I think there’s a coherent narrative to be woven between all of the following, but for now, I offer them to you as a puzzle of jumbled bullet points. Fuller posts on some of them may follow.
1. It’s been a few weeks since my colleagues and I at Orange moved offices from Holbeck to Clarence Dock. I’ve been meaning to share some photos and thoughts on the new locality, ever since I saw Mike Chitty’s blog post and Imran Ali’s interesting response, Ideas for Cities. I know that was February and this in June. I will do so soon. Just call it slow blogging.
2. For Fathers’ Day, we took a family trip on the Leeds sightseeing boat from Granary Wharf to Clarence Dock. For 20 minutes the River Aire was our Canale Grande, only without the gondolas and palazzos. Lots of cities have a river, but I reckon we could do more with ours. If you live in Leeds you should take the boat at least once, just to see the familiar from a different perspective.
3. Kathryn, Tero and I hosted Leeds’ first ever Service Design Drinks at the Midnight Bell on Tuesday. It went even better than we’d hoped. We had a broad range of interests, some fascinating conversations and new connections made, including some people who travelled a long way to take part. We can see there’s more than enough interest for us to move to the next stage with Service Design Thinks, an evening of three talks followed by an open discussion. More on that soon.
4. Mike was one of our service design drinkers. He floated the concept of an Innovation Lab for Leeds: “a process – not a place. It usually culminates in an intense workshop to allow key thinkers, influencers, technologists and service users to come together to work intensely and constructively on developing a vision for how things could be…” Turns out Imran had already been thinking about this too. Imagining a place to imagine solutions for our city: I guess that’s meta-imagineering.
5. Finally, back in Holbeck on Thursday night Temple Works was more alive than I’ve ever seen it before, with the Sh! Awards, a prize for the region’s most promising design students run by my friends at Brahm. Having been a judge as a series of amazingly confident young designers presented their work in the edgy surroundings of the Temple Works loading bay, I’m sure the best one won. You should check out Matthew Young‘s work now, before you see it everywhere. In particular, watch his D&AD nominated winning video, The City…
So join the dots! Can tell what it is yet? if you can, please let me know.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And so I’m loving the safari around the world’s largest city and capital of the British Empire, afforded by Chris Heathcote’s inventive Newspaper Club debut As It Is To-Day.
Chris has been feeding Newspaper Club’s editing software Arthr on a diet of old London press cuttings from the 18th Century to the 20th. The result is a delightful gallimaufry (my all time top new word of the week): here the city is described at the height of its pre-eminence in 1851, there is a reflection on the sad fate of Cleopatra’s Needle by the 1920s.
My own favourite dish gives a taste of the hazards of the 1790s “On Walking London Streets,” a 14-point list of instructions for avoiding pick-pockets, horse-drawn traffic and falling slops. I love the idea that the characters of my 1794 stories were moving through a million-person city for the first time. Was this their missing manual?
Also, an umbrella was considered “a machine”. So too, in the right hands, is a newspaper. You can buy it here.
In December I blogged about the perilous state of Leeds’ Temple Works. Neglected for several years, this Grade I-listed building had suffered a partial collapse, blocking the road outside with shattered masonry and opening up a gaping hole in the roof where sheep once grazed on a covering of grass. Six months on, I’m pleased to report that things are looking up. Repairs are underway and plans afoot for reuse of the building. Last week, thanks to Culture Vulture Emma, I was privileged to get a peek inside.
Here in the heart of the world’s first industrial nation, it’s not unusual to see old places learn to serve new purposes in response to peoples’ changing needs. As traditional manufacturing has moved offshore, countless mills, factories and warehouses have been regenerated as offices, retail, flats and hotels. At Salt’s Mill, Bradford, you can find art and electronics under one roof.
Yet Temple Works stands out from the crowd for so many reasons. At first sight there’s the weighty Egyptian facade, modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu, looming incongruously over edge-of-town Holbeck. Inside, you can appreciate the sheer scale of the place; once it was reputedly the largest room in the world. And in its stripped-out state the innovative construction is easily visible. The sun streams in through 66 65 circular skylights.
Scratch the surface for something still more fascinating: in two distinct incarnations Temple Works tells the story of the past 160 years of working life, and with a third it poses tantilising questions about where we go next.
“I have got the Drawing for Your Arms in the Pediment done to a quarter of the size, shall order it to be such next week” – Robert Adam in letter to Sir Rowland Winn, owner of Nostell Priory, 1774
It struck a chord with me – first because of my own interest in how the way we get the news has changed, yet stayed the same, but also because this seems to be a particularly London phenomenon.
While the big screens do exist up North, they don’t yet feel quite as ubiquitous or oppressive as in the Capital.
Is this because we’re behind the times? Is an army of telescreen installers waiting for the next clear day to descend on some unsuspecting provincial town?
Or is it that Northerners just don’t feel the same need to be frenetically in the know, up to the minute, every moment of the day?
Love it or loathe it, Richard Rogers’ Dome was the architectural icon of of Britain’s new millennium. The hubristic creation of Michael Heseltine and Peter Mandelson, it was meant to symbolise our country’s post-Thatcher renaissance, all Britpop and Cool Britannia. It didn’t work out quite like that.
Along with millions of other Britons, we didn’t make it to the Dome in its inaugural year. We were too busy with our new arrival, our own Millennium baby. He just turned eight and for his birthday treat we took him and his friends to see the Tutankhamum exhibition at the Dome now renamed The O2.
Disclosure: I work for a competitor to O2, but my problem is not with their sponsorship. O2′s own branded interventions – a nightclub, ice rink and inflatable chill-out zones – have their own integrity and fit with the aesthetic of the Dome itself. The naming rights have been seen through with Orwellian ruthlessness: no mention of Millennia, or even of Domes, it’s The O2, plain and simple.
Yet our impression as we walked along the narrow shopping mall that skirts the perimeter of The O2 was a distinctly underwhelming “is this it?”
From the outside the space is huge, but the way the new arena, cinema, exhibition space and leisure facilities have been fitted in manages to totally obscure this once inside. Worse, the partitions that carve up the space are treated as clumsily cut out faux art deco stage setting with no acknowledgement of the structure itself.
Suburban shopping mall, airport terminal, Las Vegas casino, Dubai resort – this could be anywhere. Only it’s not just anywhere. It’s one of our landmarks, a tarnished one but a landmark all the same. Had the hype curve for the Dome dipped so low that we’d settle for this? Britain Deserves Better.
On holiday in Cornwall this summer we visited Polperro, a Cornish fishing village so archetypal that it featured in Ptolemy Dean’s BBC programme The Perfect Village. As the programme synopsis says:
On the surface, Polperro looks as if it hasn’t changed for centuries, but in fact it exemplifies a delicate balance between the tourist village of today and the fishing village of yesteryear. It could, without careful management, slide into being a fishing village cum heritage theme park – a victim of its own success and adaptability.
As we wandered down streets where every fisherman’s home was now a holiday let, I felt there was a lesson for social web and mobile services at risk of being overwhelmed by their own success as destinations. So I stuck the name “Polperro” in the title of a blog post and left it there to see how it got on. Until now.
When I first arrived on Twitter it felt small enough to be that fishing village – a fairly homogenous group of the people so that even the river of recent public updates felt like an intimate conversation between friends. How a service like Twitter copes with the inevitable influx of visitors if successful is a matterofdebate.
So here’s my thought on the matter prompted by the whole Polperro experience: the ability of the service to absorb newcomers varies massively depending on what the service is for, and what attracts visitors to it.
From Blackpool to Ibiza to Myspace, there are some destinations that positively revel in the crowds (and conversely feel somewhat forlorn without a critical mass of people).
On the other hand there are others – Venice? Alton Towers? Flickr? – where the mass of people is an inconvenience, but the content so compelling that we’re willing to put up with the crush.
And then, the most fragile of all, the places whose main or only selling point is unspoiltness – places we go to witness or take part in something special, but just by being there we destroy whatever that quality was. The perfect village? The perfect bar? Twitter?
My name is Matt Edgar and this is my personal blog. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer. Email mattedgar at me63 dot com.
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