The not so common wealth

- ‘”A 1990 survey of Dehli”, reports Susan Chaplin, “showed that the 480,000 families in 1100 slum settlements had access to only 160 toilet seats and mobile toilet vans. The lack of toilet facilities in slum areas has forced slum dwellers to use any open space, such as public parks, and thus has created tensions between them and middle class residents over defecation rights.” Indeed, Arundahati Roy tells of three Dehli slum-dwellers who in 1998 were “shot for shitting in public spaces.”- Davis, Mike (2007) Planet of Slums, London: Verso, p.140

“Most of 470 families living a slum near the capital’s diplomatic enclave for over 25 years were rendered homeless as their dwellings were demolished ahead of the Oct 3-14 Games.

Less than 100 of the affected families have been rehabiliated to flats in outer Delhi and have no water or electricity yet in their new homes.”

“Slums in Delhi seem to be sitting on a tinder box with five persons killed, 50 injured and over 1,250 hutments gutted this month alone.

Fire fighters say this can be checked by taking measures like banning commercial activities in slum clusters, supplying power through underground cables and regulate electric installations in various premises in such places.

They attribute the increasing incidents of fire in slums to materials used in constructing hutments, storage of combustible waste and a web of electric wires passing through slums resulting in short-circuits.”

apologies…

…for the inconsistent spacing in the below post. WordPress is not behaving itself!

Here, there, everywhere

Busy busy busy at the moment. Probably won’t be any long posts here for a while, but I’ll try and use it as a place to collate all the other stuff I’m doing. Namely…

New Research Trajectories

An exciting group of postrgraduate researchers in the East Midlands who’re thinking about new ways of disseminating our research/other areas of interest to the public in Nottingham on Wed 15th December. There’s a website right here.  I’m currently thinking about some kind of improv happening or doing audio guides to an imagined, utopian Nottingham (the Victoria Centre as an anarchist art space, anyone?)- perhaps with the option for people to record their own utopian imaginings. This day will be (sort of) part of Sideshow- the fringe festival accompanying the British Art Show 7 which is coming to Nottingham Contemporary shortly. Also part of Sideshow is…

Bookmobile

…for which I will be a ‘writer in residence’. This means I’ll spend one day a week in the bookmobile, writing! I plan to do some kind of ‘participatory fiction’ in which visitors to the bookmobile can choose how they’d like to be represented in a story which I’ll then try and write throughout my residency. This is likely to be set in a utopian Nottingham too! Hurrah!!  There’ll be a blog for this soon, too. For now you can find out more here.

Nottingham Critical Pedagogies Group

Getting busy with the start of the new term! See our blog for the latest. I’m particularly excited about the Spaces of Alterity Conference we’re involved with, not least because China Mielville is speaking.

Deserter’s Songs

My new column over at Ceasefire Magazine. It’s about music- and that’s pretty much my remit. But I try to relate songs/bands/concepts to political and cultural concerns. I’m pleased with the two columns I’ve written so far (a meditation on Talking Heads’ Heaven and utopia and a defence of nostalgia through the work of July Skies and epic45).

My PhD

Ah, yes. I’m going to go over the chapters I’ve written and may post them here at some point. And then get on with some new stuff! Need to think through the relationship between what I call ‘nomadic utopia’ and utopia as it’s traditionally thought.

Music and Loneliness

Until very recently, if you asked me for the single most important musical moment in my life, I would have emphatically pointed to the first time I heard Paranoid. I was 9, and it was on a compilation tape I’d bought from Publishers’ Book Clearance on Lord Street in Southport. Before hearing it, I was quite content with multi-artist compilations and my dad’s collection of classical tapes (I was emphatically not allowed to play his records!); but when the 2 minutes and 53 seconds had elapsed I knew I had to hear more by these ‘Black Sabbath’ characters. And so over the next few months I would go into Southport town centre whenever I had a fiver; head to Andys Records (sic) and grab myself another album on tape. I can still remember the order I bought them in, and the feeling of disappointment when I’d purchased them all (or all the Ozzy ones at least), and I repeatedly leafed through the pages of The Great Rock Discography* searching for other bands who might give me the same buzz. Unfortunately, Vanilla Fudge and REO Speedwagon didn’t quite live up to expectation- but my insatiable appetite for discovering music had begun.

