Wessie – Wessie du Toit

How Habitat Made Britain’s Middle Class

This essay was originally published by Unherd in May 2024.

An elegantly dressed woman is polishing her nails, looking into the camera with a kind of feline arrogance. Before her on the dressing table lies a beautiful pair of hairbrushes, while in the background a young man is making the bed, straightening the duvet with a dramatic flick. This photograph appeared in a 1973 catalogue by Habitat, the home furnishing shop founded by Terence Conran. It gives us a sense of the brand’s appeal during its heyday. The room is stylish but comfortable, the scene full of sexual energy. This is a modern couple, the man performing a domestic task while the woman prepares for work. The signature item is the duvet, a concept Habitat introduced to Britain, which stood for both convenience and cosmopolitan style (Conran discovered it in Sweden, and called it a “continental quilt”).

As we mark Habitat’s sixtieth birthday, all of this feels strangely current. Sexual liberation, women’s empowerment and the fashionable status of European culture are still with us. The duvet’s victory is complete: few of us sleep under blankets or eiderdowns. But most familiar is how the Habitat catalogue wove these products and themes into a picture of a desirable life. It turned the home into a stage, a setting for compelling and attractive characters. This is a species of fantasy we now call lifestyle marketing, and we are saturated with it. Today’s brands offer us prefabricated identities, linking together ideals, interests and aesthetic preferences to suggest the kind of person we could be. It was Habitat that taught Britain to think and dream in this way.

The first shop opened on London’s Fulham Road in 1964, a good moment to be reinventing the look and feel of domestic life. New materials and production methods were redefining furniture — that moulded plastic chair with metal legs we sat on at school, for instance, was first designed in 1963. After decades of depression, rationing and austerity, the British were enjoying the fruits of the post-war economic boom, discovering new and enlarged consumer appetites. The boundaries separating art from popular culture were becoming blurred, and Britain’s longstanding suspicion of modern design as lacking in warmth and comfort was giving way. Habitat combined all of these trends to create something new. It took objects with an elevated sense of style and brought them down to the level of consumerism, with aggressive marketing, a steady flow of new products and prices that freshly graduated professionals could afford.

But Habitat was not just selling brightly coloured bistro chairs and enamel coffee pots, paper lampshades and Afghan rugs. It was selling an attitude, a personality, a complete set of quirks and prejudices. Like the precocious young Baby Boomers he catered for, Conran scorned the old-fashioned, the small-minded and suburban. And he offered a seductive alternative: a life of tasteful hedonism, inspired by a more cultured world across the channel. Granted, you would never fully realise that vision, but you could at least buy a small piece of it.

No one has better understood that strand of middle Britain which thinks of itself as possessing a creative streak and an open mind. The Habitat recipe, in one form or another, still caters to it. Modern but classic, stylish but unpretentious, with a dash of the foreign: this basic approach underpins the popularity of brands from Zara Home to Muji. It has proved equally successful in Conran’s other major line of business, restaurants: see Côte, Gail’s Bakery or Carluccio’s (co-founded by Conran’s sister Priscilla). To one degree or another, these brands all try to balance a modicum of refinement with the reassurance that customers won’t feel humiliated when they examine the price tag.

Yet there was always something contradictory about this promise of good taste for the masses. In Britain, influential movements in design have been inspired by a disdain for vulgar, mass-produced goods since the Industrial Revolution. Conran liked to cite the great craftsman and designer William Morris — “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” — but Morris famously detested factory-made products. From the Thirties, proponents of modern design despaired at the twee aesthetics and parochial norms of petit-bourgeois life in the suburbs. The fashionable culture of the Swinging Sixties, Conran’s own milieu, likewise defined itself against the conventional majority. This was the era of John Lennon and the Rolling Stones after all.

