REPULSIVE,BEAUTIFUL CONCRETE (In Search of Home)

When I was a kid growing up in the North-East of England in the 60s and 70s I found everything, from the old bomb sites of town to the ‘failed’ tower-blocks cast in grey concrete with their furnished details highlighted in brightly coloured steel, wood and graffiti, to be absolutely spellbinding.

At the time not only did I believe the place to be everlasting in substance but eternal in spirit. However, as with most of England and the urban landscape in general, the subsequent ephemeral nature of the North-East, together with the memories of the sheer vigilante aspect of its character when I felt welded to its very structures, has left little more today other than feelings of grief and a longing for what amounted to something profoundly outgoing, inspiring, yet insular and intensely homely at the same time.

Living in Warsaw though means the old excitement and reassurance is back tenfold in the form of a physical animation and a kind of well being based inexplicably on feelings of menace - But for how long? Only time will tell – but, with the help of European Funds, probably no more time than it takes to erase the graffiti from the walls and to witness the old grey communist blocks getting a lick of pastel shades and fancy hats to top off their currently bald roofs! It’s happening big style all over the city as I type, and increasingly so.

If recently being back in the North-East of England, with its increasingly sanitized city centres and open precincts for the wealthy that is now the Quaysides of Newcastle, Gateshead and soon to be Sunderland, had me weeping and feeling overwhelmingly nostalgic for the place of my youth with all the grit and tangible excitement and danger that brought hanging in the air, then what of a disinfected Warsaw? It’s surely soon to be goodbye forever to the sounds, smells and sights of anything I can bed down in which remotely resembles home!