Cranes at King's Cross, St Pancras

By John de Plume:

Today, cranes define the skyline of London’s King’s Cross, St Pancras. Their ever presence makes them as if invisible, and yet they are at once unignorable, looming as they do over the proceedings of that immense reservoir of electrical energy. Cranes express the permanent flux of the neoliberal city, the endless growth of capital accumulation made manifest in the endless building and rebuilding of the urban space. Cranes are a concrete representation of the abstract logic of capital, where construction assumes continuation not completion: accumulation with no end other than that of perpetual accumulation as an end in itself.

Each crane alone is an impermanent structure, but cranes and construction remain permanent here. Cranes announce that buildings must be built and, implicitly, that buildings must be torn down too. High in the crane cabin – that liminal space that lays claim to the acquisition of the air by the promised commerce, coming here soon – the atomised subject of capitalist modernity pulls the levers of creation and destruction. Inside or outside of the crane cabin, it makes no difference, such levers are familiar to us all.

***

John de Plume is a writer whose work explores political economy, critical theory, and the socio-spatial effects of place. He is a member of Plan C London.

The Knowledge

By Nicky Torode:

“I can’t BELIEVE we’re leaving the EU,” my 6-year-old wails like he’s jammed his finger in the electric window as we ride, back seat, in a black cab over Croydon Flyover. The taxi driver twists his head, to double-take the young oracle, and veers, fleetingly, to the left. Good job we don’t drive on the right, my inside voice says, not ready just yet, though, for cabbie knowledge. 

Wales’s gone, England too. The early morning Brexit referendum results come on the radio, in and out, sleep to waking. We slow down at the lights on the Wellesley Road dual carriageway, slicing East from West. Jake turns to stare at the higgledy-piggledy queue curling outside Lunar House. A Union Jack droops from the staff on Lunar’s identical twin, Apollo. God of twenty-two floors of grey carpet and filed prophecies, ready for second-class dispatch. Two men in high vis vests, clutching clipboards, spit out the building’s revolving door, smiles long gone. 

I smile at Jake, squeeze his hand. We’ll look back on this moment, I’m sure, when teachers will ask me when it was that I realised Jake was so special. It was this taxi ride out of East Croydon station, en route to Gatwick, gateway to the world. Well, to Guernsey, at any rate, a hometown of sorts. It was this moment, this ride, through streets edged with shiny high rises, criss crosses of tram tracks and swinging crane arms. Ding! Ding! go the tram cars. Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! go the chorus of pneumatic drills. Digging for a better future. 

How you gonna make a dream come true? Sensible sang, Croydon listened. Brutal turned pastel, beanstalks shot up even taller. Toblerone-shaped Saffron Tower, with windows of pinks and lilacs, glints in the morning sun. A giant crocus blooms again in Croh Denu, the Crocus Valley of old. 

I lean back into the padded, smells-like-new leather cab seat. Croydon, home for now. Tuk-tuk! go the drills. I stretch out, sigh. My breath on the window throws a ghost-like shroud over Fairfield Halls, South London’s South Bank. Grey walls of halls on land that’s been blessed by wayfarers to the fairs and markets of old. I’m so London, I’m so South, belts out Stormzy from the crackly radio. 

We rise up the trunk road, pass the two IKEA chimneys, long-established shrines of Valley Retail Park, and look down on a tangle of Scalextric roads at their feet. Really going up in the world. A smugness warms my chest, like I’ve backed a winner down William Hill’s. 

“Muuuuuum,” Jake says.

“Yes, love?”

“What’s the EU?”

The taxi driver, I swear, laughs inwardly. I see you, cab driver, peeping at me in your rear-view rectangle. The Palace furry dice, hanging from the mirror, bounce and bob in cahoots.

My shoulders start jiggling up and down too as we join a tailback on the A23. 

***

Nicky Torode is a born-and-fled Guernsey girl who lived in and around Croydon from 2009 until December 2016. She currently lives with her son in the lively coastal town of Hastings UK. She loves writing tales of place and has had a few shorts published (fiction and creative non-fiction). And the ink has just dried on the first draft of her novel These Are The Places.  She’s a career and entrepreneurial mindset coach and facilitator of journaling circles.

