Ah Rome. The Eternal City. The ancient monuments, the romance, the pizza. The eternal bloody queue for Easyjet. I’ve visited before and appreciated all this but last week I was struck by the art. Johnny Roman is not ashamed of his interest in art. Good for him. On arriving in my hotel the curtains were drawn. I opened them and there was this thing sitting there embedded in the half constructed building next door. At first I thought it might be an attempt to construct a giant flying saucer in the middle of an office block. Perhaps they thought it would be inconspicuous - it was not! In fact it was the half constructed Italian Government’s Congress Centre designed by Massimiliano Fuksas and which will contains an enormous ‘cloud’ made of teflon. That’s right, you read correctly. A cloud made of teflon and what’s more the cloud will glow from within, and will contain an auditorium. What I was viewing was the skeleton of this building. Why Teflon? Well your Roman doesn’t eat much fried food and so they have no real use for their their quota of EU teflon production and so they have decided to paint it all over their public buildings. Imaginative thinking you see.
Hotel dei Congressi, Rome
In England we have consternations and letters from Prince Charles whenever the Shard or the Gherkin are mentioned but your Roman takes pride in this sort of nonsense. In the office the next day I found a dozen paintings in the style of a range of famous artists portraying the company product. Witty and fun. Later, after I’d had a chance to explore the hotel, I found a selection of artwork decorating the interior from statues and paintings to some beautiful small model buildings. This is not to say that Rome does not suffer the ghastliness of hyper-capitalism like the rest of us. At the airport, while taking pictures, I was told to refrain as photography was “not possible”. However, I managed to get this glimpse of the almost Soviet advertising poster for some kind of photocopy machine. All hail to the polit bureau for another year exceeding EU teflon production targets!
Una storia de condividere ogni giorno (All hail the EU Teflon Targets)
Madrid. Madrid. Gorgeous Madrid. The good thing about Madrid is the sunshine. Oh and the food. The hotel was nice too, as was the broad bright bus station at Plaza de Castilla and I loved the architecture downtown and the people are so friendly and have you visited the fantastic Museo Reina Sofía?!
Wait. It’s pointless to list the good things about Madrid, there are too many of them. Let’s approach this in a more rational manner. List the bad things. Everything in Madrid is good except…………I can’t think of anything and anyway, this blog has not developed a reputation for informing the reader of the great and the gorgeous. No the mission of TB is to revile the ghastliness of the human condition.
The queues at EasyJet coming home were appalling! That’s more like it. Being someone who is out of kilter with 21st Century Britain I detest queues. During my, seemingly endless queue at Madrid airport I decided that it was not so much the queues that wound me up as the people in them. I determined that there were various types of moronic queue-ers and I lay them out here for your consideration.
First there are the early birds. The people are desperate to be the first on the plane so that they can have the pick of one of the hundred odd almost identical seats. Bizarrely these people would rather spend 45 minutes standing in a queue to get their choice of seat than relax and take their pick at the last moment. Then there are the dawdlers. The people that, when the people in front of them move forward, they stay still. OK, we don’t want to be leaning into each other but come on, we’re queuing here. I don’t mean to be pedantic but we need to maintain a distinction between a queue and a bunch of people standing around in isolated clumps. I suspect that these people are the same as the morons who do the same in a queue of traffic. Appearing so relaxed and laid back, yet nip in in front of them and they soon get shirty.
Cibeles Palace (City Hall),
Then there are the sliders. These are the people that come and stand next to the queue, usually gazing at something trying to look like they are wondering if this is the queue for them. Yet gradually, as the queue moves they move along too, usually sliding past everyone else to get to the front. Then there are the back pushers. These are the people so eager to move forward that they keep pushing into the back of you. There are the misplaced toffs. I recall seeing a toff, identified by shirt by Pink, Gucci shoes etc who’d obviously had to slum it in cattle class. He just walked straight to the front hoping he could bluff it out. I was pleased to see him sent away with a flea in his ear. No doubt he cursed his PA the next day. There are the disappointed Fast Trackers. They paid their extra fiver and think they should be able to board before everyone else but, for some reason or another, there is no fast track today and they are forced to wait in line with the rest of us while they mutter about writing letters and demanding refunds. Then, there are the disorganised groups. The ones who, you think have finished at checkin but no, auntie fucking Jean still has to check her bags or one of the twins forgot to hand over his passport.
