Urban Exploration
Armed with a water pistol, I go hunting for an old friend. We go to the abandoned estate, dismal now where the student flats were.
Set down in a low part of the city, squeezed between industrial estates, lies a student building purposely built for accomodation, sixties style, brutalist grey architecture, corridors and landings.
The flats themselves are odd. Maximum use is made of limited space, the rooms are strangely vertical in orientation. Descending the steep staircases one comes on the right to a long livingroom, grey curtains concealing the grass and low bushes outside, somewhat with the atmosphere of a hospital or other institution. In here is a telly and beer cans.
The interior of the flat is somewhat reminiscent of the design of the lower decks of a ship, in terms of utilisation of space. The bedrooms are no more than bunks, narrow rooms almost like cupboards, just room enough for a bed and a narrow desk.
They are going to knock this edifice down. And with it all the memories therein. Invading old bedrooms, where old friends lived, looking for a girl in abandoned places who doesn't live there anymore... In industrial estates, concrete plazas, past concrete bollards, overwhelmed with dirt and decay, with every kind of rust and debris and mess. The chaos that you always thought you wanted to see is actually repellent, and you find yourself instead wanting to fix the place up...
But we are going over the wall and into the deep places, and into the creeping dirt.
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I thought suddenly of an old college I once used to attend, and had a sudden sharp memory of the outside of it, the north face of this old sixties building, dating from around 1966 when hopes were fresher and more poignant. This architecture then was called modernist. The students moved in, the lecturers too, with their black-rimmed glasses and practical jackets...
I thought for no reason of the exterior of the building, it's north wall, studded by grey windows and looking out onto its carpark bordered by an ordinary suburban road. Up in the top room when I was an art student and doing life drawing at the easel I would look out and see friends come in late. Ambling casually toward the entrance.
I thought too of that long room where we did the life drawing with its cold floor and the great dusty drawing boards in a shelf off to the side. Everything functional and well-designed. My memories dwelt not so much on the people as on the structure of the room, the shelves and the floors and the grey windows that let in the light. The setting appealed to me, perhaps only for banal reasons such as that I was younger then and more naive.
After pondering this for a long time I thought I would look at the actual building again, that actual north face which I thought teasingly somehow no longer existed. Somehow I thought it impossible for it to still exist.
I went to Google Streetview and traced the path as I walked it all those mornings up the hill and past the garage and the McDonald's and to a forgotten roundabout, past suburban gardens and council houses decorated with satellite dishes... By an arms factory, underneath a familiar railway bridge adorned with ragged weeds....
Of course when I got to the place where the college had been I remembered that they had knocked it down years ago, and put up a row of sullen soulless flats in its place. The windows of these awfully "modern" flats looked down, mocking me for my naivety, instilling in me the strange idea that the college had never existed, that I had dreamed the whole thing.
That exterior, that north face, does not even seem to exist in photographs as it was too ugly to capture, or too inconsequential. And I don't feel sad even slightly, or even surprised, on the contrary, it's as if everything is too expected and routine, but I do feel a peculiar loss, a loss which is almost entirely in me and related to me, and hardly at all in the exterior world or related to it. That strange loss, of a thing you didn't care about, weren't interested in, and would disappoint you if you still had it.... That inevitable loss of a functional unglamorous thing which nevertheless strikes you as meaningful and poignant. The kind of loss you find viewing old photographs of insignificant possessions, the sun shining in a certain spot, a fleeting look on a face now changed.
And the odd thing was that I knew all along that the building was no longer there, with one part of my brain, but I went looking for it anyway.
