It was a grey
Saturday afternoon in September, and I was walking into Canterbury city centre.
Heading to the public library in an attempt to get some work done, I took my
usual route from Canterbury East train station: crossing the grassy oasis of
the Mary de Castro Garden and zipping past the rows of terraced houses and
shops on Castle Street, before crossing onto St Margaret’s Street by the Three
Tuns pub. As I stepped up onto the pavement, an unfamiliar shape caught my eye.
High up on a bastion of scaffolding surrounding the derelict, almost unrecognisable
Slatters Hotel, a helmeted builder was perched precariously on a horizontal
raft of poles. With the white sky beaming through angular gaps in the
metalwork, it appeared almost as if he were floating above the street.
Struck by this
anachronism, I grabbed my smartphone from my pocket so I could document the
moment. I felt a little self-conscious in my act, being aware of the heightened
Saturday foot traffic this close to the High Street, but I took the photo
anyway. To my surprise, the subject of my photograph spotted me and shouted
down jokily, as he balanced in the air, “I hope you’re not health and safety!”
Continuing on
and looking ahead, Canterbury Cathedral emerged between the alignment of
rooftops and frontages jutting out into the street, itself plastered with
scaffolding. I thought that Canterbury at this time was a city of scaffolds,
with swarms of fluorescent yellow workers tending busily to their unfinished
projects, hanging above the pedestrian world like puppet masters. Each fragile,
temporary nest of timber and metal a monument to the city’s (re)construction.
*
Further down St. Margaret’s
Street, hiding between the Superdry store and Yorkshire Building Society, is a
narrow alleyway that for years served as my lunchtime shortcut; a shorter, less
cluttered route between the library and Whitefriars Shopping Centre where I’d go
to buy a sandwich. Turning into the passage, the busy, small movements of the
pedestrian crowds are replaced abruptly by stillness, and within seconds the words
and melodies of the High Street fade into a distant murmur. It has the effect
of creating a kind of micro-wilderness where space and time itself appear
warped and refracted. In the cracks of the cobbles, clovers peer up toward the
light like the treetops of a vast underground forest.
These in-between spaces are ripe
for all kinds of anomalies. Odd, incongruous objects like chairs with legs
missing and pieces of coloured cloth; graffiti in seemingly inaccessible
locations. In the brick wall behind Superdry, where the commercial bins are
stowed, is a plain white door with no handle, sign or identifying features,
which has become over time a site of personal myth. It’s the mystery I’m drawn
towards – an object that presents more questions than answers. What lies behind
it? What is its purpose?
I’m starting to believe that some
spaces are designed to be forgotten. Does anyone ever think about these enclosed
pockets of land, behind rooftops and spiked fences, where shop goods get
delivered and waste taken away? Iron Bar Lane, a link between the chain stores
of St George’s Street and the cosy boutiques of Burgate, is one such space,
taking up a surprisingly large area in the city centre yet remaining invisible
in the mind’s-eye view of most inhabitants. It is quite remarkable that such an
environment – perpetually unclean, unused pavements green with grime, caked in
dirt, animal excrement and plastic packaging – lies only a stone’s throw from Canterbury
Cathedral, the most prestigious landmark in this corner of the country. Yet
without its potholed loading bays and dusty back entrances, so much of the
everyday activity that takes place in the city wouldn’t be feasible.
Every city needs these spaces of
transition; changing rooms for the urban uniform. The challenge for ‘stakeholders’
in the city is how effectively they can be obscured, folding in on themselves until
nothing but the alluring, illusory facets of the city remain.
*
Since mid-October, I’ve been
working for Canterbury Business Improvement District (BID) in the city centre
as a Visitor Welcome Ambassador. One of the main responsibilities of my job
each morning is to walk around each street in my designated area and report
environment problems, including (but not limited to) broken glass, faulty
street furniture, loose paving stones, and on-street waste. Although you’d
think it rewarding to take on a role that can have a positive impact within the
local environment, the task can feel crushingly futile. In many cases, my
reports seem to achieve nothing – piles of vomit are left to dry and stick to
the pavement; rain rinses off the residue; the urban fauna are left to peck and
gnaw at bags crammed with waste, as residents and business staff alike put them
out expecting them to be taken away, never to be seen or thought about again.
