cityofsound

David Gissen (Postopolis! LA)

David Gissen delivered one of my favourite talks at Postopolis! LA, for sure. Gissen is a historian - yet lest that conjure up a certain image - an AJP Taylor, EP Thompson, or Eric Hobsbawm, bless ‘em - he actually cuts a very different kind of figure: exploratory, intrinsically multidisciplinary, and given to speculative imagination. Gissen delivered a fascinating, illuminating and often funny presentation which utterly reconfigured ideas of preservation and historical research.

Cables

A seasonal offering. Purely by chance, I’d discovered this series of broadcast transcripts from Australia to England via Paris, dating from Christmas 1932 and describing a game of cricket. Not just any game, mind. They consist of the ‘cables’ from the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), covering the action in test matches in the infamous ‘bodyline’ series between England and Australia [more on bodyline at the State Library of New South Wales or at Wikipedia]

“Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam programs directly to the United Kingdom. The main station was situated in Paris. One of its advertisers was the Gillette Safety Razor Co. which sponsored reporting of the controversial 1932-33 cricket series played between Australia and England in Australia. These were the days before live radio and television broadcasts of international sporting events. Each day a reporter cabled very brief descriptions of play to Paris where they were transformed into full scripts which were then broadcast to the United Kingdom.”

The communications technology of the time attenuated the bandwidth available to the reporters to an almost unimaginable degree by today’s standards.

The reports are dispatched without punctuation and merely consists of two- or three-word phrases breathlessly running on after each other. But note how the action still comes through loud and clear nonetheless.

“Fine warm 50000 before toss wicket good larwood voce fastest making ball fly adopted leg theory attack virulent batsmen ultra cautious"

"bradman crudest stroke first ball bowes wild pull missed crowd bitterly disappointed england decided advantage 3/67 poor result perfect wicket fingleton 50 141 minutes grand defence riskless wearing down attack fielding admirable nothing given away”

“larwood resumed scoring slow hard toiling weather warming hundreds fainted in dense throng contest always interesting bowlers making batsmen earn every run none capable forcing scoring continually on defensive bowlers”

"one side unplaying cricket ruining game"

"oldfield struck head ball larwood staggered fell crowd hooting field crowded round after five minutes oldfield supported by woodfull walked off holding towel to head play resumed crowd still hooting"

You need a little knowledge of cricket to parse all of it - or to detect the layers of Imperial intrigue that underpin the bodyline story - but it’s fascinating to see how the technology affected communication to this extent. Although the radio broadcasts in England were subsequently altered to remove references to the bodyline controversy - the  cables mention "leg theory" rather than the "bodyline" that was reported in Australia - these raw transcripts of the cables are a supreme exercise in concision and compression. Here the content was compressed to fit the signal, and then expanded upon by broadcasters at the other end of the world. It's dependent on creative interpretation by humans, with the compressed signal only visible to the system, not the ultimate receivers.

It might also give us pause to consider how available bandwidth, politics, and business models always affects communication, and how much information might be lost in today's polynodal yet low-resolution transmissions via email and IM, Twitter and status updates, audio and video streaming and so on.

Either way, I love reading these cables. The language is crafted so perfectly, despite the constraints. They’re caught between poetry and machinery.

Some more excerpts below [all cables here]

The city is conceived of radial opposites

In the previous piece about Brisbane's traffic systems, I deployed a David Malouf quote that seemed to indicate that the city's trams were a part of an imagined urban infrastructure, resonating long after their demise, as if citizens still perceived the city to be marked up with ghosted tramlines. Here it is again:

"The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with 'invisible' (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people's minds." [David Malouf, 'A First Place: The Mapping of the World', Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]

I decided to draw this out, interested as to how that might be rendered. Taking a poetic rather than literal interpretation of the tram lines, as seemed appropriate to Malouf's idea, those radial opposites across Brisbane can be imagined like this:

What I find appealing about this is that three of the four radial opposites do appear to be like a series of sutures, binding the city together across the zig-zag scar of the Brisbane river - somewhat as Malouf described, an invisible principle that "holds the city together".

Father of modern Brisbane

Clem Jones seemed like a decent man. A dedicated republican and Labor party stalwart, he died aged 89 on Saturday 15th December 2007. The press are widely crediting him with 'building Brisbane', which is now the fastest-growing city in Australia and the 'Third Metropolis' finally forcing the traditional cultural capitols of Sydney and Melbourne to sit up and take notice.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh says Jones was "the father of modern Brisbane ... his lifelong civic contribution and love of the city of Brisbane was unsurpassed ... Clem will long be remembered for his vision and commitment to transforming Brisbane from a conservative country town to a vibrant and cosmopolitan city." Local boy and new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - another sign of Brisbane's currently rising star - said "Clem was a longstanding personal friend of mine, a great source of support and encouragement and friendship."

He may well have been the key catalyst in transforming Brisbane in the latter part of the twentieth century. The city is increasingly unrecognisable to that described by those who saw it in the '70s and '80s. Wealthy from numerous sources, a strong hi-technology-oriented industrial base, with an increasingly well-respected university and research sector, the best new art gallery and library in Australia and currently the country's most innovative architecture scene, a wonderful sub-tropical climate and handy for the jaw-dropping Queensland coast, increasingly good restaurants and fabulous local produce, a tree-covered hilly topography on which the extremely liveable suburbs sit, and with the distinctly Asian aspect that most Australian cities should have.

There is still a residual sense of the earlier Brisbane in the culture, of course, as these things take generations to shift (more on this later). The city had to come a long way too, from the frankly unbelievable Joh Bjelke-Petersen years. But the character is now orientated towards an educated, cultured, outward-looking and sophisticated city - a world away from the 'Brisvegas' that the out-of-touch in Sydney and Melbourne would still tag the city with, albeit with an increasingly insecure note in their voice.

Jones, as lord mayor for 14 years from 1961, pulled the city's socks up and set the scene for all of this. But along the way Clem Jones was also the man who pulled the trams out of Brisbane in 1969. By all accounts, no-one was particularly happy that last day of the trams, except a few of the traffic engineers.

As a replacement, Jones and his administration embarked on the vast road-building schemes that now define the modern Australian city, and all to no avail. Brisbane is horribly clogged with car traffic, no matter what. Just as Sydney is. And that, perhaps more than anything, holds both cities back from fully realising their modern vision. Jan Gehl's recently announced plan for Sydney's centre is not without its flaws - listen to his lecture from September to see where it comes from - but a pretty close version of it needs to be implemented in Sydney, and Brisbane should do likewise, though spreading the ambit of the plan over the sprawling city's outer suburbs.

As with most cities, the trams were a part of the urban infrastructure that resonated long after their demise. The great Brisbane writer David Malouf suggests that the city is still marked up with the ghosts of the tramlines:

"The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with 'invisible' (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people's minds." [David Malouf, 'A First Place: The Mapping of the World', Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]

That's such a beautiful evocation of the city's form that it seems churlish to wonder how many people today, a generation later, would sense those radial opposites. Malouf's imagery is so strong that it would defy simple quantitative measurement, and by repeating it here I'm hopefully reinforcing the image one more time. However, today's Brisbane has very visible swollen arteries - principally Coronation Drive into Riverside Expressway, and the ICB (Inner-City Bypass) - rather than invisible principles, and they appear to do little to hold it together.

