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)"