Newsstands and cafes

An essential part of a living city is having space for living, eating, drinking, shopping (see John Londei's pictures on the death of independent shops), reading and just hanging out. Tying in with that theme are Rachel Barrett's Newsstand pictures - here, Big Brother takes the form of the ranks of airbrushed models celebrities staring out from those top shelves, little signs of independent retail life in the big city.

Barrett also has some tremendous bad food pictures on her website, which leads on to the subject of the theme of the British cafe, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had their first serious tiff in "...a grubby restaurant near Euston Station (London). The absence of Parisian cafes, about which they both complained bitterly after a bun in a Lyons Corner House, added heat to the argument" (from A Dangerous Liaison, by Carol Seymour Jones)


British cafe culture is examined in this feature from the Guardian - it's better than it was, but it's not that good is the essential message. It also notes that Italian cafe culture came from England don't you know!

"The UK doing cafe culture is a bit like watching your dad dance," he says. "We're never really going to carry it off with any aplomb and sophistication like the French. The cafe culture in France is different from the one here. In the UK, it is very much the Starbucks culture. It's been transmitted from America, rather than trying to replicate the French version, which is much more relaxed."

The irony of us trying to decide whether we want American-style or French-style coffee shops is that, as Markman Ellis, author of The Coffee-House: A Cultural History, says - we had them first. "The continental notion of the cafe was inspired by a British idea. When the first coffee houses opened in Rome in the late 17th century, they were very much thought of as an imitation of a British model," he says.

Alec Soth's Detroit

In the Daily Telegraph, Mick Brown and Alec Soth look at the effects race, cars and the subprime fiasco have had on Detroit. James Howard Kunstler gets a namecheck and there is also a short slideshow by Alec here .

"The birthplace of modern America - one might say the modern world - is a huge disused factory building that stands on a busy six-lane boulevard in a part of Detroit named Highland Park.

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It has become a commonplace to describe Detroit as the sick city of America, but it is sobering to reflect on just how long this has been so. Browsing the internet before arriving in the city I came across an article in Time magazine headlined 'Decline in Detroit', lamenting the rising unemployment rate, the rate of migration from the city and its declining tax base. 'Blight is creeping like a fungus through many of Detroit's proud, old neighbourhoods,' it read. The article was dated 1961."

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This exodus of people and commerce to the suburbs resulted in a massive shift of capital, and a declining tax-base in the inner-city. While Oakland County, the wealthy suburb to the north, is one of the most affluent areas in America, Detroit itself is the country's most impoverished city - not only a synonym for urban decay, but a repository of all of America's most intractable problems: the decline of manufacturing and the threat of competition from overseas; racial tensions; a housing market decimated by the subprime mortgage crisis. More than a third of Detroit's residents live at or below the federal poverty line. Ironically, in the city that gave America the automobile, more than a fifth of households do not own a car."

Read full article here

One Mile from Home

We all have our Geography of Nowhere moments. Mine came in Burlington, Ontario. My wife was born there and grew up there. Her parents, refugees from the former Yugoslavia, moved into an empty plot of land after the Second World War on a street inhabited by refugees from Eastern Europe. Surrounding the house were fields full of corn, lettuce and plums which the street's inhabitants picked for a living. In their gardens they grew fruit and vegetables to supplement their incomes. The family built a garage and lived there when their first child, my sister-in-law, was born, then built a house where the rest of the family including my wife grew up.

I first visited in Burlington in 1992, while living in Toronto. The fields had gone and in their place were used car lots, strip malls, railway tracks, chemical works, an Ontario Hydro plant and endless roads and parking lots. My wife's childhood home had become the wrong end of the tracks. We walked across town to my sister-in-law's house, which lay in the pleasant wood-lined roads near the lakeshore. It was 25 degrees and about 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. We saw 3 people who weren't in cars. I was flabbergasted at how easily people had lost their environment, how development, planning and an overwhelming attachment to the car had alienated people from and made them blind to their immediate surroundings - which is really what the Geography of Nowhere is all about.

So, as you do, I decided to photograph it and here are some of the results - One Mile From Home - pictures of the immediate area 1 mile from my wife's home in Burlington, Canada.

July 4th

In my previous post, I mentioned James Howard Kunstler and his book, The Geography of Nowhere (which has influenced many photographers, most notably Jeff Brouws). This examines the brutalisation of American living spaces through roads, architecture and the destruction of public space.

Kunstler also has a website where he features his Eyesore of the Month. This is what he says about his July 4th offering.




" The Magic Forest amusement park, Lake George Village, New York. Here in this sweet-but-ridiculous little roadside attraction we see all the aspirations of a post-World War Two middle class -- the wish to feel good about our country (having just won a victory over manifest evil) and the secondary belief that we were now entitled to all the goodies that the universe had to offer. We can look at this kitsch panorama and wonder at the innocence of the nation we were back then. We have become something else now, something both scary and pathetic. What will be the icons of our country in The Long Emergency?

Happy birthday, United States of America"

Jelly Architecture

It's the London Festival of Architecture and the novelty story is the July 4th jelly competition, where Britain's top architects (Will Alsop, Foster and Partners etc) head the shortlist for the prize of Britain's top jelly architect - read the story here.

On the serious side, the relationship between food, jelly and architecture has a long history. Antonin Careme, chef to Napoleon 1, Tsar Nicholas and King George IV, believed in the power of the jelly to transcend the palate - he also believed architecture was essentially an extension of pastry making.

Maybe more buildings should be made of jelly. You can see the shortlist here.

The Magic Roundabout

The most important development in post-war Britain was the construction of the road and motorway infrastructure. As well as increasing geographic and social mobility, it led to the death of an affordable public transport system, the monopolisation of the retail industry by the big 5 supermarkets, the brutalisation of out-of-town architecture (see Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere for an American perspective on this ), and the rise of commuting and the displaced individual.


Central to making the roads manageable was Frank Blackmore, who invented the mini-roundabout.

Blackmore died last week, but part of his legacy is pictured above - The Magic Roundabout, highpoint of any trip to Swindon. Blackmore was a true eccentric - his family snaps were of roundabouts and junctions from around the country and in his home he had the rubbish bin placed in the middle of the kitchen to ease family traffic around the cooker and sink.

Adam Fuss, Stephanie Valentin

More photograms from Stephanie Valentin who makes images of bugs, seaweed and pollen amongst other things.















The most beautiful photograms come from Adam Fuss whose baby pictures, ripples and disembowelled hare are an inventive, intricate and time consuming take on the fragility of life. Also pictured here is one of his My Ghost series, a delicate take on the archaeology of dress.