The perks of being a suburban wallflower

Milton Keynes EKZ by Dr Ronald Kunze is licensed under CC BY 3.0

By David Stoker:

Milton Keynes, situated between London and Birmingham, is frequently a punchline of a town. MK, as locals call it, has the reputation for being a bit of an oddball - if not backwards exactly, merely parochial, where weird things happen through sheer boredom, like local newspaper headlines that occasionally go viral. Given the British custom of celebrating all that is shabby (a book entitled “Crap Towns” was a surprise hit in 2003, selling 120,000 copies) it earns a chuckle more than true derision. People who live in older towns or cities that grew more organically over time balk at it. Really? You built this - here? 

MK is famous for two things: roundabouts and concrete cows. Occasionally nausea-inducing to drive on, the 130 roundabouts punctuate the vertices of its grid squares, the town’s transport arteries designed with a ruler. Visiting “H6” may be less glamorous than New York’s “40th and 8,” but such is the power of movies to elevate mere digits. The cows: at first glance they seem to be a memento of an agricultural past, a lifesize version of the cheap fridge magnets you and I collect from a city break. Yet somehow the herd is celebrated: these hand-forged Fresians were long adopted as the unofficial town mascots. Amateurish yet undeniably cheerful, the cows express a kitsch naivety and as such have earned significant affection from locals.

Concrete Cows at CMK by Prioryman is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

My relationship to MK is like one has to a gawky high school photo of oneself - familiar, with a small grimace. Or perhaps the special blankness we reserve for people we have ghosted, or - morally and aesthetically - outgrown. Having spent some formative years there, I felt lucky to have got out. My memory is of what French philosopher Marc Augé has described as “non places”: corporate blandness of airport lobbies and drab, air-conditioned conference centres, devoid of character. I would joke that the town is a giant car park with shops and houses attached. But my mind was opened by Filmmaker Richard Macer’s recent BBC4 documentary Milton Keynes and Me, which showed the idealistic vision behind the project. Luxurious, quasi-socialist, grand meeting places were planned, open to all, flattening social hierarchies. So I got thinking about Milton Keynes and me - was it so terrible? How did it shape my character?

Britain’s newest town built from scratch was founded in 1967. But idealised urban planning has a long history: in the Renaissance, symmetrical, fortress-like, pentagonal cities were drafted, intended to represent the Platonic ideal of a city. Bauhaus pioneer Le Corbusier boldly described homes as ‘machines for living’ that he believed would eventually have a transformative effect on human behaviour. As their fame and reputation grew, Bauhaus visionaries were soon designing, if not whole cities, then large estates. Yet social problems soon emerged in these concrete palaces, from places like outer-Amsterdam estate De Biljmer; to Glasgow’s high-rises, and the housing ‘projects’ in the US. Many were torn down. One infamous block came down in only 20 years, such was the human misery its misguided design caused.

To ask whether MK’s design is equally misguided needs a caveat: it was softer from the start, more modest, less stark. MK, despite some brutalist centrepieces, didn’t go full modernist to its core - you might call it twee-modernist. From above, within each grid square, instead of a spray-painted, hatch grille of harsh hexagons, street designs look more like a doily dusted with icing sugar, relatively benign. No rows of communist-style blocks - though there are some foreboding low-rise 1970s estates - (round the corner from our house was a series of long, dark-chocolate-bricked, triangular prisms, twenty houses deep) - but from the 80s onwards house building was firmly conventional, even ‘checkbox’, what have been dismissively called ‘Noddy houses.’

And misery, what misery exactly? In controlled, over-regular environments, we feel penned in and our senses dulled. One of the psychological imperatives of humans is to make their mark on things. Notably, entire sprawling MK estates of detached houses shared a common floor plan and exterior. I sometimes imagined locals would need to count the number of turns they make left or right upon driving home, such was the difficulty of recognising one’s own house. A car aerial, one can put a brightly coloured ball on - not so easy to festoon a house for distinctiveness, at least outside of the festive season.

Suburbia has its pains for any teenager and I was no different: I wanted ‘scenes’, a ferment, the accidental, to feel legitimately part of something bigger. Brought together by daily coach-rides to my high school, my teen friendships were a constellation of satellites and in the evenings we socialised on MSN Messenger, discussing how to impress girls without many opportunities to try it out. My mates had sports - MK has the national badminton centre - and I had my books and music. I organised my collections as an antidote to life’s anxieties and meaninglessness, self medication. It was my spiritual way out. Weekends saw us at Centre MK: Europe’s longest shopping centre was our temple, our promenade, our place to go. It wasn’t much: MK could be described as a sad Los Angeles without its Vegas. But it was ours.