Jones did what he thought was necessary - albeit advised by American planners, apparently. Certainly, someone had to lift Brisbane into the post-war period. Before Jones, many of Brisbane's roads "even those just a kilometre from the GPO", reports The Australian, breathlessly - were "uncurbed and unsurfaced dirt". Admittedly the dirt roads weren't tenable and Jones's administration sorted all of that. But in doing so, it fully orientated the city towards the car. There's an in-built prejudice against public transport around this. Jones was quoted as saying that his ideal was for the working man to be driving his own car, not catching a tram. This is where Australia looked to American values rather Mittel European or Asian, and for the worse. There are clearly spatial similarities between Australian and American cities, but I'm yet to perceive the swing back towards public transport seen across the US west coast, from the Bay Area up to Portland and Seattle (never mind New York City, which might be a special case). It's not a party political issue either; Jones was solid Labor, though his sentiment was close to Margaret Thatcher's infamous statement: "Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life."

Hear we see not only Thatcher's near-psychotic levels of misanthropy but also, crucially, her lack of long-term strategic vision. The question now is, at what point will we be saying "any man who doesn't ride a bus won't be getting to work".

Jones was far less destructive than Thatcher but either way, an entire car-centric infrastructure will now have to be taken apart, bit by bit, and reconstructed with mass-transit systems in the ascendancy. As with Sydney, that realisation is not widespread yet, and the culture is so ingrained as to actually prevent people from thinking there could be another way. The dramatic flourish in Gehl's plan for Sydney, pulling down the Cahill Expressway across Circular Quay, is described by the Sydney Morning Herald's urban affairs editor as overly "drastic and impossible".

Frankly, that's the unconsciously defeatist talk of someone who's spent too long in their city's skin, and can't think the the unthinkable. Equally, in Brisbane, it seems people can't think of another solution to near-fatal levels of individual car traffic than building more roads. Listening to Gehl's talk, they'd hear that building more roads only leads to more traffic, a pattern we've seen many times over. Almost every day in the local rag, the Courier Mail, you'll read of a simple unfortunate accident causing hours of chaos throughout a system organically interconnected through necessity rather than strategy. They even have a 'Stop the carnage' campaign, due to the increasing number of road deaths on Queensland's roads. These are all symptoms of the same spiralling metastasis you see when systems run at overload (see also Heathrow, the world's worst airport). Yet the solution offered up - despite the carnage, even - is usually tunnels, bypasses, bridges, while rail and bus services suffer from the bad management often seen when implicitly deprioritised.

Sadly, the shrill new urbanist agenda doesn't help change people's views that often. It's overly orientated towards the pedestrian, and needs to find a way of handling moderate levels of private car traffic as well as mass transit and pedestrianisation. Equally, some of those elevated road systems can be amongst the most thrilling aspects of modern cities, particularly Brisbane's Riverside Expressway (section pictured top), which is virtually a big-dipper casually sweeping out over the river. It's going to take far more imaginative campaigns than we've seen thus far - it's a hegemonic battle, ultimately - alongside serious build around mass transit systems and related infrastructure, hard and soft. And even then the strongest clear message will probably be peak oil.

A recent BusinessWeek article seems to assume that citizens have got the message:

"The size of a city determines its need for a metro system. Cities of a few million people—or those anticipating huge population growth—really can't do without a mass transit system. But cities of one or two million inhabitants can choose between a subway and a surface tramway, which costs far less but also runs more slowly."

But I'm not sure it's that well understood - simply a case of choosing between subway or tramway. Of course, there are now plans to for the trams to return to the 1.8m strong Brisbane (the person holding that 'you won't see this again' sign in 1969 was wrong), along with bus systems weaving underground and around the centre. Bike lanes are emerging, albeit threaded through some of the busiest and most dangerous roads in the country. These are usually seen in addition to road-schemes, rather than as progressive replacement. So it's a start, but hearing the currents in everyday conversation in this city, people have yet to understand the scale of change required to the city, that quite shocking sense of dismantling the entire infrastructure.

It's too simplistic to blame Jones or his administration - as a New World city boss of the 1950s and 1960s, almost anyone would have seen cars as a first order object to organise around. Only the already dense cities of the Old World were fortunate enough to have the right form for mass transit (even then Paris, New York, London, Boston, Barcelona et al did their best to slice their fabric apart with roadways, turning their backs on rivers or harbours, only to have to now re-build.) Yet even with a shift towards private ownership of cars, there was no real reason, strategic or economic, to pull the trams and light rail systems out of cities, and certainly no need to go as far as Jones or Thatcher suggested.

So. Brisbane is potentially beautiful and Clem Jones seemed like a good man. He helped shaped what's emerging as a great city, and now is not the time to speak ill of his generally valuable work. Yet it's symptomatic of the lack of understanding of the ills of the modern Australian city that few people are pointing out the flaws in building Brisbane around the car.

The city as destructive system: wildfires, Dresden and the case against urban sprawl

Since I wrote about the first glimpse of the bushfire season here in Sydney a few weeks ago, attention has switched to the south-west of the USA, where devastating wildfires continue to burn across California. While bushfires or wildfires have been a part of both areas since time immemorial (see also France, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, the Balkans, etc.) there seems little doubt that the drought attributed to climate change is exacerbating the situation. So fires both get worse and more widespread.

By chance I also happened to recently read an astonishing, sobering article on the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in the Second World War, entitled 'The Mongol devastations', by Jörg Friedrich. (Originally publishd in Die Welt, on 10 February, 2005, it's hugely enlightening on this horrific, unnecessarily brutal end to the war, amidst the post-war carve-up of Europe and Asia, suggesting that the bombing by the British and Americans was essentially just a strategic show of strength to the Russians - "the demonstration of a capacity" - using already-defeated Germany and Japan as no more than a token.)

Friedrich's article, when taken with images of the wildfires in California, and those around Australian cities in recent years, gave me pause to consider how urban form and fire are related. I don't want to use the terrible fires around California, and in Australia before them, as my own spurious token in an academic argument about urban planning. And yet I can't help but correlate urban sprawl with placing more and more people into areas consistently threatened by fire. In this, the contemporary form of the sprawling city is not only something that is bad for the city in general - you could argue that point of course, but I don't think it can really be doubted  - but also just supremely dangerous.

We're now seeing deaths, upheaval of communities, destruction of property and vast economic losses. And this is to do with the form of the city,

In Friedrich's words, in their numbing horror, we see that urban form itself, as well as the motivation of bombers, either encouraged or discouraged the flames of late-World War 2. He describes the malevolent science of firebombing developed by the allies as they studied the effects of fire on various cities. These designers - why not use that word? - attempted to create more efficient city-destroying systems. In effect, they were a form of urban planner, yet looking at the landscape, structure and fabric of the city in order to destroy rather than create. Friedrich makes clear it was planning, rational enquiry and product development, with strategists asking questions such as "How could similar death zones be made to be safer, more manageable, more cost-effective and larger?" and describing the race to the atom bomb as "the most formidable development project of all time". (Disconcertingly, you can almost perceive this stance on the RAF Bomber Command's website, in the grimly satisfied terms deployed to describe their bombing of Dresden, which they still claim to have been of military importance, running against Friedrich's well-researched counterpoint.)

A lengthy quotation from Friedrich's article:

"The fire bombing of Hamburg killed 45,000 people overnight, more than the Luftwaffe had achieved in nine months of dropping bombs on England. Only eight weeks earlier,the fire in Wuppertal had resulted in 3,000 deaths, an unprecedented figure until then."

"The fire in Wuppertal burnt in the air circulation pattern particular to enclosed river valleys. In Hamburg it was the dry summer heat; in Heilbronn, Dresden and Pforzheim it was winter snow. Tokyo was built almost entirely of wood and paper, Darmstadt of sandstone, Munster of brick. Hildesheim and Halberstadt were criss-crossed by narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, Mannheim was divided into classic quadrants, Dortmund and Duisburg were made up of sprawling 19th century blocks. The thermonuclear planners delved into the fund of knowledge left by the area bombing of the Axis powers. This was the only way to understand how individual cities burn."

