Surface Depth
Surface Depth
Matthew Harle plumbs the depths of two-dimensional London
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When he was interviewed by the Guardian in May of ‘94, Patrick Keiller declared that, “perhaps more than with any other capital, you can make your own London,” and that idea of reshaping the city was something Keiller was highly proficient in, both in his original career as an architect and as a filmmaker.
Through his camera and his script, Keiller shows us London through the eyes of a pseudo-flâneur, whose high-flown ideas are quickly punctured by city’s rough surfaces and unvarnished edges. But even unrealised dreams offered up by a sometimes-unreliable narrator are enough to allow us to see once-familiar streets with fresh eyes, to smell the potential beneath the paving stones and maybe give us the courage to begin shaping our own versions of London.
On the 30th anniversary of the release of Keiller’s London, the writer and curator Matthew Harle revisits the film to see if there’s still optimism and poetry to be found amongst its frames, now that we're living in a version of London where unreliable and surreal futures are fed to us at every turn and the grandest things beneath our feet are luxury mega-basements.
On Sunday, Patrick Keiller’s London played at the Barbican. It has been thirty years since Keiller shot the work across 1992; where Robinson, Keiller’s fictional lecturer from the University of Barking, sets out to attempt to find answers to ‘the problem of London’.
London has long been the London film. Seminal in both the history of Artist’s Moving Image and Urban Studies, Keiller overlays a pensive, melancholic script onto street scenes of everyday life, where the ordinary – Vauxhall, Staples Corner, Perivale Golf Course – becomes cinematic on warm 35mm stock.
In London, depth matters. It is a film that digs where it stands: ‘the problem of London’, Robinson posits, is to be found in Britain's unfinished bourgeois revolution, and as a consequence, the traces of the ancien regime are everywhere to be seen.
For his sequel to London – Robinson In Space (1997) – Keiller changed tact. Deep history on its own was no longer the answer. A quotation from The Picture of Dorian Gray headlined the film’s poster for its theatrical release: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is visible, not the invisible…”. Landscape, Keiller’s sequel implied, could also be interpreted entirely from its surface phenomenon. The film’s narrator riffs on Wilde’s line:
“Robinson believed that, if he looked at it hard enough, he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.”
In the period between London and Robinson in Space, Robinson realised that there was no answerable ‘problem of London’. In fact, for those with vested interests in land, London had always presented very clear reasoning. What Robinson saw around him was not a cultural-historical riddle of landscape, but an aesthetic reality. The city’s surface had become depth.
Writing about the film last year, the architect and critic, Douglas Murphy, noted how a trip to London’s locations on Google Street View offers a forlorn experience. The city’s edges have been smoothed, the vacant spaces that once offered bohemia or marginal cultures to grow are long gone. The recent census data from this year also shows London’s centre is getting richer, whiter and the suburban edges more diverse.
Unlike 1992, London’s political influence is returning to the centre. Murphy’s observations are made truer when applying Robinson’s own reasoning to the exercise. Though a very different city, the locations of Robinson’s walks can still be a guide of sorts, as not only have most of London’s sites been sanitised, they have almost all been redeveloped.
Brent Cross Shopping Centre – the spiritual omphalos of North West London – where Robinson bumps into a man reading Walter Benjamin by its fountain (above), is now due to be redeveloped and eventually absorbed by Brent Cross Town; Elephant & Castle, subject of one of London’s most vivid portraits has been bulldozed and turned into Elephant Park; alongside Brixton Market, which is now to be integrated with a set of new proposed towers.
Scanning this assortment of consumerist, architecture-free placemaking, a new Robinsonian surface emerges, principally in the form of the corporate CGI landscapes that front the marketing of these new developments. Thirty years on, it seems entirely possible to recreate Keiller’s London shot for shot in rendered CGI development imagery.
For many years now, Londoners have learnt to ignore the anaemic hallucinations plastered on new-build hoardings. They usually contain the same components – a city bathed in permanent sun, populated by adults of unidentifiable ages who stroll aimlessly through the landscaped parkland surrounding their new apartments. Most worryingly in these CGI renders is the implied position of the viewer – frequently these images show the dappling of trees or foliage creeping into frame, suggesting the onlooker gazes at these people from behind a tree or bush. They are rich. We are perverts. Peeping toms of development paradise.
In the last five years or so, various artists and writers have covered this phenomena – these include Crystal Bennes’ Development Aesthetics, James Bridle’s Render Ghosts, Felicity Hammond’s Remains in Development, Stewart Home’s Denizens of The Dead and Max Colson’s Images of Enjoyment and Spectacle. All these works, spanning photography, print and installation, bring a consoling irony to the most visually inane symptom of London’s perpetual crises of housing and public space.
Max Colson’s line of enquiry brought him to a filmmaking project that encountered a new kind of surface depth. Construction Lines (above) initiated in 2017, is a film that sketches out the plan of a proposed ‘Iceberg Home’ in Kensington, a house where the underground rooms outsize the surface structure. Objections to the planning application from local residents are read aloud by actors with an affected priggishness as Colson’s film gradually plunges the architectural renderings into chaos. The iceberg home has been described as “luxified troglodytism” – and in 2019, numbered at around 1,500 across the city.
Robinson’s original ‘problem of London’ inadvertently leads us to the problem of London. In 2022, would Robinson know where to look? The act of walking and seeing no longer seems a plausible methodology when London’s streets have become an unreliable narrator; between a city plastered with rendered fictions and the subterranean dwellings of the super-rich, concealed from view.
Matthew Harle is a writer and curator at the Barbican.
5 little bits
Somehow there were no “serious injury collisions in London overnight” according to the Met, although there are a number of “severe delays” and “part suspensions across the tube network this morning. The good news is that the ‘snow clouds’ gave people arriving by air a pretty great view of Canary Wharf:
Police broke into the into the Laz Emporium gallery on Lexington Street in Soho a few weeks ago to ‘save a woman in a critical condition’. Except the woman was actually a ‘hyper-realistic sculpture’ by the American artist, Mark Jenkins.
Climate charity Possible has asked TfL to remove ads that promote cars “to encourage more people to choose more sustainable transport.” The campaign group says that if TfL can prohibit junk food ads in an attempt to cut obesity. “then it is surely time for high-carbon advertising to be subject to the same logic.”
London’s Morocco fans were out celebrating over the weekend. On Saturday night they bought the Edgware Road to a standstill. The Guardian’s Aina J Khan went out to speak to some of them.
The Guardian also has an article on the fight to save the I Camisa deli in Soho.
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