Milton Keynes Centre Queens Court by Cnyborg is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

There is a real eeriness to MK. If you visit, you will feel it. Away from the roads it is quiet - too quiet. Early settlers had a counsellor appointed by the development company to make sure they weren’t going loopy. It was just a couple of streets at first. Coming from my current London neighbourhood I sometimes feel like I’ve wandered onto the Truman Show, but with no-one watching. Connection suffers in towns built at the scale of the car - the distances were just too far to allow chemical reaction. A social coarseness can easily creep in like bindweed when people don’t mix enough, aren’t given proper meeting places. To create chemical reactions in an area too big without enough particles, you must add heat.

Is it too harsh to say that planned towns are doomed to make life boring and lonely? It feels like one priority, living space and affordable home ownership (it was originally designed to alleviate urban crowding in London) was pursued above all others. The privacy of one’s tiny castle. And on one level, it succeeded fully in improving the material standards of its residents. Notably Milton Keynes’ original vision was only incompletely realised - a huge cultural district was planned and scrapped. 

And there was beauty amidst the boredom: cycling up to the concrete cows with a mate and sitting on them, off past ruins of an abbey, past lakes and past pub lunch denizens. In pre-teen years there were some local excitements: I remember being confronted by estate kids. These boys, though looking back, so obviously deplete of love, stability and material resources - had a physical rough and readiness that I found exhilarating. The adrenaline you feel when you might be put in a head-lock for no reason. Their desire to explore places we weren’t allowed to go. 

In some ways, MK occupies an “uncanny valley” between utopia and dystopia. But it was not all bad, a grey life. Actually it was quite green. Last time I went, MK felt slowly better - more ethnically diverse. There is a new art gallery, sheepishly hopeful, an outpost of bigger dreams. If I could write to myself aged fifteen, I would reassure my younger self that not all places suit all people. So don’t worry. Cultivate your own curriculum and throw yourself into connecting with people, even if it seems pointless. I wish MK’s current teenagers well. I hope souls’ wildflowers can grow on its roundabout verges. 

Timbold Roundabout, Milton Keynes by John Winfield, is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

***

David Stoker is a writer, facilitator, and communications specialist. He has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and now calls London home. He has worked as an analyst in the nonprofit and public sectors, a policy researcher and an educator of children. His writing has appeared on Citizens Advice and the UK Cohousing Network, and he has performed poetry to Sunday Assembly London. His other interests include accumulating more books than he could ever read, painting watercolours and building secular community.

Where the sun sinks and is caught

By Kenn Taylor:

The city has its grids
This is one where the sun is absorbed

The disc itself fades
far off in the distance
behind towers
behind seas
Here though,
bookended by two busy roads
of bars, restaurants, entertainment halls
Are running
as warps to their weft
smaller streets 
Taking you up and down
one of the city's few hills

A rare space of peace in the city
Quiet streets
some still Georgian
cobbled, mewsed
Punctuated by pubs nestling in corners
Pubs which give it lifeblood
Boxes of energy
in otherwise
often silent
throughfares 

This is one of those places in the city
though,
where the energy lies buried
waiting to be dug up

All the faded red brick
Cracked paving stones
Black painted iron
Even occasional marble
and contemporary pre-fab
capture the sun as it retreats 

As the gold and red bounces off surfaces
Reflects in dark glass
and double yellow lines
Brings brief heat to alley beer gardens and
casts shadows
long and lean 

Sweat pricks brows nearing the top
High enough to watch the disc
slide away from view
Leaving only the vast
blood and honey glow

As you look back down the
long straight vista
and up beyond it
to the distance
the buildings step down beneath 

That energy though
flowing through the streets
warp and weft
The ghosts of dwellers and idlers,
prophets and priests,
of the past 
Remains even after dark 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and creative producer with a particular interest in culture, community, class and place. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and City Monitor to Caught by the River, Entropy and Liverpool University Press.
www.kenn-taylor.com

The Largest Mud Building in the World...