Never a single day with nothing
new to report; always something remaining to be fixed.
Even long-term solutions are
always temporary. Shortly after I started my position, I discovered that my
favourite little alleyway in St Margaret’s Street had been swiftly and brutally
closed off; truncated by tall metal gates that seem to stay permanently locked.
These measures were taken to address concerns about the endless accretion of
waste and graffiti that occurs there. Yet within days of the gates being
fitted, great masses of limp, sodden cardboard piled up high against the metal
bars, as if revolting against this new imposition. Spray-painted tags still plague
any wall that can be claimed. Ultimately, all that has been achieved is the closure
of a route reserved for those with insider knowledge of Canterbury, to momentarily
bypass the obstacles of city life.
It is inevitable, in an urban
ecosystem where diverse forces interact in such high concentration, that things
get ignored and abandoned, things rot, mistakes are made, objects collide and
break, or at least uncomfortably coexist. Cities aren’t orderly places; in many
ways, disorder is their defining characteristic. Which makes our attempts to manage
the chaos somehow artificial. In our urge to tame its wildness, what we are
ultimately guided by is an imaginary version of the city, one that has never
existed and never will.
*
As part of my job, I have visited
Canterbury’s Roman Museum twice in recent months. There is a wealth of material
to see there, leading you along a timeline of the city told through a
comprehensive collection of artefacts, information boards and interactive tools
which paint a detailed picture of the daily lives of our ancestors. But what
tends to draw my eye are the artists’ impressions of what Canterbury looked
like during different time periods. My personal favourite is from the era when
the city was re-occupied by the Anglo-Saxons after the Romans had abandoned it.
The image depicts dwellings of wood and straw settled between crumbling stone
walls; the mossy remnants of the empire now acting as the foundations for new,
living structures. I try picturing what it would be like to make a home amongst
ruins, and contemplate that, ultimately, this is what ‘dwelling’ means; it is
the necessary precondition for inhabiting a place. What varies is the
visibility of the decay.
Towards the end of the museum
walkway you find the main event: the Roman pavement, a stretch of decorative
mosaics preserved exactly where they were excavated, alongside a dusty stone hypocaust
(Roman central heating system) that served the Roman townhouse whose ruins the
museum is built around. For all the site’s cultural significance – being a
Scheduled Ancient Monument and the only remaining example of an in-situ Roman pavement
mosaic in the UK – it was an act of destruction that brought about its
discovery. The WWII Baedecker raids of 1942 razed the majority of the buildings
from the pavement’s site on Butchery Lane to the modern-day ring road
(including Iron Bar Lane) and with them a significant portion of the medieval
street layouts and buildings that Canterbury is known for today, from those areas
that survived the bombardment.
Consequently, it’s in this
quarter of the city centre where you’ll find the greatest concentration of
modernist architecture, as the post-war rebuilding effort took shape. Recently,
I found out that the building where Superdrug is currently housed, which I’d
never paid much attention to previously, won the 1957 RIBA Bronze Award for its
unique serrated roof and columnar design. Previously, all I’d associated with
it were the heaps of cigarette butts that collect in the colonnade, where taxi
drivers and nearby shop workers alike go outside for breaks. The disparity in
perspective makes me wonder how these newer spaces will be valued in the
future. What will the criteria be, in the decades and centuries to come, that
determine whether a landmark is preserved or ‘redeveloped’? What events will
define its fate?
Like flies in amber, the Roman mosaics
today are encased in glass; yet still the pavement is unexpectedly warped,
sloping and buckling on the uneven ground upon which it is spread. Not even the
extensive preservation efforts can prevent the slow shifts of the earth’s crust
beneath it.
*
One of the characteristics that
distinguishes Canterbury from many other cities is the ease with which you can discern
evidence of different historical periods in the built environment. Nowhere is
this starker, perhaps, than in St. Radigund’s Garden. Bordering the unkempt
grass and paved area on one side are remnants of the city wall, which has
marked the limits of the city centre in Canterbury since the Romans. In its irregular
surface, you can recognise a wide variation in texture and shape, containing materials
including flint, mortar, sandstone and even brickwork, having undergone successive
acts of construction, damage and repair over the centuries. On the grass nearby
is a fascinating signpost matching each section of the wall to the time period
from which it originates.