"The historic fires in San Francisco, Hamburg and London had nothing in common with the procedure whereby in only 17 minutes (Würzburg) or 21 minutes (Dresden), cities were showered with hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs. These sparked thousands of fires, which within three hours became a flaming sea, several square kilometres wide. Large natural fires normally have a single source, and are driven for days by the wind. But war statistics showed that such winds played a minor role in fires caused by bombs. The real destructive power was not in the wind that drives the fire, but in the fire itself, which unleashes its own hurricane on the ground."

"Neither buildings nor people can escape the logic of the elements of fire and air. A fire starts, it sets the air in motion, fire and air form a vortex extinguishing life and all that belongs to it: books, altars, hospitals, asylums, jails and jailers, the block warden and his child, the armourers, the people's court and all the people in it, the slave's barracks and the Jew's hideout, the strangler as well as the strangled. Hiroshima and Dresden, Tokyo and Kassel were transformed from cities into destructive systems. The agent of change is the bomb war, and the bomb war is its construction site."

Of course, the 'motives' behind the wildfires and bushfires - save for cases of arson - are entirely different, being the result of systemic interactions between wind, climate and terrain. Yet this is a dynamic system and at least one of those variables has been actively altered by humankind, and by city dwellers most of all. Developing Friedrichs' notion - that cities can become destructive systems - can we see that the form of the contemporary sprawl city, 65 years later, might be becoming a new kind of destructive system?

If the early-20th century urban forms of Hamburg, Tokyo, and Dresden set up their own destruction under the extreme conditions of their time - a bomb war, in that case - the new urban form of Sydney and San Diego in the early-21st century might also be setting up destructive systems, inadvertently unleashing a similar firestorm but at the edges of the sprawling city. In both cases, the combination of urban form introduced to a new agent of change results in the hurricane of fire: in the Second World War, firebombing destroys cities, flames sweeping from the centre out. In the 21st century, the rising temperatures create tinder-dry conditions in the bush and fire attacks the city from the edges inwards, edges that have begun to extend well into dangerous territory.

In The Economist's recent piece on the wildfires, Joel Kotkin all but suggests that cities are over-extending their reach:

"Recent (fires) have caused more damage than those 30 years ago, because the population has grown and many more Californians have moved out of city centres and built big homes surrounded by foliage. “In more remote areas, you're more susceptible to fire,” argues Mr Kotkin, “and nature still has a lot of power.”

Similarly, an excellent recent documentary on bushfires on Australia's ABC Radio National makes a similar point about the "urban interface" and its new proximity to bushfires:

"The cities are sprawling outwards, into bushland, and closer to national parks. In Melbourne, it's the hills around the city; in Sydney it's the northern and southern suburbs and the Blue Mountains area. The edges of Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart are all places where the city now meets the bush head-on."

In the same programme, Naomi Brown, CEO of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council, sounds frustrated that people don't see this "bigger picture" of urban development's role in recent bushfires around Australian cities:

"They very rarely have the ability or the inclination to take a few steps back and look at the really big picture on what actually led up to these fires, what's happening with land management ... You know, why is the vegetation doing what it's doing, what is happening with land planning. You know why are structures and developments where they are. You very rarely get that big look at what the total picture is"

Ross Bradstock, Head of the University of Woolongong's Centre for Environmental Risk Management:

"You know, there's hard decisions to make because real estate is valuable, and people value their lifestyles and all those sorts of things. And to some degree you know, you can't have your cake and eat it. People can't live right in the bush, and expect to enjoy low risk of damage to their property. So there's always going to be hard choices to make about the way development is managed in the future"

I recall Barista's post of last year, describing how those fires affected Melbourne:

"Now Melbourne - ultra-sophisticated, urban, discursive, computerised, air-conditioned, internationalised - carries an elemental haze of smoke. I walk the dog on beaches that smell of hydrogen sulphide and ash. My partner Susie reaches fretfully for her athsma inhaler"

The site for ABC's Background Briefing has a series of images of new habitation in and around the Ku-rin-gai National Park north of Sydney, such as this street, sitting just below the fire-blackened trees on the skyline.

I'm currently reading David Peace's shattering new novel Tokyo Year Zero, which is set in the almost mortally-wounded Tokyo of 1946. The sense of the city in ruins, physically and psychologically, has rarely been rendered more evocatively - Tokyo is utterly defeated, on its knees - yet each image also implicitly prompts you to consider how Tokyo responded, building one of the most advanced, civilised and affluent cities of our time.

It is possible to calibrate the symbiotic relationship between cities and cultures - indeed, it's manipulating cities through the legislation of property development that has led to sprawl. What's more complex here, as with much these days, is that the imagery and problem is not rendered in sharp black-and-white contrast - a burnt-out Dresden or Tokyo - but is more amorphous, dynamically distributed and insidious. The sense of a few cities glowing at their edges, with a complex set of underlying causes, does not in itself provide enough traction for change. (Note Bryan Finoki's recent reportage from Flint, Michigan, a city largely in an advanced stage of decay, caught in the wake of contemporary economic development and struggling to respond. This slow demise may prove fatal, as opposed to the quick double-tap incapacitation of firebombing. Ironically, if the causal factors are apparently difficult to perceive until it's almost too late, the resolution of imagery has increased such that we can see the effects of these changes almost as vividly as those images of Dresden and Tokyo, and certainly from more angles; see the maps of CNN or Wikipedia. A form of City Informational Modeling - a derivation of BIM - may enable us to see - the changing city in real-time.)

So without undergoing world war, without the bomb as an "agent of change", we seem to have still developed the conditions for burning cities, through little more than avarice and a culture of individualism. It's not a time for pointing the finger at individuals suffering terrible upheaval and dealing with huge personal loss. It is a time, however, to look at the patterns of urban development - and the wider political context - that created this situation, with the fringes of metro areas the fastest growing parts of the USA and Australia. Not just enabling cities to sprawl but subsidising and encouraging them to do so, as Dolores Hayden suggests. In the context of accelerating a climate change, it has only increased the likelihood of bushfires in inhabited areas. This careless combination has already proved deadly in Australia and California.

The only good that could come from these ongoing reports at the singed urban interface would be an increased impetus to reverse both these trends and focus on re-building the high-density city, diminishing the need for a sprawl of over-large detached houses with their associated environmental cost, and thus remaining easily defensible against these natural fires.

The cities described by Friedrich were old European or Asian forms and, frankly, didn't stand a chance:

"... There were cities like Berlin that did not work right. The width of the streets, the firewalls, the abundance of greenery and canals opposed the fire-injections and responded wrong. But Dresden's narrow streets, decorative old town and wooden buildings fed the fires according to plan. The carefully selected triangle between the Ostragehege park and the main railway station functioned as a "fire-raiser". The old cities, bent with age, testimonies to the distant past, were best suited to such attacks. Freiburg, Heilbronn, Trier, Mainz, Nuremberg, Paderborn, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, Würzburg: this avenue of German history shared the lot of Dresden in these months. For the allied fire bomb strategists, the study of their material composition was a science in itself."

But San Diego and Sydney are new cities - New World cities, even - and if urban progress is to mean anything, they shouldn't really be on fire. The "study of their material composition" doesn't need to be that forensic for us to realise it's not scalable to sprawl. Taking a reductionist approach, as if we were allied scientists attempting to come up with a formula for destroying new cities, you might conclude:

urban sprawl + climate change =  destructive fires

A birth, in 13 places:13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

Read the introduction to this series

This series could clearly go on and on, but you have to draw a line somewhere. So the official registration of Oliver's birth seems a good opportunity.

This can only be done with the official Registrar at Camden Town Hall. The latter is essentially another solid 1930s building at Judd Street, opposite the scaffolding-clad spires of St. Pancras station.