Yesterday must have been a good day for these people as I witnessed one of the most obnoxious types. The shover. I’d sat at the back of the plane bombarded for two and a half hours by the loud shouting of a party of Spanish school kids and was accelerating along the Gatwick Airport corridors in order to leave this group far behind. I rounded a corner and my way was clear down the final slope to border control. Just then a wide portly woman emerged just in front of me and sidled slowly down the ramp. I readjusted my expectations (ooh Mrs!) and resigned myself to a slow decline. Suddenly a bloke in a suit weaved passed me and shoved her out of the way so that he could pass. She muttered something and he turned and gave her a look of pure hatred and asked her “What?” then rushed off.
As Sartre rightly pointed out: Hell is other people.
The people of Berlin are protesting about the large number of tourists who visit their city and I have every sympathy.
Mass tourism is a scourge on society. The enormous buses clog our streets obscuring the very views that the tourists have come to see and eventually the local culture is displaced by an international tourist culture of burgers, beer and bullshit. Local charm is replaced by shops selling plastic beefeaters and pictures of how things used to be before mass tourism.
We all love to travel and from the tourists point of view mass tourism is a boon enabling us to see the world. Without mass tourism many of us would have no experience of anything outside our immediate vicinity.
But mass tourism destroys the thing it loves. A herd of tourists cannot visit a city without damaging it like some socio-economic version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When a person reads of the Left Bank in Paris he learns of Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. He thinks that he too must experience this seminal environment and he buys his ticket. But the locals have seen him coming. They know that the age of art has passed and the age of commerce is upon us. So they open themed cafés, bars and restaurants with names like Bar Les Artistes or Le Lucernaire.
When our gallant traveller arrives he finds that he is not rubbing shoulders with writers or poets but engaged in a drinking competitions with a IT Administrator from Milton Keynes. Our intellectual explorer is now in the minority. The majority of the clientele are not interested in culture but feel they should “take a look while we’re here”. They have been sold culture in the same way that they are sold breakfast cereal and aftershave.
Our cities become caricatures of themselves, Ko Samui becomes Blackpool and an Indian tourists sits and enjoys the ambiance of Paris while eating a Big Mac.
The tourist industry markets travel as a liberating experience but mass tourism is not so much a manifestation of freedom as of greed, globalisation and hyper-commercialisation.
The population of Greater London is estimated at approximately 7.7 Million people. Wikipedia considers that London receives 15 million tourists each year and it is a safe bet that the vast majority of these concentrate their activity in central London. At the moment, the tourist industry sees no limits on how many people it can push down the subway at Oxford Circus. This has been detrimental to the quality of life of Londoners and no doubt Berliners suffer similarly and so are right to object.
Industry and commerce have long involved the appropriation of commonly held land for exploitation by self appointed “owners”. Communism recognises this when it declares that “property is theft”. We generally consider this property to be land used for homes, farms or factories and we assume that this confiscation means exclusion of the public but we neglect the public space in between private property. We neglect the commons.
This common space is owned, used and valued by all of us yet government and commerce now seem hell bent on exploiting it to herd around disinterested tourists in such wretched conditions that their goal, once they emerge from their air-conditioned packaging, is to take a piss, grab a burger and get back on the bus.
The Tragedy Of The Commons may sound like a Thomas Hardy novel but is, in fact, a concept used by economists. To quote Wikipedia: “The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”
The scenario usually given is where common land is used by multiple individuals to graze their cattle. It is in the interest of each individual to graze as many cows as possible yet this will eventually ruin the grazing land to the detriment of all.
One solution often proposed is that the commons should be privatised and access restricted to those with the ability to pay. The owner would then work in his own self interest to ensure that the asset was maintained in good condition. This could mean that the owner would limit access but this is, by no means, certain.