In his outlook and his commercial ambitions, Conran tried to ignore such tensions: good design should be available to everyone. But they have inevitably come back to the surface. With the rise of Asian manufacturing, passable copies of classy or arty products are now as widespread as any other; think mass-produced ceramics that imitate artisanal imperfection. Similarly, successful Habitat-like brands have acquired corporate managers who force them to expand. Even an apparently exclusive institution such as Soho House, the private members’ club for wealthy creatives, is now a globe-spanning lifestyle brand with locations in dozens of cities and its own line in cosmetics, furniture and workspaces. These trends have made Conran’s vision of life appear increasingly hollow, because even in the absence of snobbery, it relied on a sense of originality, individuality and artistic inspiration. Such qualities are difficult to find when a product suddenly graces every living room and Pinterest board.

These same contradictions doomed Habitat itself. In the late-Eighties, Conran’s appetite got the better of him, and a botched effort to incorporate two other firms led to his ejection from the company. After 2000 the brand rarely made a profit, as it was passed along by a series of retail giants, including Ikea, Argos and Sainsbury’s. Like so much that was fresh and subversive in the Sixties, Habitat was absorbed by the mainstream, its lively identity reduced to a market segment and subject to the demands of accounting. Its famous shops were trimmed down to a handful of showrooms, and last year those closed as well. Today it is little more than the husk of a brand — a slightly upmarket, design-conscious Ikea — condemned to the purgatory of online retail, where every competitor has its endless thumbnail images of seemingly identical products.

A more serious problem is that, while we now have an overabundance of style, the “life” side of the equation has become increasingly sparse. The Boomers buying continental quilts were a generation on the up. They could plausibly imagine themselves moving towards the spacious and leisurely domestic life that Conran dangled before them. Most of those young professionals who entered work after 2008, by contrast, know they will never stack their French crockery in a French holiday home; they would be happy with a modestly sized apartment. So aspiration does not really capture the appeal of lifestyle consumerism for these embittered millennials. It is more a question of consolation, or escapism, or a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves from the mass market where they know they belong.

Then again, it increasingly feels like the whole notion of lifestyle was a recipe for dissatisfaction to begin with. Habitat emerged at a moment when traditional roles and social expectations were melting away; in their place, it proposed the idea of life as a work of art, an exercise in self-fashioning, with commodities and experiences guiding consumers towards a particular model of themselves. Today, with all the niches and subcultures spawned by network technology, there is no shortage of such identities on offer. If you like outdoor activities, you may find a brand community that combines this with certain political views and a style of fashion. If you like high-end cars, you might dream of occupying a branded condo in Miami or Dubai.

But these lives assembled from images remain just that: a collection of images, a fiction that can never fully be inhabited. It seems the best we can do is represent them in the same way they were presented to us, as a series of vignettes on Instagram, where the world takes on a idealised quality that is eerily reminiscent of those Habitat catalogues from decades ago. One gets the impression that we are not trying to persuade others of their reality so much as ourselves.

The Sublime Hubris of Tropical Modernism

This review was originally published by Engelsberg Ideas in April 2024.

In December 1958 an All-African People’s Conference was held in Accra, capital of the newly independent Ghana. It brought together delegates from 28 African countries, many of them still European colonies. Their purpose, according to Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, was ‘planning for a final assault upon Imperialism and Colonialism’, so that African peoples could be free and united in the ‘economic and social reconstruction’ of their continent. Above the entrance of the community centre where the conference took place, there was a mural which seemed to echo Nkrumah’s sentiment. Painted by the artist Kofi Antubam, it showed four standing figures along with the slogan: ‘It is good we live together as friends and one people.’

The building was a legacy of Ghana’s own recent colonial history. During the 1940s the UK government’s Colonial Development and Welfare fund had decided to build a number of community centres in what was then the Gold Coast. Most of the funding would come from British businesses active in the region, and the spaces would provide a setting for recreation, education and local administration. The Accra Community Centre, neatly arranged around two rectangular courtyards with colonnaded walkways, was designed by the British Modernist architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Antubam’s mural calling for amity reads somewhat differently if we consider the circumstances in which it was commissioned. The United Africa Company, the main sponsor of the project, was trying to repair its public relations after its own headquarters had been torched in a protest against price fixing.

The Accra Community Centre is emblematic of the ambiguous role played by Modernist architecture in the immediate post-colonial era. Like so many ideas embraced by the elites of newly independent states, Modernism was a western, largely European doctrine, repurposed as a means of asserting freedom from European rule. ‘Tropical Modernism’, a compelling exhibition at London’s V&A, tries to document this paradoxical moment in architectural history, through an abundance of photographs, drawings, letters, models and other artefacts.

