Book review: A glimpse of dereliction
I’ve been reading a marvellous new book from Random House - Paul Talling’s Derelict London.
Back in 2003, it turns out, Paul and I both had the same idea. We’d both seen buildings slated for demolition and decided to take photographs of them. We both took photos. But I went off and did other things - while Paul had discovered an obsession. More derelict buildings followed, then the derelict London website, and now this book - the result of five years tracking down and documenting the derelict buildings of the capital.
It sounds gloomy - and indeed some of it is. The closure of the Intrepid Fox pub in Soho, for instance, which a former regular describes as “another step towards the homogenisation of Soho as just another bland, faceless area.” The boarded up Severndroog Castle, a wonderful folly in Shooters Hill that was closed by the council in 1988.
There’s the sadness of a single marooned turnstile at Woodford Town FC, surrounded by grass; a turnstile to nowhere. And everywhere in the book you can see blind facades, shuttered with steel or boarded up, windowless, like a face with no eyes.
But there’s more to the book than that. Paul seems so often able to capture a little incongruity with his lens - like the wonderful photo of a housing estate being demolished in which a white plastic garden chair has been neatly placed right in front of the JCB. There’s a strongly surreal feeling to some of these shots, and it’s this sense of weirdness that makes the book so interesting.
A photo of the Coopers Road Estate shows us flats with no fronts, the whole wall ripped off to prevent squatters; it seems to make toy theatres out of people’s living rooms. Or there’s the P&O building, which because it’s built around a concrete core, is being demolished from the bottom up, so that it looks like a building suspended in the air.
Weirdest of all is a photo taken in Tobacco Dock - which I actually remember as a shopping mall in the early 1990s - with pirate dummies standing immobile in the half darkness. Very film noir.
The book also casts a marvellous light on old London. (One of the derelict buildings has been ruined since 1814 - Winchester Palace, a fine medieval hall in Southwark.)
There are some superb aristocratic properties, like Northumberland House in Tottenham - it was Harry Hotspur, Duke of Northumberland, who gave his name to Spurs football team. There is grandeur - assertive hulks like the Millennium Mills in Royal Docks, and Battersea Power station - huge great buildings fallen on evil days. There’s delicacy, with the Flemish gable of the Crown & Shuttle in Shoreditch, and there’s style - the 1920s slickness of the Matthiae cafe in Richmond.
Paul has certainly done his research on these buildings, and the text that accompanies the photos illuminates the lives these dead buildings have lived. There are pubs that declined from darts nights to strippers, then to ruins; there are stories of films that were shot in the docks and wharves; even the pet shop where Ken Livingstone got his newts.
And there are some macabre stories, including ghosts, and the disused Necropolis station where corpses in their coffins were loaded on to the trains that took them to their final resting place.
The book also illustrates some potent ironies. Pimlico houses that were slated for demolition ten years ago, and now sell for a million quid each.The Tower House in Whitechapel - a doss house where Stalin stayed for sixpence a night, now turned into luxury flats which rent for £300 a week.
My favourite picture, though, is the funniest - a Russian tank marooned in wasteland. Its nickname, apparently, is Stompie - and urban legend says its has its gun trained on the local council’s planning department.
My only quibble is that it’s a pity the book is not in a bigger format - the quality of the photography is so good.
Derelict London is published by Random House in paperback at £9.99.
Photos provided by Random House and © Paul Talling
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