Okay, let’s take a look! When Georgian Bath
was first hacked from nearby limestone quarries and put together by jobbing
builders between 1740-1850 its design concept was revolutionary and beautiful.
It’s architects you might say had all the imagination in the world but then not
quite as they took many of their ideas from the ancient world, particularly
Rome. At the time, what they laid out, partly on the land of the Pulteney
Estate, was indeed art. Art as design. Art as architecture. That is to see it
in terms of its time or what it was then. Today it’s still beautiful all right
but its beauty well worn, Architecturally sterile. True, the local council has
been doing its best over many years to stuff up the integral totality of the
Georgian design by dumping within it various monstrosities like the Beaufort
Hotel, the ghastly neo-Georgian Podium, the desperately ultra neo-Georgian
Southgate shopping center along with various house-building adulterations. But
then these are just signs of a furiously unimaginative local officialdom trying
to show brain though even then still desperately failing to fuck up a decaying
concept with their own brand of awfulness.
Georgian Bath still remains sterile, a
brushed up thing of the past for the tourists with architectural modernity
popping out like venomous pustules all over the place. What was once art of a
kind has now become artifice. A kind of decayed picture postcard, a digital
snapshot of history that tourists love to be in along with its residents, who
do so love to be living in living history. People, let it be said, often so
sterile themselves that they take on the character of their streets and
buildings. They’re full of swank. Up front like the buildings they live in.
Fine masonry work on the outside with everything round the back filled out with
breeze block and rubble! Remember it was built on the cheap at the time! And
they love doing what may best be described as ‘parading’, much like Georgian
‘society’ did in its heyday only now it’s walking up and down Milsom Street on Saturday afternoons
holding expensive brand name carrier bags despite the fact that most haven’t
got a pot to piss in. The bags of course are mostly empty! Swank is the object
for this show of post-modern Georgiana. It’s still fun to watch only Jane
Austen got there first and sent it up mercifully. Loved the bricks but hated
the people!
Having said that Bath’s still a good place
to be compared to the modern excrescences surrounding it like Trowbridge, Chippenham and Peasedown
St John. Trouble is, the city itself is like a museum so it doesn’t bother
having one of its own. Nothing showing its history and culture unless you want
to call the display of artifacts at the Roman Baths a museum which it’s not.
No, Bath’s a museum of buildings, mainly Georgian, only all too predictable. No
treasures for tourists to see unless you like builders rubble and stone.
Any imagination it once had is locked away
deep. Set in stone if you like. Not that it doesn’t desperately pander to
cultural aspiration. Thinking that it’s one of Britain’s great tourist meccas,
a place with a history and a cut above so many others, it has its very own
Festivals. International too don’t you know. An International Festival of
Music, A Bath Festival, A Bath Fringe Festival. A Festival of This and a
Festival of That. Its Council wants
to give its City an image of quality.
After all, its architecture is genuinely special only people can’t live by
bricks alone and as long as I’ve known it that’s what those who inhabit its
center have been turning into. Pretentious bricky little dullards.
The City has its own local artists who
specialize in painting buildings, bricks and bridges. Nothing really
imaginative. They can’t be because they only paint what’s already been there
200 years. They’re as passé as the place itself. Their work at best just imagery.
A miserable artifice. Smooth, right and tight like the City’s lower middle
class Liberal Democrat and Tory voting inhabitants. Most of them simply better
than anyone anywhere else!
There’s definitely no artistic vitality in
Bath. The place is a cultural desert for creativity and imagination. Bristol is
different. It’s a place of colors and contrasts. It’s not as neat and tidy as
Bath. Not as right and tight but it’s definitely colourful. At its center you
can see terraces of houses with their stucco exteriors painted in blues,
yellows, reds, greens, whites and browns. It’s a kind of invitation in itself
go looking for street art and no mistake, you’ll often get it. Much just off
the center of Bristol is only too often plain ugly Victoria epoch Satanic
redbrick factory building ripe for dereliction and change. What it actually is
and the social deprivation it appears to contain may be a subject for critical
condemnation , thus the critical finger-pointing art of much of its graffiti.
What is to be done with it all and where is it going are, like the questions it
raises, subjects for futuristic speculation. Thus the social scientific-
science fictional dualism of many of the graffiti hoardings I admired along
Bedminster’s North Road. You could never have had anything like it in Bath.
Bath’s a finished job. It’s smug and self-satisfied. Bristol’s graffiti are
buzzing and angry like the artists who create it.
Only it’s an intelligent, imaginative
anger. Graffiti Artists for last week’s festival came from all over the world
to be there and spray. Maybe it was to honor Banksy, a Bristolian and the art
form’s favorite son or just a kind of cultural clanning together. A jam session
of depressed nozzles. I chatted to many of the artists, all of them interesting
and thoughtful, and as important as
anything else, affable. People with lively minds from whom you might expect
just about anything. Much of the draftsmanship was superb and the themes on the
hoardings and buildings endlessly lively. It surely won’t be long before we see
the millionaire art buyers and nouveau banker-riche of Britain turn from Turner
Prize winners and old hat dead sheep and unmade beds to the thought provoking
two hundred quid a time Nouveau-Graffiti nozzle-nobbies of Bristol.