Intuitively I am against the continued expansion of the private sphere and I find modern shopping malls a poor replacement for a thriving high street.
Another way of addressing TTOTC is intervention by local government. Legislation could be implemented to limit use and protect the asset. In the case of mass tourism this might mean metropolitan rules restricting the number of Bulk Tourist Deliveries (BTDs) in a given period.
However, local government derives a lot of revenue from allowing companies to graze their tourists in city streets and officials often see their role as maximising revenue. According to Wikipedia “The Government Office for London states that tourism revenues constitute 10 per cent of London’s gross value added and contributes to the employment of up to 13 per cent of London’s workforce. According to the London Development Agency, visitors to London spend around £15bn each year.”
Obviously cities will not wish to give up this revenue but at the moment we are sacrificing our environment for short term profit. Reversing this trend and protecting our cities will make them better places to live and ensure that they continue to attract tourists well into the future.
Many years ago, over too many pints, I recall discussing the idea of creating a tour operator which would specialise in giving tourists an authentic night out in London. We would offer a standard service tailored to the Japanese businessman and start with a few pints in a local boozer followed by a trip on a big red double decker bus down to Fitzrovia. More pints would be consumed and a Japanese man would be cajoled into thinking that his beer was off and pushed into taking it back to the bar. The barman would be bribed to take a sip, pause, frown and then apologise profusely before telling the Japanese businessman that he had a “very discerning pallet sir”. More beer would be consumed and the Japanese businessman encouraged to approach a specific young woman who would be bribed to slap him soundly around the face.
The frivolities would continue in an Indian Restaurant where large portions of Vindaloo would be consumed and the waiter paid to talk some bollocks about how this was the hottest curry ever consumed. Eventually the tourists would be emptied into taxis and left to find their own way home when hopefully a minority would vomit in the back of the cab and end the night sleeping in a railway station.
The company was to be called Here We Go Tours and we considered that visiting Australians would make the best tour guides.
The 20th century was the age of standardisation, the production line and economies of scale. The 21st century looks set to change all that. From Internet shopping to 3D printing, globalisation and technology are enabling consumers to customise their purchases to suit their tastes. House swaps and couch surfing are two examples of how independent travellers are using The Internet to bypass the mass tourism industry.
Why not go further, why not reject the standardised tours set by self appointed experts and design your own itinerary? In the past this may have been difficult but in the 21st century the tools are readily available. The Internet allows us to research an area, Google Street View lets us wander the streets before we get there and our GPS equipped smartphones allow us to navigate once we get there.
Why not create an itinerary and share it with your friends on Facebook?
The concept of tourists destroying what they visit is not new and was deftly described in a 1975 Science Fiction story by Garry Kilworth named “Let’s Go to Golgotha”. To quote Wikipedia: “In the future period where the story takes place, time travel has been invented and made commercially available. Among other historical events, tourists can book a time-travelling “Crucifixion Tour.” Before setting out, the tourists are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!”. (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 AD are present at all.”
Have been in London for a couple of days. Highbury looking beautiful with blossom on all the trees and the daffodils in bloom. Arsenal football stadium is Amazing. Bicycles everywhere. Down the West End, China Town crammed with delivery vans in the morning and in Sloane Square an old woman feeds the pigeons while an ancient Harrods electric delivery van trundles past, the driver sporting a grey top hat.
Nic Fiddian-Green's horse head
An enormous horses head sculpture by Nic Fiddian-Green now stands at Marble Arch and walking back along Oxford Street I looked for the first time at the extravagant sculpture over the doors of Selfridges which seems based on a nautical motif. On Tottenham Court Road a queue formed for the new iPad2 at PC World.
Later, in the evening, the Cafe Oto in Dalston had some kind of music event underway but the bloke on the door wanted £12 so I declined and continued on to The Prince George which, to my delight, had Neil Young’s Words on the juke box.
On Saturday morning I noticed that the top of Charing Cross Road has been closed off for work on the London Underground. A lot of work going on there.
