FEATURE ARTICLE: “Exmouth Market” by Sir Peter Cook
In the first in a new series of feature articles, Sir Peter Cook recounts the role that Exmouth Market has played in the architectural life and times of London.
Maybe it’s ridiculous in an iPhone/conference call/Facebook world, but there’s still something about those old city favorites – eye contact, glances, overheard gossip, heavy gossip, alcoholic laughter, and especially the kind of conversation that follows when you “bump into” someone – that really pins down a culture. The “bump” is anyhow not necessarily a real bump: you’d hoped, hadn’t you, that this person might be passing by?
That’s the point. The business of proximity: of which we’re reminded by TV shows like The Office or Madmen, which only work to a certain level since they are both cruel, predictable, and limited; based as they are upon the limits of an institution. Yet we remember that at college there were routes out – the institution itself was larger and had all sorts of cracks and crevices down which the shy, the weird, the bored, the gregarious (and anybody else) could escape the predictable five o’clock conversation, if they had a will.
So, if we prefer to operate in a place that offers a choice, especially when it is a choice that involves the least amount of driving, bus-hopping, or special effort, where can we construct for ourselves a theater of the semi-expected, the nearly casual, a theater that legitimizes those glances and echoes? In London it used to be the area around Charlotte Street, W1, conveniently around the corner from the Architectural Association, and where literary figures could hold Thursday lunches on one floor of a restaurant, while Arup’s engineers would chat up architects on another: where you would always seem to run into someone from Vienna or Sydney while simultaneously waving at Bernard Tschumi calling his distant girlfriend from a usefully dodgy “New York for a shilling” phone.
Then we all gradually moved east – as the advertising agencies flooded into Charlotte but the printing presses conveniently decamped from an area called Clerkenwell – a couple of streets were discovered there that could offer something of the secret wish of the English to inhabit a little local and atmospheric corner in Paris (imagining, too, that they might – any minute – encourage the odd artist, clairvoyant, or inventor to reside up a staircase, or in a backyard). After all, printing plants have just the right characteristics for the architect’s or graphic designer’s studio: tough, light, not-too-industrial, and not-too tacky, and the nearby shops that used to sell screws, car parts, pies, or gadgets can be progressively leaned on to sell such necessities as drinking mugs based upon the most favored Pantone colors or waistcoats imported from Iceland. (Yes, Iceland – and why not?)
There is a street called Bowling Green Lane that has a variety of old printing plants and a touch of the picturesque about it (of course you must beware of this tendency of the English – for even the toughest will always go for a bit of the picturesque). Characteristically, Bowling Green Lane was discovered by Piers Gough, the most English of us all, and a symbol of the strength and truth of contrariness.
Let me explain.
In the 1970s, Piers and three friends started their office in the corridor of the Fifth Year Studio at the Architectural Association. I was their teacher, and, without pressing my ear too near the door, I could hear them making deals, arguing with their “quantity surveyor,” and generally getting into business. They were stylish, snappy, noisy – often hilarious. We followed them everywhere – to their optician, to their parties, to their new boutiques (which seemed to close as fast as they opened). Since that time they have built blue buildings, red buildings, pink buildings, big buildings like lumps of cheese and (typically English) achieved their greatest fame for an iconic public toilet and florist shop in Westbourne Grove.
Then Piers fell off some scaffolding with disastrous consequences to his body. His infectious wit turned from giggly and ribald to critical and considered – but remained a wit. His tall frame somehow recovered to the extent that his transparent plastic walking stick is as much loved as his flock of curls. Nowadays, he makes his way a little slowly down the adjoining street, Exmouth Market, with a quip and some tough words to say about Prince Charles’s latest antics (as do most of us). His buildings have also become more serious, having acquired the patina of thought. And wonderfully, two years ago, at the age of 60, he created his first child.
He characterizes the legacy of the old market in a very particular way: it was the birthplace of Joseph Grimaldi – the first clown. This has not been lost on the marketing men, of course, as big red clown’s lips have become the sales symbol painted on all vacant shops. Nonetheless, the spirit of the clown survives, and Piers is one of that “chirpy” band of English architects who readily admits, “Things are bad – but then they’re always bad . . . so it’s okay, really.”
Keeping his head down in the chain Italian at the corner of the two streets and being chatted up by his pet engineer is a man of very different temperament and whose style is far from that of clowning – involved though he is in an architecture that can be magnificently flamboyant. This is Patrik Schumacher, who brings us to the essentially 21st-century difference between the old ‘W1′ architects’ world and the edgier or more cosmopolitan “EC1″ architects’ world. The powerhouse of the parametric world is stoked by Schumacher and you can spot the inmates – especially the new ones. A sassy looking girl seemingly from the East Coast of the US was looking lost at the bus stop: “Bowling Green Lane? You need Zaha’s office?” I guessed, without exercising any particular wisdom. And, of course, she did, presumably disappearing into the old schoolhouse at the end of the lane from which she and the rest will trickle out into the Exmouth Market bars and food tents.
