ventured out, I could only call strange, not yet able to identify it as something tending to undermine senses of difference, distance, stillness and motion, original and image, penetrable or not, surface and depth.

TfL, as is well known, are chary of mechanical reproduction, and, though I had the SLR, I preferred not to use it, afraid the sound of the mechanism, the whir as the system of mirrors chops away from the sensor and back, would bring unwanted attention. The compact, on the other hand, though quieter, and involving a slighter gesture - an appearance, indeed, often more of fiddling than shooting - I discovered in the Underground has other issues, a snowstorm of hexagonal orbs entering any image shot into light over darkness. Blowing to remove dust from the lens, though, found it unmovable, all on the inside, and, worse, moisture from the puffing got in there, too, a thick fog joining the flakes of flare.

It was Ruby, of the Goldhawk Road station café, who’d first made the connection: that a better class of customer could be persuaded in to Westfield from a catchment west as far as Heathrow, east all the way to the sea, suggested to her that more must be made of Goldhawk. Vast engine of gentrification, taking over not only the remaining imperial exhibition White City buildings, but also one of the last of the Inner London goodsyards to have been made over, these spaces around rails – King’s Cross, Paddington Basin, Broadgate one of the first – freed up by the smoother times of IT from goods, Westfield in scale alone a planner’s dream, where the atmosphere, meaning of a vast surrounding area could be transformed in repercussions at a blow. If the council now have eyes on Goldhawk, this is why, and, to sound the depth of the changes – changes echoing across the city, too, gravitational fields realigned - would require a visit.

My 2004 A-Z wall map marks the area in the same cartographic white that drew Conrad’s protagonist, and perhaps before him the man himself, into the dangerous Hell the Europeans were earlier making of the Congo. ‘Site of proposed White City development’ is all it will divulge, adding to the allure with an anomaly: that here in the future could lie the origin of the name.

Because certainly the source is up for grabs when it’s a question no one trustworthy will claim to resolve. Most agree that it appears to have emerged at the time of a 1908 exhibition of imperial flavour, but beyond that will only say that it may have referred to the white stuccoed acres of buildings in the Indian style, negative imports of Lutyens’ export London in Delhi. Having drifted around to the North and West under the gravity of the entertainment industry, the BBC studios and QPR/Fulham grounds, the flavour of the name has now become something of a phantom past or abandoned future, imperial castle perhaps of the air, vast mnemonic blank, calcined battlefront, necropolis or utopia, take your pick.

Above ground, where meteorological indecision veered between rain, grey, and sun to confirm the ambiguities below, shots were equally hard to take. I had of course visited the place many times after a buy, for specific business commissions what with the vast number of windows, or in the general way of research, though the retail world, despite the storm of reviews, is less shaken up by the arrival of something like this in its midst than are the wider behaviour patterns of the city, however much the latter prove less noticed or discussed.

But today I wasn’t there in the way of that sort of research, and, those bearings gone, found myself frequently at a loss for subjects, lacking the pretexts either of work or shopping loosing concentration, drifting for long periods without aim until suddenly a subject appearing to suggest itself shooting something quite other – grasping at what I thought was a shopper and coming out with a reflection, catching a photograph where I’d intended a passerby, fumbling exposure in the vast gulfs staged in the place between light and dark, focus between solid and void, depth of field in a place with multiple layers all surface.

Pushing on into the jungle of crystal and glass, I began to doubt whether the proposed White City development ever happened, the name dropped, after all, for a reason. Although Westfield is certainly in the West as far as the city’s concerned, lying over brownfield land on the junction of the Westway and the West Cross Route, it was in the West of Sydney that the chain the name was formed for drove its first stake into the ground, taking over the field of a farm before mushrooming to include an international portfolio of proprietarily named malls our local’s only a page from. It would of course explain the trouble focusing, the sense of disorientation, repetition of one thing in another, dissolution of scale should Westfield, the concept, turn out more one of activity than place, a sudden change befalling an environment, a removal from context, a gravitational force and set of realignments in which for the visitor to participate must entail the same disorientation I’d been struggling against for shots.

If in Westfield Conrad’s Company comes home, it would be of its Kurtz I should doubtless go in search.

Any attempt at portrait work is of course hard here, few ready to risk being caught by a manager off job, and those who are, not for long – snaps must be quick, slipped in with a sudden chat which itself will illuminate no more than a chance fact from a vast terrain.

Ollie, from Israel, has noticed there a large number of his compatriots, and puts it down to aggression, related to conscription perhaps, a willingness to plunge endlessly into the pressed passage of custom with a smile and a product, an offer to shine the most recalcitrant nails in proof, again and again, undaunted.

Caroline, from Sweden, mobile masseuse, loves the work, a craft, not being in an office all day, meeting people, grabbing a passer by, a laying on of hands alone relieving them of their internalised burdens of the day, leaving them lighter, suppler, happier.

Daniel, from Spain, found the job on Gumtree, has always worked in the food industry, and was happy to find work in what turns out to be one of the few – perhaps only – stores here independent of a chain. Tapas here’s different of course, without the sociality at home, but the quality’s good, the opportunity.

Of those I meet who agree to a photo, Linda comes from the nearest, in from Chiswick to work the Venture photography stall, selling trips to the Knightsbridge studios with the family, the loved one, for the most important story you ever told, bespoke. What she enjoys is the independence, the place, she suggests, a little town, a world in itself. In this little prism, all the world caught up in an image, perhaps, glittering, to measure, of its requirements and aspirations.

It’s Linda, also, who has about her, perhaps, something most resistant to the tendency of the place to seek to draw them into the disorienting terms, polished, of its own surfaces. However, as I attempt to photograph, I am, of course, at my most self-conscious before this confident mover in a world that finds me a baffled explorer. She seems slightly amused by how dark my result is. Flash is out of the question for the security guards, I explain: as I’ve learned from investigations elsewhere, there’s something about this type of space that resists photographers, must monopolise the production of image, reproduction, surface.