Drew and Fry are the exhibition’s main protagonists, an energetic pair of architects who struggled to implement their vision in Britain but had more success in warmer climes. In addition to the community centre in Accra, they designed numerous buildings in West Africa, most of them educational institutions in Ghana and Nigeria. In the course of this ‘African experiment’, as Architectural Review dubbed it in 1953, they developed a distinctive brand of Modernism, of which the best example is probably Ibadan University in Nigeria. It consisted of horizontal, geometric volumes, often raised on stilts, with piers running rhythmically along their facades and, most characteristically, perforated screens to guard against the sun while allowing for ventilation.

On the basis of this work, Drew and Fry were invited to work on the planning of Chandigarh, the new capital of the state of Punjab in India, which had just secured its own independence from Britain. Here they worked alongside Le Corbusier, the leading Modernist architect, on what was undoubtedly one of the most influential urban projects of the 20^th century. Drew and Fry also helped to establish Tropical Architecture courses at London’s Architectural Association and MIT in Massachusetts, where many architects from post-colonial nations would receive training.

Not that those students passively accepted what they were taught. The other major theme of the exhibition concerns the ways that Indian and Ghanaian designers adopted, adapted and challenged the Modernist paradigm, and the complex political atmosphere surrounding these responses. Both Nkrumah and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, preferred bold and bombastic forms of architecture to announce their regimes’ modernising aspirations. This Le Corbusier duly provided, with his monumental capitol buildings at Chandigarh, while Nkrumah summoned Victor Adegbite back from Harvard to design Accra’s Black Star Square. In India, however, figures such as Achyut Kavinde and Raj Rewal would in the coming decades forge their own modern styles, borrowing skilfully from that country’s diverse architectural traditions. At Ghana’s own design school, KNUST, it was the African American architect J Max Bond who encouraged a similar approach to national heritage, telling students to ‘assume a broader place in society, as consolidators, innovators, propagandists, activists, as well as designers’.

As is often the case, the most interesting critique came not from an architect, but an eccentric. In Chandigarh, the highway inspector Nek Chand spent years gathering scraps of industrial and construction material, which he secretly recycled into a vast sculpture garden in the woods. His playful figures of ordinary people and animals stand as a kind of riposte to the city’s inhuman scale.

One question raised by all of this, implicitly but persistently, is how we should view the notion of Modernism as a so-called International Style. In the work of Drew, Fry and Le Corbusier it lived up to that label, though not necessarily in a good way. Certainly, these designers tried diligently to adapt their buildings to new climatic conditions and to incorporate visual motifs from local cultures. In light of these efforts, it is all the more striking that the results still resemble placeless technocratic gestures, albeit sometimes rather beautiful and ingenious ones. We could also speak of an International Style with respect to the ways that these ideas and methods spread: through evangelism, émigrés and centres of education. It’s important to emphasise, which the V&A show doesn’t, that these forms of transmission were typical of Modernism everywhere.

By the 1930s, Le Corbusier was corresponding or collaborating with architects as far afield as South Africa and Brazil (and the latter was surely the original Tropical Modernism). Likewise, a handful of European exiles, often serving as professors, played a wildly disproportionate role in taking the International Style everywhere from Britain and the US to Kenya and Israel.

If Modernism was international, its Tropical phase shows that it was not, as many of its adherents believed, a universal approach to architecture, rooted in scientific rationality. Watching footage at the exhibition of Indian women transporting wet concrete on their heads for Chandigarh’s vast pyramids of progress, one is evidently seeing ideas whose visionary appeal has far outstripped the actual conditions in the places where they were applied. As such, Modernism was at least a fitting expression of the ill-judged policies of rapid, state-led economic development that were applied across much of the post-colonial world. Their results differed, but Ghana’s fate was especially tragic. A system where three quarters of wage earners worked for the state was painfully vulnerable to a collapse in the price of its main export, cocoa, which duly came in the 1960s. Nkrumah’s regime fell to a coup in 1967, along with his ambitions of pan-African leadership and the country’s Modernist experiment. Those buildings had signified ambition and idealism, but also hubris.