Yet there’s another moment- some four or five years before I heard Paranoid for the first time- which has had a far greater aesthetic resonance throughout my twentyfive years. It didn’t change my musical life; it helped change the way I see the world.

It was a car journey with dad, and we were driving past the petrol station in Claregate, Wolverhampton. He put on a tape I’d not seen before, with a blue cover which featured a photo of some men in white running across a beach. I initially mistook the strange noises contained on the tape for the sound of passing cars, but it quickly dawned on me that it was the ‘music’. I was horrified, but was soon rapt.**

The music, I soon discovered, was the soundtrack to a film called ‘Chariots of Fire’. To this day I can’t really find words to explain the feelingit gave me (and still does). Eerie? Melancholy? Ethereal? Haunting? Sublime? Alienating? I don’t know. It’s relaxing, in a sense, but it also makes me feel utterly alive- it’s not a vapid womb-regressive chillout ‘vibe’ by any stretch. I feel utterly alone- even on a crowded train- when I feel it; and yet I feel utterly alive.

Perhaps it’s a flipside of Nietzsche’s ecstatic, horrific embrace of our irrelevance- an aesthetic that also animates (and sometimes paralyzes) me.

Above all it’s a beauty- and it’s my ‘favourite’ kind of feeling: I crave it far more than I crave ‘joy’, or ‘happiness’ (outside sex, the only time I really seek feelings of intense joy is when I improvise collectively or go to Molineux and long for a goal- but even then I enjoy watching passages of play unfold almost as much).

Much of the music I listen to articulates this feeling to me in one way, and much of the music I listen to most frequently (epic45, EL Heath, Mercury Rev, July Skies, Tim Hecker, GY!BE, Silver Mt.Zion, Slowdive) expresses this feeling. Sometimes it’s explicit (as in July Skies) and sometimes the sounds act as a metaphor for- and thus amplifies- my feelings (as with Tim Hecker, who may be trying to get at something altogether different for all I know). This track, from epic45′s Drakelow EP, is up there with the best of this kind of music.

Vangelis became a firm favourite on car journeys with my parents- replacing The Yetties (!) as the music I most frequently nagged for. It allowed even the most banal countryside to take on this magical, sublime quality and I felt as I was the only person alive: a feeling amplified by the arrival of my first Walkman (you can hire the model I used to own as a prop for a mere £15). To this day, I adore long journeys- particularly by train- with a good pair of headphones and an iPod filled with wordless music which I can use to colour, enhance or shape my relationship with the landscape as I pass through it. I retain an immense amount of joy and hope in the social function of music- something I’m particularly keen on exploring through improvisation, which I do through playing with The Exploits of Elaine and in my forthcoming book for Zer0 on the politics of improvising music. But paradoxically, I also love to ‘wall up against the social’, as kpunk would have it and retreat into my own OedIPodal world.

Sometimes this ‘walling up’ produces truly transcendent moments. I remember, for example, when I first felt what I would now articulate as hauntology. It was driving through Brownhills/Chasewater, and I was listening to Chariots of Fire on my walkman. We stopped at some traffic lights and there loomed the ruined hovercraft racing stadium. I have a number of memories of passing this in the car as a child- but it’s indelibly bound up with Chariots of Fire in my mind: the ghostly synths perfect for this crumbling ruin which had once contained so much happiness and- in the shape of the hovercrafts- so much utopian promise for the future (the stadium was demolished in 1998, but I can find no photos of it online. In my memory it was a huge colisseum; the size of Wembley. It wasn’t, of course).

Such a sensibility may well have (indeed, probably would have) developed anyway had I never heard Vangelis: my childhood love of railways lead to an interest in abandoned/mothballed railway lines, for example. And whilst I find music often enhances- or provides a gateway- to such experiences, it can also hamper (if I can’t find the right music for the mood); and sometimes it’s wholly unnecessary. A walk on Titterstone Clee, for example, needs no colouring. But that’s for another blog…

*I sometimes wonder what’s happened to Martin C. Strong- author of the Great Rock/Metal/Indie/Psychedelic/Sixties/Seventies/Eighties/Nineties Discographies since the dawn of the internet. It was clearly his life, and they are now- sadly- utterly redundant. Were I a twee indiepop type, I’d almost certainly write an EP about him. Perhaps each song as a different band, with fake discography entries for each of them.

