The Blackberry Walk

Let the Third Blogging Derby commence! Like last time, myself, Iklone and Ben will be competing in a test of endurance, posting one article every week until only one blogger remains. Best of luck to all participants. In recent times, I've been doing some travelling here and there around the country. And on those travels, I've had chance to visit two examples of what I would call 'Victorian Façades': the first was at a converted sixteen-person party house in Leicester, and the second was in Buxton. I'll start with the party house. We had two nights there, in this party house on the outskirts of Leicester, where much alcohol was imbibed; but in the moments when we were not inebriated, a few of us took great interest in the property. Arriving, the house was hidden from the road by a wall and bushes - you wouldn't know it was there should you not have been told - and clearly it was far older and far larger than its neighbours. You drive up the drive way, park; you walk up the path, then up the stone stairs lined with stone balustrades, and you're greeted by a red-brick Victorian mansion, far too large for any one person to live in today. It's really quite pretty. Inside, hosting nine bedrooms, the house at first was like a maze. We'd get lost one moment, then discover new rooms the next. But unfortunately despite the beauty of its exterior, the interior could be somewhat tacky. The outside, the architecture of the building, retained its Victorian charm, but the inside had been done up with easy to clean furniture and surfaces, new fire doors which slam, modern faux-marble kitchen counters, and clichéd motivational pictures adorning the walls. There was a kind of decay in the building too. Upon closer inspection, parts of the building, both inside and out, had started to break down and fall apart; like an AI-generated image, the harder you looked at any one spot the more decrepit and unkempt the property began to look. This assessment isn't ingratitude, please understand - we booked this mansion for us all to get smashed, after all - and it was still incredible we managed to nab a mansion in which to host our event. But a few of us, in our hungover assessment of the building, couldn't help imagining what this building must've been like in its heyday. The lord of the manor, over what wouldn't have been suburban Leicester and likely instead meadows, with his family and his maids. In its day, this house must've been beautiful, and in such a culture, having so many rooms under one roof would've made sense. The second building was a little different. The second hotel was the largest hotel in Buxton, the Palace Hotel. And in Buxton, the Palace Hotel can be seen from some vantage around. Once a Victorian spa town, Buxton has to this day an inordinate number of hotels. You wander the town centre, and with each corner you turn, another hotel appears in front of you; and these hotels weren't small either, these were expansive hotels, each no doubt with many beds. As a spa town, once, no doubt, the hotels were the attraction, since it was at these hotels you'd be.. spa-ing. I confess, I don't really understand what you do at a spa. Bathe? Steam? Massage? Something like that. Anyhow, you arrive at the Palace Hotel, find no where to park in their higgledy-piggledy car park, then after finding somewhere else to park and returning, you'll see a beautiful structure of Derbyshire sandstone stand imposingly over you. And unlike the Leicester mansion, the inside does not disappoint. It's like walking into a National Trust property. A high hall-like nave held up by Corinthian columns, winding staircases, real dark wood, and we paid only £90 for the night. Our room, however, didn't turn out to be some beautiful Victorian dark wood palace. We were instructed down a corridor, then a flight of stairs into the basement, into a pastel-painted Premier Inn-looking room. Plenty clean, mind. The next morning for breakfast, we went to the again beautiful dining area, but breakfast there was a bit Faulty Towers: there were no plates, so I asked one of the many waiters there for a plate, and was given a pasta bowl, since it was the only piece of porcelain left. For whatever reason, they didn't trust guests with tea either. Tea bags were available, but you had to ask specially to receive a cup. Granted, it was quite a pretty china cup, but what a rigmarole for a cup of tea! Our experience there was pleasant, again please don't misunderstand me - it was a perfectly good hotel which we managed to get last minute on the cheap - but that doesn't subdue the feeling we're living under the shade of the boughs of a grander era. That shadow is cast no more apparently than on the British high street. There, you will find any number of shop names chiselled into the stone from an older era. 