Photo: Mud Mosque, Mali – Mike Manson

By Mike Manson:

I arrived in Djenne as the Sahara light faded. Twilight was quick and grey, the air heavy with desert dust. The mosque, said to be the largest mud building in the world, sits alongside what was now an empty market square. Squat towers and a minaret were outlined against the grey sky. The pale light flattened the features. I was excited by the obvious energy of this powerful building. 

Djenne

Dotted along the milky Niger from Mopti to Kabara - the tiny river port that serves the legendary Timbuktu – are several intriguing village mud mosques. These structures are classic examples of Sudano-Sahelian architecture, an eco-friendly style of building characterised by the use of mud bricks and wooden support beams that jut out of the walls.

The most splendid mosque of all is in Djenne. The building stands like a castle on a rise overlooking the town’s market square. Djenne, an ancient flat-roofed adobe town, is built in a loop of the lethargic river Bani, a tributary of the Niger.

After a night in a straw-roofed adobe hut I was eager to explore. I got up shortly before dawn to avoid the heat. The market traders were already setting up their pitches of vegetables, second-hand clothes and piles of pungent dried river fish. 

Since 2007, when a fashion photographer disrespectfully held a photo shoot in the mosque, non-Muslims have been barred from officially entering this holy structure. However, as I walked around the building admiring the construction I was quietly approached by a guide who, for a small contribution, offered to slip me in through a side door.

The ochre coloured walls of the mosque are buttressed and pierced by spiky wooden struts. The roof is supported by ninety gargantuan pillars making the prayer hall akin to an indoor maze. There are no windows. Shafts of dusty light shine from the roof through small ventilation holes which are covered with ceramic caps in the rainy season. Adjacent to the main building is a large courtyard surrounded by six metre high mud walls. 

Photo: Djenne Mosque, the largest mud building in the world – Mike Manson

Although the present structure is only 100 years old, it sits on the site of earlier mosques dating back to 1280.

Sun dried mud is one of the oldest known building materials. Adobe building (the name is Spanish for mud brick) requires few tools relying on material as local as you can get. The shape of a brick is universal - the width is half the length, so it can be used side-on to add additional strength. The tools of the trade may be simple but the skills required constructing adobe buildings are complex. In Djenne, the adobe masons train for an apprenticeship that can last for as long as ten years. The apprentices are also taught secret spells that protect the buildings.  

There are a number of possible approaches to the construction largely governed by what is available locally. The simplest technique is to build-up gradually layers of clay to form walls. To obtain the optimum combination for strength, the raw earth is moistened with water and artfully mixed with straw, dung, animal hair, small pebbles and any other suitable materials to hand. Some adobe buildings will have a supporting wooden frame, others are constructed with an unreinforced raw mud mix. A water-tight roof is essential to prevent the building from being washed away. The roof will consist of roughly hewn timber logs covered in clay. Flat roofs will have wood, pottery or tin drainage spouts. If grass or reed is available a pitched thatched roof is an option. 

In villages I saw bricks drying beside the mud pits from which they had been excavated. Mud bricks, shaped by hand or formed in wooden moulds, are left to dry in the sun. Unfired, the bricks are then laid and cemented with wet mud. To offer additional protection the wall may be covered with a mud based plaster. Before construction begins a text from the Koran will be read.

Photo: Unfired mud bricks are left to dry in the sun – Mike Manson

Aside from the use of local materials, the benefits of adobe structures are that the interior is warm in winter and cool in summer. The buildings naturally breathe; in recent cases where waterproof cement has been applied to the exterior this moisture can be trapped, which adds to problems of damp.   

There are, of course, limitations. Walls necessarily have to be thick and doors and windows small; ornamentation is basic. The biggest threat to adobe buildings is rain. Unlike fired bricks, which are hardened and hold their shape even when damp, mud bricks quickly return to their original form when exposed to rain. Over the years, if not properly maintained, unfired bricks melt back from whence they came, leaving merely a hillock on the landscape.  

In Djennne there is an annual festival when the town comes together to repair the mosque. Mud is mixed by foot and handed to agile youngsters who climb the projecting struts and pat on a new protective layer.

The oldest building in Ghana

Other fine examples of Sudano-Sahelian mosques are to be found in the North West of Ghana. Several years later I visited Larabanga, whose mosque is a surrogate Mecca for Ghanaian muslims.