We’re particularly prone to these
patchwork surfaces here, retaining elements of the old as we claim spaces anew.
On Stour Street towards St. Mildred’s Church, you’ll find an incongruous sight
where the front of a three-storey brick edifice – just the front, the rest has
been demolished – is coated in scaffold. This building was formerly a warehouse
for the old Tannery, where animal skins were treated to produce leather, which
operated in Canterbury for over 150 years. Now, the building is being converted
into housing. However, the red-brick façade is being preserved due to its
historic interest, creating the unusual situation where the new construction is
concealed by the wall of its predecessor.
How do we decide when the
cultural value of an object overrides its practical difficulties?
Mere metres away on Gas Street,
the entrance to Canterbury Castle – a stone keep in situ since the 12th
century – is closed off due to falling masonry. Surrounded crudely by metal
barricades, piles of flint lay tiredly at the feet of the sagging walls. The
site has been closed since the summer and shows no signs of re-opening any time
soon.
That word we use to talk about
the changing face of the city – urban ‘development’ – often appears to be a perpetual
process of stemming the tide of chaos and destruction, like a leaking dam.
Destruction is inevitable, but which surfaces we prolong and which we surrender
is a choice; a slow current consisting of countless individual decisions, all
adding up to something – or nothing.
*
When the weather allows, I eat my
lunch in Solly’s Orchard Garden, a cosy riverside green space with planted
trees and flowers, overlooked by the 13th century buildings of the Dominican
Priory.
I often like to sit on a brick wall
bordering the river in summer, watching the wildlife busying itself with innocent
endeavours and listening to the boat tours as they paddle behind me.
From the number of times I’ve
heard the tour guides speak, I now know their script for this part of the river
almost off by heart. As they approach the garden, its former use by the
Blackfriars as an orchard is explained. Due to the River Stour’s former status
as an open sewer, cider was safer to drink than water in previous centuries,
which they made using fruit grown where the garden is located today. The guides
then stop a while by the black, wrought-iron floodgates, in place since 1829,
to observe them in action as the water cascades downstream, before revealing
that the properties in this area are some of the most expensive in the city, with
house prices in the region of £1 million. Despite, in previous centuries, being
one of the most squalid parts of the city due to the river’s stench and habit
of flooding.
Resting on the wall with the
Stour flowing by, no single droplet the same; an image of time passing continuously,
inevitably, and without care. While it follows the course it has done for more
generations than I can perceive, the judgements of worth that we humans make are
as fickle and predictably changeable as the seasons. There can be no masterplan
of the city, for there are always inconsistencies in resources, lifespan and
interest.
Over the rooftops beyond the
river, Canterbury Cathedral looms, half under a white blanket of covered
scaffolding, camouflaged with the overcast sky. Sometimes, I wonder if, one
day, even the city’s most famous landmark will be considered not worthy of
repair; an eyesore, even. It’s funny, and perhaps a touch frightening, how a
feature that seems so intrinsic to the identity of a place, object or person
can seem so foreign, given time.
*
Back on St. Margaret’s Street on
my way out of town, I pass the Slatters Hotel, where an excavation is underway.
Archaeologists are attempting to discover and examine objects from the Roman and
medieval levels, where they hope to find clues about life near the site of the
Roman theatre (at the crossroads by the Three Tuns pub), and Roman baths on
this same street.
The dig lies tantalisingly behind
hoardings eight feet high, precluding participation. Meanwhile, the old hotel
building rises above them, gutted and forlorn, hiding in plain sight. The
receptacle of countless stories of lives gone by, now also consigned to
history, waiting for the earth to envelop them. The past occupying the present
in its most visible form.
I think you could call anyone an
archaeologist if they observe what they find in the built environment and use
it to form a narrative.
I amble back to the train
station, another day done, ready to return home to my sleepy village and
restore myself anew, turning my back on the glowing lights of the city as it
does the same. Which artefacts of urban life will be unearthed tomorrow, and
what stories will they communicate? Which will be lost and forgotten; which
will remain buried?
Time will tell.