Take a Seat

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in March 2024. Subscribe here.

This week I was lucky enough to attend a symposium at the Royal College of Art, on a subject that is close to my heart – and even closer to my rear: the chair. This is one of those objects that is both extremely ordinary (are you sitting on one now?) and freighted with all kinds of social significance. Natalie Dubois of Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, a speaker at the symposium, pointed to the longstanding link between chairs and power, encoded in language. Can you secure a seat at the table? Or will you be dethroned? Who will win the most parliamentary seats? Better ask the chairman. On the other hand, these can be very intimate objects. Few images represent absence as viscerally as an empty chair.

Designers, like monarchs and emperors, have long shown a peculiar interest in chairs. Normally prestige flows towards things that are very large (buildings and monuments) or very expensive (precious materials and intricate workmanship). But to judge by the results, neither of these criteria can explain why so many prominent architects have tried to stamp their genius on the chair, from Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld to Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons. Perhaps the reason is that, as the RCA’s Alon Meron suggested, a chair is not just an object but a space – an engineered structure and a sculptural negative of the human body. As such, the chair lends itself to the concentrated expression of architectural style.

To show the on-going association of chairs with power, Dubois recalled the infamous snub of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, by Turkish premier Recep Erdoğan in 2021. At a diplomatic event in Ankara, a chair was provided for Erdoğan and for Charles Michel, another EU politician, but not for von der Leyen, who was left standing awkwardly at the side. She reluctantly sat down on a couch opposite the Turkish foreign minister, an arrangement seemingly intended to humiliate. In truth though, there are few situations today when chairs possess such gravity. The old codes dictating who can sit and who must stand belong to a traditional understanding of authority and deference, one that offends the modern mind. What remains is largely a matter of body language. There are moments when sitting down uninvited feels inappropriately relaxed, like swearing or lighting a cigarette.

If sitting no longer conveys the authority it once did, it might also be because most of us do it all day. Modernity has been, among other things, a revolution in posture, as a growing portion of the population completes the journey from the fields via the factory into a chair. The symbol for bureaucratic labour has always been the desk – that is, the bureau – but these objects are symbiotically connected (you generally don’t stand at a desk). Today the chair is part of a functional apparatus that includes the table, the laptop, the human body and the coffee cup. That may sound facetious, but in the early twentieth century, when people were still needed for tasks like copying, filing and computing, significant attention was paid to the most efficient way of seating a worker. From the perspective of “scientific management,” a typist and her chair were part of a single productive mechanism. The same is true for me, except that I’m free to sit in an uncomfortable chair if I wish.

The point is that, in a sedentary world, a chair is as likely to represent confinement, boredom and inertia as power or status. We go to great lengths to ensure we escape our chairs at least occasionally, lest we develop back problems or depression. An “active lifestyle,” once an obligation for the vast majority, is the real luxury now. Then again, when I’ve finished this sentence I will probably just move to the sofa.

The Cult of Land Rover

This essay was originally published by Unherd in March 2024.

In most circumstances, finding your car submerged in mud up to the fenders is a sign that something has gone badly wrong. For the off-road enthusiasts of the Shire Land Rover Club, it is the entire point of having a car. This was one of the first things I learned at the Club’s “play day”, held at a military training area near the Hampshire-Surrey border. I’d barely arrived when I witnessed a Defender 90 being hauled out of a bog where it had almost disappeared, water rising in fountains from its furiously spinning wheels. The man who did the hauling — also in a Land Rover, of course — was James McCurrach, a management consultant and volunteer on the Club’s committee. “No one learns,” he observed cheerfully, “someone else will have a go in a minute.”

The course was a maze of muddy tracks and clearings, littered with puddles that turn out to be deep trenches of water. As more Land Rovers arrived, it became an orgy of revving engines and diesel fumes. The Club’s basic purpose, said McCurrach, is to “meet up and talk shit about Land Rovers”, but these monthly play days are for pushing the cars to their limits. “When you go out as a group, you can be a lot braver and try things you would never try on your own. Most days I’ll come home and say, ‘I didn’t think my truck could do that.’” It was clear however that this is about people as much as vehicles. There is something oddly sentimental about a day spent dragging people out of holes; it is like an elaborate friendship ritual.

