Church and King

The point where Church Street spills into the roaring Roman Road of Edgware appears an exemplar of urban dysfunction and a crushing critique of London’s particular brand of anti-urbanism. Yet, this is a cityscape of infinite complexity, one of the most perfect ciphers for the contemporary city in which globalisation informs the street in every conceivable way.

This is the view from that corner. The mouth of the  street faces a huge hoarding and the behemoths of Paddington Basin’s expanding fringes. This is the strange world of Paddington Green, the city’s de facto high-security police station, once the monopoly of the IRA, now a drop-in shop for surveilled Muslims but also the Clash’s Westway, a stream of imagined modernity flowing through the city. Church Street itself is delicately framed in perfect symmetry by a pair of traffic lights and the guard’s tunic colours or a matching pair of ‘no entry’ signs.

The stucco Victorian terrace survives, set back from the single storey shopfront extension of what was once a mutualised building society but has now morphed into the Spanish Banco Santander, its flame logo looking deliciously like a mangal or grilled meat sign. ‘Stucco?’ said Groucho Marx of Florida’s real estate boom, ‘O can you get stucco’. The flush façades, stripped naked, caked with plaster like bad foundation, turn the corner into a mess of plastic shop-signs and ads for global phone  cards, this new calling-home industry announced on its ad-hoc streetside boxes, the slightly more legal equivalent of the sharp’s three-card-trick crate. The garish signs segue perfectly into the dumb pale façade of the Tesco Metro, one of Britain’s few remaining home-grown global brands. The architecture which frames this entrance to the world of Church Street is defined at every conceivable scale. First, the resilient Victorian fabric which has survived absurd traffic schemes and bombs, then the humane, Scandinavian-influenced social housing of the immediate post-war period, which modestly retains pitched roofs and window surrounds, a few ghostly remnants of northern European tradition. This gives way to more heroic applications, the ribbons of modernist housing, determined in their horizontality to  create bands of social intercourse – street, canopy, terrace, elevated accessways. This is good, solid, self-effacing urbanity; these near invisible structures prove easily capable of handling bridal-wear shops, grocers and caffs, permeable enough to accommodate the Middle Eastern lifestyle, lived more on the street than in the shop, yet robust enough to remain secure and to adapt. Then this mid-moderne gives way to a less humane version, brick cliffs and towers begin to disperse the street, breaking up the plan though their sheer mass.

But between the housing and the pavement emerges another language, an architecture of the in-between. It is this articulation of street furniture and mini-architecture which gives Church Street its particular expression. The modernist blocks to either side set a datum for the street. Fascias are capped with concrete canopies so that the garish plastic lettering doesn’t infect the dignity of the housing above. But equally, these devices create shelter and produce a humanised scale which chimes with the stripy canvas coverings of the market stands and the barrows. This correspondence between building and the itinerant architecture of the market creates a mid-scale which is what makes this a part of a real city. But the scale of this world is not limited to the market stands. There is a complex ecosystem of things positioned at this scale. There are three different species of phone box, from the enclosed and glazed to the simple side-canopied. The internationalism and relative poverty of parts of the area and the proliferation of prostitutes’ advertising cards (clients presumably do not want to have numbers logged onto their mobile accounts) means that the phone boxes are in greater use than they are elsewhere, where they have become largely defunct. 

A public toilet is dwarfed by the cliffs of social housing which frame it. Its half timbering is a touching reference to a bucolic, village green Englishness. The last resort of mock Tudor applied to that most English of building types. The streets are further flanked by bubblegum dispensers, by mobile street signs, by historicising bollards and signposts which bear no relation to the post-war welfare built landscape in which they stand. 

Church Street gentrifies rapidly. The market stalls, some of which sell chandeliers, others seemingly attempting to sell spangly belly dancing outfits to the hijab-clad Muslim ladies, peter out and give way to antique modernist furniture shops and the indoor arcade of Alfies. The last stall is a frothy coffee merchant, a heavily gentrified intruder. Just as Benjamin perceived In the arcades of Paris the decline of a particular moment, but also a symbol of a certain kind of bourgeois production and consumption – industry and luxury – one which generated the unsettling, occasionally jarringly surreal juxtaposition of objects. Benjamin revelled in the defunct goods and trades of the arcades, geared towards a society that no longer existed, and outside of their time, temporal as well as spatial passages. In the self-conscious retro of Alfies, the effect is accelerated, moderne cocktail classics redolent of an age where wives were expected to greet their returning husbands with a Martini, the layers are suffused not only with the residue of time, but also endless layers of irony. Yet they do not let us forget that these are relics of an age which cherished modernity with an enthusiasm wholly lacking now. The security of a future of progress has disappeared; the ad-hoc aesthetic of the market outside has replaced a vision of gleaming technology.

