An Ode To Cement

 Brutalist architecture is not the first thing which you may associate with gaming...

I would guess that none (well maybe two) of my friends are aware that since my early teens I have had a love of ‘true’ Brutalist architecture? Not the modern ‘fuck you’ school, but the proper full on 'Exposition Du Cement style.

Growing up in the 1970 and 80s, Shefield was full of the stuff. It was grim, gritty and drab, but it spoke of the future.

Where we now have the Winter Gardens in the heart of the city, there stood the truly futuristiv modern extension to the town hall, known with love and loathing by local folk as 'the Egg Box'.

Built in 1977, it sort of collided with punk so that in 1978, aged just 10, I was already being drawn into the grotesque sci-fi beauty of it.

You see, that was the year that I started to take an interest in things... Music and popular culture  was starting to slowly become something I was interested in, with the awful but still rather exciting to a ten year old 'I lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper' by Sarah Brightman in the charts and  Blake's 7 was starting it's multi-series journey on television screens and of course it was the previous year's emergence of the groundbreaking comic '2000AD' which catapulted me at lightspeed into the future, never to return. Oh andthere was that obscure film by someone called George Lucas, I seem to recall.

Sarah Brightman

 Blake's 7 was notorious for using concrete buildings as locations and so, you will I am sure start to appreciate why I have this sense of cement and dice being connected symbiotically.

It was some years before I managed to get inside the Eggbox, but as you can see, it did nothing to discourage the imagination of the young teen I had become:

You can almost hear the lasers and smell the ozone as you avoid black-clad marines, to go and pay your annual rates. Alas, it lasted 25 years before it was pulled down. I have never voted Labour since...

The most traditional buildings could not escape Sheffield City Council's concrete fetish, and one of my favourite structures was a bland, grey-brown cement staircase in the otherwise noble and staid, Mappin art gallery, which connected to an upstairs cafe, walking up those stairs, the smell of coffee and hummus drawing me on, is something I would pay money to experience again. Boy I spent some time in there until they also did away with that little pleasure - Bastards!

At weekends, in the period '81-82 as I was finding gaming and the scene was probably in the top three in the U.K, rubbing shoulders with London and that upstart Nottingham, my gaming buddy of the time and I hung around the assorted multi-story car parks, the galleries and even selected underpasses, imagining we were interstellar freedom fighters, grim fantasy adventurers or just 80s kids reading comics and avoiding skinheads and punks. One particular underpass, had an entrance to the main branch of Boots, which was back then so much more than a chemist. On that level there were books and even some computer bits for the ZX81. You left a grey dark realm, the traffic passing above you, and entered a quiet, never that busy basement, bright and warm. It was where I first saw the Steve Jackson's Sorcery series too, come to think of it, a couple of years later, as we always took that route as part of a journey between several stores with things for the teenager obsessed with comics, Left Wing art installations, model kits and gaming, with Games Workshop being the next to last before Sheffield Space Centre.

Now, the music of Gary Numan and local legends Human League (named after a scenario in a boardgame no less) was made for Brutalist backdrops, in fact was inspired as much by it, as the works of J.G Ballard.

Take a trip to the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and get the old iPod playing the 'Dare' or 'Travelogue' album as you wander round, and you'll see what I mean. A walk across Leeds from the railway station to the Department for Health building known as 'the Kremlin' and you'll get the same effect.

If you can't feel the vibe, then sir, madam or miss, you are devoid of the finer feelings... :D

I became something of an afficianado of the grim and grey. The cement, polished by the constant brushing of human hands and the oils therein takes on a marble-like hue.  

About 15 years ago, we were in Plymouth, and seeking toliet facilities after a coach ride over from Newquay, I found a wonderfull run down subterranean cement edifice, which warmed the cockles of heart, despite my screaming bldder.

So, this morning as I finished my breakfast, head in the Yorkshire Post magazine, with an arresting article on Brutalist architecture in Yorkshire, I got to the end, and saw that the images were from a book by Simon Phipps, who has written several books on the style, but as this one was a bit more focussed, I scarfed down the last of my toast and marmalade (coarse cut, Seville orange) and parted with £16.99 for a copy of this 200+ page, hardback gem:

 

 

 

'During the post-war years the North of England saw the building of some of the most aspirational, enlightened and successful modernist architecture in the world. For the first time, a single photographic book captures those buildings, in all their power and progressive ambition. Over the last few years acclaimed photographer Simon Phipps has travelled and sought out the publicly commissioned architecture of the post-war North. From Newcastle's Byker Wall Estate, voted the best neighbourhood in the UK, to the extraordinary Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, from Preston's sweeping bus station and Liverpool's Royal Insurance Building, these structures have seen off threats to their survival and are rightly celebrated for the imprint they leave upon the skyline and the cultural life of their cities.This inspiring invitation to explore northern modernism includes maps and detailed information about all the architecture photographed.

Publisher: September Publishing
ISBN: 9781912836154
Number of pages: 208'

And so, I am listening to Human League as I write and in a few moments I shall be stiing with several choice 1980s gaming titles, looking out across the city from the hill on which the Dark Tower sits, dreaming of years and buildings that I'll never see again, but which have all played their part in getting me to where I am now.

TTFN