The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Richard Wentworth
the conventional “snapshot” image of local life. Equally the close textural
and textual study of the physical fabric—the accumulated flotsam of buildings
and objects, the marks of pragmatic interventions—enables Wentworth
to tease out a subjective and fleeting narrative, an intense and vivid
testimony to the continuous relationship between people and the architecture
they inhabit. However, this is not merely an uncritical celebration of
life “as it is,” for part of the process is to speculate, in the most imaginative
and untrammeled manner, about the causes and purposes of what might
otherwise be considered to be a wholly arbitrary collection and organization
of diverse objects and phenomena. It is this poetic engagement with observable
reality that distinguishes this as a creative process and not merely
as a task of recording, while it is the freedom from the constraints of academic
convention that allows fresh insights into our discussions of urban experience.
This independence from such systems of thought permits the parameters—geographical
and intellectual—of the urban study to be developed
in subjective and arbitrary terms. For Wentworth, the Cally is mapped in
relation to his own participation in this environment; its structure is revealed
when he discerns the underlying patterns of the landscape, and it is
narrated by the successive act of photography.
EXPERIENCE AND PRACTICE
Joe Kerr:
So what status do we accord “the Cally”; is it a definable concept?
Richard Wentworth:
Our habits of movement within cities are very telling—they may not be consistent
but they are full of patterns based in accumulated choice and necessity.
They contain preferred routes, whose whim may hinge on “the sunny
side of the street,” or an expectation of things or people to see or to avoid.
The “accident of where I live” presents me with one very specific option—a
run of nearly a mile on a single road whose various characteristics combine
under the one heading, “the Cally.” This mile seems to contain the most significant
phrases and measures of the Caledonian Road between the two
landmarks of Pentonville Prison and King’s Cross Station. Somehow it’s a totality,
a continuum.
It occurs to me that a roll of film is similar, and unavoidably any
thirty-six exposures are a kind of diary, containing all kinds of oppositions
mediated in linear form, a narrative frame by frame. Perhaps the length of a
film is in some apposite relation to this length of road—a “manageable”