Stepping out into the furious sweat filled air of the top deck I scanned the terraced pitched roof horizon and felt my lungs slowly calm under the strain of dust built up from months of urban reconfiguration drawn upon by the frustration of what appeared to be an endless post-recession South London. I
had lost track of how much time had past since I first arrived at Tower 1, or The Croydon Walled City as the government had grown fond of calling it, the collection of colourful beer bottle tops I had used to indicate the passing of days, weeks and months that I placed carefully on the one shelf in my plywood and corrugated aluminium shelter had all been lost or destroyed during the last unsuccessful relocation raid by the police.
As a younger man I had known Tower 1 simply as one of seven multi-storey car parks located within Croydon town centre that stood like giants alongside the likes of the decorative Allders building, and shortly after arriving we kept the name as a means of preserving the material innocence of the car park's function. Looking back, there was evidently a part of us that was too afraid of becoming emotionally attached to something whose dimensions were designed for a machine, besides, we were a generation conditioned to Disney visuals, we knew how to see through the smoke. The name Croydon Walled City was an attempt by the government to convince the favourable architects and psychologists of the day, who were busy analysing and recording our micro society, that it was us that had divorced ourselves from the world and not the other way round. Within the Tower though we understood this childish naming game that the politicians loved to play, but we chose to ignore it, even when they changed the local road signs.
I have grown fond of the sounds that bounce off the harsh walls of the Tower produced by the illegal fermenters and 3D gun printing factories, but there was I time when I often lay awake at night recalling the early days when I first arrived with the other architectural students. The idea began its life in a homely London pub corner like so many other ideas, rooted in a frenzied discussion between the social-urban ideals of participatory architecture and the new Judge Dredd film. Our architectural education had filled the pallets of our minds with creativity but sapped it of reality and the transparency and absence of the most modern architecture had left us questioning whether humans were meant to feel anything for this sort of aesthetic at all. Upon seeing this unapologetic urban grain that surrounded us it was clear that the only form of progression was by way of rescuing one its orphaned children, something the London 2011 Riots flickered a subdued lust for, an architecture by occupancy.
We settled on a car park, tackled the brief but memorable climb to the top deck and pitched our tents and trangias in a circle in one of the sheltered corners, the nomadic home for all our meals and conversation for the next few months. In the early days we passed the time playing football between the stacked levels of the Tower, resting on the cool surface on the concrete when our thighs could no longer negotiate the verticality of its mass. Book readings and philosophical discussion would fill the late night air as a halo of light pollution climbed above us, whilst the days were spent scavenging for any food or building material we could recover. Making use of this abandoned space, we were busy, we were happy.
After a couple of months a varied pack had joined our cause including engineers, artists and carpenters, all of whose skills were vital in adapting this concrete Noah's Ark. Permanent shelters, rain water harvesters and home-made solar panels began to coat the Towers top deck like a second-hand pointillist painting, and with the introduction of more feet came the fading of the yellow lines that marked out the endless car parking bays like the tattoo removal of a reformed prisoner. The frequency of visits by the local council had dramatically fallen, their presence dripping with a hidden agenda as they hovered around like mosquitoes, but the main change was that cars had now stopped coming to the Tower and a human scale was truly beginning to transform the frame of this magnificent structure.
However, it has been a long time since our arrival and now with my back on the pitched roof horizon facing into the cool breeze that so elegantly drifts above and through the graceful grey lines of the Tower it amazes me still how our community has evolved since those early days. Yet the authorities come for us now with an animal like dedication to their precious car parking spaces, eager to re-establish its uniform structuralism. A camouflaged appearance even shadowing the thick concrete decks, the Tower now resembles a space more like that seen in Mumbai with its some three thousand occupiers, surrounded by an urban canvas of London roofs having been coated with dust, graffiti and litter, our very own Warhol.
I can hear the shouting and stamping of heavy booted feet from the bottom deck and the television helicopters, like vultures, are beginning to appear on the horizon for their finest meal. I will miss this place dearly, its mass becoming an extention of ourselves, funny though that it was never really us they wanted to remove, it was the ideal we have created.
tW
