CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

Queensmere Shopping Centre, Slough. What becomes of you, my love? No one takes credit for it. No architect puts their name to it. This concrete shopping centre that it took most of the sixties to build.  It’s 1958 and town planners have a vision for Slough: shops, squares with fountains, abstract Hepworth-like statues, geometric concrete angles and beautiful trees growing in the cracks. Slough is part of a larger project to clear slums in London and rehouse those living in them to something better. Slums with Londoners still living in bombed out houses - no water, no electricity, no plumbing for decades. It took an Act in the late 60s to cash incentivise landlords to see tenants as humans.  From the Borough of Slough document: "An Approach to Renewal" The Greater London Council designs estates in Britwell and Langley (parts of Slough). It’s going to take ten years and in fact it takes to 1973 for Queensmere shopping centre to open.  From the Borough of Slough document:...

The Irish club is now a nursery school.   Lurking behind the Catholic Church, Friday nights were for the grown ups drinking in full house lights all night. Match of the Day on the tubular TV mounted on the wall. In the darkness of the room next door, Benson and Hedges took out Silk Cut for a weekly slow shuffle to American country songs. We skidded on shiny knees and glugged the Coca Colas that we gladly took as payment from our parents to allow them to forget they had us for the evening. On Sundays our parents took us to Catholic mass in our crispest beige, just so that they had someone else to talk to. The conversation was as bland as the mass we’d just sat through - spontaneously coughing up prayers and daydreaming of a world outside those sombre walls.  Sunday was the slowest that time could pass. In primary school, we ascended holding hands on to this little parade of shops and were all designated a shop to draw and interview the shop keepers. I sat on the small fence and...

A thousand years ago, this little valley lacerated by loops of the same river was claimed for Christian theology.  Thousand and thousands of bricks laid to build great libraries and homes for bishops. A king even made his home here too. The city’s university, made up of dozens of colleges, feels like a museum. At least it did until that photo of Boris, George and David pomping up some steps in a Bullingdon Club portrait, the collective smuggery on record: this is the place that a class of people go who were born to run things.  Oxford is the only place that the word magdalen isn’t pronounced magdalen. Its terms are Michaelmas, Hillary and Trinity. It’s PhD is a DPhil. It is not the same. As a teenager, I agreed to take part in a local inter-school athletics event. I was a decent long distance runner, mainly because I would set off to fast to get ahead and then stubbornly run like Forest until I was told to stop. The problem was that Slough is local to Eton and this event event...

The restaurant on the sea front is closed. Sun-bleached photos of English and German meals are still on the wall outside. White plastic chairs dusted green from salt winds stacked away never to bear an overweight hammy arse again. Outside, a poorly painted goldfish stares cross-eyed. Mobility scooters murmur past.  At the hotel check in desk, a woman is annoyed at the suggestion its her first time staying there. They come here in twos. Retired. A life behind them. They sit on benches staring out to the sea in different directions. The sea ignores them. Wave upon wave upon wave rolling onto the sand before sharply inhaling back into the sea again. The wind whips off the water and the secret heat it hides throws sea salt and sand to erode  the heyday off the life of this frontier of land and water. This is the sea’s land. Just as it erodes rock into sand, it will claim this place that is aging with its visitors until one day there is nothing and no-one here. They stare out ...