'Home Ales', it reads above one shop on my own high street, for instance. Walk around Nottingham and you'll find any number of these shop names emblazoned on building from a more confident age. They must've felt, in chiselling these signs, the euphoria of the bull run, of the top, that their business would be around for ever like some kind of Egyptian Pyramid. To the disappointment of these Ozymandiases, this has of course not been the case. So many of these buildings are now home to one of Britain's new cadre of front businesses: the Turkish barbers, American Candy, and vape shops. In the husk of the old society lives and grows a new kind of world very much alien to the husk it inhabits. Like a young hermit crab finding his father's well worn shell. Architecture is the king of the arts. No form of art is seen by and experienced by so many people as architecture. A painting can be displayed in a gallery, but beyond its beauty it isn't used. Music can be played for a huge crowd at an open-air concert, but once a note is played, it will disappear into the black night. Architecture exists now, and for a ruddy long time after. We live in architecture, it's a participated art form. Not one simply experienced, but one used day in and day out, and witnessed, whether we like it or not, by anyone and everyone who passes it each day. Buildings in our culture are rarely knocked down to be replaced with new buildings. We Britons make not buildings of wood to be blown down by the big bad wolf, but buildings made of brick to withstand centuries. And walking around London, you will find centuries of architecture. You'll see Norman architecture, like the Tower of London, you'll see mediaeval cathedrals, sagging Tudor timbered wattle-and-daub beauties, the London of the English Renaissance in Wren's St Paul's, Georgian London down Whitehall, Victorian London in Westminster, post-War London at the Barbican, and modern London in Canary Wharf. Each era of London expresses a different world-feeling, a different intellectual mood and sense exuding from that time. And here, there's a through line, linking from Romanesque to Gothic, from Gothic to Baroque, to the Palladian, to the Victorian, to the Brutalist to the glass-and-steel structures of today: that through-line being infinite space. Spengler in attempting to express the Western Faustian spirit, intuits that Faustian man yearns for the infinite, reaching up for the heavens. The Romanesque through stacked rows of narrowing arches, the Gothic through high vaulted ceilings and stained glass, all the way up to the present, with the elevated knot of thoroughfares in the Barbican, and the modern glass skyscrapers: what could express a desire for the infinite more than a skyscraper made of glass! Spengler couldn't have made it up! Even the blank white ceiling of my subterranean Buxton hotel room speaks to this desire. Yet for whatever reason this more modern expression of concrete, glass, and steel leaves many including myself cold. The Shard, in its incomplete imperfection, doesn't do for me what Southwark Cathedral or Westminster do for me. And I believe that to be its cheapness. Made of glass and steel, its lightweight form attempts to pierces the heavens in the same way a Gothic spire pierces the heavens; but the Gothic spire pierces the heavens from atop a great Cathedral nave built of hard stone, solid, quarried and transported, not from steel beams and glass. Steel beams and glass won't last a thousand years, an age many of England's cathedrals will reach in the coming few centuries. There is something fundamentally flimsy-feeling in its glass form. The same can be said for Brutalism. Concrete, though versatile, is cheap and easy building material. It almost feels like cheating when compared with placing red brick by red brick, laying each one by hand. And though concrete may last where glass will not, concrete can't help but evoke the utilitarian and mundane note of a power plant or recycling facility. A Brutalist cathedral, for instance, would be a ridiculous notion. And this is why these two recent visits to Victorian façaded buildings sat heavily in my mind, and why it feels like there has been such a decline from the gilded Victorian age. There is a certain cheapness to the style of these building's interiors. On the surface there are the trappings of grandeur, but once experienced inside, you soon discover a kind of hollowness. It's all ornament and no soul. The face is pretty, but behind the eyes there's little going on. All that remains is the reminder that once the building did live up to its façade, that the people who lived there in the Leicester manor were the part dressed in suits with a coterie of maids and butlers, and the service of the Palace hotel really was that of a few dozen conscientious Jeeveses. You know what it feels like we are: children in adult suits, unable to live up to the ideal etched in architecture, that's what our generation is. Spengler wrote about the civilisational winter, a period pushed by inertia from a past age when the dynamo was still running, and those with eyes to see can see it everywhere. The revolutions of the axle are slowing, and friction is winning out. The long winter of Western culture sets in, the nights become darker, longer, colder, waiting for the light of a new culture to emerge, an Aslan, to thaw winter into spring.