Parallels are tantalising: Church Street is at once as globalised as anywhere in the world, yet resolutely local in its particular blend of businesses and an architectural aesthetic which results from an enlightened post-war consensus and the uncertainty of a property market which has difficulty sizing up the potential of a poor district on the threshold of some of the most valuable and desirable real estate in the world. The former Duke of York pub on the corner of Gateforth Street is now inhabited by the Lahore Restaurant (established 1970). Király Street (King Street) in Budapest was, curiously, named after the King of England. The Angol Király (English King) pub lent  the street its name. If there are other links, they are through trade. Király Street was a centre of the city’s rag trade: a few of its haberdashers and fabric shops remain, whilst Church Street’s traders ply their brilliantly-coloured fabrics from their stalls and shops. It was also a centre of the city’s Jewish community; bakeries and delis, now catering as much or more for Israeli or American tourists than for the locals, still dot the surroundings, whilst the extraordinarily theatrical endless perspective of the courtyards of the Gozsdu Udvar just off Király Street give an insight into the density of the urban fabric on the edge of the one-time ghetto.

Like Church Street, Király Street became an early adopter design ghetto, now with VAM’s design centre bringing the corporate modernism of the big Italian manufacturers to the city. Previously, it was a place of small, smoky cafés and grudging service, Communist-era stores with wonderfully unselfconscious window displays of machine parts or sun-faded 1980s knitting patterns. Now, in its blend of ‘ruin pubs’, design shops, kosher caffs and pop-up stores, it has become more mainstream, pandering to a sentimental image of its own dereliction. The ruin pub, a particularly Budapest phenomenon, sees bars inhabit the complex spaces of derelict apartment blocks, using every room, from courtyard to garret, to create a rolling sequence of space in which the customer asserts his or her independence of the formal city through a kind of drunken dérive. It owes more than a little to the pop-up bars of Berlin, which took advantage of the urban carnage left by the vacation of the swollen state apparatus of the East after its swallowing up by the West. Dozens of properties, from Stasi offices to  police apartments, were left empty and appropriated by enterprising entrepreneurs to create party spaces selling cheap beer, which disappeared as quickly as they arrived, their activity tracing frenetic patterns through the pock-marked fabric of the city, their movement ensuring they stayed hip and cheap. The biggest of Budapest’s ruin pubs have, of course, become institutionalised, and the area around Király Street has become the epicentre of this formalised informality. The pop up and ruin phenomena highlight a number of contemporary concerns – they are at once a subversion of the city fabric in the finest Situationist tradition, whilst at the same time becoming a formalised fetishisation of decay. They are a huge hit with tourists who rail against the corporatisation of Western Main Street, but who fail to acknowledge their role in precisely the kind of gentrification which, ultimately, leads to the arrival of the corporates. Nevertheless, in their transformation of the hulks of the nineteenth century city they do allow a penetration into and an alternative reading of the interior spaces of the city, which is unique and, in a voyeuristic way, thrilling. There is an undoubted frisson in such subversion of domesticity, but it is accompanied by a sadness that the centre of the city is becoming less dense as inhabitants move to the suburbs and spend their leisure time at the mall. 

Whether in Church Street or Király Street, there is an ever-present danger in obsessing about the decline of a particular version of the city. The growing tendency to idolise authenticity is unavoidable in a globalised, insecure, rapidly-changing and international gentrifying urban realm. Until recently, Király Street with its Communist-era shopfronts and dusty displays, its old time espresso bars and musty, decaying buildings, presented a picture of a city stuck in a seemingly more intimate urban milieu. Church Street too, with its buzz and astonishing diversity of the kitsch and the utilitarian, its seemingly exotic blend of shishas and hijabs against a background of the architecture of the welfare state, and tempered with the chic of its mid-century moderne specialists, seems to have found an urban ideal. But, as its rapid Islamicisation shows, the streetscape is far from static.

The urge to preserve authenticity is powerful but misleading: it is precisely the city’s propensity for change which keeps it alive, even if the process may be painful, and even if our tendency towards the sentimentalisation of an earlier era makes us yearn for the old days. Whether the context is London or Budapest, that remembered utopian city always seems to be something slipping from our grip. We should instead relax, attempt to enjoy the city while we can, and revel in its endless capacity to absorb and adapt.