ARRIVAL
My first visit I am overwhelmed. The exterior merely confirms my expectations from the plans and photographs I have used to imagine what ideas I may have for using the place. It is the interior that is overwhelming, overwhelming in its sameness - the same logos, shop fronts, the same herd of people circulating in a bag laden amble, faces hung between what they've just bought and what they can't quite remember they were going to buy next. I think, why have I volunteered to spend a week here? There is nothing remarkable. Bluewater is Leeds without weather. Without quirk. There is no uncontrolled individualistic edge.
It is crowded because of Elizabeth Windsor's Jubilee, a bank holiday. I expect the big screen hung in the entertainment piazza to be wired into the fireworks and flypasts and aging rocker sycophancy taking place not far down the road in the capital, but this is the republic of shopping, of leisure. The screen shows live World Cup football, and between games, live Big Brother.
Big Brother. This is the city of 300 CCTV cameras. There are too-easy images that play the edge of my disappointment, this city is built in a hole in the ground, this city is built on sand. In the construction process 3,000,000 cubic metres of Thanet sand were brought through tunnels from the quarry next door, then compacted for the steel skeleton to be erected on. In fact, digging deeper, this place is built on water, below the sand, below the quarry, is an aquifer.
The second time I visit is later the same day. The crowds have gone. The building is beginning to emerge from under their feet, from behind the logos and shop fronts. It is not quite like walking though an evening city because there is still no weather, but the architects' intent, wit, their references begin to reveal themselves. Not carved in the grand self-important quotations, but in the leaves in the pavements, the river laid in Thames Walk, the detail in ballustrades and railings. I begin to admire the place.
NARRATIVE
In reaching for a project like this you tend to fall into application speak, dress up the approach rather than express your core process. For the first two days I toy with my idea of codifying ancient lost organic cities and this modern found city and overlaying the two, which remains an interest, a framing device, but is not the process itself. By constantly holding it up against the building and its activity, I cannot find a line or shape which interests me as a writer.
Then on the third morning I come out of my hotel at the end of the spine of the Dartford Bridge, the cars and lorries run off like drops of water, and there in the road between the metal distribution sheds is a train on a long long Convoi Exceptionelle, slowly angling through roundabouts.
I look at myself in the car mirror and say, 'I am a writer of fiction' and the line begins to emerge. A man on a ship, the ship is impounded, he jumps ship in the train, the train is now a British train and parks up going nowhere, so he jumps the train. Looking for somewhere to hang out in that strip of northern Kent he ends up in Bluewater. A seaman in Bluewater.
Then I make those writer's steps, don't have one guy or you have no dialogue, then don't have two guys or your dialogue sounds like ping pong. So I have three guys, off a beached ship, three guys who are in a shopping centre but have no money. The shape begins to emerge and I begin to think, not how I capture this building but how the building is revealed by their being in it. Both its form and function. A shift from expression of intent, to voice.
Once I get into the meat of the writing back in Yorkshire the train disappears and one of the guys becomes a woman.
WEATHER
On my penultimate day I am shown the control room, not as many screens as I imagined there would be, but screens that see everywhere, and one computer screen for the man who controls the weather. By zone. The light, the temperature, the music. He can even change the road signs to redirect the flow of arrivals and departures. Walking around for the rest of my time I am conscious of him - he becomes like god in that teenage religious stage, the more conscious I am of 'him' the more conscious I become of myself. When lights change, or Sinatra blends out of the Four Seasons it is because I am moving into that part of the landscape. When I leave I am sure he knows I have left, I wave him bye bye. He is waiting for me to return to shopping heaven.
THANKS
I'd like to thank Suzy Joinson for having this architecture and text idea when she was at South East Arts, a rare commission that allowed writers to just write. Also Mark Hewitt for being a friendly and supportive Project Manager and Rachel Nolan, of Bluewater, for her information and insight. Particular thanks to Sheena Wrigley and Tom Palmer for their encouragement and the way they talk writing.