Zaha herself will take the second table from the door at Moro. It’s a North African kitchen, which may or may not be authentic. (But who cares? It tastes really good.) Rattle (of the orchestral baton), Gormley (of the attenuated figures), Finch (of the snappy phrases), critics, dancers, and observers – none will hear what’s being said amongst the din. Even when the weather is not so good, the Moro tables merge into the Medcalf tables that merge into the Café Kick tables that edge toward the Ambassador tables. Sometimes the odd taxi creeps through a mulch inhabited by architects and designers of many tongues. For in 21st-century London, 40 percent of them are not Brits. Our barrier-free Europe has meant that German is bantered from Kick to Moro; Italian from the Ambassador to the coffee shops. Increasingly, various forms of Chinese enable Bartlett School gossip to filter through to ETH Zurich gossip, which will be repeated in French at the AA bar tomorrow.
All this has been overlaid, somehow, on a piece of London that some of us had forgotten for more than 30 years. For, in one’s first days as a keen, “spotty” provincial, one went to see Berthold Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre and the adjoining modernist apartments, which were both bolder and cuter than the cautiously worthy social housing that we were more familiar with. Wandering around it were the “London poor” who could have just as easily walked out of Henry Mayhew’s reportage from London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Now the Health Centre lies within the trees, rather small and rather forlorn. Today’s cosmopolitan crowd has to be reminded, with some embarrassment, that the building was considered to be a piece of pioneering architecture. Yet I can tell by their faces that they don’t believe me.
Are they not telling me, by the most honest of responses, that locality and architectural culture are tricky companions? Are they hinting – ever so politely, of course – that English modernism (even in the hands of a Russian) was, in the end, rather provincial. There’s better stuff in Oslo or Bucharest, not to even mention Rotterdam or Milan. It is for other reasons that they have willingly descended upon London. Even the “crunch” seems only to have thinned them out a little. London, more expensive than Berlin, but more challenging, more operational, and better networked, has more flights to Beijing, you see.
But look closer, for just as there is also a pie shop and an Indian newsagent next to the self-consciously designed archi-grunge of Medcalf (with its old butcher’s table still there in the window), there are dodgy looking owners of bull terriers, tired looking mothers, and sad old people amongst the tall, hip dancers and bright Caribbean dudes or architects in silver and black. If 40 nationalities of beer at the Café Kick are actually necessary, you begin to take a little more seriously the nuances of the shrieks that follow the scoring of a goal at one of the football tables. So, while the shy Armenian landscaper is coaxed into the first stages of a liaison by the cocky Spanish parametricist, his beer might be Belgian and her downfall might be a marguerita, salted just how they do it in Porto Alegre. Abu Dhabi might well be sitting on their screens back at the office, but past and future might collide just about anywhere.
So, what has happened to the old cry, “Let’s go for a pint!”? Is it slowly becoming a relic or could the traditional English stuff still be folded into this scene of (almost) nonchalant cosmopolitanism? It becomes as querulous an issue as asking whether there is still an English architecture. It becomes as phony as an overpriced dish in the heroic pie shop on the corner but stands to be as undesirable as the unhealthy pie in the cheap pie shop in the market. Both of them must now begin to give way to the cluster of tents that appear at lunchtime: Nigerian, Thai, Provençal, Jewish, veggie, “rhetorically” Spanish (complete with national flags and colors), and – a tellingly new phenomenon – the tent of Moro. Thus, in a perverse trick of inverse commerce, Moro brings one dish a day out of the posh larder for the £5 clientele who actually work for the well-heeled, in-the-restaurant clientele, asserting its position with a dark blue tent from which a prince-at-arms might well have emerged in other times. Indeed, the whole scene has a certain air of confident showing-off – of battle, of layers of grunge folded into elitism and vice versa.
Amidst the melée, a gentleman in a brown bowler hat will appear from the side of the Italianate church, a big floppy handkerchief, pink shirt, and pinstripes confirming his status as an authentic throwback to another era. The joke is, you will probably have just seen him on that morning’s TV. The joke within the joke is, he is a real working architect. Furthermore, he is the former president of no less an august body than the Royal Institute of British Architects. Typical of our host culture [British architecture?] is the paradox of such a man as Maxwell Hutchinson – pianist, raconteur, mixture of reactionary and progressive – the youngest RIBA president ever, and one of the most far-seeing and, in his time, best known. But well known, perhaps, to English dads and mums who actually watch TV rather than to the young architects standing outside the bars in Exmouth, enjoying the frisson of these fellow travelers, yet sharing few references with them.
Maybe the place has always been a little like that? By tradition, it’s a location where the clerks of the City would go for recreation, relief, and cheap food. More recently, it’s a service street and now awaiting one of two or three fates. Like Notting Hill, it could inspire a film and be infiltrated by tourists looking for “atmosphere.” Like Charlotte Street, it could be moved-into by wealthier professionals. Or it might wake up one day and find that the action has gone elsewhere.
I hope not. The worst would be to wake up in our studio to find that our young colleagues are only coming in from Yorkshire or Clapham.
I hope not.
Sir Peter Cook is a founder member of Archigram, a leading academic and a current practitioner with CRAB Studio. He also acts as a consultant to Populous.
“Exmouth Market” first appeared in Log 17 (Fall 2009), published by the Anyone Corporation, New York City and is reprinted here with their kind permission.
Tags: Exmouth Market, Sir Peter Cook
