P.D. Smith's Blog, page 5

December 20, 2012

Reading the City

Allison Arieff has written a piece for her New York Times column called Reading the City, in which she discusses books published this year that engage with her "recurring obsessions — cities, walking, suburbia". They include Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, Jeff Speck's Walkable City, and Dave Eggers’s novel A Hologram for the King. She also mentions my own book, City:


"The author’s ideas are original and inventive enough to warrant his description of the book as ‘a guidebook to an imaginary Everycity.’ It’s a great thinker whose musings run the gamut from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan to Tahrir Square, graffiti to gladiators, who can quote the Old Testament and Baudelaire, and throw in an infographic entitled, ‘When skyscrapers rise, do markets fall?’"


Read Allison's whole piece here.


Although the weather outside my window is miserable, wet and not at all festive, I want to wish everyone a very happy Christmas! And I hope someone, somewhere has snow...


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Published on December 20, 2012 07:16

December 1, 2012

Best Books of 2012

Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic of the Financial Times, included City among his Best Books of 2012. This is what he said:


"The city is a big subject but this is readable, concise and extremely entertaining. Smith spans the emergence of the first Middle Eastern cities – places with no streets, so inhabitants needed to walk on roofs and descend ladders to reach their homes – up to informal settlements and high-tech hubs today. Well-researched, well-written and clear."


There was also an excellent piece in the Globe & Mail by Canadian author Taras Grescoe on City and Jeff Speck’s Walkable City. Writing about City, he notes that "this crash course in urban civilization is a reminder of the complexity, cosmopolitanism and creativity that are engendered, and encouraged, by living and working cheek by jowl". Read the article here.


Eric Liebetrau, editor of Kirkus Reviews, has also included City among his Best Nonfiction of 2012. The full list is here.


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Published on December 01, 2012 02:36

September 21, 2012

Amsterdam, reviews, etc

For the last few days I've been in Amsterdam, taking a break from writing and talking about City. I'd forgotten how beautiful Amsterdam is.



For the first time I visited the Museum Geelvinck-Hinlopen, a late seventeenth-century mansion facing the Herengracht.



With its secluded garden and luxurious rooms, it provided a memorable glimpse into a time when Amsterdam was one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. But as I was walking round, I noticed a small white plaque on a piano in the Blue Room. In wonderfully ornate script, it proclaimed that the makers of that piano were John Broadwood & Sons, who were based in Great Pulteney Street, near Golden Square, London - the city that would soon take over the role as the commercial capital of the world.



If you're planning a trip to Amsterdam, I would recommend Proeverij 274 as a great place to eat (thanks to Matt Muir for that tip), and for a really superb cup of coffee, Screaming Beans. They sell delicious almond cookies too.


I forgot to mention before I went away that the Guardian published my review of Taras Grescoe's Straphanger, an excellent whistle-stop tour of world cities and their transport systems. Apparently, Americans now spend nine years of their lives sitting in their cars, and the pollution they produce kills 30,000 US citizens each year. You can read the review here.


When I got back from Amsterdam, a very nice review of City was waiting for me, by Annick Labeca on Urban Lab Global Cities. In it she admits to having read the book four times! I'm impressed... Also on City, I did a Q & A with Sherin Wing for Metropolis Magazine. That was posted online yesterday and you can read it here. There's also a slideshow of some of my urban photos at the end.


Oh, and here are some of my photos of Amsterdam on Flickr. Enjoy...



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Published on September 21, 2012 12:16

September 6, 2012

Watching the Detectives


I’ve just signed the contract for my next book! I’m very happy indeed that it will be published by Bloomsbury and that my editor will be Bill Swainson, who worked with me on City.


The working title of the book is Watching the Detectives: The Birth of a Modern Hero. (Yes, it’s one of my favourite songs too.) It will tell the story of the detective set against the backdrop of the city of crime. It’s an exciting story, full of deception, mystery and, of course, murder. And it’s one in which fact and fiction are closely woven together, as they were in my earlier book, Doomsday Men. Indeed, when you look at the history of detection and the city, it’s sometimes difficult to tell where fiction ends and hard facts begin. But that’s what makes this story so fascinating to me.


