Holy Sewells! It's all gone a bit arty-farty on the isle of blogs today!
Cliftonville Chronicle devotes 17 pages to the unsurprising news that T S Eliot found inspiration for The Wasteland by sitting on a bench in Margate for a couple of months.
And Turneround Margate has a glowing paeon of praise to that chap from the circus who's been entrusted with designing the Anthea Turner Centre. The great man is quoted as saying:
“I think that the point of being an architect is to help raise the experience of everyday living, even a little… None of this means designing funny shapes or getting politicians to go ‘wow’ or making the media think you’re the new thing. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of experience, and a lot of unfashionable thought”.
Right. So let me get this straight. We're spending £17.4m (plus £8m wasted on the previous effort) on a building that will have the 'wow' factor deliberately designed out of it, that will be unfashionable, and will not be regarded by the media as anything new. And that's going to attract lots of people down from London to marvel at it, is it?
So being the da Vinci style genius I am, I thought I'd rustle up my own design (above) which definitely does have the 'wow' factor, and is certainly at the cutting edge of 'fashionable' and 'new'. I've never seen anything like it, that's for sure. Bentleys all round!
PS: Please don't let on that I designed my Turnip Centre in three minutes using that free Google SketchUp thingo, otherwise my £2m fee might be jeopardised. Thank you.
7 comments:
By late October 1921 the Eliots were installed at the Albermarle Hotel and breathing the perfumed air of Cliftonville
ahh the kababs
It's a little known fact that there are many references to Margate in The Wasteland by T S Eliot. For example:
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant
is clearly a reference to One-Eyed Pete the Carny Man, who erected a big wheel on the Dreamland site last year.
Similarly:
On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing.
speaks for itself, really, as does:
Burning burning burning burning
I remember I used to bump into old T S in Franks every Thursday night during the 80s. Oh how he used to joke and dance, especially when Hi Ho Silver Lining came on at the end of the evening.
I bumped into him once by the clocktower, he was wearing a kiss-me-quick hat and sucking on a stick of Margate rock. "Hello T S," I said. "How's it hanging?"
"Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, had a bad cold," came the reply. I surmised that his visit to the end of the pier had ended in disappointment.
Oh what a wealth of pithy wit on here. Very amusing indeed, and may it long continue! BUT I do think it's important that we don't continually pour scorn on serious attempts to lift modern day Thanet out of its self-perpetuating mire. Doing a place down, even in jest, becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. (It is funny none-the-less!).
I would never do Kent's Ramsgate Peninsula down. Merely Margate.
No, seriously, I love Thanet, and would dearly like to see it do better in the world. It's got so much going for it, it's a shame it's been so neglected over the years. In fact that's what makes me truly angry, to see what was once such a glorious part of the world suffering from the incompetence and ineptitude of local, county and national government, and the greed of local property owners and developers who only want to get their snouts in the trough.
There. I've said it. I've had a couple of glasses of wine. Er...
And another thing, if we can't poke fun at some of the more misguided attempts at regenerating the place we might as well all go and live in bloody Brighton.
Pass us the Krug, Elton.
I see your Turnip Centre has one more visitor than the real one is likely to get.
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