Arcadia for All

 

 

 

 I've got to the end of Arcadia for All it was a good read.  I am struck that for Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward there is an emphasis on dwelling, they seem most interested where the makeshift buildings become homes. Their focus is on the plotland developments of the interwar years as an exceptional period, the physical manifestation of a hinterland that is also an historical hinterland, a between time.  Written in 1984 the book draws on Raymond Williams concept of 'real history' to paint a true picture of lived experience.  They aim to look back through the fog of romanticism, look past nostalgia to critically explore the past. We walk with the families who spent their summers playing in sand dunes, raising goats, picnicking and also shitting in the woods and carrying drums drinking water for long distances.

The problem is similar to the concerns I had about the Humberstone Fitties.  I love them for what they are, and for what they have grown into. The additions the bricolage, the ability for them to absorb anything into an overall aesthetic of reuse and entropy.   Yet even as I count the ways I love them I would not like to see similar add hock developments across our green and pleasant land.  This contradiction sums up the the book in a nutshell, its complex brilliantly researched and conflicted.  We love the idea and the associated freedom of plotland developments but there is still something very British about an unbroken view across rolling hills.  The same generation but not the same social class that gave us the country  shack developments and the intangible Englishness of an Eric Ravilious landscape. Ironically while looking for an example of a Ravilious landscape I found an image of an old bus propped up on barrels clearly waiting to be up cycled into a dwelling. I also found a painting of two Boer war fever caravans where Eric lived with his wife Tirzah Garwood while they were in Sussex.   The draw of a simple life, lived closer to nature is a desire that transcends class, everyone is looking for an escape. I wonder if this compulsion is sustained in our current obsession with glamping and wild swimming. People are drawn to alternatives as there is often a discontent in what we have, whether it be the constraints of a modern  new build in an urban township or the creaky floors and drafts of an old Victorian terrace. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I came to plotland development through the idea to re-imagine Prospect Cottage  in my garden.  My journey into Arcadia and a visit to The Humbertone Fitties have felt like a diversion.  I succumbed to the aesthetics, the way something looked on the outside which doesn't really correlate to the way I feel on the inside.  Part of this is the trying to write when I'm not making and trying to plan something in the abstract.  Of course the mind tells me there is a need to have a plan for a building on this scale but the gut tells me something different.  I am going to try and think about the nature of Gothic, a further distraction but there is snow on the ground and although I am of the Northern tribes I am not prepared to go out and do any ground clearance until the weather warms. 

I will take many things from reading Arcadia for All, as I am not going to live in my makeshift hut/shed/shack/workshop/studio and it is actually in my suburban garden I am perhaps off the mark.  This is why I'm struggling with the materialization of proposition cottage, pastiche, garden room, derivative, not art, not functional, expensive, altogether uncomfortable.  I thought it might propose a renewal in practice and to be of use this is what it must become.  My feeling is that I may need to spend less money and assemble some parts that will suggest their new use. Explore the things I don't yet know that will fit together.  Perhaps I need to find a " timeless way of building that sets itself against design.  I like this quote from the final chapter of the book

 "The enormous interest of the plotlanders, statistically insignificant (though you have only to open a conversation with Londoners of a certain age to learn that many have spent a holiday at Jaywick, Canvey, Shoreham, Pett Level or the Selsey Peninsula), is that they reverted to the 'timeless way of building', seized the opportunities available to them when marginal land was as cheap as dirt, and built for themselves. They had opened a crack in the crude duopoly of access to housing in Britain, a country where the use of land is more strictly limited and controlled than in almost anywhere else in the world. In peasant Andalusia, the local phrase for getting married is building a house, and the village finds à site and helps with the quarrying of materials.(P293)"

