'The site of the intervention is a garden in Bloomsbury , whose railings were removed as part of the
1940s war effort and never replaced, leaving a line of iron stumps along the
surrounding wall. Using sensor-based acoustic devices, the installation makes
evident the absence of railings by creating a resemblance of the familiar sound
produced by running a stick along an iron fence. The pitch of
each railing’s "sound" is set to vary according to the pedestrian’s speed and
proximity, allowing the “phantom railings” to be played and tuned as desired.'
You can
find out more on the website www.publicinterventions.org
I wrote
this four years ago about the railings around
In all
the anniversary discussions of May 68, I have not seen any reference to Britain 's most
unusual, homegrown variation on the Parisian evenements . Forty years ago this
month, in Notting Hill, a loose alliance of hippies, community workers and
locals scaled the gates of the private garden squares and claimed them for the
people. The psychedelic poet and playwright Neil Oram called the occupation a
symbolic quest to convert "unturned on people" and start "a
tidal wave which is about to wash away the square world".
As you may already have guessed, this didn't happen. But the Notting Hill insurgents did succeed in a more modest aim. They persuaded the council to buy the overgrown, privately owned
Granted,
this isn't quite as dramatic as students from the Sorbonne defending the Latin Quarter with barricades built from iron railings
and paving stones. But protests against railed-off gardens have a distinguished
place in the English radical tradition. When cast-iron railings began to appear widely in the mid-19th century
they were a hated symbol of the enclosure of common land. The Reform League
marched on Hyde Park in 1866, pulling down the
railings and trampling on the
flower beds. And when the railings
around London 's
private squares were removed for salvage during the second world war, many
welcomed it as a democratic gesture. At the end of the war George Orwell noted
that makeshift wooden railings were
being erected so that "the lawful denizens of the squares can make use of
their treasured keys again, and the children of the poor can be kept out".
For Orwell, the resilience of Britain 's
keep-off-the-grass culture was a victory for its few thousand landowning
families, who were "just about as useful as so many tapeworms".
The idea
that these gardens might ever have become permanently communal now seems rather
quaint. In a scene from the 1999 film Notting Hill that unconsciously mirrors
the 1968 occupation, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts climb surreptitiously into
the private Rosmead
Gardens , a few blocks away
from Powis Square .
But Grant is no one's idea of a long-haired revolutionary
("whoops-a-daisy!" he says, as he slips), and at the end of the film
we see them both relaxing in the gardens, presumably having bought one of the
surrounding houses.
Personally,
I cannot see why private garden squares are any more invidious than private
back gardens - which just goes to show, I suppose, that I am a liberal wuss who
will be no use to anyone when the revolution comes. More importantly, it shows
that we now live in a relentlessly privatised society, in which postcode
prestige and gated communities (both official and unofficial) are the norm. If
you have to pay several million pounds for your Notting Hill house, then it
seems reasonable enough to expect a key to the garden square.
No one
today would think, as Orwell did, that railings
reinforce the legalised theft of land ownership. Over the past few years
English Heritage has been campaigning for the restoration of the railings in London 's
squares as "a vital component of the public realm". In my own area of
Liverpool , I have noticed people installing
traditional railings outside
their houses, in the pursuit of what estate agents call "kerb
appeal".
It is
easy to dismiss the occupation of the Notting Hill squares as countercultural
self-indulgence. But these revolutionaries realised that social change had to
take place in the mundane spaces of everyday life, where inequities of money
and class are naturalised. Today we look through railings as though they are invisible; we should remember
that what they really mean is "keep out".
Mundane
quote for the day: 'No one perhaps has ever felt
passionately towards a lead pencil.' - Virginia Woolf
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ReplyDeleteYes, I like Phantom Railings too, thanks for this post.
ReplyDelete