brutalism – Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

Story-by-story: While You Were Out

The inspirations for this story about a delivery driver feel blindingly obvious to me – I wonder if anyone will see the connection?

First, there’s the nightmare logic of the films of Lucio Fulci and, in particular, The Beyond from 1981.

I find it hard to argue that The Beyond is a great film.

It has all the usual problems of Italian exploitation horror – bad dubbing, odd pacing, nonsense plot – plus the particularly dense layer of dinge and sleaze that seems to ooze from Fulci’s pores and over everything he makes.

So I’m not necessarily saying you should watch it.

But don’t be mistaken: I love it. At least, I keep rewatching it, and thinking about it.

Because, for all its flaws, it is full of breathtaking images, and its disjointedness begins to feel like a feature rather than a bug.

The ending, in particular, I find astonishing.

Our heroine and hero escape from pursuers by running into the basement of one building, only to find themselves in the basement of another, right across town.

This makes no sense.

What makes even less sense is that they then find themselves walking across an infinite plain strewn with corpses.

“And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored,” says the voiceover, gravely.

The other inspiration, very obvious, I think, is Robert Aickman’s wonderful 1967 story ‘The Cicerones’, in which a tourist explores a cathedral on the Continent and meets a series of unnerving tour guides as space and time distort around him:

Then something horrible seemed to happen; or rather two things, one after the other. Trant thought first that the stone panel he was staring at so hard seemed somehow to move; and then that a hand had appeared round one upper corner of it. It seemed to Trant a curiously small hand… the stone opened further, and from within emerged a small, fair-haired child… ‘Hullo,’ said the child, looking at Trant across the black marble barrier and smiling.

So, when writing ‘While You Were Out’, I kept challenging myself to make it not make sense in the same pleasing way.

To achieve this you really need to tap into the feeling of dreams or nightmares – the strange segues, the instability of objects or people, the sense of wading through glue.

The setting, a group of tower blocks on the edge of an English city, is not based on any one place but it does borrow from Barton Hill and Redcliffe in Bristol, where I live.

There’s also something of Gleadless Valley near Sheffield which I visited on a bleak November day a few years ago.

And the elevators, stairwells and corridors are straight out of various tower blocks I have known, including one in East London where my partner’s father lived for a while.

The chink of departing coin

When I wrote this post about being a working class writer last week it prompted writer Joel Morris to talk about characters who feel “the chink of departing coin”.

Bogdan, the delivery driver who is the main character in this story, is under pressure to meet unrealistic targets. And stress is part of what makes him vulnerable to strange experiences.

Throughout Intervals of Darkness there are characters who make bad decisions because they need the money. As well as feeling true to life – or, at least, true to my own experiences – this also brings a new energy source to the stories.

One of the characters in ‘British Chemicals’, for example, takes speed and works through his break periods because he’s just become a father and needs all the overtime he can get.

A quote from Verity Holloway: "Impressively eerie and packed with shocks... moments of powerful poignancy and startling strangeness. You'll want to linger over these stories." Next to it is the cover of Intervals of Darkness with a black background and red details. The illustration is of a person casting a long shadow. Nearby is another shadow suggesting a lurking but hidden figure.

Intervals of Darkness will be published on 7 September. You can pre-order the eBook now.

Brutal Bristol

Brutalist architecture isn’t so called because it is harsh or bullying but because it emphasises the use of raw concrete, via the French: béton brut. Bristol’s brutalist buildings, as well as being a pragmatic response to the post-war need to build quickly and cheaply, are powerful, sometimes even beautiful presences in the cityscape.

At first glance the Shot Tower on Cheese Lane might be mistaken for a Cold War watch post. Its actual purpose was the manufacture of lead pellets. Designed by Underwood and Partners in 1968 it succeeded the world’s very first shot tower which occupied a nearby site. It demonstrates how varied and interesting concrete buildings can be, the chunks from which it is constructed given texture by the casting process, and used to create futuristic forms. It reminds me of the Discovery from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey but it is perhaps also somewhat, just to the tiniest degree, phallic. It is now part of an office complex.

Concrete fetishists are about the only people who get excited by multi-story car parks which offer plenty of opportunity for bold design and abstract forms. NCP Prince Street, designed to serve the hotel next door by Kenneth Wakeford Jarram & Harris in 1966, is a much-admired example, made mesmerising by the saw waves and diamonds that cover its bulk, brought alive by the shifting of light and shadow. Another of note is NCP Rupert Street, the first multi-story car park in the city, designed by R. Jelinek-Karl in 1960, which sits above the street like a coiled concrete python.

Repeating concrete patterns on a car park. — NCP Prince Street.

Among Bristol’s most exciting buildings of any style or vintage is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Clifton by Percy Thomas & Son. The thrusting spaceship-like spire can be seen for miles around and the more-or-less hexagonal church was apparently unpopular with conservation-minded locals and worshippers when it arrived from its home planet in 1974. It was built using especially fine, pale concrete and so hasn’t aged as poorly as some similar buildings.

A modernist cathedral in concrete. — Clifton Cathedral.

Nobody can have missed Castlemead, the tower that rises over Castle Park. It is part of the last gasp of brutalist building, conceived by A.J. Hines in the early 1970s but not finished until 1981. It looks like the kind of building evil corporations in Hollywood films choose for their bases but there is at least a little humour in the concrete battlements at the top of the tower.
The Arts and Social Sciences Library of the University of Bristol on Tyndall Avenue (Twist and Whitley, 1975) is another building often described as ‘fortress-like’. Its windows, angled to control the entry of light, and its top-heavy structure, do give the impression that it is peering down on passing pedestrians.

A tower block surrounded by trees. — Castlemead.

Underneath a motorway. — M32 at Eastville.

I’m going to finish with a leftfield suggestion: take a closer look at the M32 motorway from beneath, at somewhere like Stapleton, where the song of the traffic between concrete columns brings to mind the interior of a cathedral, with mile after mile of the rawest béton around.