CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

H ome from school, change clothes, eat dinner and jump in dad's car to Langley Trading Estate in the van.   We had Henry hoovers, bin bags and bleach. I’d clean the first floor: tipping desk ashtrays into little white bin bags of ash, emptying the cans of Coke from their little bins. One of the desks had a Page 3 calendar on the wall.  Cleaning office toilets at night. The halogen buzz, dim light and a wall length mirror spooked me out, so I’d bleach the toilets, flush, and clean the mirrors without looking behind me.  When we were done I bought a hot chocolate from the machine and sit in that warm feeling of having worked.  I only did it to help my dad. He’d left a good job as a fire chief in Knightsbridge to start a cleaning business with a mate. He had vans, hoovers and headed paper, but was soon a one man operation cleaning offices day and night. The business went bankrupt and we lost our house. The debts followed him until he sold the world that he’d gone in...

There’s someone living in it - at the top - the room with the plastic red roses in the window, underneath the yawning hole in the roof where the slum pigeons nest - the lonely company of TV strobe in the dark. The hotel closed in 2011, although time had stopped in the hotel in the late 1980s. Breakfast was served in a David Lynch red room, a full English ordered the day before and served in reverse. This was a hotel of the old internet. Scrolling scrolls of information. Disappearing into the lost property bucket of capital S Search.  For us, it was the mystery across the road -  Cars under covers that evaporated in the morning - Floor plans showing networks of corridors left behind.  A building once occupied by an elite, fallen into three star hotel mediocracy and left for dead in the playground of casual property acquisition - bored by the resistance of municipal planning permission.  We want to get inside - to take photos of the fall from grace. But this is someo...