It's our first trip out with Oliver in our pram, the Bugaboo Cameleon. Bugaboos are rather over-exposed in Britain and the USA - indeed, they get nicked to order in North London - but we went for it nonetheless. It's a great bit of engineering and it handles beautifully. (In no way am I sounding like a dad, right?)

The excellent Daddy Types covers new prams amidst numerous other objects it's OK for new dads to get distracted by, with detail, passion and, thankfully, good humour. The forthcoming release of the new Bugaboo stroller, the Bee, is anticipated with much the same fervour that the Second Coming might be. He has an interview with the Bugaboo boss, who speaks of his "desire to change the world, not just fill out a product line", with the Bee a product of "form integrated with function.". I appreciate that level of passion in a product. And so far, the Bugaboo is working well.

For instance, for this first trip with Oliver, we step out into what the following day's news headlines would later describe as 'TWO MONTHS OF RAIN IN JUST ONE DAY'. It's an absolute monsoon for 20 minutes, far closer to a tropical summer storm in Brisbane that England's usual light persistent drizzle. But under the Bugaboo's rain cover, Oliver is completely dry. We're soaked, but he sleeps right through it.

To Camden Town Hall, which doesn't quite have the grandeur of the great gothic town halls of a generation previous. The original layer is not a bad building - it's relatively distinguished, solid, but somewhat mundane.

It does have some lovely interior touches typical of the era, such as those also seen earlier in the older layers of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - doors, internal windows, door handles etc.

Juhani Pallasmaa has said you can tell a lot about a city by looking at its door handles. In Helsinki, it's one of the first things you notice. Handles by Holl, Aalto and others, visible from the street. In London, all the best door handles are internal. Is London an internalised city?

Inside here are some great old municipal touches - doors with Orwellian things like 'Room 7 - Citizenship' written on them. There's a delicious nostalgia in all these things, but this building isn't really of the quality to preserve; these touches are not enough to warrant it standing in the way of progress, and a more flexible, adventurous, contemporary building to represent Camden is probably required.

Others have clearly thought so too, over the years, though with variable results. The Town Hall has been adapted, with a modern layer constructed along the Argyle Street and Euston Road sides. Again, quite typical of British town halls - see also Sheffield Town Hall, with its 1970s egg-box parasite attached to the side of the gothic host. This looks similar, but unlike Sheffield's doomed extension, is still standing.

It continues to show its age inside with a haughty interior of white marble and grand staircases. The flow of this space is disrupted by a new desk in the foyer, but the functions of the town hall have changed somewhat since the staircase was envisaged. The space was still imposing enough to stand in for the US embassy in Moscow, for the execrable Val Kilmer vehicle 'The Saint'. It also features in 'Shadowlands' and 'Breaking and Entering', presumably playing itself.

The role it's playing now is that of 'Registry Office suffering a computer breakdown', so all the paperwork has to be done by hand. The details of this episode are rather dry, the only thing that is today, and we're done within 30 minutes. Oliver officially exists. And we're out, back via the Brunswick Centre, through Senate House, to Gower Mews.

And there I'll leave it. I felt the need to write something here, so collected the thoughts that felt most appropriate - how I saw some of the buildings, places and things involved in, or altered through, Oliver's birth. It's also a farewell to the area, an act of self-preparation for moving on to Australia. As such they are perhaps the most personal entries I've written here. And at the same time, it isn't the full story at all, and I'm certainly not suggesting it's Celia's story, nor is it Ollie's. They will have their own to tell, although Ollie's might be even more impressionistic than mine. Involving less brickwork too, I would imagine.

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

A birth, in 13 places:12. Bloomsbury, Central London

Read the introduction to this series

Our first night home with Oliver, and we're not sure exactly how to put him to bed without him waking. This is before the learning acquired when we're re-admitted to the Transitional Care Unit. So I end up taking Oliver on a long 3-hour walk at 6AM on a Sunday morning, back and forth around the 4 or 5 blocks of Bloomsbury that surround our flat. He's in a sling, fast asleep for most of the time.

Going over the same terrain, over and over again, even terrain I've walked a thousand times, I see it in a new light, particularly on this cool overcast early Sunday morning, with streets largely without traffic. It gives me a chance to write about the area Oliver arrives in, and that we'll be leaving soon.

I've written a fair bit about Bloomsbury over the years - on the Brunswick Centre, Senate House, Bedford Square, the London bombing, filming Batman, even the collision of 4 different types of street sign on our street corner.

We wander across to Bedford Square, a few metres from the entrance of Gower Mews. Writing about the privatisation of Bedford Square, I'd provoked a response from Mark de Rivaz, Steward of the London Estate - and our landlord, I guess. You can read it here. It's lengthy, lucid, considered, historically informed and though I have never replied to his comment, hoping others might offer a further opinion, I still don't agree with him. As one of the earlier comments notes, neighbouring public squares like Russell Square, Gordon Square and Bloomsbury Square are all well-kept and well-used all year round. The centre of Bedford Square itself is still empty of people almost all of the time. That just can't be right. When a centrepiece garden like that is kept pristine but also devoid of people, you can only assume its primary use is to lift property prices. It becomes little more than an attractive buttonhole.

The improvements to the street furniture on Bedford Square have spruced the place up no end, but there are still issues with drug users around the Square. What would really change the Square, as well as making the centrepiece public, is a more mixed-use approach to tenants, curating the area somewhat, as previously discussed. This would mean the Bedford Estates not trying to earn maximum revenue from every square metre, but seeing the betterment of the area as a goal too, balancing their income across a few high earners to offset a few different tenants that aren't charged as much. Freed of the constraints of maximising revenue, genuinely improving the area through mixed-use development becomes an achievable goal. I can't see that happening anywhere in property-obsessed London though. Besides, the Bedford family have owned the area since 1669 - when it really was all fields - and would argue they know what they're doing.

It's heartening to see one property on the Square - the first for years - applying for planning permission for conversion back to residential use. But the only other non-commercial use on the square is the Architectural Association, and that's disappointingly opaque most of the time. The AA needs to work on their public access and permeability, it really does.

One recent initiative the AA does well is a summer pavilion for Bedford Square. Last year's was fascinating, possibly derived from 3D Pythagorean trees. This year's is equally good, being a dome-like structure composed of huge sweeping wooden struts, curving up at the ends like great Wooly Mammoth tusks. Alone in the square, we stand underneath it, a limited bit of cover from a few spits of rain. It's a nice piece of work, from a project by student Margaret Dewhurst. On sunny days, the great trunks of wood become impromptu seats for people to lean back on.

Wandering across to the British Museum, I note the Great Court opens at 9AM, and pin that as our goal ... Ollie seems OK with this. Then again, he's 3 days old - what does he know? Two drowsy, punky young Americans hail me from across the street, asking for directions to Bedford Place. The girl is annoying at first, but they both melt on seeing Oliver in the sling. They stumble off towards Russell Square, heading roughly in the right direction. I see them ask for clarification from a tourist coach driver no more than 20 metres further on, having clearly forgotten anything beyond the last 10 seconds. Oliver and I turn our attention to the two fine haughty lions, imperiously guarding the back entrance of the British Museum.

Bloomsbury is physically and psychologically dominated by two large institutions, whose administrative relationships are entwined in such labyrinthine ways it's impossible to pick them apart: University College London (UCL) and University College London Hospital (UCLH). I've written quite enough about the latter in this series, and a fair bit about the former, including its complex history emerging from the University of London, in my tour of the wonderful 1930s building, Senate House, the university's administrative headquarters.

Like London itself, the University of London was poly-nodal, with multiple institutions under its umbrella. A smart concept, ahead of its time maybe. It was a network of networks, and is depicted at its simplest in a beautiful tapestry map in Senate House. Still, that's wall-sized and it's got more complex since then.