I was here to find out what the Club thought about the evolution of the Land Rover brand, a story that speaks to deeper shifts in Britain over the last 70 years. These cars once represented Britain’s rural soul; they were “classless” vehicles used by farmers, landowners and the royal family. Today, they have become status symbols for a moneyed elite around the globe. The Club’s members had plenty to say about this transformation, but their own geeky obsession with Land Rovers tells another story entirely. It demonstrates the survival, in these atomised times, of an associational life based on shared interests, fun, and a kind of everyday camaraderie.

Like most great British myths, Land Rover’s origins lie in the war, or more precisely, the strict industrial rationing that followed. This was what led Maurice Wilks to design a simple aluminium-bodied working vehicle for farmers in 1947. Unstyled, bare-bones authenticity turned out to be key to Land Rover’s charm. It became a feature of the British establishment in more ways than one, a detail of country life as well as a supplier of ambulances and army trucks. In 1970, the first Range Rover — a crossover catering to both everyday and off-road use — instantly found its way into the Louvre. For Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, who drove Land Rovers from the Fifties until their deaths, the cars helped to project a sporty, down-to-earth charisma. That said, the royal fondness for the brand was clearly sincere. The queen was supposedly handy with a spanner, while Philip made the design of his hearse a morbid pet project of sorts, tinkering with it for 18 years before finally riding in it in 2022.

The legendary simplicity of these cars is also what allows associations like the Shire Land Rover Club to flourish, and there are dozens of them in the UK and elsewhere. When I asked the enthusiasts what was special about Land Rovers, they all cited the ease of repairing and customising them, as well as the availability of spare parts for doing so — a result of various models using the same specs across decades. At the play day, I saw vintage military vehicles from the Seventies as well as Frankenstein cars cobbled together from different eras. As one Club member put it, “they’re a big Lego kit for adults really. You can swap and change bits as much as you like.” Unsurprisingly, this seems to attract mechanically-minded, hands-on types: engineers, farmers, tradesmen, builders of one kind or another, small business owners in software or electronics.

The spirit of passionate amateurism, along with the Club’s “pull your mate out of a hole” ethos, creates strong bonds. Some of the members have been close friends for decades. At the play day, I met one man who had come with his partner all the way from Belgium; he told me his main reason for collecting British cars is “the community”. These seemed like the kinds of people you would want around in an emergency, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that some of them, under the leadership of a Hampshire businessman called Guy Shepherd, have repeatedly driven to Ukraine with supplies for the war effort, including medical equipment, uniforms and quad bikes. Shepherd even donated one of his own classic Land Rovers, a weapons-mounted infantry vehicle, which went straight into action on the front line. The Club likewise ran an aid convoy to Bosnia in the Nineties. It is a useful reminder that groups like this are not just for hobbyists; they can be the stuff of civil society.

But the Club’s rugged vision of Land Rover feels increasingly antiquated. Over the decades, the lure of the luxury market has reshaped the brand into something that evidently lives on smooth surfaces. Leather and wood trimmings replaced the early utilitarian interiors (the first Range Rover could be hosed-down inside), the indestructible ladder-frame chassis made way for more comfortable handling, and electronic gadgetry began to infiltrate the engineering. The cars were finding a new role in the global market, as was the company itself. After being bought by BMW in the Nineties, it was passed along to Ford and finally ended up with the Indian conglomerate Tata Motors in 2008.

In this way, Land Rover became part of a historic shift in the economy, signalled by an openness to foreign ownership of even the most traditional British companies. In the same decade that it acquired Land Rover, Tata took over Tetley Tea, the remnants of British Steel, and Jaguar, another heritage car marque. Tata’s own heritage is certainly not to be sniffed at, having been established by the great Indian industrialist, Jamshedji Nusserwanji Tata, in 1868. Still, it is testament to the enormous global realignment of the last 70 years that Land Rover, whose first model was being designed the year India gained its independence from Britain, is now just one small part of a globe-spanning Indian business juggernaut. In addition to its British plants in Solihull and Halewood, Land Rovers are now made in Slovakia, China, India and Brazil. Meanwhile, the UK’s dependence on Tata was illustrated by the company’s recent decision to lay-off 2,500 steelworkers at Port Talbot in Wales, as well as its commitment to fund a much-needed battery plant for electric vehicles.

