Hobart Hall (and the plastic roses)

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 someone’s home and there’s no art in disrespecting a person’s humanity. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Petticoat Lane (and the passers by)

Image
7am Sunday clang. Clumsy gloved hands assembling clothing rails before dawn. Fluorescent £5. Reclaiming the street from the sockless Essex of a few hours before.  We slept tight in a tight bed in a tight bedsit flat above it all. 60 degree white over the landlady’s purple. Groups half listen to the tales of a sadistic serial killer. It’s been long enough. I politely walk through them into the Sainsbury’s. Years before, I’d walked behind army surplus camo jackets and Dr. marten’s to the market.  Every Sunday, I sought out the market seller who spoke with an electrolarynx. He’d try to defer to his Vietnamese wife, but she always just shrugged with indifference. I bought cameras and guitars, none of which worked. The next stall sold Lomo cameras. I couldn’t afford one, but I bought a Holga. The camera came with a roll of black tape to block out the light leakage onto the film. The market closed for redevelopment. Now there’s a Wagamama, if you were looking for one. We met o...
Read more

Marine Court (and the stiff signal)

Image
1. The address of the rave was texted to us. A car full of 19 year olds, driven by a guy in his thirties. Greg wore designer knitwear and styled his hair with gel like the posters I saw in the barber I used to go to because it was empty. We drove through the crowd of baggy hoods and neon traces and parked on the edge of the field. A few different sound systems stood apart stoning us with walls of trance. Greg disappeared from the car and gurned his way back home to a rave that had died ten years ago.  2. We wriggled through the shallow tunnel under the Glastonbury fence, having thrown school bags filled with pants and socks 3 metres over the top. Waiting for darkness from the lights of patrolling security, we ran through the gap between the perimeter and the festival. Having camped up we set to the stone circle and approached a man with clumped hair, clothing from the incense shop with the statuette of Ganesh. He opened up an Alice in wonderland book they’d doused in LSD and ...
Read more

Trelawney Avenue

Image
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...
Read more