Like many people, I grew up reading about detectives and watching them on TV: Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, the unforgettable Frank Marker in Public Eye, scruffy, cigar-puffing Columbo, the misanthropic Morse, and many more. These characters and other more recent ones have become part of me, part of how I visualise the modern city and its problems. In Watching the Detectives, I will explore what the figure of the detective tells us about ourselves and our modern urban culture.


Let the investigation begin…


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Published on September 06, 2012 06:24

August 30, 2012

Bright Lights, Big City


Like much of our often invisible urban infrastructure, modern city dwellers take street lighting for granted. At least, they do until they walk down an unlit and unfamiliar street. While I was researching City, I came across the rather sad story of one of the pioneers of gas lighting, a man who was truly ahead of his time. There wasn’t room to include it in the book, so I thought I’d share it with you now.


Continue reading...


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Published on August 30, 2012 12:19

August 22, 2012

City – interviews & reviews #2

Dan Wagstaff has interviewed me for his wonderful blog The Casual Optimist. We covered a lot of ground, from cities (of course) and dystopias, to my earliest experience of writing (as well as reader feedback) and my favourite book (Titus Groan). You can read it here.


City was reviewed by Will Wiles in this month's Icon magazine. It's an urban-themed issue, including a fascinating piece on feral cities by Geoff Manaugh and some of Michael Wolf's superb photos of Hong Kong skyscrapers. Well worth buying! The review is not online, but here's a taster of what he thought about the book:


"The overall effect is an energetic tribute to the city rather than a guide or academic study - a celebration of city-ness itself. Smith...writes plainly and with astonishing scope, persistently global and seemingly at home with everything from Mardok to Masdar. The little thematic essays are a joy... With even littler texts boxed in colour and scattered hither and yon, City is a tremendously jazzy, restless book."


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Published on August 22, 2012 10:05

August 7, 2012

Cynics and Monsters

"Arrival frames many of our experiences of the city: the routine arrival of the commuter each day, the excitement of the tourist at that first glimpse of the metropolis, the anxiety of the migrant – a stranger in a strange city. Sam Thompson’s Communion Town begins with an appeal to a migrant, Ulya, from a faceless official who has been secretly observing her and her husband, ever since they arrived in the city. He tells Ulya that he just wants her to open up, to confess her true feelings. Think of it as your “true arrival in the city,” he says. But the words of this sinister, Kafkaesque narrator ring false. It smells like a trap."


My review of Sam Thompson's novel Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters, which has been long-listed for the Booker Prize, appeared in the TLS last week. You can read it here.


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Published on August 07, 2012 09:58

August 6, 2012

The Wired City

The Australian Design Review has published an edited extract from "The Wired City" essay in my new book City. It's about urban infrastructure. Here's the first paragraph:


During the 1870s time was pumped beneath the streets of Paris. Spread out under the city was a network of pipes filled with compressed air from industrial steam plants. The pipes emerged into homes and commercial premises, where they were connected to clocks. From a control room in the rue du Télégraphe, a pressure pulse periodically rippled through the system of pipes beneath the streets, pneumatically synchronising the clocks of the French capital to the standard time of the Paris Observatory.


You can read the rest here.


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Published on August 06, 2012 09:37

July 31, 2012

City – interviews & reviews

The last few days have been pleasantly busy with interviews and reviews of City. I was on Sean Moncrieff's show last Monday and talked to Robert Elms at BBC London on Wednesday. Robert really loves cities, especially London of course, so that was great fun. Yesterday I talked to Rob Ferrett at Wisconsin Public Radio. It was a wide-ranging discussion about some of my favourite cities throughout history. We talked for about an hour and took calls from listeners, including one who had been to Timbuktu. You can download the programme here.


A piece by me that appeared in last month's Architecture Today on "My Kind of Town" is now online. I cheated a bit and created a composite of those aspects of cities that have most impressed me, from the garden squares of Bloomsbury, the evocative history of Rome, and the friendliness and efficiency of Tokyo, to the dynamic diversity of New York City. Read it here.