What is the significance of the Land Rover’s British heritage in this context? The design writer Deyan Sudjic has compared it to “breeding rare sheep”, in the sense that such brands are careful to retain the distinctive marks of their parentage even as they are relentlessly adapted for the market. The appeal of today’s Range Rovers, typically found in affluent urban enclaves, comes partly from a nouveau riche aspiration to an older image of prestige, like a modern equivalent of commissioning a family crest. That seems to be the idea behind the new Range Rover Burford, a name invoking the Cotswolds country lifestyle favoured by celebrities and hedge fund managers, aptly described by Simon Mills as “unmuddied but filthy rich”.

But while the brand is still associated with the royal family, it is also associated with Kim Kardashian. And increasingly, it is just famous for being expensive. Whereas the first Range Rover only cost twice as much as a Ford Cortina, Britain’s most popular car at the time, the latest models are now between four and 10 times the price of a Ford Puma. An endless menu of optional extras can take them past a quarter of a million pounds — and that is before the insurance premiums, which have skyrocketed thanks to the rate at which they are stolen (though at least criminals are more likely to use their off-road capabilities).

At the Shire Land Rover Club, the consensus was that the cars had lost touch with their roots. “Land Rovers as we’re using them here today are gone,” said Adam, a carpenter and longstanding member. “It’s now a luxury product. It’s a Gucci handbag or a Chihuahua. You’re paying for the oval badge.” The crucial difference for him, and for others I spoke to, was not a decline in performance or engineering, but the loss of the vehicles’ trademark simplicity. “If I want to change the brakes in that,” he said of his own 1962 model, “it might cost me a hundred quid and take me half a day. Now you have to take it to Range Rover, and they have to plug the car into a laptop.” The same complexity makes the newer versions unsuited to the really tough conditions that the Club loves. “There’s too many sensors, too many electronics, the air suspension can fail.”

Be that as it may, we could see the UK’s luxury car brands as a story of manufacturing prowess unlocked by foreign capital. Making these vehicles requires a level of craft and sophistication that Britain rarely achieved in the early decades of Land Rover. And they are hugely desirable overseas. Just look at what happened when sanctions prevented wealthy Russians from importing them: a mysterious boom in shipments to neighbouring Azerbaijan. The problem is that, as Ruchir Sharma has pointed out with respect to Europe as a whole, luxury goods are not a promising basis for a modern economy. It is all very well for Britain to supply the world with heritage cars — or, for that matter, with public schools, London apartments and actors with plummy accents — but such artisanal products do little to address chronic issues such as low productivity and underinvestment. No longer just a car, today Land Rover is a symbol of Britain’s power as a brand, and its powerlessness as a country.

Mechanising the Oceans

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in January 2024. Subscribe here.

I recently watched for a second time J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, a strangely riveting film with only one character, no dialogue and almost no words at all, set in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The entire plot consists of an unnamed man, played by Robert Redford, struggling to survive at sea. The sailor’s misfortune is not just that there is no civilisation on the ocean, but also, in a sense, that there is too much. Everything starts to go wrong when the man wakes to find that his boat has collided with a stray shipping container, a red steel cuboid disgorging its cargo of branded trainers as it bobs ominously across the water.

This shipping container feels symbolic, though I’m not exactly sure why. It could represent capitalism’s conquest of the globe, eradicating every frontier until even the oceans offer no escape from the rule of consumer goods. But we could equally read it the other way around. The doomed man’s boat stands for us, the coddled citizens of the modern world; afloat on a sea of complacency, we take for granted the global networks that underpin our way of life – then something breaks down, and our hidden dependencies burst into view.

