The strangeness of Albion

Sometimes the everyday strikes you as extraordinary: the mundane seems strangely exotic. For reasons too complicated to explain, to do with an M.A. dissertation I'm in the midst of, I needed to drive home on the A38 trunk road rather than straight up the M5. It seemed everywhere we stopped was a bit weird.

First stop - Tewkesbury. A nice place, lovely ancient abbey church, interesting mix of timber-framed and Georgian vernacular architecture, innocuous enough, apart from its tendency to get submerged every time there is more than a light shower and the Severn floods.

Lovely mix of Tudor and Georgian architecture - the 'Poundwise' shop reminds you - not all  'shire-towns' are affluent.

Even the Jobcentre was up for sale...

Stunning Abbey church though.

For some reason though I became slightly disturbed by The Tesco Metro, and in particular the odd stripy figurines on a toddlers car ride outside the shop.

Look at it - isn't it truly strange?  Just think, someone actually sat down and designed this, Cadcam controlled  lathes and robotic injection moulding machines were intricately programmed to make it, hundreds of them are pouring off a production line in the depths of rural China, container loads are being shipped across the world to enable toddlers from San Paulo to Singapore to harass their overwrought mothers, laden with shopping, into shoving small  change into a slot so little Carlos or Wang Yong can sit and go brmmm brmmm, beep beep. Funny old world, just as well we usually wander about in our own little bubble, if we actually thought about ordinary stuff in any depth we'd probably go completely bonkers in just a couple of hours.

Next odd moment. One of the texts I've  been studying is a great book called The Making of the English Landscape by W. G. Hoskins. Since reading it I've become quite taken by English field and settlement patterns. What's great is whereas when it was first published in 1954 the only way you could study these patterns was by perusing large scale Ordinance Survey maps; now these have been supplemented by both aerial photographs on the O.S. site as well as Google Earth and Street View. So, in my quest for interesting settlement patterns, I'd homed in on places linked by the A38 trunk road. Tewkesbury, for example, is a good illustration of how physical features - the confluence of the rivers Severn and Avon combine with political and historical factors - the Abbey - to create the layout of a particular place.

Where I was heading was a village location - Severn Stoke - a few miles north. Sadly it was not to be. Partly I felt awkward parking up the motorhome in such a small place on a sleepy Easter Monday. The main reason, however, is that I felt intimidated in the presence of a local militia. What, might you ask, was the function of this uniformed, semi-official vigilante group? Driver 'education' I believe.... it's called Community Speed Watch and involves concerned members of the community being armed by the police with speed guns and zapping passing motorists. So terrifying was the hi-res garbed gruppenfuhrer that I drove-on and parked up in a layby just up the road. Even here the malign influence of petty authority was a wonder to behold.

The layby was pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

This did not prevent an outbreak of covert surveillance on the part of the local council

and a somewhat perplexing ambiguity concerning litter, and what to do with it.

Next stop, Droitwich Spa, which was not so much peculiar, as slightly melancholy. The town can trace its history back to the Anglo Saxon period. Throughout its long history it prospered as a centre of salt production. The town does have an attractive old quarter, centred on a crossroads. Now it mainly houses restaurants,solicitors offices and the like.

The central shopping area has moved a few hundred yards away housed in a redevelopment dating, by the look of it, from the early 70s. Why large scale planning always seems to result in somewhere dispiriting, I' m not sure. Maybe it's history's unexpected juxtapositions, coincidental and surprising differences of style and scale which give places a unique character. You can't plan serendipity. Droitwich shopping centre really does suffer from planning blight. Pleasant enough but soulless.

Somehow, we just can't quite manage 'social spaces'

if you have to declare the quality on the tray - then probably it's missing from the cup.

Not that the city fathers were unappreciative of their history. The shopping precinct boasts one of those 'toned down' modernist municipal concrete murals, so beloved of the post-war town planner. It shows the eighth century Mercian king granting the town a charter to produce salt. There is even evidence of the industry going as far back as Roman times.

Across the the square is a more recent sculpture in a realist style; it commemorates the hard labour of the salt workers - men, women and children. Overall it is quite well done, powerful in a slightly conservative way, a noble monument to the ordinary working people who enriched Droitwich over the centuries.

Worker as hero - the pose is reminiscent of  Ford Madox Ford's central figure of 'the navvy' in his famous painting, 'Work'. (1865) in Manchester Art Gallery

                              Although the style is traditional, the sculpture balances realism and idealisation.

The way the figures are almost 'products' of the salt boxes is a powerful touch.

There is one strange miscalculation however. The female worker is depicted bare-breasted. Now there is plenty of public statuary that feature nudes. These usually evoke some personified idea, like Liberty or Victory, and hark back to a classical tradition. The problem is, in a work of social realism, introducing a nude figure cofuses tone and register. It just looks odd, as if the artist was invoking a 'grand manner' as some kind of badge of honour out of kilter with the work's intention. Overall though it was good to see recent investment in public art.

Lido Park. next to where we had parked the van, featured public statuary of an altogether more amusing tenor. Over the past few years there has been a fashion for tree stump whittling. Local councils, faced with the task of removing tree stumps from local parks have taken to commissioning wood sculptors to come and 'transform' them. The results are almost always kitch, but rarely so hilarious as the Lido Park 'Diver'. Droitwich's very own timber Rodin decided to celebrate the local outdoor swimming pool by carving a diver in wood. The result is a 3D paean to Hockney's 'Big Splash'; it could be renamed the 'Big Clunk'.

'The Big Clunk'

Ouch! He's going to need more than a couple of paracetamols.....

The strangeness of Albion. I rest my case.