The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The following paragraphs were written in the last months of 1996, during
the final stages of production of the film Robinson in Space, for which the
journeys they recall were carried out. Toward the end of a previous film, London,
a fictitious narrator offers the ambiguous assertion, “The true identity
of London . . . is in its absence.” 1 “Absence of what?” the viewer might ask.
One of many possible answers to this question is that London came into being
and grew as a port city. Its port activity is now largely absent, but continues
somewhere else. One of Robinson’s objectives was to locate some of the
economic activity that no longer takes place in cities.
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Robinson in Space was photographed between March and November 1995. 2
It documents the explorations of an unseen fictional character called Robinson,
who was the protagonist of the earlier London, itself a reimagination of
its subject suggested by the surrealist literature of Paris. Robinson in Space is
a similar study of the look of present-day England in 1995, and was suggested
to some extent by Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great
Britain (1724–1726). Among its subjects are many new spaces, particularly
the sites where manufactured products are produced, imported, and distributed.
Robinson has been commissioned by “a well-known international
advertising agency” to undertake a study of the “problem” of England. 3 It is
not stated in the film what this problem is, but there are images of Eton,
Oxford, and Cambridge, a Rover car plant, the inward investment sites of
Toyota and Samsung, a lot of ports, supermarkets, a shopping mall, and
other subjects that evoke the by now familiar critique of “gentlemanly capitalism,”
which sees the United Kingdom’s economic weakness as a result of
the City of London’s long-term (English) neglect of the (United Kingdom’s)
industrial economy, particularly its manufacturing base.
Early in the film, the narrator quotes from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of
Dorian Gray: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” 4 The appearances
by which the viewer is invited to judge are initially the dilapidation
of public space, the extent of visible poverty, the absence of U.K.-branded
products in the shops and on the roads, and England’s cultural conservatism.
Robinson’s image of U.K. industry is based on his memories of the collapse
of the early Thatcher years. He has assumed that poverty and dilapidation
are the result of economic failure, and that economic failure is a result of the
inability of U.K. industry to produce desirable consumer products. He believes,
moreover, that this has something to do with the feel of “Middle England,”
which he sees as a landscape increasingly characterized by sexual