Container shipping is the kind of background system that we tend not to notice until it’s disrupted. And because we are living in a time of increasing global instability, such systems are being disrupted, and noticed. I was buying coffee at the supermarket this week when the cashier ruefully observed that prices were likely to go up again, thanks to events unfolding around the Red Sea. In northern Yemen, Houthi rebels backed by Iran have been attacking the shipping of countries aligned with Israel in its current war. As a consequence, cargoes trying to access the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal face higher insurance rates, or a much longer route around the tip of Africa. Either way, the costs will be passed on to us. That’s to say nothing of the dangers of military escalation, as the United States and its allies try to protect the Red Sea lanes.

Such incidents have geopolitical importance because western voters have become accustomed to cheap imported goods, and that is in no small part thanks to the revolutionary impact of container shipping itself. As I discussed in a previous post, the adoption of this system in the 1960s and 70s killed stone dead a millennia-old tradition of human life on the oceans. It laid the foundation for the mechanisation of ports, and of the vessels themselves. It drastically cut the cost of transportation – a television can now be shipped from China to the U.S. for as little as ten cents – and thereby facilitated the rise of globalisation. Look around you: virtually all of the objects you see, and many of their parts, have crossed the ocean in a container ship.

And yet, the principles behind containerisation were so simple as to be almost banal. As the author Matt Ridley notes, it involved “no new science, no high technology, and not much new low technology.” The idea is essentially that, if everyone uses the same standardised boxes for trade, huge amounts of time and labour can be saved. Goods can be loaded at factories rather than in ports, the containers can be stacked onto ships by cranes, and the ships can grow to enormous dimensions, carrying thousands of identical containers and thereby reducing the cost for each. This is largely a question of organisation, but it also could not have happened without obsessive determination and an insane appetite for risk, qualities that came together in an American businessman called Malcolm McLean.

By the mid-1950s, as Ridley notes, foreign trade had actually been shrinking for decades as a proportion of the U.S. economy. This was when McLean sold his trucking company and, having borrowed a large sum of money, entered the shipping business. He bought two Second World War oil tankers, which the engineer Keith Tantlinger helped him convert into makeshift container ships. McLean had done his sums and thought he could reduce shipping costs from $5.83 per ton to just $0.16, a saving of over 97 percent. Still, he had to see through years of conflict with commerce authorities, dockworkers’ unions and port managers, his usual response to failure being to borrow even more money and design even bigger ships. Eventually, through stubbornness as much as anything, he brought the world around to his system. As with so many momentous innovations, the U.S. military played a role, contracting McLean to resolve its supply issues in the Vietnam War.

No less than the shipping container itself, this story is emblematic of how capitalism works. It is a framework in which the animal spirits of unusual individuals can change the world, yet it often produces inhuman efficiency and homogenisation as its end result. It ultimately consumed McLean himself: the final gamble of his career ended with bankruptcy in 1986, at which point he was $1.2 billion in debt.

The most successful revolutions are those that create a new normality and recede unnoticed into the background. This is especially true of container ships because, having displaced the older commercial fleets and needing only small crews, they now rule over an ocean world where there are few people to observe them. This eerie state of affairs is nicely illustrated in All Is Lost, as the desperate castaway floats right beside the vast hull of a container ship, unable to get anyone’s attention. But what happens at sea does not, of course, stay confined there, and trade disruptions are far from the worst way to be reminded of this.

Last month, six shipping containers fell into the Atlantic off Portugal, one of which contained millions of plastic pellets used in the food packaging industry. These rice-sized beads, easily ingested by fish, birds and other animals, are currently causing an environmental catastrophe on the Spanish coast. This comes almost exactly a year after an identical plastic spillage took place in French waters. These disasters bring hundreds of volunteers desperately trying to gather the tiny pellets from European beaches, a harrowing image of our struggle against the very systems that facilitate our lives.

Why Do Some Things Last?

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in January 2024. Subscribe here.

I always find it strange to see children using the same stationary that I once did: the protractors and rulers made from clear shatter-resistant plastic, the index cards in their familiar range of pastel colours, the pocket calculators that are, in fact, slightly too big to fit comfortably in a trouser pocket. So much has changed in the two decades or so since I used these things, it seems slightly shocking that they are still in production. Such items have all but vanished from everyday life, but in the doomed effort to keep children off their phones long enough to learn something, this particular ecology of objects has been allowed to survive in a kind of time warp.