Nelson's Ship in a Bottle
In Trafalgar Square the Fourth Plinth currently supports a large ship in a bottle. At around 11am people gathered as for the anti-cuts demonstration and a group of women from the Association of Child Psychotherapists sort of put the cuts into perspective.
Further toward Victoria, in St James Park, the squirrels are practically tame and leap onto the railings to beg for food. Once they receive something they rush away to bury their little treasure in the flower beds.
I’ve lived in Brighton for around ten years and for all that time the West Pier Trust has been twittering on about rebuilding the West Pier. The trust was established in 1978 and in all that time they appear to have achieved nothing.
Even after the superstructure of the pier was utterly destroyed in two fires in 2003 the Trust claimed that the infrastructure was still intact and that restoration would go ahead. However, despite the trusts interminable deliberations, despite its studies, web sites and marketing material the pier continued to deteriorate until in 2011 the soul useful purpose of the West Pier is to provide a muse for local photographers.
Since the pier is dead one might expect that the trust would make the remains safe, tidy up the foreshore and run itself down but that is not how bureaucracies work.
The West Pier Trust has a new idea. It is going to build a new “world-beating landmark”. An enormous spire with a viewing platform which goes up and down. The marketing material looks pretty good though one wonders if the trust will be any more successful at building this than it was at restoring the old West Pier.
Last year I attended a course on a Project Management framework known as PRINCE2. One of the aspects that was hammered home in this course was that one must continue to justify the project in terms of its stated objectives. If risks or issues occur then the project manager must go back to the executive and report that there may be a risk that the project cannot meet its objectives. The reason for this is that the decision to stop the project does not lie with the day to day management but with the project sponsor. The decision lies with the person or body who initiated and set in place the reason for the project.
It seems to me that the West Pier Trust have failed miserably in their management of restoration of the West Pier. Not only have they failed to restore the pier but they have invented a new objective for themselves once it became apparent that the original objective could not be met.
This probably sounds very dry and irrelevant but look at it like this. Suppose you saved up your pennies and decided to build an extension to your house. Suppose that the project manager who you engaged spent most of his time on presentations and web sites and then came back to you years later and told you that he had failed to build the extension but had built a fantastic swimming pool.
I believe that the Wets Pier Trust is a classic example of a self sustaining publicly funded bureaucracy. Even when its raison d’etre is removed the executives cannot bring themselves to dissolve the trust and go home. Even as the gutted ruins crumbled into the sea and as late 2007 the trust continued to proclaim their mantra that they would rebuild it. I would have loved to to attend the meeting where the staff of the trust finally acknowledged that the West Pier would never be rebuilt and then scrambled around for something to spend the money on and some way to keep themselves in jobs. One wonders what will happen once the viewing tower is completed? Will the West Pier Trust discover some other vital role it needs to fulfil? I have no doubt that they will surprisingly discover that managing the new structure takes the same if not more staff and a budget which seems to increase year on year.
Personally I am in favour of letting the the sea to take the bones of the West Pier and for the trust to die along with it.
As I was in the area, today, I thought I’d drop in to the Asda in Brighton Marina. Big mistake. Whoever owns Brighton Marina has been steadily building more and more shops and flats. As the Marina is artificial it only has one access road which runs down a sort of flyover. Add to this the way that the Asda car park entrance runs around a bend so that you cannot see the mass of traffic before you until it’s too late and you’ve joined the queue for the car park. I queued patiently and parked. When I emerged it took me 45 minutes just to get out of the car park.
All this is, of course, ghastly but it made me wonder about the new development which was being planned for Brighton Marina which, according to some reports, could include 1,280 new apartments.
It makes me wonder what our city council is thinking of. What possible sway could large rich developers have over city councillors? It beats me.
This is a video by some guys called The Love Police who are highlighting the increasing restrictions on individuals in public/private spaces. e.g. the way the police claim powers which they do not possess to stop filming.
Art Photography
Urban Underground Exploration Steven Duncan
Tags: Moscow, New York, Steven Duncan, Urban Exploration, Urban Explorer
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