Walter Segal

  I have spent most of the day watching videos and reading about the Segal method of building.  I like lots about it but it also feels very architectural.  I think the image above has the look of a Segal design in that it shows its structure on the outside.  This timber frame sits on light foundations that do not require leveling.  Much of the technique is about simplification of building to make it achievable by the untrained.  The structural integrity relies on a tartan framework that sits on a series of flagstones which are supported by concrete foundations.  The flagstone is set at an slight angle for runoff and the foot or wooden pillar is wrapped in lead which seals the end grain.   I am not sure what attracts me to this system that feels limited and Fordest.  The buildings look like something from the 1970's, they are light and optimistic.  They don't look like something I would build though.  They lack a certain Gothic dimension, the in the moment rugged, northern industrial chic that a Sheffield  garden may require.  They remind me of my dad in their insistent practicality and rationality.  I may say that form follows function but when I see it enacted in practical modernist simplicity I long for the superficial and the messy. I like the stuff on the surface, the fact that buildings have both a skin and an envelope. 

I priced up materials and everything seemed prohibitively expensive, Ceder shingles, tanalised timber, double glazed windows, wood wool boards.  I again had the feeling I was making a pastiche, when I was looking for some sort of honesty. There is a gap between the Segal approach and the small buildings I love when I encounter them in the world. The Humberstone Fitties  or the upturned boat sheds on Linderfarne.  The makeshift dwellings of the plot-lands.  Either Thoreau's, Walden or the brick built shed at the Riley's house where we used to watch the rats steel the chicken food.  I feel a long way away from making any decisions. Perhaps I need to decide on materials and make this process more about building something practical again.  The proposition may be more simple than I think.  In the short term without some sort of simplification it feels unlikely anything will happen.  I wonder if overthinking is the same as over-coding.

Perhaps it was not a wasted day it just felt that way.  There are too many separate things going on to form a raveling, the raveling needs the making along the line for it to take shape, for it to tangle. I am sorting out the threads, tidying up the draw full of bits but the doing is missing.  The design process entwined with a low level anxiety about becoming pointless does not feel nomadic even though a destination feels unlikely it is still a pull in a direction, a map, a plan a move away from the smooth space of possibilities.

 

 

 

Bit of a Gap

 

Proposition cottage has been on the back-burner.  Slowly stewing  away like a good stock or slow cooked piece of meat, ready to drop off the bone. to melt in the mouth.  I've read the first two chapters of 'Arcadia for all' Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward sketch out the interwar years as a period of accidental development.  I am disappointed that Wards Anarchism didn't take center stage. I suppose that there is an element of been careful what we wish for. However much we love a ram-shackle shed we don't want them scattered willy-nilly across our country vistas and the gardens of stately homes.   There is a nice description of how unscrupulous country folk would create rolling boundaries .  They would plant thick bramble hedges to create a threshold then cut them back on the inside while letting them grow on the outside thus increasing the plot to which they had laid a tenuous claim. I also found a reference to 'rusty pork pies' which were the nick names of circular huts made form corrugated iron sheets.  There are no hits on a google search and no images I can find which is strangely reassuring to know. Perhaps the makeshift should vanish into eternity. 

I have also used AI to imagine proposition cottage.   I spent most of a day slightly changing my text descriptions.  Black ship-lap with yellow windows, Bi-fold doors opening onto patio, Derek Jarmen, prospect cottage, plans, and various different styles and positioning of commas.  

 

 

It resulted in lots of difference and lots of repetition and left me wondering if I was in danger of making a pastiche.  Perhaps this is the problem with images generated through AI, the intelligence chooses the things it can connect together, ideas such as death, wisdom and renewal cannot be wrapped into the overall and the altogether.  As I scrolled through the images they began to fill my minds eye with actualities where until that point there was speculation.  The more impossible ideas in relation to scale or cost became less achievable and the more practical assemblages became the flat reality of what is perhaps possible.

The question of why I have stepped away from writing and making is about practice, the building of a shed, workshop mausoleum, Walter Segal inspired, place to develop propositions is closely linked to my state of mind.  Most days recently it has felt pointless, a vanity project that does not deserve any investment.  I will find a line and follow a practice to lift myself from the sea like Baren Munchausen pulling myself up by my own hair or bootstraps.