Personally, I’m attached to the way her presence retreats from the wider glare. It’s fine, she concedes, and, going innocently for the kill, as a snapshot, just what you want for a blog. Along with the dark it’s the scale, apparently – a portrait should have more focus, my desire to contextualise by the by.

Too late to remedy this here with this subject, the lesson, though, was learned: if Westfield was itself less a place than an upheaval that befalls one, a search for context, solidity or the fixed – the search for Westfield, in fact, at all – would be distracting from an ability to shoot.

The Sacraments, Mercy, and the Last Days of Fitzrovia by the Windowless Consultant

After the previous post, the comparison with the Prado, I needed to revisit the National Gallery, see the paintings I knew in the new light, discover others never noticed.

The Prado has a small selection of Poussins, but it's nothing like, as I recalled, that in the National, and I made my way to the room dedicated almost exclusively to the Seven Sacraments with great pleasure. I hadn't seen these for a while - not since before a recent trip to Edinburgh, where I'd spent time with the earlier and rather different version they have. I would now be able to make the comparison I'd been meaning to ever since. Interestingly, although I'd always considered them one of the most powerful groups in their profound mystery, there had never been postcards available in the shop, and in the Taschen Poussin in the gallery shop, they are not reproduced, being, we're told, inferior to the Edinburgh set. This inferiority had by no means been my impression. The National Gallery series, I recalled, made in some, for instance, a much more abstract use of framing triangles, circles and squares to freeze the actions of the paintings into that strange, almost magical intensity of relations among parts that distinguishes Poussin's works, where, for instance, in a device he often makes use of, the simple fact of a figure's being partially cut off from view on movement by an intervening upright - a person walks behind a pillar or through a doorway - seems to imply motion, not out of our sight, only, but between dimensions, out of ours; not passing out of visibility only, but into something else.

My search seemed, though, to be cut off by a re-hang, the Poussins nowhere to be found, and staff I asked were unable to help.

It was on my way to the downstairs computers to locate the paintings that I chanced on a little temporary exhibition being held there at the moment - Edward Cayley Robinson's Middlesex Hospital group Acts of Mercy and recalled that this was something I had been meaning to see.

The Middlesex Hospital is a place I'd occasionally considered a post about, and its effect on Mortimer - or, in its prolongation to the East - Goodge Street. I thought it would be interesting, if depressing, to record the effect of its redevelopment by the Candy brothers into NoHo Square, the name, with its functionless central capital serving as a plastic portico, seeking to align the area off with New York by the magic of branding alone, revealing the attempt to send what is a little island of Fitzrovian independence the way that Marylebone High Street so recently went - tarted up out of dowdy neglect and into the exclusive plaything of the international elite who can afford the sort of housing developed by, well, Candy and Candy for the likes, at Chelsea, of the court of Qatar.

The only thing that had been stopping me had been that the story had already begun, the buildings knocked down before I even knew about it, so the post, beginning in medias res, would be without the necessary visual record. I had never once noticed, I have to admit, passing on innumerable occasions in the past, what the hospital looked like beyond its being red brick with greying stone details. Here, then, at the National, would be an opportunity to redress this.

Robinson's series was a double record of the Middlesex, since not only do they depict scenes of the hospital itself, both inside and out, but also, having been painted for the hospital to be displayed in situ, they are in fact a little piece of it itself, removed from the entrance lobby, for the first time since their installation in 1930, only on demolition.

Robinson was clearly something of a Symbolist, the realism in his paintings set off by a strangely timeless poise giving his figures hints of that mystery that haunts the viewer in Poussin. The canvases are of very large scale, bringing the refectory, the courtyard spaces, with classical foreground porticos framed by Bloomsbury terraces back- from Mortimer Street into the National Gallery's Sunley Room and shrugging off the lack of substance, the hospital twice demolished (the Robinsons are of a previous, reputedly more elegant incarnation), with an ethereal lightness. The viewers in the gallery space entering the friezes of orphans, patients, nurses, families and doctors they contemplated would be a perfect photographic document, I realised, of the hospital that was. In the etherealisation of the transformation to a symbolist framework, the physical sustenance of the orphans became the spiritual of the gallery visitor, coming together with the paintings, given a temporary home, to recreate the hospital in the imagination before its destruction in reality. I left excited that perhaps I'd be able to pursue the Mortimer Street project after all, using shots of the series in this new situ standing for the old, the Sunley room a street saved, briefly, from, if not total destruction, damage beyond recognition.

If that seems naïve - if I should, perhaps, have realised that, since the paintings belonged not to the gallery, but to the Welcome Trust, they wouldn't have even the right to give me that permission - so, perhaps, should my blind confidence that I would again be viewing the Poussin as so often before.

The paintings, like so many others in what we call the permanent collections of what we call our public galleries, I thought of much as I thought of what we call our public spaces - part of our shared landscape, something that would always be there, unproblematically, to visit, whenever I'd need whatever that sustenance is that paintings bring. In fact, it transpired, they were a loan, dependent on the continuing largesse of the Duke of Rutland, an informed and enlightened guard at last informed me, a largesse which the continuing health of the art market has recently been putting such under excessive strain that the man has decided to explore other ways of enjoying his family's rights to privilege.

If the art market's managing to keep it up, the property isn't, and the Middlesex land has dropped sufficiently in value to spare Mortimer Street at least a little more time to itself, albeit diminished, gaping in its middle at the site once given over to charitable causes. This post, then, if it can't reproduce what the street once was, can at least seek to show what it soon no longer will be.