Footdee (pronounced "Fittie") is a small fishing village near Aberdeen harbour. From the beach it’s easy to miss but turn a corner and you're in a delightful square full of dinky little houses gathered round a communal green. Round the outside of the square the buildings are regular - neat rows of granite cottages and townhouses but round the inside they're anything but with shacks, sheds and outhouses jumbled with washing lines, plants, flowers and even a church.

The wonderful thing about Footdee is the randomness of these buildings. They're pretty puzzling. It's hard to tell if they're outhouses, or holiday homes or perhaps mansions for a race of tiny seafaring people. No two are the same and the styles range from miniatures houses with well-kept gardens to ramshackle structures made of found materials that look like only luck is holding them up. The only place I've seen anything similar is at Dungeness. In the details there are lots of seafaring accoutrements - model boats, ships-in-bottles and glass fishing weights. Hanging on one shack, a lifebelt from the Thermopylae, the world’s fastest sailing boat built in 1868 by the Aberdeen White Star Line, is a nod to local nautical heritage.

There are three squares altogether. North and South Squares were designed in the early 19th century by Aberdeen City architect John Smith who also designed Balmoral Castle. Pilot Square, built to a better standard for pilots of the harbour boats was added later. Looking closely, there are some clever design features - the houses are low and face inward to shelter from the sea, the pitched roofs keep the rain off and even the chimney pots are specially designed to keep seagulls away. As the cottages were so small, they were sold with space for an outhouse opposite, which explains the more idiosyncratic architectural elements. For fisherfolk this would be somewhere to keep your nets and other necessary equipment.

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Posted by Anne on February 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Museum Of Shops is sign-posted all over Eastbourne. It really whets your appetite. What an intriguing name. What could this place be? And it doesn't disappoint when you get there. It's spread over four floors in a townhouse not far from the seafront, in a quiet bit of town.

It's a massive 100,000 bit collection of, well, stuff, from the last hundred and fifty years of shops and consumption. Packaging, advertising, products, signage, clothes, ephemera, everything. The collection is crammed into themed displays with emotive mannequins acting out the part of shopkeepers. See Mr Barton in his well-stocked Grocer’s Shop. Check out the now long-gone treats available in the Sweet Shop. The Edwardian Kitchen is like a scene from Upstairs, Downstairs and the Wartime display will remind everyone large and small that we’ve never had it so good.

The focus seems to be mostly on the first half of the 20th century; if you're a thirty or forty year-old, you won't find much actual nostalgia to bathe in, but that's better in a way. You don't spend your whole time shouting 'Look! Spangles!' you actually look and think.

The museum was created by Jan and Graham Upton over a period of 50 years. They've done it really nicely. There's none of the compulsory interactivity that seems mandatory in museums nowadays. And no real attempt to create some historical context. You just gawp at the stuff and soak up the atmosphere. But it works really well, the overwhelming effect of the densely-packed sheer mass of stuff soon fades and you get to peer at the revealing little details. The tiny shop format is the perfect way to organise it – like full-size doll houses. This is a great place to pass some time.

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Posted by Russell on February 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

North-East England, in the past few years, has been busily redeveloping itself. Towns have been smartened up, decaying buildings redeveloped, and irredeemable monstrosities torn down. The process started twenty years ago, and it's still ongoing today. In the next few months, a large block of Gateshead town centre, for example, is to be torn down and redeveloped. In the process, the building that is arguably the town's most famous and most prominent landmark will be demolished.

Trinity Square car park stands firmly above Gateshead, by some way the tallest building in the town centre. It's been Gateshead's biggest landmark for over forty years, having been opened in 1967 after five years on the drawing board. Built over a market hall and surrounded by a shopping precinct at its base, it was intended to be a centrepiece of its community. The top floor featured a space for a cafe-bar, with large, gorgeous, square picture windows looking out over Gateshead and Newcastle. It was never used, and has been empty for almost the whole of the building's life. Rather than becoming the centre of its community, the building is instead famous for the role it plays in a film, the 1971 gangster movie "Get Carter". A corrupt (and fictional) property developer shows Michael Caine around the empty cafe, and is later thrown off the building to his death. His grim demise fits well with the film, and with the dark bulk of the car park itself.

By the time the car park was constructed, its Brutalist design was already out of date and unfashionable. Its outdoor shopping precinct quickly became outdated too; shoppers preferred indoor precincts such as Newcastle's Eldon Square or, later, the Metro Centre in suburban Gateshead. Nevertheless, the building is still distinctive, striking, and important. Although the car park is closed off, the precinct surrounding it is still just about accessible. Almost all the tenants have left, now, given the impending closure, their shops hidden behind pastel security shutters. Boots The Chemist was so far as I could see, about the only remaining tenant, when I visited in January 2008. The precinct was still busy with locals, though, using it as a shortcut, hurrying through draughty passageways amid a forest of concrete columns supporting higher-level roads and walkways. The lowest two or three storeys have been slathered in thick cream masonry paint, presumably to help prevent graffiti; but above, the car park is still its original bare grey concrete, alternately dark and light, constantly changing shade with light and weather.

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Posted by FP on February 03, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)