The centrepiece and focal point was always this area though, with Senate House at its heart. Its influence spreads over the entire area, though, with the end result that it almost feels like a campus. It lends the place "the character of a university town" according to Peter Campbell, in a lovely piece on the area in the London Review of Books.

This it does, and there's a remarkably placid, civic feel to the place. Even though the area around Malet Street is historically a home to protest, it's always a very genteel form of protest.

The smallish area we're walking around is marked out below:

You can see the area is characterised by squares, the university, and the British Museum, with the hospital to the left. Just out of view are the Brunswick Centre to the right, and then all of London's centre further to the left. As such, this area is perfectly placed and articulated - a "university town", with numerous perfect green squares, and almost everything else you'd need within walking distance.

Strolling through the UCL campus, we look ahead to see someone stretching, preparing for a run. There is hardly anyone else around. To our left is a small but neat extension of SOAS - the famous School of Oriental and African studies. Next to a curving 30s block, it enjoys floor-to-ceiling picture windows, with text in numerous scripts engraved on the left-hand panes, from ground to roof.

We then come to a favourite point of mine - the Denys Lasdun-designed Institute of Education building. I love this building - it's almost a megastructure. It actually picked up the gauntlet of the original plans for Senate House, which proposed a vast extension to the north of the tower. That never happened, but Lasdun's Institute of Education, opened in 1977, at least continued in the same brave, progressive vein. Though this too only completed 1 of the 5 proposed wings.

Round the back, where we are, there is what I reckon is London's Most Thrilling Staircase. It seems to rear up at you and recline backwards, simultaneously. It provides a serrated edge to this side of the building, and punctuated with holes, frames numerous great views from all angles. So thrilling is the staircase, in fact, that access seems utterly denied, with metal railings all around every possible egress point.

I suppose it might have some competition from Lasdun et al's other staircases on the South Bank. The Trellick Tower's staircase is too showy, too obvious. And I'm discounting the many fine internal staircases in London. So this is it.

I pause to consider the fact that I've made a up mental list of London's Most Thrilling Staircases. I move on, quickly.

I walk across the rear courtyard of the IoE with Oliver, and up some stairs to a podium level to nowhere. There are what I assume to be concrete plant pots built into the podium wall, sadly dry and bereft of life. Why are our finest buildings not serviced properly?

A security guard sleepily calls up to ask "What I'm looking for?" I say I'm just looking around, going for a walk with my baby. He says I'll set off alarms, so I saunter back down the steps, half-heartedly, It's a podium to nowhere - what alarms? Investing in alarms but not plant pots seems odd. The guard is good-natured though, closer to Ollie's heavy-lidded state than my inquisitive meandering - I imagine he'll be asleep too within minutes.

Peter Campbell's aforementioned LRB article centres on Russell Square, and the Bloomsbury squares in general. Though he disagrees with me about private squares - he says they're better than private gardens; I say let's have private gardens and public squares - he paints a good likeness of the reinvigorated Russell Square:

"In the centre children tease the new, pond-less fountain by dashing through the spray; flocks of parasite-ridden pigeons ease the itch as they bathe there with ruffled feathers. If you cross the square early you strike the dog walkers and the t’ai chi adepts. Later it is tourists asking the way, unable to believe that the British Museum can be where their maps say it is, and parties of schoolchildren eating their sandwiches."

Friends of mine think it disgraceful that the wiping clean of the area has also eradicated the casual and harmless gay sex that Russell and Bloomsbury Squares afforded the night. Indeed, the squares are possibly too sanitised now. But as with the Brunswick Centre, this is a fine balancing act and possibly beyond the nous of London's private developers or public councils. Or more generously, beyond the tight, property-driven framework that contemporary London allows them.

As we approach Russell Square this morning, I spot a slightly bedraggled man hopping out of the bush on a traffic island near the square, and start scrabbling around in the undergrowth, looking for something. I don't think he's an amateur botanist, though he may be looking for a weed of sorts. But probably something harder. He's harmless enough.

Also scrabbling around in the undergrowth - though you'd expect them to - are several squirrels. Seeing them frozen on the spot, barely twitching, then darting with impossible speed, then freezing again, I'm reminded of John Updike's description of them as always posing for photographs.

We head back towards UCL, past the Cabman's shelter, past the Faber building on the corner, with the brown plaque commemorating when TS Eliot worked there. Bloomsbury has an intense concentration of heritage plaques, and as we wander over to Gordon Square, via Woburn Square, we see an aggregate plaque for the Bloomsbury set - great artists, writers, economists but also purveyors of the hilarious Dreadnaught Hoax, in which a bearded Virginia Woolf fools the British Navy. Writing, publishing and a gently British political provocation infuses much of the psychogeography here.

The squares are gorgeous. What a great bit of planning this is. No need for a large park, surrounded by serried ranks of streets. Far better to intersperse the area with a series of smaller squares. I've already mentioned the private Bedford Square and the public Russell Square, but there are several lesser-known public squares - Gordon, Bloomsbury, Woburn - that are all well-used and well-kept.

Surrounding each is a quiet riot of varied architectural styles, but at its core the Georgian terrace. Campbell again:

"The homogenous domestic style of the Bloomsbury squares starts very simple (brick, with stucco ground floors and no ornament except around doorcases). Even the full stucco fronts and porches of the later 1800s are not much more than heavier make-up on the same faces. These styles still cover much of Bloomsbury like tattered wallpaper."

Indeed they do, but what wallpaper. There's a pure, minimalist grace to the Georgian terrace, which is also extremely adaptable. Campbell notes "the terrace house is an adaptable building type which can fit most needs." As with the Harley Street buildings earlier, it's an adaptive design of firm foundations, and simple, clear, boxy layers that can stand a fair bit of reconfiguring. Its clear beauty and human scale, and lack of the rich ornamental detailing that came later, also enable simple conversions.

We wander across to Gower Street. Gower Street is a bit sad, really. It was clearly a very fine London street once, but is now impossibly choked with traffic. The current incarnation of the street is defined by many useless hotels - and a few nice small ones - and even some derelict terraces, which is amazing and terrible given the location and fine building stock. There's the original RADA building, bisexual society hostess and incurable romantic Lady Ottoline Morrell had a house just opposite the entrance to our Mews, and in between the two, appropriately for a street effectively lying dormant in terms of genuine use, there's a plaque marking where the first anaesthetic was given in Britain. The street has now been anaesthetised by traffic coursing through its veins, and is going nowhere slowly, just like the cars and buses. The new UCLH dominates the top end, and Bedford Square marks the bottom end, but aside from all the blue plaquery, the only real point of interest is the excellent Waterstones bookshop at no. 82, which specialises in academic text books and has a good remainders department.

Across Gower Street, we're veering too close to the hospital Oliver's just emerged from, so we wander back, pausing only to note the lovely solid mansion blocks of Ridgmount Gardens and Gordon Mansions. British architecture has none of the lightness or permeability of, say, Pacific Asian/American equivalents, simply due to the climate. It's brick and stone, in varying degrees of grace. It is solid, sturdy and that's that, somewhat like its traditional cuisine. So these mansion blocks, and buildings like EGA, Cruciform, Senate House, IoE etc, will always symbolise much of British architecture to me.

Back around the block again, this time we note the new Birkbeck building, just behind Senate House. As with the new building opposite Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, it blends beautifully with the existing building that adjoins. Note how the tiled 'piping' at the top continues from old building to new. It's not that it's an absolutely knockout bit of architecture; just distinguished. Both of these buildings move forward - the one by EGA most of all - but not at the expense of synthesis with the existing architectural fabric. Which, frankly, probably made them achievable.

