http://www.newstatesman.com/200803130046
Link: New Statesman - The shock of the newish.
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"So it is especially interesting that, gradually, English Heritage has come up against heritage conservatism itself. While TV programmes and books such as Demolition or Crap Towns pander to the public horror of all things ferroconcrete, English Heritage has been rescuing some of the most controversial postwar buildings. Heroically, it even listed Owen Luder's wild, reviled Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, alas too late to save it from the wrecking ball. This unlikely bravery now produces Images of Change - a gazetteer of the recent past, as a lavishly illustrated guide to motorway service stations, shopping centres, council estates and holiday camps: the landscape of the past 60 years, and perhaps exactly the things English Heritage was formed to fight. (((Unless they've been reading J G Ballard novels.)))
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"Images of Change has a similar eerie poetry to these works, and the photographs, frequently aerial shots, take places as prosaic as Butlins, a 1960s hospital, or the centre of Milton Keynes and make them strange, revealing their peculiar geometry, their ruptures with the 19th-century country we think we know.
"(...) these landscapes appear and disappear with remarkable speed - tower blocks dynamited after 20 years, distribution sheds designed to be dismantled with maximum ease.
"There is sometimes a feeling of nostalgia and loss here, more keenly felt than it might be over the ancient monuments that are supposed to stir the emotions. The holiday camps of the 1950s, shown here as jolly panopticons, had a reign of only a decade before ease of foreign travel made them superfluous. More poignantly, the landscape of the welfare state - social housing, the National Health Service, prefabs, new towns - appears as a reminder of a road not taken: Britain as a saner, Scandinavian country with a cool acceptance of modernism, modernity and social democracy, rather than the Americanised "privatopia" of today.
"Not that this is a melancholic book. The story becomes so resonant of the traces erased, the industries made obsolete, that the contributors poke fun at it. In a section on "television landscapes", Penrose visits the former "Teletubbyland" in Warwickshire and observes how "the field was ploughed back into parkland, as if the Teletubbies had never actually existed"....