Photo: The whitewashed Larabanga Mosque, Ghana – Mike Manson

I paid my respects and a handful of cedi to a sleepy mullah resting in the shade of a tree. Excitable youths escorted me down a lane. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the serene whitewashed mosque, sheltered by a huge tree, is said to be the oldest building in the country. It once stood alone in the sandy sub Saharan scrub, set in its own low walled enclosure for outside worship. Flat roofed huts have grown up around, so now it is in a back street. 

The uneven organic form of the building - low, squat and punctuated by irregular triangular buttresses - is captivating. Scraped from the earth, supported by rare and precious timbers the mosque is built on a simple wooden frame. The ends of the supporting, uncut, beams extend beyond the walls providing useful props when the mosque is repaired after the rainy season. Two pyramidal towers, a mihrab which faces Mecca and a minaret, are capped with plastic orbs. Traditionally these finials, as in Djenne, would have been ostrich eggs. 

The surrounding streets were dirty with animal dung and plastic rubbish but the yard is clean, swept gracefully by a woman with a long handled nylon broom. The Larabanga mosque is entered through a low, 5 ft high doorway. As your eyes adjust to the dim light, the impression is not of a room but of a series of interconnected passageways. Because of this only few worshippers are able to directly see the iman. Uneven steps at the back of the building lead up to a stumpy minaret and a gently cambered flat roof to allow drainage. 

Although there has probably been a mosque on this site since the thirteenth century - the age of the present structure is open to debate. Certainly the Larabanga mosque has recently been extensively restored by the World Monument Fund after the mihrab and minaret were on the verge of collapse after a severe storm.

Over the years most of the mud mosques in Ghana have been replaced by more substantial brick buildings; in 2018 just eight of these Western Sudanese style mosques remain.

In these eco conscious times these organic buildings are about as environmentally friendly as you can get. The building materials - mud, water wood and dung - are local and biodegradable. They leave hardly a footprint on the landscape.

***

Mike Manson is a writer and historian who lives in Bristol, England. His most recent book Down in Demerara (Tangent Books) is set in Guyana.

Postcard from... the Kelso Hotel

By Fiona M Jones:

I have seen these stairs in one of many dreams: old-carpeted and awkward, all in different directions and never a full flight together. Hardly a room shares floor with another as you climb a little, step down, turn to find yourself above an entryway or down in a strange narrow yard recently wooden-decked. You find yourself neither indoors nor outdoors between high white windowed walls, followed by an archway too low now for horse-drawn gig but surely never meant for a door.

In my dreams every building is like this: old and idiosyncratic, mazelike, defying rectangular expectation, atticked and cellared and easy to get lost in—as though in books or dreams or ancestry I lived in such places and can never quite get used to architecture that makes sense.

It comes almost as a surprise that the hotel rooms boast space and light and all mod cons, and ensuite shower and a huge TV. One single mid-ceiling beam leads me to wonder if this once stood as two smaller rooms. The corded-casement windows are the oldest feature inside, but younger than the building itself by two or three centuries at least.

Noise from the small hotel bar filters up through the floor, but Kelso is a quiet town and the mild revelry of its Saturday night dies down early. From the street below our casements the last late vehicles rattle over cobblestones before night deepens into peace. We are staying one night here in Kelso, and it is not enough. We have walked beside the river, visited one restaurant, sampled a local micro-bar—and already we start planning our return.

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Edgework Artist Profile #4: Andy Day

‘Tjentiste II', 2015 by Andy Day

As part of our collaboration with Edgework an artist-led cross-disciplinary journal and store with an emphasis on place, we are running a series of monthly profiles of the artists here on Elsewhere. The fourth artist in our series is the photographer Andy Day: 

Andy Day's work examines the body’s relationship with the built environment, wilful misuse of architecture, subversive practices, appropriation of space and place, edgework and social interaction. Often, he works with climbers as they deliberately misinterpret architecture, finding new uses for both public and private space. 