We wander through to Tottenham Court Road, which is now beginning to get busy. It's not a great street, particular at the lower end, towards Centre Point and St. Giles (which I've also written about). There are numerous interesting details to TCR, both in and on the buildings and the inhabitants, but it's in no way pleasant. So we move back towards the comparative shelter of Bloomsbury.

I realise how much I've enjoyed living in the area. I'm ready to move on, though, and it's at this point - alongside the peculiarly utilitarian block on Bedford Way - that I really realise I'm saying goodbye as well as showing Oliver around, and looking forwards to Sydney.

I think on this through all the way across to Great Russell Street, past the lovely 1957 Congress House with Jacob Epstein statue, with its "noble aspirations", according to Peter York.

Down Coptic Street, along Little Russell Street, round the back of Hawksmoor's St. George's with its distinctive stepped tower derived from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, as seen in Hogarth's etching 'Gin Lane'.

Onwards up Bury Place past the wonderful London Review Bookshop, and up and down Great Russell Street a few times, not wanting to expose Oliver to the slowly rising fumes of Southampton Row. I don't come to any particular conclusions, but given the time afforded by Oliver, I just relax into the thoughts.

This sense of time is different to that I'm used to. I'm usually cramming information into every spare moment - I'm the kind of guy who reads a magazine, with the radio on, while brushing my teeth. Here, I have nothing to distract me. Indeed, can have nothing to distract me, due to Ollie.

By now, it's nearly 9AM, and I make sure I'm around the front of the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Grabbing a coffee, we enter the building's huge forecourt and head up the steps into the Great Court, by Foster & Partners, the only part of the building that's open.

As much as I love this space, the light in here is often unappealing - a strangely dead non-white is cast evenly to every corner. Perhaps it's the lack of crisp shadow that unnerves.

Here though, virtually empty, the space does seem quite majestic. It's me, Oliver and the Japanese tourists. The latter had actually, and quite uncharacteristically, turned up 12 minutes early. They found themselves in the unusual position of having to 'hang around'. This they did by taking pictures of each other, as if to actually perform a perfect stereotyped portrait for me.

Inside, with the pale English sun shining through, we wander quietly around the empty space. I notice a spattering of discreet black marks on top of the canopy, but upon looking carefully, I can see they're birds sitting on Foster's roof. I'd never seen this before, on many previous visits when the space below had been very full. I wonder if the noise of the inhabited Great Court reverberates upwards, transforming the glass into a form of giant snare drum. We should fix some microphones to it.

In 1869, Henry James called Bloomsbury, "an antiquated ex-fashionable region, smelling strong of the last century". Yet, 138 years later, I can report that Bloomsbury feels just fine (even if bits of it do smell of various points in the last 3 centuries). We head home ...

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

A birth, in 13 places:11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London

Read the introduction to this series

Home, finally, and for good, for now. I pace our small living room, carefully carrying this little bundle, shushing him to sleep. Time begins to slip around, become fluid. I play The Necks' "Mosquito/See-Through" on repeat. As each of the two tracks takes an hour, and is composed of repetitive fragments in the first place, placing them on repeat seems like a very odd thing to do. It feels an odd use of the interface. They are almost inherently 'on repeat', structurally. "Mosquito" just sounds apt, its trickling percussion and twinkling piano possibly conducive to re-creating womb-like conditions. As far as I know. Sod all that new age nonsense of whale song and ambient electronica for the baby. Wombs sound more like Sunn O))) as I understand it. Apparently new-born babies like white noise, so I mentally reconfigure the space in the apartment accordingly, as we seek out promising areas: the hum of the fridge; the extractor fan in the bathroom; the water heater by the kitchen; we move towards taxis as they turn round outside the window. Raymond Scott's 1963 classic 'Soothing Sounds for Babies' might be investigated later, but just for fun and just for me. Our friend M reminds me that nice tasteful wooden toys are for the parents and kids love those horrible garish plastic horrors that make unpleasant noises and probably consist entirely of toxic components assembled by child labour.

For now an Aussie piano trio is all that's required. "See-through" is just as good, not least for the way the sense of space is articulated. The track is composed of great swathes of silence sitting amidst pools of shimmering noise - presumably lending the porous allusion in the title. It feels, structurally, like encountering a loose lattice of Diller+Scofidio blur buildings in an endless ocean. While Ollie is briefly asleep on my chest, I'm reading James Cook's 'Hunt for the Southern Continent' (in the beautiful Penguin Great Journeys edition), which also suggests this idea that the track might be a meandering route-less voyage, chancing upon mighty ice masses amidst a vast fathomless sea of nothingness.

Again, the sheer length and fluid formal qualities of the music distort my sense of time, proving a perfect accompaniment for this continual circuit of the room. Having lived in the same place for over 4 years, the room now becomes familiar in new ways. I see new details, and reconsider the space, just as our imminent move to Australia - meaning many belongings are now in a crate in Wembley, ready to be container-shipped across that great Southern ocean - and the arrival of Oliver has reconfigured the room, and its primary functions. What was once a wall of vinyl and art & architecture monographs is now dominated by a tall shelf of nappies, babygros, muslin cloths and a changing table. This is a good thing, but before Oliver arrived, the room was in a limbo, and felt half-naked as a result. (A half-naked limbo might sound appealing, but isn't in this case.) Now Oliver has moved in, it feels more alive than its ever been, with entirely new, and very bodily, functions. It works. But what's actually going on is that this room is suggesting the next room, which will be in Sydney, Australia. Its change in function is its last act, and as I pace around I fantasise instead about living in a Jean Prouvé Maison Tropicale, hoisted up on the hills above Bronte beach. Despite our endless circuits of the room, we're already moving on.

I will be sad to leave the Mews itself, too. Earlier, I'd carried Oliver up and down the sunny Mews, the sling pacifying him and therefore me, my free hand hoisting up a copy of James Cook, who was at that point sailing north from Antarctica, thoroughly annoyed with the lack of prospects amidst the giant icebergs.

The London mews is a near-perfect urban form for living in, certainly in this city: relatively high density but low-rise scale; a semi-pedestrianised space that safely swallows up cars, without passing traffic; capable of being spruced up with pot plants and small trees; tucked in between larger roads and streets, so generally amidst services and shops. It seems like an un-coiled version of the continental European apartment block. It's the closest thing London got to that fine form. Instead of a square of apartments surrounding a shared internal courtyard, the mews takes those same apartments, unfurls them and lays them down end on end with a shared drive. It's not quite as efficient, but close, and with similar civic qualities.

A Bloomsbury mews like ours is generally a little more functional, utilitarian that its West London alternatives in Chelsea and Pimlico. It has fewer of the wooden plant boxes and garage conversions with more garages used as storage for local businesses. The Korean grocer around the corner on Store Street employs a garage for storage here. Closer, a cleaning company called Sparkle Cleaning equips its vans with products first thing every morning. The other garages are used as parking space, and rarely to do with the flats above.

Gower Mews has been here since at least 1792. I recall seeing it on maps of the city at the excellent 'London - A Life In Maps' British Library exhibition that I visited with R+J last year.

It's clearly visible on Harwood's "PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE", from 1792. It is clearly shewn here.

But I don't think it's on Rocque's "An Exact Survey of the Citys of London, Westminster, ye Borough of Southwark, and the Country near Ten Miles round" from 1746.

There's a couple of layers of history visible in the brickwork of the Mews. One side looks Victorian - recessed sash windows, flush garage doors, and a garret-level top floor. The other looks more inter-war - metal frame bay windows, recessed garage doors, flat roof. This side could be post-war bomb damaged houses rebuilt, but the style looks slightly earlier than 1950s. It reminds my mother of the 1930s blocks in the far North London of her youth. So perhaps it is interwar rebuilding; but what bomb damage from World War 1? There was some bombing of London in WWI, from zeppelins raids. (What a romantic way to trash half a street - in a zeppelin raid. I've walked past this great plaque on Farringdon Road many times.)

Time for another quote on the way London redevelops itself, this time from Churchill:

"London is like some huge prehistoric animal, capable of enduring terrible injuries, mangled and bleeding from many wounds, and yet preserving its life and movement."

But I have no evidence that one side of the Mews was rebuilt for any other reasons than a spot of dry rot.

The Mews is sandwiched between a few great bits of architecture, on different scales. A dimpled canopy over the atrium on the Imagination building behind us, converted by Ron Herron from an Edwardian schoolhouse in the South Crescent of Store Street.

Bedford Square is to the right (I can hear the wind rustling through its trees as I type); and there's a wonderful view of the imposing Senate House in front, gleaming in the sun during the day and well-lit at night. I've written about Senate House in some depth before. I'll miss it.

It's the quietest place I've ever lived in London, despite being bang in the middle. Far quieter than Stoke Newington, Clapham, Shoreditch, Fitzrovia ... I repeat this hymn to quietness, noisily, until Celia can stand it no more.

We're right at the end of the Mews, with a view up back up the street. Perfect for people watching, and over the 4 years I've lived here, I've built up a detailed picture of who lives where, speculating as to what they do, sometimes giving them fake names I won't reveal here. It may not be surprising that 'Rear Window' is one of my favourite films. This Mews isn't that diverse for London, but it's still diverse, and that diversity is one of the things I enjoy the most about living here.

There's an opera singer a few doors down on the left. How Bloomsbury. We've often heard her warbling up and down the scales during the day. If it's who we think it is, she's pregnant too. (We can't confirm the opera singer is the person we see leaving the flat, having never seen her sing. She just looks like one.) I say congratulations to her, and she asks how long I've been in the Mews. I reply "4 years". They've been there 10 years. "The last bargain in London", she claims, smiling. (Many London conversations between strangers turn quickly to property.) They'd only noticed me recently, she laughs. She thinks that's "Very London".

Upstairs are our wonderful Finnish neighbours plus 8-month-old Alvar, who are moving to Helsinki about the time we move to Sydney. There's an American-British couple up the road have a had a baby recently too. We're beginning to repopulate central London. There's a couple of little old ladies further up. Adjoining to the left is a flat of 4 impossibly cool Japanese students, who pop out at night to smoke; glamorous in the way that only Japanese students could be, apparently with a different outfit every day ... And so on, and so on, up the Mews.

Steven Johnson has written about the social cohesion that a baby affords. As he put it, "children strengthen the connective tissue of urban streets." I don't mean to suggest that social cohesion is only possible via toddlers. Indeed it would be unutterably lazy, selfish and careless to rely on a baby to engender good civic behaviour; equally, folks without babies are entirely capable of creating their own 'connective tissue' in cities, thankyouverymuch. But it's certainly true for us that our neighbourhood has become something we've engaged with more, as Oliver approached. Our street has tilted on its axis slightly, as our lives have.

Even before Oliver, I felt more at home - actually in a neighbourhood - than at any other point in my 10-year history in London. I actually know my neighbours. The note of surprise there is very real. I've never had that in London before.

And yet I think the one of the little old ladies who lived next door to the left may have died recently. The one I used to say hello to as she peered down from her living room window. I'm not sure. There were reports of a hearse one morning, and I just haven't seen her at all recently. The picture frames are still propped up on her window sills, but the curtains aren't drawn at night. So the social binding is so loose that a neighbour can die and you don't know about it. Indeed she might not be dead. This, it seems to me, might be a condition of an archetypal contemporary central London street.

For Jonathan Raban, the anonymity of the city has been a theme through many of his books, from 'Soft City', via 'Hunting Mister Heartbreak', to his recent 'Surveillance'. It is a great pleasure of cities, the ability to lose oneself in a crowd, in a street. Equally, Richard Sennett's point I quoted earlier - learning to live and interact with strangers - is also fundamental. 'Rear Window' is poised on this contradiction between anonymous observation and visible participation. It's this fluid, homeostatic balancing act of life - it's up to you how you choose to live your life, but always in the context of others - that makes the urban experience so rich.

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

A birth, in 13 places:9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London

Read the introduction to this series

Before we're out of the amenity rooms, I have to leave the hospital, as partners are asked to, on the first night. I'm not sure why this is - are we infectious? (Possibly.) Presumably it's to ensure rest all round. Anyway, as our first night together is actually in Delivery Room 1, with me sleeping in a chair at the side of the bed that Oliver and Celia lie on, I actually leave at 06.30 the morning after, walking out of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, feeling a warm ebb and flow of emotions and thoughts that I can't place, or describe.

Rather than head home and go straight to sleep, I feel I have to mark the occasion somehow. And given my 'episode', as the doctors called it, using that appropriately dramatic term, I should get something to eat. I should also skip down the road like Gene Kelly, but it's not raining. It's actually a lovely sunny morning. So I have a full English breakfast instead, having virtually floated to Café Deco on Store Street, just around the corner from our flat.

Café Deco looks like it should be just about the best Italian-run English caff in London, but it doesn't quite cut the mustard. I like the place, but despite itself. It closes too early, and though the food is good solid greasy spoon nosh, it's nothing special. This particular morning I watch in amused horror as the 'chef' peels a pre-cooked, chilled, flattened fried egg from a clingfilm-wrapped plate covered in 7 or 8 such things, and adds that to the plate in the microwave, which has sausage, bacon and beans on it. That's not quite right. Still, with a hearty dollop of tomato ketchup, an uncharacteristic teaspoon of sugar in my tea, and on this morning, everything tastes fantastic.

I stop off next door at the newsagents beforehand, to buy 3 newspapers - again, trying to mark the day. They are of course the day after, so that doesn't really work. I also feeling like announcing to everyone in the café - about 4 workmen, also sitting outside, smoking and intently studying quite different publications to mine - that I'm a new dad, and looking forward to their hearty congratulations, men bonding over my new fatherhood. But instead I sit there, quietly eating my breakfast and glancing at the newspapers, not really taking them in, and I watch Store Street slowly wake up.

I love Store Street. It's between two hellish streets for traffic, but generally avoids any overflow. It has a row of independent shops and cafés on it, struggling valiantly against Britain's creeping homogenous high street chains. It's home to New London Architecture; Cedric Price had his offices around the corner; and the Imagination Building is a conversion by Archigram's Ron Herron.

There's a Korean supermarket which always has men sitting outside it, chatting all day, sometimes squatting on their haunches in the oriental fashion, other times propped on a pile of the Korea Times. Unlike the Anglo-Brits, these guys know how to use the street. Fopp was 20 paces away until a month ago; there's Busaba Eathai and a not-great pub; despite the late 20th century, there's an independently-run garage.

Allegedly, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Women here in 1792; it's got good trees; and you can sit outside Café Deco, on the corner of it and quietly eat a full English breakfast having just seen your first child enter the world.

Some of my happiest personal moments have been alone in cafés in cities, in the rare moments when I've had time to just sit and enjoy it. I have numerous other happy memories with others, but the quiet solitude of sitting having a coffee in a café, with nothing to rush you, is such a delicious pleasure. I remember distinctly a coffee in a café by the Tate in Pimlico about 10 years ago; a series of flat whites at Urban Grind in Brisbane last year, and many others in-between, often when I'm on business in a city overseas and find myself in some non-time in the gaps between flights, meetings, conferences. It's a complete luxury of time and space - what Will Hutton and others call 'time sovereignty' and usually apply to working patterns. It is to be grasped firmly if the opportunity presents itself. And ironically, given everyone's knowing warnings about 'never having any more time ever again', Oliver's birth offers up such an opportunity.

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London

A birth, in 13 places:2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London

Read the introduction to this series

Many scenes in Oliver's birth take place in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Obstetric hospital, which is part of University College London Hospital. As a building, it's caught between late Victorian and Edwardian styles, and sits heavy in Huntley Street, which is tucked in between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street.

It's a fairly well-known old London hospital - thousands upon thousands of Londoners will have been born there. Founded in 1866 as a dispensary for women in Bryanstone Square, it wanders across to Marylebone Road in 1872, and is housed in a new building on Euston Road, as the New Hospital for Women in 1890. Looking at the foundation stones by the entrance of this building, we see King George V's name commemorating the "New Obstetric Hospital and Residents' Quarters built by the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation USA"  in 1923, with a later engraving denoting the opening, by the Prince of Wales in 1926. (In these two stones we see two facets of the British establishment's 'special relationship' with the United States: the former enjoying the benevolence of the Rockefeller's deep pockets; the latter enjoying Wallis Simpson to the extent that he would later abdicate and run off with her.)

The hospital is named after the founder of that first dispensary, and the driving force behind the subsequent hospitals, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, after she died in 1917. Garrett Anderson was the first woman to gain a medical qualification in Britain, as well as a suffragette and then the first female mayor in Britain. What a gal. The New Hospital was originally staffed entirely by women, and originally had a broader remit across womens and children, but now seems focused around obstetrics.

My mother had her tonsils out there in 1949, and remembers being in for 2 weeks, not allowed to see her parents. Uncle Jim smuggled himself in and gave her a fountain pen as a present at the end of her stay.

I'd never really walked past it before, as Huntley Street only really goes to the hospital. The bottom end of Huntley Street is dominated by one of those lovely large mansion blocks, like Gordon Mansions, with glazed brick around the base, and then some semi-derelict old terraces. The latter seem a dreadful waste, like some of the fine but empty addresses on Gower Street, a few metres east. They may be caught in that London property dilemma: the land is too expensive to sell, with developers circling, eye-ing the space hungrily, but it's too difficult and costly to simply re-furb and re-use the dilapidated built fabric. So it ends up in limbo, neither being redeveloped or torn down. They'll rot from the inside eventually, so nature will do the demolition job for the developers.

We come to EGA for several visits - for scans, check-ups and visits with the ante-natal class - and Oliver's birth and transitional care, so we get to know the building fairly well. Inside, you can see the original layers of what was once a fine bit of architecture, but it's been chopped around over the years, ending up as the familiar mish-mash of styles and shapes that define many old public buildings in Britain. Different regimes, different funding schemes and different functional and aesthetic requirements all accrete around the building until the hospital ends up as kind of untidy palimpsest. There are floors at random junctions, peculiar illogical corridors, odd dead-ends and an internal spatial form that is entirely beyond comprehension. You just have to go with it.

In fact, it has ended up a bit like the fictional hospital that I seem to recall from an old Will Self short story, possibly in 'The Quantity Theory of Insanity', about a North London hospital that is essentially alive; long corridors unfolding as arteries and capillaries, a huge grey body-mass, slowly enveloping its inhabitants in stud walls, bureacracy and medical equipment.

EGA isn't as malevolent as Self's hospital; just occasionally confusing and a bit tatty. It's to be replaced as part of the next phase of development in the 'EGA wing' of the new UCLH building 100 metres away at the top of Gower Street, and is clearly on its last legs. Having said that, any other building this close to the end of its life would be left to rot a bit more obviously; you can't do that with a functioning hospital.

There is evidence everywhere of earlier layers of the hospital. There are some quite lovely wooden doors, crowned with semi-circular glass windows, and set with brass handles smoothed by a million hands. These appear on a few corridors downstairs, away from the patients' areas. You can find a few lovely porthole windows, including some elongated ovals. A corridor for staff, that I quickly get asked to leave, features some fine wood paneling and pigeonholes, light flooding in from tall metal windows. Here are some snaps (again, sorry about the mobile phone quality).

But the building is slowly being left behind, no doubt about it. A good way of spotting the status of a building is by checking the signage. If the owners care about a building, the signage is usually spot on, updated properly. Here, the signage is all over the place, with temporary additions stuck on with sticky tape, or propped over structural elements. The signage itself conveys the age and decrepitude of the building, sadly, with recent layers of change only registered with masking tape.

Across the road from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is the famous Cruciform building, by Alfred Waterhouse, and the centrepiece of University College Hospital for years.

I've worked in a Waterhouse building before - the glorious Manchester Town Hall. He's better known for the Natural History Museum in London - and less well known as the architect of Strangeways prison in Manchester - but all his buildings are wonderful examples of dramatic Victorian architecture, each with their own internal logic, and program suffusing the fabric of the building itself. They're proud, powerful, muscular evocations of the British Empire, standing long after the latter was dust.

The terracotta and hard red brick were chosen to withstand London's filthy pollution as much as anything else. Another choice - say, the portland stone visible in the more genteel streets west of here - would have required constant cleaning, and even then a dirty-looking hospital would've stood out in all the wrong ways. Now these choices appear to be part of a late-Victorian aesthetic; and aesthetic only, the functional choice of red brick having been long forgotten.

As with the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the interior reflects building on a grand scale - contemporary revisionists, it's worth noting it went 200% over budget - with terrazzo, mosaic and wood block for the floors and glazed bricks for the walls, and with marble for the formal outpatients' entrance. The exterior has some wonderful brickwork details and carved lettering. Unlike the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, It's being re-furbed now, a new home for the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research.

In Waterhouse's Manchester Town Hall, I remember decorative codes, hidden in the stonework, to indicate subtly what floor you're on (industrious bees for the chamber of commerce etc.) Here, the distinctive cross-shape of the building itself tells a story of its function. The Cruciform Building's logic is arranged with separate wards for particular ailments, along each arm of the cruciform. The beginnings of an understanding that fresh air, ventilation and sunlight might aid recovery meant these long, radiating wards maximised light and minimised infectious horizontal crossover, in favour of organising ailments vertically, with the open central core providing services to all. Although the windows are still far too small by 20th century standards, it lifts the building and practice out of the dark ages of medicine. As such, it's a specific entry in the development of Western architecture towards clean, open, light-filled spaces that would ultimately lead to a defining characteristic of modernist architecture, and with a specific antecedent in Alvar Aalto's Paimo Sanatorium. There's a good short history of the Cruciform building here.

Directly opposite the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital, and on the adjacent block to the Cruciform, is a fine new building. It's unlabelled, and possibly still uninhabited, but it's quite lovely, creating a new statement on an old street whilst blurring well with its surroundings. It shares the terracotta colour of the adjoining architecture, but here deployed in some gorgeous ceramic-looking shutters, rippling across the entire front of the building. These look as if they might move independently, reacting to light and heat, but despite staring at them for minutes on end, willing them to move, they don't.

I must walk past this building 30 or 40 times during Oliver's birth and it looks wonderful each time. I wish I knew what it was, but it's heartening to see something inventive and progressive built here, providing good company for the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Cruciform Building.

 

Other pieces in this series:
A birth, in 13 places

1. Scan; Private clinic, Harley Street, Central London
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
3. Active Birth Centre, Tufnell Park, North London
4. Antenatal classes; 1A Roseberry Avenue, Central London
5. Bloomsbury Birthing Centre, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
6. Delivery Room 1, Labour Ward, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, UCLH, Huntley Street, Central London
7. A&E, UCLH Main Building, Gower Street, Central London
8. Amenity Room 6, Nixon Suite, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (part of UCH), Huntley Street, Central London
9. Café Deco, Store Street, Central London
10. Transitional Care Unit, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (UCLH), Huntley Street, Central London
11. Home, Gower Mews, Central London
12. Bloomsbury, Central London
13. Registry Office, Camden Town Hall, Central London