Bluewater is the first stage of a linear city of 320 stores, 30,000 dwellings and 50,000 jobs, a peripheral private town or 'edge city' not yet fully formed but well on its way. It attracts 45,000 customers a day. Built for retail, it is an inversion of the classic town built around industry, commerce and housing.
This residency enabled me to spend a week as a flaneur in the Bluewater centre watching it shift between being a shopping centre, a leisure complex and a place of work. I also got the chance to look behind the scenes and talk to the company that run the place. I visited at all times of the day and at night. I also spent quite a lot of time sitting at my desk in the nearby Campanile Hotel watching the cars and lorries cross the Dartford Bridge. Although some of the key ideas for the eventual piece emerged during the week, in notes and photographs, most of the actual writing and rewriting has been done in Yorkshire in the five months since.
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Paul Klee wrote "We can perceive rhythm with three senses at once, firstly we can hear it, secondly we can see it, thirdly we feel it in our muscles, that is what gives it such power over our organism." The painting above is called A Leaf from the Book of Cities. My original proposal was to write a series of prose pieces, leaves torn from the Book of Cities, codifying the 'city' of Bluewater by describing the physical architecture through the movement of people - playing with and perhaps organised by arrivals, lobbies/gates, signage, footfalls, pathways of desire, zones, malls/streets, cultural and resting places, squares/halls, public and private spaces. I intended to include incidents, dialogues, records, both found and invented. Then I remembered I was a writer of stories. Though I think Klee's words hold good for any writing, especially that exploring a sense of place.
My Father worked and taught as an urban architect and family holidays always included a certain amount of visiting urban centres and developments, modern and historical, so I guess from an early age I have been interested in the relationship between people, space and flow.
"As twilight falls the glass skyscrapers seem to flame. This is no dangerous futurism, a sort of literary dynamite flung violently at the spectator. It is a spectacle organised by an Architecture which uses plastic resources for the modulation of forms seen in light." Le Corbusier.