I can see it all in my mind’s eye. Bath
Bypass bypassed by a procession of Land-cruisers and trailers on their way down
to Bedminster with crate loads of Chardonnay or, better still, three litre
flagons of semi-rough cider. Quick-quick, flash the cash before the prices get
knowledgeable as the dealers get in on the latest thing and start flogging it
off to the Chinese for ten times the price. Oh, do you think I’m joking? Many
of them are ex-public school with an eye for making dosh out of the art trade just
as much as any Royal commercialization of peas and carrots. You’ll be hearing
some pretty posh voices around Bedminster and the Bristol Docks soon. I say my fine bearded local fellow, would
you like some of these fifties for those painted billboards of yours?
It could be the shape of things to come.
Graffiti art boards hanging in the windows of Mayfair galleries. For now though
it’s just a feast of the imagination for the local enthusiasts to enjoy, people
who’d never come to Bath to look at the buildings. Some I chatted to offered up
the fact that they were working class and proud of it. It was strange to me.
Culturally imaginative people, happy to be young mums and dads and making a
point of what they felt they were. You’d never get that in Bath, especially
Georgian Bath where people would rather die than vote Labour and never admit to
anything except being self-employed, or then again, most of the large population
of working class people living on large estates hidden away across the river
and railway line to the far north-west of the City who only vote Lib-Dem! Bath
and its architectural artifice make people want to feel better than what they
actually are. As Margaret Thatcher once said,
it’s a funny old world.
No, Bristol is active, full of art and
imagination. Bath is passé, full of artifice and imagery. One’s up and running
into the future. Hopeful and creative despite all its social problems. Bath lies
static and smug with its heritage. It’s certainly glorious with its pre-Roman
and Roman, Medieval and Georgian character but that’s where it’s stuck
emotionally and psychologically. People who live in the center of Bath wouldn’t
live anywhere in Bristol, not even the City’s fine and extensive Georgian
suburb of Clifton let alone definitely down market inner areas like Bedminster
and Ashton Gate. And they certainly wouldn’t touch the socially deprived crime
centres of the outer suburbs with a barge pole! Shock and horror.
Georgian Bath has its reputation all right.
When people in Bristol or anywhere else within a fifty mile radius of Bath ask
you where you live and you tell them they invariable put a finger to their nose
and push it upwards in a kind of well-known expression of deference but more
actually as a kind of acknowledgement of posh-ness and snobbery. Bath eh? Hmmm…
The City then has taken its architectural
reputation and Georgian history of exclusiveness and fashion, (what it once was
and the kind of people who came to live there, ‘take the waters’ and mingle
with the fashionable people) and planted it in the minds of city dwellers from
Bristol to Boston, Hong Kong to Timbuktu. They all come here and love it. There
are countless Jane Austen societies all over America. There are people who come
to Bath in large parties specially to dress up in Georgian style and parade
around the town in groups for days on end. It’s a wonder to see. Jane Austen
herself would have had a nervous breakdown because she actually hated the
place! That’s the new art of Bath. Reinvigorating the pretentions of old for a
fast tourist buck. Talk about poncing off the past. The City does it in spades.
Bristol on the other hand also has a past. Part
of it up to its eyeballs in the Slave Trade, part of it heavy in support for
Parliament and Cromwell during the English Civil War, other parts Quaker and
then heavily into cigarette and aircraft production along with the manufacture
of stylish cars. Whatever the City did it had its own kind of style.
Imaginative at times in its awfulness and imaginative in its industrial
creativity like glass blowing. Above all innovative. Bath doesn’t have that and
never repeated its architecture and I for one much regret it. Local politicians
who could give it new cultural direction are as unimaginative as the endless
chain store shops that clog its streets. It used to be different in the sixties
with its many excellent antique and bric-a-brac shops, auction rooms and
bookshops. That’s all gone. Replaced by crap coffee chains with people walking
around the town like zombies holding plastic cups full of some marshmallow
nastiness at two quid a throw! That’s now the bright new imaginative culture of
coffee drinking in Bath!
Can you imagine anyone doing graffiti art
in Bath? I mean we’re talking death here! But then I have to tell you readers,
life is full of surprises and the spontaneous spirit, even in Bath, does find
its ways. As for the City burghers the brightest most imaginative thing they could
do would be to find a place, and there are many, where local graffiti art
candidates might get to work and reinvigorate the cultural scene. Then the
Council, being who and what they are, could charge an admission fee and bring
more money into its coffers. Residents and pensioners getting a miserly ten
percent discount, the tourists paying full whack! Now that’s a really new way
of making money out of municipal art and besides, the old reprobates would even
come up smelling of roses. But then Bath is Bath and they’d never contemplate
such a thing. Or would they? We’ve all heard about people who’d sell their own
mothers for a couple of quid.
Finally and more generally, environment is
very important, particularly for young people who only too unselfconsciously
grow up in them. What they live in becomes part of them. Makes them who they
are. In time what they become. Take note of the fact. Let it help you become
someone different than a troubled teenager or a self-satisfied prig!
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