This weekend there was a good review of City in The Economist. Here's an extract:


Mr Smith has written an unapologetic paean, not to any particular city but to the urban idea in general. Not for Mr Smith the lazy myths of a lost, rural golden age, to which many city-dwellers are prone to succumb after a day spent negotiating the noise, traffic and smog of their man-made environments... The city is the building block of civilisation and of almost everything people do; a guidebook to the city is really, therefore, a guidebook to how a large and ever-growing chunk of humanity chooses to live. Mr Smith’s book serves as an excellent introduction to a vast subject, and will suggest plenty of further lines of inquiry.


The full review is online here. Yesterday I found out that City had also been reviewed in the current issue of The New Yorker. Being reviewed by The New Yorker is a new experience for me, so that was really exciting. It's not online but I don't suppose they will mind too much if I share it with you:


This “guidebook for the urban age” ranges from the Mesopotamian cities of Eridu and Ur to the unbuilt cities of the future, which may or may not feature smart electricity grids, rent-by-the-hour “love hotels,” and “skyscraper farms” housing chicken and fish that feed on the waste from hydroponic crops. Short chapters cover such subjects as parks, train stations, department stores, hotels, graffiti, gentrification, parking meters, street food, cemeteries, and ruins. Smith’s enthusiasm for cities sometimes lapses in a generic boosterism that whitewashes their more pernicious aspects. But the book’s hodgepodge structure excitingly mirrors the improvised order of cities themselves, and Smith encourages his readers to “wander and drift,” a strategy liable to generate surprising juxtapositions – as between urban birds, which sing at a higher pitch than birds in the country, and the police drones that fly above the streets of Liverpool.


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Published on July 31, 2012 03:45

July 18, 2012

London’s Necropolis Station


In the early 1850s, following the death of his father, Charles Dickens suffered from insomnia. At night he wandered restlessly through what had become the largest city on the planet. On one of these ‘homeless night walks’ through a London cemetery, he imagined the city populated by its past residents:


‘It was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, God knows how far.’


Few cities can boast a railway line for the dead. The London Necropolis Railway station was constructed by the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company, specifically to serve their Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in Woking, Surrey. The Company’s logo was, somewhat ghoulishly, a skull and crossbones.



The station opened on 13 November 1854, just outside London's Waterloo station on the London and South Western Railway. Trains took coffins and mourners from the ‘Necropolis station’ — located between York Street (now Leake Street) and Westminster Bridge Road — directly to platforms within the cemetery. By 1874, 64,000 people had made the journey from the Necropolis station and been buried at Brookwood.


In class-conscious Britain, even funeral trains were divided according to class, and this applied to both the living and the dead passengers – although of course these only needed a one-way ticket. Indeed, the trains had carriages reserved for different classes (First, Second and Third) as well as for Anglicans or Nonconformists. At Brookwood there were even two stations, one for Anglicans and the other for Nonconformists. Each station was also provided with its own licensed bar. The divisions in Victorian society lasted up to the very edge of the grave.


When the free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh died in 1891, 5,000 mourners took the train down to Brookwood. No one was dressed in black. The 150 or so mourners who attended the cremation of Friedrich Engels on 10 August 1895 at Woking Crematorium also travelled from the Necropolis station. His ashes were later scattered from the cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex.



Prior to 1900 there was a daily funeral express, down to Brookwood and back. To make way for an expansion of the mainline station, a new Necropolis station, designed by Cyril Bazett Tubbs, was built at 121 Westminster Bridge Road from 1900 to 1902. By the mid-1930s, trains were only running twice each week, much of their business having moved onto the roads.


On 16 April 1941 the station was hit by bombs during an air raid, damaging the lines. It was never rebuilt or re-opened. However, the entrance to the station used by First Class ticket holders – both the quick and the dead – still stands in Westminster Bridge Road, a permanent reminder of a very different London. I photographed it last year. The station and cemetery is the subject of Andrew Martin’s novel The Necropolis Railway (2003).


Sources:


Charles Dickens, ‘Night Walks’ (1860), cited from Dickens, On London (London: Hesperus, 2010), 77;

Ben Weinreb, The London Encyclopaedia (1983; repr. London: Macmillan, 2008), 992;

Ed Glinert, London’s Dead (2008), 215;

John M. Clarke, ‘The London Necropolis Railway’, Cabinet, 20 (Winter 2005/06);

Wikipedia


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Published on July 18, 2012 06:25