The Long Walk Home

About two years ago the Walkabout club in Croydon shut its doors and pumps to the public for the last time in what had been a long and confident history. I remember just turning eighteen and going there with friends to experience the legal drinking scene for the first time and falling straight away for the vodka a redbull deals, which inevitably left you waking up at half past five in the morning with a heart like that of a car battery and a headache to match. Needless to say as youth of the early twenty-first century we punished our health and continued this routine for another three years.

But enough with a the drink, what can actually be done about a piece of architecture like Walkabout that had such a specific layout and had spent years spatially evolving like a ninety year old war veteran set in his ways and routine? Furthermore, how can one confidently say they have the answer to the next stage in this architectures life without a second thought for the urban communities need rather than what can simply fit inside the existing space?

As it happens it has been decided that Walkabout has finally matured and the time has come for the space left behind to become victim, like so many of its Croydon brethren, to the blitzkrieg of Poundland architecture. What the bloody hell is going on? The space left behind by Walkabout was one full of character and variation (an aspect generally rarely seen in a Walkabout), with a set of stairs here, a lowered platform and a raised platform there and a room full or railings and columns at the back, a remarkably complete antithesis of Poundland. With its reliance on ninety-degree angles, white-wash walls and the endless aisles of Chinese child-labour filth Poundland will no doubt have the appearance of a silk purse made of a pigs ear. Until Croydon's urban community begins to observe and then deal with this issue of architecture for architectures sake we are going to continue witnessing our urban environment evolving with no soul.

More than what architecture can replace, it is how architecture replaces it.

tW

Photograph / David Cook