Andy Day comments: ‘Practitioners of buildering deliberately misinterpret architecture, finding new uses for both public and private space. The built environment presents opportunities and climbers bring investments of meaning to aspects of the city. A playful recoding is achieved; imagined futures are enacted and recorded, and the praxis produces a fresh set of urban features. For a brief moment, a ledge becomes a crimp, a protruding brick becomes a side pull, a drainpipe becomes a layback. Routes otherwise unknown and unseen come temporarily into existence. There is a unique appreciation of mundane features with the geometries and textures suddenly containing potential for adventure and embodied encounters. These physical interventions radically insert the body into the urban landscape, bringing alternative meanings to the city, and making it a site for autotelic experimentation and earnest play.’

'Grant, University of British Columbia I', 2014 by Andy Day

International travel has informed much of Day’s work. He is a participant-observer in the international parkour scene and documented the rise of parkour photographing its communities in London in the early 2000s. He continues to play a role in shaping its visual culture today. Notable works include ‘Former’, a series of photographs taken in collaboration with parkour athletes from Serbia and Croatia at Tito-era monuments across former Yugoslavia.

Day will take over the Edgework Instagram account from 28 October – 3 November and share images from his recent exploration of three Sound Mirrors (also known as Acoustic Mirrors or Listening Ears) situated on the south coast of England. 

The takeover marks the launch of Day's new limited-edition print 'Sound Mirror' is available to pre-order from Edgework here. 

Andy Day on Edgework
Instagram
Website

Dispatches from Olsztyn: Olga Tokarczuk’s Chair

By Marcel Krueger:

This year Marcel has been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and until September he is living there, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to his official translator a.k.a. Marcel’s Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But he has also been writing some  irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog: 

In an interview with the Calvert Journal last year, writer Olga Tokarczuk expressed her shock about the age of the furniture that she discovered on an old Scottish estate where she stayed for a writers’ scholarship, some of it dating back as far as the 16th century. “We don’t have such a stable reality,” she said. “Poland is in the central corridor of Europe.”

This is a notion I concur with, living on an island. While Ireland has and had its fair share of violence and tragedy over the centuries, it often feels as if more objects and places have been given longevity, by fate or coincidence. On my street in Dundalk I have the bell tower of a Franciscan abbey built around 1240 AD, and the last time the building has seen targeted violence was around 1315 AD, when invading Scots under Edward the Bruce burned it and killed 23 monks. There are Victorian post boxes strewn around town that were erected in the second half of the 19th century and are still in use, the royal insignia clearly visible under the Republican green paint applied after 1921. There are plenty of hundred-year old tables and chairs still in use in households across town that are not in a museum.

It is different in Olsztyn. Here the tragedies and invasions feel more numerous, the past more unstable. Last week I walked around Park Jakubowo with radio journalist Alicja Kulik, and we talked about melancholy and what Olga Tokarczuk said in the interview. For me, the park provided an almost perfect cross section of the horrors that have visited the city, and I didn’t have to go back to the Middle Ages to find them. The park was first established in 1862 as part of the expansion of Olsztyn from a small provincial town to one of the main cities of the area thanks to Prussian railways and army barracks, and over the following years saw the erection of a panorama restaurant, a dance hall and tennis courts. 

Today it is a pleasant place to wander around in, with a small lake, playgrounds and tall trees providing shade in summer – the oldest tree here is an oak tree, 28 metres high. But even here the currents of history are visible, mostly through the buildings and memorials. The large green area across the street from the park used to be a Protestant cemetery that was closed in 1973 and turned into a park. The small neo-Gothic red-brick chapel that stands there was built in 1904 and is today the Orthodox Church of the Protection of the Mother of God. Right next to it is the memorial to Bogumił Linka (1865 -1920), a social and nationalist activist who campaigned for Warmia and Olsztyn to join the newly created Poland at the Versailles conference, and who was killed by a German militia during the 1920 East Prussian plebiscite. The memorial was created by sculptress Balbina Świtycz-Widacka and erected in 1975. Maybe fittingly so: back across the road, in 1928 the citizens of Allenstein erected the so-called Abstimmungsdenkmal, the memorial to the result of the plebiscite where the majority of the inhabitants voted for remaining in East Prussia and the German Reich. Together with a similar memorial in Malbork and the Tannenbergdenkmal Olsztynek it was one of the main nationalist memorial sites in East Prussia.

Across the street from it is a remainder of what extreme nationalism can result in: here lie those killed by the Nazis. Some of the people buried here were patients of the sanatorium in Kortau (location of the university today) and killed by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia programme, some were killed in sub-camps of the concentration camps across East Prussia. The remaining patients, staff and refugees that had gathered at Kortau were massacred in 1945 by the Red Army.

