The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

23.9
Journeys on the Caledonian Road
JK: But it’s also an archiving process of the objects?
RW: Yes, even though if I tell him that he says, “Well I don’t know, I just put
them out”; but I think he knows incredibly well, but it’s got nothing to do with
that antique shop high self-consciousness.
JK: But objects are categorized as they would be in an antique shop, aren’t
they? The glasses are put together and so are the pots and the dumbbells.
RW: They are today.
There is a capacity for the Cally just to be permanently nauseated,
which could obviously be traced to some economic condition, but I do sometimes
imagine that round the back it is actually producing new products to
spit out; but what comes out is always of a certain type and period. It’s what
I call the “Valor/Ascot/Raleigh/Aladdin moment,” which is like a smell of “Old
London”; but also for my generation it’s a diagram of “the end of everything.”
Even though those things were made very badly, they had the illusion
of British Empire competence, and we found afterwards that we couldn’t do
it any more. There was a skip [large trash container] here this week full of
large quantities of things that had obviously been shoveled out into a garden
and left. It doesn’t actually take a large quantity of this stuff to fill a skip, but