An Englishman's home is his castle

IdleRich

IdleRich
Version called me crying when he finally got indoor plumbing. No more dragging the bucket to the moor he said
In Russia we stayed in a house with an outdoor toilet and where the only bathroom was a sauna. While I was there it was -10 and you could hear wolves howl at night.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Though come to think of it we were looking at a flat here in Lisbon and I was thinking "why is it so cheap?" and then I realised there was no bathroom or toilet. A few old ones were built that way in fact but many have been converted, often quite crudely so that the toilet is in the kitchen. I guess cos that's where the pipes are. Bit annoying but not half as annoying as waking up at 3am and having to walk four flights of steps to the street just to find somewhere to relieve yourself.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Though come to think of it we were looking at a flat here in Lisbon and I was thinking "why is it so cheap?" and then I realised there was no bathroom or toilet. A few old ones were built that way in fact but many have been converted, often quite crudely so that the toilet is in the kitchen. I guess cos that's where the pipes are. Bit annoying but not half as annoying as waking up at 3am and having to walk four flights of steps to the street just to find somewhere to relieve yourself.
This is what bedpans are for, I guess.
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
Nevertheless the juxtaposition of bleak, strip-lit foyers for the social housing tenants and luxurious hotel-style concierge lobbies for the rest evokes uneasy images of spatial apartheid.

Spatial apartheid. I'd not heard this phrase before but it fits the UK very well. We've been doing it for decades, just refining into a fine art now.
 

version

Well-known member
The banks are the new landlords.

The firm that just bought Reese Witherspoon's production company for almost a billion are doing this too.
 

luka

Well-known member
the dilapidated dwelling is good. it basically says the problem with this country is that it is a pirate ship. when i saw it
craner's bete noire owen hatherly was doing a q&a with the director patrick kellier. i was on acid and very drunk but
i enjoyed the film a lot.

“What does it mean to live in a culture that finds it so difficult to produce new domestic architecture?” asks the invisible protagonist of Keiller’s film, an inquisitive and puzzled fictional researcher, voiced by actress Tilda Swinton. She returns to the UK with fresh, and soon frustrated, eyes, finding, after her 20 years in the Arctic, that whilst the UK remains one of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced economies, its extraordinarily expensive housing still lingers in a state of backward ruin.

Nineteen years on from its initial release, Keiller’s essay on the problems of the house in Britain has only gotten more vital, acute and devastatingly pertinent, as the housing crisis rages, rising rents displace residents, and property is leveraged as an asset that dominates, and rocks, the global economy.

Breaking down the failures of the housing industry to innovate and re-think itself – despite past achievements ranging from Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road Estate to Walter Segal’s self-build typologies – the film looks to Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, Constant’s New Babylon and Japan’s Metabolists for answers, alongside interviewees including Cedric Price, Doreen Massey, Martin Pawley, James Dyson and Saskia Sassen. Throughout, Keiller’s narrator journeys on her quest for answers, through facts, fiction, humour and even a love story.

“Is English housing just another characteristic of a backward capitalism? Is England a backward capitalism because it’s never had a bourgeois revolution?”
 

luka

Well-known member
Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns.


“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don’t it?”


I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw; with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.


“That’s a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I hoist it up—so—and cut off the communication.”


The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and not merely mechanically.


“At nine o’clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you’ll say he’s a Stinger.”


The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress, constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.


“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede the idea of fortifications,—for it’s a principle with me, if you have an idea, carry it out and keep it up,—I don’t know whether that’s your opinion—”


I said, decidedly.


“—At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions.”


Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite wet.


“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in acknowledging my compliments.
 
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jenks

thread death
I love that Dickens makes the figurative actual. As if to say what would the metaphor look like in reality? And it would look a bit shit but also charming when viewed sympathetically.
 

luka

Well-known member
no one else even knew it was dickens jenks the sad state of literacy today all they do is play space invaders this lot, honestly, its enough to make you weep
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
I managed to score a digitised copy of The Dilapidated Dwelling that looks like it's been taken from a VHS. Terrible quality, but if anyone wants to see it drop me a line. Unlikely there will ever be an official release since it uses too much uncleared stock footage.


Of paqrticular interest is photo 4. I have nothing but respect for someone who dedicates what looks like 20% of their total living space to a sound system.
618_KBN210023_IMG_03_0000.jpeg
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
She returns to the UK with fresh, and soon frustrated, eyes, finding, after her 20 years in the Arctic, that whilst the UK remains one of the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced economies, its extraordinarily expensive housing still lingers in a state of backward ruin.
It's weird how often you read "The UK is one of the wealthiest blah blah blah, but X is terrible and really shit".
I'm starting to wonder where the good bits are.
 
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