Back in the park, the Abstimmungsdenkmal was replaced by another memorial in 1972, a monumental slab commemorating the ‚Warmian-Masurian Heroes of the National and Social Liberation‘ created by local sculptor Bolesław Marschall. Down the road from the park, at the end of nearby Sybiraków street is a memorial to those Poles taken to work at the GULAG and forced labour camps all across the Soviet Union. It lists the places the people were sent to, among them Sverdlovsk in the Urals (Yekaterinburg today), where my granny was also sent from her farm on the outskirts of town.

All these tragedies and horrors, and some people always trying to claim them for political gains. But I think there is a better use for the past and what it leaves from the people that were here before us. As Alicja and I continued on through the park, we walked past one of the playgrounds were a group of young children were playing noisily, the sun was shining and the park was beautiful. We stopped next to what looked like an old unused fountain, a stone bowl now empty of water but still looking beautiful. Alicja said that ‘maybe this is our version of Olga Tokarczuk’s chair’, and I think she was right. This then, perhaps, is a better way to look at the past. Regardless of who created it, we should be able to share the good things, without jealousy and hatred. A German or Jewish or Polish or Russian sculptor might have created the fountain, but I don’t know if this is relevant. It’s a beautiful old fountain in a nice park.

Dispatches from Olsztyn: The House that Erich Built

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

This year, I have been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and until September I will be living here, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by my local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But I will also write irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog.

Erich Mendelsohn had a skewed relationship with his hometown. The man who would become one of Germany's most prominent inter-war architects was born into a Jewish family in Allenstein in 1887, as the fifth of six children of Emma Esther (née Jaruslawsky), a hatmaker and David Mendelsohn, a shopkeeper. The family home was situated in the old town (just one bloc down from where I'm living at the moment), and Erich went to the nearby humanist gymnasium. But from there he went to Berlin and Munich to train as a merchant and study national economics, but soon switched allegiance to architecture and began studying his profession at the Technical University of Munich in 1906.

Photo: Erich Mendelsohn, cropped from an image donated by National Library of Israel to Wikimedia Commons and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

From there, he went on to a stellar career as one of the most visionary architects of Germany: first working as an independent architect in Munich, then after the First World War opening his practise in Berlin which employed 40 people thanks to such iconic buildings like the Einstein Tower in Potsdam, the Schaubühne in Berlin or the hat factory in Luckenwalde. He even designed whole neighbourhoods like the WOGA-complex at Lehniner Platz in Berlin, and together with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius founded the influential progressive and humanist architecture group The Ring. Erich also travelled extensively, often with his wife Luise: to Palestine (where Erich built a hydroelectric power station), the Soviet Union, the US.

He did rarely return to his hometown. What he did do here however was to realise his first ever project: the Tahara house of the Jewish community. Commissioned when Erich was still studying in Munich and completed in 1913, the Bet Tahara (a place where the Jewish deceased are prepared for burial) was built as a component of the Jewish cemetery of Olsztyn and also came with a second building designed as the residency for the cemetery's caretaker. The building showed many of the organic-looking characteristics that made his later buildings stand out, and came with a fine tiled cupola, while simplified geometric elements around the main hall and specially designed lamps showed the influence of Art Nouveau and expressionism.

Photo: Marcel Krueger

After 1933, Erich and his family emigrated to Palestine, London and subsequently the US. He died in San Francisco in 1953.

Many other Jews from Allenstein did not survive the war: in the summer 1942 the Germans deported them to the Minsk Ghetto and the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Jewish community ceased to exist, but the cemetery and Erich's building remained. After the war, it was used by the new Polish administration as a magazine for the municipal archive, the headstones for building materials and the cemetery slowly turned into an unofficial park used by the neighbours (my own grand-cousin, who lived in Olsztyn until 1961, remembers using it as a shortcut often).

Today, Olsztyn is rightfully proud of its famous son, also because his building is accessible again: in 2005, the Borussia Foundation (Fundacja Borussia) initiated the reconstruction of the building. Borussia is a group of local writers, artists and teachers founded in 1990 and dedicated to the research of East Prussian heritage and cultural dialogue (and one of my main partners in the city). The restoration project was realised with the support of European Founds, and the building and the adjacent cemetery were acquired by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. Since 21 March 2013, the 126th anniversary of the Mendelsohn's birth, the building has been used as a center for intercultural dialogue by Borussia Foundation and was named Mendelsohn House (Dom Mendelsohna) in memory of Erich.

