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.

On the Beginning of the End of the End of Goldhawk Road by the Windowless Consultant

Of course a city must always evolve. I don’t mean, only, that not to is death, but rather, for a city, even decay is evolution, just as regeneration can be decay. Think, for the latter, of Westfield shopping centre, subject of a future post, for the former of Goldhawk Road.

In my incarnation as window consultant, I’ve come here often, after materials for commissions, drapes for backdrop. I’ve been doing so for as long as I remember, since some of my first ever jobs, doing my business and heading back off without, I suppose you could say, considering, noticing what it was as a place. It’s not an area you’d recognise as a thing in itself, just a patch of mostly scruffy houses with a low-end market behind, and it’s only a couple of notices pasted here and there, pretext for conversation, a job having fallen through, that had me considering further.

Ruby, of the Goldhawk Road station café, was one of the first to fill me in, happy at the prospect of the market becoming something, as she sees it, more like Borough, serving more quality foods, attracting people after something a little better, more natural, catering to the rising aspirations of the area. Presumably she hoped this business might open avenues for Ruby’s Café itself, allow her to nurture the first shoots already visible in the decorative scheme of olive oil bottles, the freshly squeezed juices, home-made soups of the day and quality herbal teas already insinuating themselves among the more traditional greasy spoon fare. While many are less enthusiastic than she, as to the present shabbiness of the space there is general unanimity, as there is, even among some stall holders, concerning the shoddiness of much on sale.

Something, it’s agreed, must be done, and the council, along with their plans to upgrade the market, find that the strip of houses adjacent along the northern end of Goldhawk Road are of poor quality, and are of frontage inappropriately humble for their scheme.

There is a class of areas whose claim to our affections lies in the melancholy allure with which they seek to be overlooked, to be passed in a hurry by those too busy to notice that the excitement they head for beyond may be surpassed here, less strident, intangible, more profound. And so it was that, discovering that it was to disappear, having visited so often, I at last became aware that this, here, was such an area, its quality, tagged for demolition, suddenly noticeable for having been overlooked.

Who could explain to the council that to knock down the authentic set of the key meeting of Quadrophenia, when Jimmy encounters Kevin, mod meets greaser, is a mistake, in the same way it is to dislodge Turker and Emete from their place at the helm of the last Zippy café, the first Zippy ever in London, perhaps anywhere outside of America? That people come from the States, where the franchise still abounds, to try the only Triple Shake left in the Old World can’t be expected to find its way onto the planning documents, or the pride of the textiles shops in that other local phenomenon, their accelerating proliferation. There were, it appears, a mere five or six years ago just four of these shops, but, with people beginning to cross London for them, another would open, then another and still others, attracting still more customers, until now people come from everywhere, they tell us, Arab royals in limos up to the inappropriately humble little pavement, people up from out of town going to marry, fashion students needing an edge in a new design.

More intriguing still than the facts themselves are their recorders, the shop traders and their quiet pride in their collective creation, or Mr Zippy, as Turker calls himself with a glint, as indefatigable in anecdote as he is in business, his only time for rest, he jokes, at red lights in the van.

Planning documents nowadays are, on the surface, exacting, must bear in mind the existing light quality, aspects of atmosphere, characteristic odours, too, at times. Here at the Bush they delve as far as into the etymology for clues as to character, though skirting over its murkier depths. Shepherd’s Bush, they tell us, refers to the open fields that once characterised the area, and their bucolic exploitation. That this folksier side is cast under doubt by the more scholarly, if superficially less picturesque suggestion that it may well have been a family that went by the occupational name, they fail to mention, missing thereby too a patronymic trail that, who knows? may lead to the notorious crook and prison breaker Jack, whose family, a thrilling legend could potentially be made to have it, once lived here.

It’s the aim of course of this collective blog to capture qualities about an area that pass unnoticed, that are notable, perhaps, for that reason alone, perhaps entice some of the subtler forces of the city out into the open, or furnish routes for a day-to-day with a keener or subtler awareness. It was speaking to the Goldhawk protagonists I began to realise that a study of this area might allow that, by seeking to grasp what the council fail to take account of, perhaps even must ignore – a thing, perhaps, whose existence is dependent on its being unable to be acknowledged by established procedures, a thing that can never quite be grasped.

And yet, even as I sought to record that intangible, I had constantly to suppress at the back of my mind a doubt that it was itself perhaps nothing but the shadow hanging over it, the atmosphere I saw there now not simply inseparable from but an actual product of the demolition order. Certainly I may never have seen the one without the other.