**Memories are notoriously unreliable, of course. I think I remember this incredibly clearly, but I may well be wrong. The tape must have been in the middle of a side for me to hear the ‘car noises’ first (which are in Eric’s Song, I think), and dad never left a tape unwound. I may well have heard Chariots of Fire a number of times prior to this remembered occasion, though I’m fairly certain this is the first time it really registered with me.

The Seeds Beneath the Rhetoric Beneath the Snow

Cracking piece from Alex at The Guardian (and in the paper, no less). If I may be immodest for a second, my tweet that ‘the Tories are giving an inch; we must take a mile’ (or words to that effect) was the catalyst for him to write this, and but for editorial deadlines and my pressing need for a house we would have co-written.

I think I would have sounded an ultimately more pessimistic note, though. Whilst there are rhetorical similarities between “Big Society” (and what New Labour called communitarianism, and what the Lib Dems claim are just old Lib Dem ideas) and Colin Ward’s concept of ‘anarchy in action’, we must remember that Ward was always vigilant to warn against allowing the Tories in on such rhetoric, well aware that they were no more than a false veneer designed to clear the way for the triumph of the market.

And therein is the problem for every anarchist(ic) lefty. If the state is the enemy, then anything that takes services out of the hands of the state is good; yes?

Well no. Publicly ownership is closer to my vision of anarchism than private ownership; even when it’s centralised and state controlled (except, perhaps, to the extent of a Stalin or a Mao). Communistic/socialistic anarchism doesn’t really fit onto a left-right economic spectrum: wealth should be communally owned, but not through the mechanisms of the state.

Like me, Ward generally felt state ownership was preferable to the free market running riot, though he was in favour of the privatisation of council housing as he thought dweller control was of paramount importance.

The importance of maintaing vigilance against neoliberal appropriation of anarchist rhetoric is highlighted by World Bank President Robert McNamara’s unlikely alliance with anarchist architectural theorist John Turner in the 1970s, as described in Mike Davis’ wonderful Planet of Slums:

“The intellectual marriage in the 1970s between World Bank president Robert McNamara and architect John Turner was supremely odd. The former, of course, had been chief planner of the war in Vietnam, while the latter had once been a leading contributor to the English anarchist paper Freedom. Turner left England in 1957 to work in Peru, where he was mesmerized by the creative genius he discerned at work in squatter housing. He was not the first architect to enthuse about poor people’s capacities for communal self-organization and clever construction….however, in collaboration with sociologist William Mangin, [he] was a singularly effective popularizer and propagandist who procaliemd that slums were less the problem than the solution. Despite its radical provenance, Turner’s core program of self-help, incremental construction, and legalization of spontaneous urbanization was exactly the kind of proagmatic, cost-effecitve approach to the urban crisis that McNamara favored.

‘…this amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism had become a new orthodoxy…Amidst great ballyhoo about “helping the poor help themselves”, little notice was taken publicly of the momentous downsizing of entitlement implicit in the World Bank’s canonization of slum housing. Praising the prais of the poor became a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelesness. “By demonstrating the ability, the courage, and the capacity for self-help of slum people,” Jeremy Seabrook writes, “the way [was] prepared for a withdrawal of state and local government intervention and support.”‘

Davis goes on to say how this left the poor unable to repay the loans they were offered to further their self-build projects and that the most ambitious projects were ambushed by the middle classes and non-needy, who pushed the poor out to areas where there was less ‘self-help’. This, of course, is a real danger with the Big Society- one can quite easily imagine councils using it to gentrify areas, pushing out the needy to areas where the Big Society’s a bad joke.

The optimism for anarchists and anarchistic thinkers and activists should not come in the form of the Big Society, which will undoubtedly make things less free and less fair. Rather, it should come in the form of the rhetoric that accompanies it. People do not want untramelled market power and politicians know that. What people want is freedom from clumsy hierarchy, bureaucratic imbecility and- despite the many sneering naysayers- many do want the ability to run their own communities.

What they want is anarchism.

News from Nowhere, pt.1: Rails to Utopia

Poland was as wonderful as I’d hoped. The travelling, the cities, the people, the conference: all enormously pleasurable; all wonderfully thought-provoking. If you’ll excuse the indulgence, I’ll spend two or three posts on my reflections and some thoughts. This post is on the journey to Lublin: the architecture, shops and bridges of Cologne and Warsaw and the sights, sounds and smells of the trains and trams that got me across Europe. I’m afraid I don’t have time to write a short post, so I’ve had to do a long one instead.

Ignoring my diversion to Canterbury on the way down, I travelled to Lublin in five stages:

1/ Nottingham to London by East Midlands trains (covered here)
2/ London St.Pancras to Brussels Midi by Eurostar
3/ Bruxelles Midi to Koln Hbf by Thalys
4/ Koln Hbf to Warszawa Centralna by Jan Kiepura (EuroNight sleeper train)
5/ Warszawa Wschodnia to Lublin by PKP TLK (Polish State Railways semi-fast train)

The total travelling time from Nottingham-Lublin was around 21 hours, but I deliberately allowed myself time to sightsee around Cologne and Warsaw on the way there and Warsaw and Brussels on the way back, meaning I took around 36 hours to make each journey. The total cost was £220, which comapres favourably with flying when you factor in free food and coffee on two trains and the fact that travelling by train is infinitely preferable in that you get to see so much more (from the windows and when changing trains) and in that you do far less damage to the environment. And the incredible experiences that you have…

London-Cologne

I enjoyed the Eurostar more than I’d expected: the thrill of travelling at 186mph is really quite something; it still seems so futuristic to me that it’s hard to believe they’ve been running for 16 years now (and that the French and Japanese have been reaching such speeds with their trains for decades). My enjoyment was tempered slightly due to the fact that I was sitting behind a lady who pulled the window blind down over half way as soon as we left the tunnel under London. Had she asked I wouldn’t really have minded, but I came over all superior and decided that my desire to see the landscapes of Kent was more important than her desire to read an abysmal ‘lifestyle’ magazine without the glare of the sun bothering her. I spent the next hour or so slowly inching the blind up but she got off at Calais and the French/Belgian countryside was all mine. Not that it’s especially interesting, but little matches the joys of looking out of the window of a train for me and it certainly beat Nottingham-New Street, if only for novelty value.

I had a couple of hours at Brussels Midi which revealed itself to be a truly uninspiring station- detractors of Euston should be forced to spend some time there: it really is drearily forgettable. I also ventured so far as to poke my head around the surrounding area but this proved to contain no more joys so I retired inside for a coffee and muffin, immediately disproving the theory that it’s impossible to get bad coffee on the continent. My spirits were lifted by the site of one of Brussel’s many President’s Conference Committee trams (yup, that’s the name of the manufacturer), the design of which dates back to the 50s.

My initially negative impression of Brussels was reinforced further, however, with a near death experience on the platform as I waited for the Thalys to Cologne. ‘Brussels’ is often used as a byword for POLITICALCORRECTNESSHEALTHANDSAFETYEUROPEANBUREAUCRATSGONEMAD in Britain, but it would appear no-one had told the driver of the articulated delivery wagons supplying catering products to my train, for he tried to reverse down a particularly narrow and particularly crowded stretch of platform, almost knocking me (and several others) into the path of our arriving train.

Surviving this, I boarded. I’d got a first class ticket to Cologne; it was a fiver more and included food and coffee, which was brought to my seat by an immaculately coiffured, tanned and dressed steward who reeked of cologne (which, as I discovered later, many men in Cologne do: and I took a quick detour into a department store to check if it was the eau de Cologne, and indeed it was).

The food was an odd mix. A tiny plastic cup (rather like the ones my parents used to give me Calpol in) filled with a lovely pea veloute; a cold white fish I could not identify, sugar snap peas, an overwhelmingly strong (and strange) tumeric cake/bread slice, another plastic cup of houmous and some radishes and cucumber. Oh, and a bread roll of the finest central/west European variety- designed to eliminate weak teeth with the utmost efficiency.

And another cup of shit coffee.

The train itself shot through Belgium. Brussels North, I noted, was of an infinitely preferable design to Midi- a cool, art deco efficiency to its clock tower marking it out from the glass monstrosities which dwarf it.

We didn’t stop there though; first port of call was Liege, which has a truly magnificent station, even if it does have something of the showpiece airport terminal about it. It’s not sealed off from the town though, which I like- the platform shelter roof framed the ‘outside world’ rather nicely. The best photographs seem to show it under construction (it’s now finished), but they give an impression of its grandeur. Part of me hopes the town’s workers rediscover their 1961 radicalism though, when they smashed the station’s predecessor up over disatisfaction at low pay and job cuts. These buildings seem a little too self-satisfied with their position, somehow; as if divorced from the hustle, bustle and trouble of the outside world. No matter how hard they try, they still seem to be marked by the problem of what Marc Auge calls ‘non-place’; places of transience whose significance lies in the fact that you pass through them, pausing only for a coffee or to use an ATM.

Whilst the sheer effort and size of Liege Guillemins (to give the station its correct name) seems to suggest it might transcend this problem of non-space, to me it seems to embrace it and magnify it. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, and I’d certainly like to ‘use’ the station rather than just pass through it. And at least they’ve tried, as opposed to, say, the recent redevelopment of Derby station.

Cologne Hauptbanhof is infinitely preferable to me, though. It’s modestly spectacular, if that makes sense, and seems to both frame the city and be an integral part of the city. The glassed roof allows in plenty of light and on the approach to the station and the exit from it you’re dwarfed by the incredible gothic cathedral, which survived the Allied bombardment in the war (perhaps not by accident- its towers were apparently used as navigational aids by Allied pilots).

Cologne

I spent the rest of my time walking around Cologne, with a vague idea of where I wanted to head. It’s a picturesque if unremarkable city, though I warmed to it immediately. I spent a great deal of time in the Kompakt record shop and bought what I think was a mixtape in Groove Attack (their sister shop, I think- and highly recommended). I was drawn to this by the inlay card, which featured various rail freight wagons graffiti’d (in full American subway style) with the names of Pitchfork indie types: Bonnie Prince Billy, Neil Young, The Van Pelt, Modest Mouse. I had no idea what the music was like, but the trains drew me in and for six euros it seemed worth a punt; particularly as I didn’t fancy carrying vinyl around the rest of Europe with me. Unfortunately, I left the damn thing on the sleeper train, so I fear I’ll never find out.

I had an absolutely delicious pizza in Ristorante Sansone and went for a final walk; crossing the Rhine by the Rodenkirchener suspension bridge and back via the Hohenzollernbrücke- a truly spectacular rail and pedestrian bridge. I guess bridges should constitue non-places too: they are, after all, designed for transience. But at their best they interrupt the seamless journeys of (post)modern traveller; forcing them to sit up and take notice. Those going over water are always especially evocative- there’s always a slight thrill from the menacing depths beneath them. Hohenzollernbrücke is also notable for a number of love padlocks (these gave me a Kanye West earworm which would not leave me for a week), and I saw one couple cement their love in such a way- culminating with a quick kiss and a ceremonial chucking of the key into the depths of the Rhine.

Cologne-Warsaw

I made it back to the station in plenty of time: I was knackered, and paranoid about missing the train. This was to be my first sleeper experience, and I was full of nervous energy when it finally pulled in ten minutes late (forgivable, given that it had come from Amsterdam). I found my couchette (a cabin with six bunks) easily and- as it was dark- decided to settle straight down. I had a reasonable chat with those I was sharing with, who- as it turned out- were also heading on to Lublin, though the language barrier prevented me from finding out where they’d been or why.

I had a reasonable sleep, though it was broken by the uncertainty of my surroundings and my natural curiosity. Everytime we stopped I wanted to pull back the curtains to find out where we were: I have a desperate desire to know such things and hate not being able to pinpoint my location on a map. By 5am I was wide awake and decided to go and sit in the seated carriage: this was just in time for arrival in Berlin Ostbanhof, which meant I got to see the sun come up over a city I’ve always wanted to visit.

A trip to the loo revealed the fact that the door on the last coach of the train was glass, meaning you can stand there and watch the tracks disappear behind you. I spent probably an hour engaged in such a manner, and had a friendly chat with a guy who’d gone there to smoke (which you can still do in certain ‘vestibule areas’, as they’re wont to call them on British trains).

You’re in Poland not long after leaving Berlin (I’d never quite realised how close to the border it is before). The countryside between there and Warsaw reminded me of nothing so much as the Fens, which I have traversed many a time on my way to relatives in Norfolk. It seemed the same mix of tiny hamlets, anonymous warehouses and endlessly flat farmland. I had the joys of a breakfast (scrambled egg, breads and a cheese platter, and a cappucino- all for 14zl (£2.80)) in the buffet car and felt most contended with life.

The journey to the buffet was a joy in itself: the train is made up of various coaches going to and from various places: a few Polish and German coaches on the Amsterdam-Warsaw service; some more from the Frankfurt-Warsaw train; Russian coaches going from Amsterdam-Moscow; and a lone Belarusian coach going from Amsterdam-Minsk (the latter two also going via Warsaw). Each country’s coaches had marked differences; most profoundly in smell and carpet. The Russian coaches smelt exactly how I’d imagine Russia to smell: vaguely modern and vaguely musty- a ghostly scent of Communism’s failure, perhaps. The posher Polish coaches (with cabins rather than couchettes) smelt overwhelmingly of rose-scented cleaning products and the Belarusian coach smelt of coffee and cigarettes. The latter also had a quite wonderful rug stretched along the corridor:

Still the endless fenlike flatness trundled past- punctuated by occasional stops and the thoroughly depressing site of an enormous Tesco warehouse. A stop in Poznan enlivened the surroundings, it being a city I’d like to visit one day, and which I feel is probably more lively than, say, Wisbech…

…and Ely certainly has nothing on Warsaw.

Warsaw

I’d heard mostly negative things about the city before I arrived, but was almost instantly blown away. Warszawa Centralna station- where I disembarked- is everything New Street should be. Owen writes about it in a far more architecturally literate manner than I here.

I spent a good 5 minutes on the platform soaking up the atmosphere and watching trains arrive and depart- including a good few hauled by the EP07s and EU09s I mentioned in my previous post.

The station isn’t enormously easy to navigate though. I wanted to come up in the main hall to see what it was like and buy a drink, but found myself navigating an interminable (though quite wonderful) underground shopping mall (which is still above platform level); eventually coming up by the side of an uncrossable main road. I disappeared back into this labyrinth and eventually managed to resurface in the main hall- which is every bit as impressive as Owen makes it out to be, though is spoiled slightly by the tacky looking PKP boards (though these are helpful, as they clearly list every departure and arrival). I was also amazed- and pleased- by the total lack of international chains (though, thinking about it, ‘Pumpkin cafe’ probably wouldn’t be recognisable to a foreign traveller traversing Britain’s railways). I’d expected to see a Costa, or Starbucks, or even a Polish equivalent: but everything seemed fairly one-off: little news kiosks and a fast foody type restaurant, with kebabs, little newsagents and a bookshop on the concourse immediately below the booking hall.

Leaving the hall, the next thing that hit me about Warsaw was the heat: it was in the high 30s (astonishingly hot for Warsaw, where the hottest July temperature on record is 35 celsius, which I’m sure must have broken- one building’s thermometer said 38). And then the trams! They were everywhere. Some were unromantic low floor articulated things which bore a resemblance to Sheffield’s ‘Supertram’ trams, but my heart was stirred by the site (and whine) of a pair of these beauties whizzing past:

They’re alarmingly common in Eastern Europe, and probably as dull to those who live there as, I dunno, a Plaxton bus is to us. But to me it was wonderful, though I can’t help but wonder if I have some Iron Curtain form of Orientalism.

My first port of call required no such transportation though. The Palace of Culture and Sciences- a ‘gift’ from Stalin to Communist Poland- is Warsaw’s tallest building (and the world’s 187th), and a mighty example of socialist realism. It’s right next to Centralna station (though accessible only through the maze of subways). Whilst the ideology which built the building is abhorrent to me, as is what the building stands for (which one might generously call paternalism), I can’t help but be attracted by it. My aesthetics and my politics rarely match- and architecture is perhaps where I feel this most strongly. The non-spaces of capitalism always abhor me, but I can’t embrace anarchistic dwellings and love those produced by State Socialism.

The building currently houses a cinema (I later learned this was once called Kino-Prawda: ‘cinema of truth’, but it’s now called Kinoteka: google translates ‘teka’ as ‘briefcase’, I assume it’s more a play on ‘biblioteque’ or ‘discoteque’), a few theatres, an art gallery (with an environmental themed exhibition sponsored by Renault…), offices and seemingly thousands of starlings, which swoop in and out of the rafters and circle the viewing platform- to where I quickly headed. Predictably, this has some cracking views of Warsaw- I was particularly taken by the red and white chimneys of the power stations as well as the appalling row of glass fronted shops: C&A, H&M, Marks & fucking Spencers on Marszalkowska Street.

I descended the ‘Palace’ to find another site familiar to Brits: an open top bus from the City Sightseeing franchise, which was waiting to depart. Whilst I’m wary of these things (and their price), I was knackered from walking around Cologne and decided it’d be a decent way to scout out interesting locations I could visit on my return to Warsaw on the journey back to Nottingham.

I initially miscalculated the cost of a ticket, thinking 60zl was £1.20. It is, in fact, £12- which is what these tours tend to cost in Britain’s most touristy places- Stratford-upon-Avon and London, where there are thousands of rich tourists to soak up the extortion. Little wonder that there was hardly anyone on the bus (and no-one Polish: a Warsaw bus/tram day ticket- as I later found out- costs 9zl). It nearly proved the death of me too; I have encountered suicidal bus driving before (notably on the Isle of Arran, where the driver seemed to think he was Colin MacRae), but nothing on this scale. Cobbled streets, reversing police cars, pedestrians, red lights: nothing thwarted this driver’s need for speed. His haste meant that the GPS triggered commentary rarely matched the actual location of the bus, but I got a good flavour of what was where and so the bus served its purpose.

One thing that struck me was the startling mix of architecture in the city. I’m not sure what I think of rebuilding demolished buildings in their original style- but it’s done very tastefully in Warsaw (and if I did have an opinion, I think I’d keep it to myself: it’s not my city that was destroyed by the Nazis, so it’s really not my place to stick my aesthetics in). And it contributes to a remarkable mix of rebuilt 15th-18th century, socialist realism, socialist brutalism and glass skyscraper’d capitalism: a bizarre hybridity which really struck me.

I’ll deal with my return to Warsaw- when I visited the old town, the ghetto and visited the uprising monuments- in a later post. My time on my first visit was pushed by my need to get to Wschodnia (East) station for the train to Lublin. I wanted to leave plenty of time for this as I had no idea how to get there. I had a map and decided to walk, but the head eventually defeated me and I decided to take a tram. Disappointingly, this wasn’t one of the Konstal 14Ns- though it was a pleasingly boxy Konstal from the 80s.

Wschodnia station is remarkable. It’s quite something on first view…

…but is in a terribly crumbling state inside, as if it’s Pripyat’s main station. Pigeon crap is everywhere, and there’s a real air of melancholy. Which of course I quite like, and the flap display board is quite something. The underpass to the platforms is truly bizarre and is dotted with little market stalls selling DVDs, magazines and lots selling various kinds of bread and pastries (from where I purchased a delicious bread/tomato/cheese/pepper roll thing). These stalls are great but the underpass surpasses even the booking hall for its state of disrepair. Needless to say, I found it most evocative. You can certainly see why Joy Division initially called themselves Warsaw, and despite the encroachment of free market capitalism it remains a wonderfully brutal, crumbling, strangely alluring city in places.

Near to Wschodnia is the National Stadium, being constructed for the opening game of Euro 2012 (it will also host a semi-final)- which Poland is co-hosting with Ukraine. The stadium’s another example of this creeping globalisation: it’s a fairly anonymous design and is built on the site of the fascinating Tenth Anniversary Stadium, which shut as a football stadium in 1989 and survived hosting an enormous market selling huge amounts of counterfeited goods. It was also the site of Ryszard Siwiec’s self-immolation in protest of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (at a state propaganda festival attended by 100,000 people). To build such a predictably drab stadium on the site saddens me somewhat, as do the plans to renovate Wschodnia station in time for Euro 2012:

Warsaw-Lublin

This was the part of the journey I’d been looking forwards to the most, and it didn’t disappoint. The train was hauled by an EU-09 locomotive and the non-matching liveries of the coaches reminded me of late 80s British Rail, when it was common to see an engine in one livery and the coaches in two or three more. It trundled, creaked and squealed its way south-east through the countryside (which was slightly bumpier and decidedly more forested than that to the west of Warsaw). Coaches had compartments (which are still fairly common in Europe) and you can open the windows to stick your head out- which I frequently did (though one has to be wary for passing foliage). It travelled through a gentler Poland; people swimming in lakes and rivers, and an old man loading broken up cement into a horse drawn cart. The sun was still blazing but I still detected a certain darkness to the landscape; this perhaps something more psycho than geographical though, my western imagination overlaying narratives of dangerous Eastern European forests and Katalin Varga-esque rawness over what- in reality- is actually far more benign.