There is however another instance that might symbolise Erich's skewered relationship with his hometown: in 1943 he collaborated with the U.S. Air Force to build a "German Village", a set of replicas of typical German working-class housing estates and other building types, where the effects of incendiary and other bomb types could be tested. In this way, Erich contributed to the Allied war effort in the way he knew best. And even though Allenstein was never bombed during World War 2, I wonder if he thought about his hometown and its fate when he designed the buildings to be bombed, and about the first house he had built there.

Passages / Transambulare

By Anna Evans:

The passage is a city, a world in miniature.
– Walter Benjamin

Our walk back through the city, in the fading light, when everything starts to look different. We take the Metro upwards, with the idea that we can descend back towards the centre via a series of steps marking our route. I am charged with navigating streets unknown to me: guesswork, anticipating the disorienting effects of the darkness. Already, it begins to fold over us, obscuring the paths we take, bending downwards through the lit city streets.

You expect the secrets of the streets to unveil themselves like a map, as if you could look at them from above; but they only come step by step, there is no panoramic view.

It is at this time of day that the city begins to reveal itself. When street lamps are lit, exposing walls and the narrow passageways between buildings. The lights illuminate brightly so that the wall seems cast in yellow stone, and the shadows of overlooked corners steal away to find new hiding places.

The shutters suggest a neglected abandon, broken and crumbling. For a moment I am mesmerised, drawn inwards to claustrophobic interiors, the living darkness; concealment of unspeakable shadow. Echoes of the uncountable possibilities of the concave life of the city.

Out on the streets daytime is retreating, furtively, while the night is lit up like a museum display. Steps leading upwards, and at their base the silent scream of graffiti on walls. Unabashedly colourful, it becomes a mural, taking its place within the narrative of the streets.

As we walk, you identify one of the symbols that mark the famous passageways, the lion’s head, and opening the heavy wooden door we enter, perhaps there is a passage through. At the entrance I take a photograph…

***

It has been a day of wandering streets, drawn into courtyards and entrances, seeking glimpses of interiors, arches and vaulted ceilings. The traboules, the network of passages between buildings, crossing through the streets of old Lyon.

When the city was occupied in the Second World War, Resistance fighters used this system of passageways to evade the Gestapo and as meeting or drop-off points. Perhaps this is why they feel underground in some way, like stumbling upon the unseen and hidden side of the city. An in-between space, they suggest undercover operations, secrets and trespass, a code you have to know about; off the map.

They are a passage through where it looks like there is none.

***

The photograph shows a series of staircases lit up, rising to the top of the building. Railings ascending, the stairwells connect the floors, crossing sides and linking them together. The stairway exposed, ironwork and stone pillars; it is as though one partition, one side of the edifice has been removed, like a doll’s house.

In the photograph, the yellow light is eerie; it accentuates murkiness and incandescence. The ascent of the stairs a gradual slant upwards, shadowy and bending towards the reflected cast of iron railings. Lit up, haunted space. Through the closed door the city continues, spilling its inside into the outside. It is like seeing what usually takes place under cover, behind the walls of the building. Like an undercover car park, subterranean and suggestive. The illusion of mystery; what it looks like when no one is around.

Looking at the photograph, I notice the figure again; remembering how entering the passage had seemed like an intrusion, into a space we thought was empty. In the way that cities have always that possibility of an encounter, in passing by or meeting another, in crossing over. Footsteps following onwards.

In the contrast between bright and dark, the figure both blends in and is exposed. Like a shadow emerging from the walls of the building, ghostlike, and appearing only as the photograph is taken. An apparition. An echo of the light and the shadow. As if the figure is both there and not there.

It is the stillness of the figure that strikes me now. It is as though they have been sitting a long time, on the stairs, outside of laws and history. The lit cigarette, like a pause. The brightness of the light making a silhouette. The smallness of a human figure positioned in space and timeless, against the city streets. A witness to all the hidden and secret encounters, and to everything that might take place in a passageway.

***

Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction.