Brutalist Christmas
Give me a brutalist Christmas,
The 25th day on mid-century estates
Santa taking the lift to the top floor
Following the plasticated fonts on the walls,
The smell of parsnips filling the ziggurat,
Cards posted from flat to flat,
Santa Please Stop at these streets in the sky!
I want a brutalist Christmas.
Let’s have a brutalist Christmas,
Snow settling on a Barbara Hepworth,
Like the clean lines of igloos,
Form follows function in the concrete tundra.
I want a brutalist Christmas,
Give me icicles hanging from the béton brut,
Pantomimes in ‘60s art centres
With net & ball carpets,
Oh yes it is! A brutalist Christmas.
Give me a brutalist Christmas,
Tinsel decked in empty university halls,
Chris Rea doing seventy down the M6,
Bus station roofs with room for a sleigh.
I want a brutalist Christmas,
Couples holding hands on the top floor of car parks
Looking down at the lights,
Parties in old office blocks,
Carols outside shopping precincts,
Holly in the windows,
The white against the grey,
A brutalist Christmas,
Heavy and weathered,
But built around people
Like it was always meant to be.
Just after midnight last night, I was finishing a cup of hot chocolate from my Park Hill mug before putting the light out, and looking at the illustration of that mighty Sheffield landmark must’ve done something to me, because a few hours later, unable to sleep, I was writing this poem out on my phone.
It’s taken me until now to finish it off and upload it, but that’s because I’ve been at work, listening to the surprisingly-harmonious strains of the Key Stage 2 carol concert waft through the corridors to the office. In a middle-England market town like Witney, there’s not really a lot of brutalism about, but the Christmas spirit abounds.
Most people that know me will know that at heart, I am a brutalist. I’m not sure why, but for as long as I remember I’ve been drawn to the architecture, despite my more bucolic upbringings. There’s just something about its simultaneously complementary awkwardness, which perhaps is what I relate to, but also the fact that – despite the half-century of nimbyist sneering and snobbery – these buildings were well-designed, functional, built for the residents and patrons that used them, and above all, interesting. Most modern architecture could barely live up to one of those criteria, and given the choice between a sprawling estate with every amenity included, built around green space and a shared optimism for the future, or some glass-curtained Square Mile penis extension, I know which side I’m on.
Although I’m not sure I ever wrote about it on here, when I first launched the Poetry Advent Calendar in 2014 I was working at the National Theatre on the South Bank, one of the best examples of brutalism in the country and probably my favourite building. I remember being incredibly grateful, weaving my way to work along Lasdun’s crenellations, that I got to call such an amazing space my workplace, and even now I find myself drawn to it any time I’m in the centre of London. “There’s something aphrodisiac about the smell of wet concrete”, Denys Lasdun said, and he wasn’t far wrong.
Today’s Door isn’t the first time that brutalism and poetry have combined for me. I once graffittied an elegy to the doomed Welbeck Street Car Park (just off Oxford Street) on the hoardings around it, as it sat awaiting a totally-unjustified demolition. Luci kept guard as, around 11pm, I took a Sharpie and scrawled ‘Farewell, Fair Welbeck Street’ across it in my worst handwriting, before vanishing into the night. Returning a few weeks later, people had begun sticking photos of the building around my poem, and the whole hoarding turned into a sort of makeshift shrine that lasted until the bulldozers came.
A few months later, the brilliant filmmaker Joe Gilbert tracked me down and asked if I would mind him using my poem in a film he’d made about the last days of the building. Of course I didn’t, I was delighted, and although I’d initially left my guerrilla poetry anonymous, I was dead chuffed that it was being read, and enjoyed, and even more chuffed to feature as part of this fantastic video. There’s another reading of it on Instagram, somewhere, too – despite the building’s untimely end, the poem has taken on a life of its own, which I’m delighted about.
I’ve got a Paul Catherall print of Welbeck Street, it’s one of the most expensive things I’ve ever bought (still a bargain at £125, I think) and it’s currently on our living room wall, draped in tinsel. You can see it in the background, here.
Today’s picture, on that note, is of Balfron Tower, by London From The Rooftops. It’s available as a Christmas Card here, so if anyone wants to send me one that will inevitably end up staying up all year, you know where to go. They do all sorts of other beautiful designs, and hopefully they won’t mind me giving them some free advertising on the Advent Calendar. These are quite natty, too.
I’ve also got a chunk of the late Owen Luder’s Trinity Square Car Park in Gateshead in a little jar on my bookshelf, but I’ll have to tell you about that another time.
Brutal is beautiful. Ten days to go…
Owen x
The Poetry Advent Calendar 