Just before the train pulled into Lublin (two and a half hours after leaving Wschodnia), it passed a quite magnificent engine shed- complete with turntable- which is still in use (I can’t find a photo, unfortunately). It still looked proud, despite its rather run-down state (and the rusty looking locomotives surrounding it).

It was a fine way to end a 1,300 mile journey.

Every fool in Nottingham can be in Lublin in 24 hours…

I’m off to Lublin, Poland on Monday for ‘Spectres of Utopia’, the 11th annual Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe. Due to a combination of madness, environmental concern and a love of trains, I’m travelling by rail. From Nottingham.

I’ve always loved trains. The first house I lived in backed onto the Wolverhampton-Shrewsbury line, just to the east of Bilbrook station. My earliest memory is watching an InterCity train flash past in the dark; the lights glaring. We moved out when I was 2; when I was packing up my favourite toy- a wooden Brio railway- I asked mum if we could take the big railway with us too.

At the age of three, I astonished a book shop owner by sitting on the floor of his shop with a railway book and proceeding to name each class of engine. I could still do that- except for some of the more recent anonymous multiple units (trains where the engine and the passenger accommodation is together, and that run in fixed formation) that now have a monopoly on train travel in the UK. I love going past the former BR Rail Technical Centre just outside Derby when I go home from Nottingham. My grandfather (a BR architect) helped design it, and there’s always a decent array of older engines stationed outside.

I’m doing a bit of touring before I leave the country though, and am currently in Canterbury- staying with Alex and Tammy- and greatly enjoyed my journey down by train today. I was pleased that the train from Nottingham was an HST (or InterCity 125 as they used to be branded) rather than one of the modern Meridian units. HSTs have been around since my childhood (and much longer- they’re into their fourth decade of frontline service now, although they’ve all had engines replaced, meaning they’ve lost their characteristic jet-like howl) and have always had a magical allure: they’re the third fastest diesel trains in the world (although the Guinness Book of Records has them as the fastest as the two who claim to better it are unverified) and are just about the only frequently used passenger trains in Britain to have any kind of allure. They’re a great unsung success of modernism and something I really think we should shout a bit louder about. Though we did when they were built- this is the last 35mm film made by British Transport Films, celebrating their production.

The journey from St. Pancras to Canterbury was by the new Javelin train, which runs on Britain’s first high speed rail line as far as Ashford International (it’s the Eurostar route). I was excited about this, and did enjoy the speeds- but I don’t really enjoy high speed travel: I like to enjoy the scenery, and the paraphenalia you get with High Speed Rail (the tracks are always far more separated from the surrounding scenery, and there’s always a lot of concrete- something which, as George Monbiot has highlighted, means it’s very likely as bad for the environment as flying) looks the same wherever you go- I was struck by how much the new Stratford station looks like French high speed stations, and how much Ebbsfleet International looks like an airport:

For that reason, the train I’m most looking forward to travelling on over the next few days is the one I’ll be getting from Warsaw to Lublin: a proper, locomotive hauled InterCity train that’s decidedly less globalised than the others (I’m also looking forward to Lublin’s cold war era trolleybuses).

At least, I hope it’s like that. PKP (Polish InterCity) does operate some horrible multiple units that look like multiple units you get all over Europe.

I’m going on a sleeper from Cologne-Warsaw, but would rather travel in daylight so I could see the scenery (although this will be my first sleeper experience, which is pretty exciting). And there is, of course, a certain romance to the Eurostar from St. Pancras-Brussels and the Thayls from Brussels-Koln, but I like rickety, old and quirky.

I may not be saying that when I arrive at 7pm on Tuesday, mind.