Assuming this arrangement can’t last forever, it is difficult to imagine anyone bothering to substantially redesign such basic stationary products. (The boutique and specialist stuff is another matter of course). They have likely reached the final stage in their evolution as objects, much like the cordless landline phone or the rectangular plane tickets printed at the check-in desk. Then again, it is difficult to imagine how one could redesign something as simple as a ruler. This is a question which has long tantalised designers and practitioners of various crafts: can an object achieve not just its last, but its ultimate form?

In a crowded marketplace, where even small differences can be crucial in distinguishing one product from another, there is always an incentive to reinvent things. But some tools seem to do their job so well that they outlive even the most ingenious designers. We are more likely to redesign the educational model that demands rulers than the ruler itself. One can say something similar about the basic form of the sewing needle, the egg carton or the four-legged chair. In a world defined by the aggressive pursuit of innovation and by change in general, such items have a peculiar persistence.

Early in his career, Le Corbusier developed his philosophy of purism from similar premises. What he called “type-objects” were, supposedly, the best possible solutions to particular design problems; timeless, universal forms that modern engineering and mass-production were bound to discover in their quest for the most economic responses to human needs. Though these type-objects were anonymous industrial goods, the idea was deeply mystical. Le Corbusier drew a parallel between Darwinian natural selection and the “mechanical selection” which resulted in perfect artefacts; he imagined the latter sharing a Platonic harmony with the physical and mathematical laws of the universe. Stripped of useless decoration, the products of the machine age were free to realise the beauty of the purest architecture of earlier epochs. It was on this basis that he likened automobiles and grain silos to the Parthenon.

This notion is dubious to say the least. Mass production does not, of course, have an inner logic which tends inevitably towards particular designs; formal change is generally driven by economic conditions and commercial strategies. In fact, most of the “type-objects” displayed in Le Corbusier’s famous Pavillion de l’Esprit Nouveau of 1925 were, like products coming out of the Bauhaus at the same time, specially commissioned pieces that merely imitated a mass-produced appearance.

Still, we have to account for the apparent maturity of certain forms. Deyan Sudjic calls them design archetypes: things that turn out to be not just objects but “a category of object.” His examples include the clock face, the wine bottle, the dinner plate, the balanced-arm desk lamp, the rotary-dial telephone, the tap and the key. To become archetypal, an object must meet some minimum standard of usefulness, but that is not enough. There are presumably other, equally practical ways to serve food, lock a door or illuminate a desk. Archetypes also rely on an emotional resonance for their survival, and in particular, the appeal of familiarity. “Even if our possessions do not age well, and we continually replace them,” Sudjic writes, “designs that evoke archetypes offer a consoling sense of continuity. They introduce a ready-made history for an object.”

Consider the school stationary again. Whatever their functional merits, there is undoubtedly something reassuring about the formal persistence of these items. They suggest a basic continuity in what it means to be a child across generations. This may be a silly conclusion to draw from the contents of a pencil case, but that is the point: familiarity exerts a powerful force on our intuitions.

That force presents one of the most profound challenges to innovation, and to creativity in general. It is not just that familiarity can motivate resistance to what is new; it defines what is new. If archetypes are essentially default forms for a given object, then attempting a different form means drawing a contrast with the archetype. This is another way of saying that something which breaks a rule does not only derive its value from its own qualities, but also from the rule it has broken. It cannot be otherwise. A square plate will never be judged as a square plate; it will be judged, for better or worse, as a plate that is not round.

Challenging an archetype is therefore a delicate process that can easily go awry. One way to understand a gimmick, or a mere novelty, is as something which relies too much for its impact on a contrast with the archetypal. It thereby reveals itself as parasitical on the very familiarity that it pretends to reject.

And yet, according to this same dialectic, the archetype itself can become a kind of parasite, its value inflated by efforts to challenge it. Once the familiarity of a form is sufficiently entrenched, most attempts to do things differently will be regarded as pretentious gestures that only confirm the validity of the original. You may have envied that other child with the fancy folding ruler, but could you really pull that off? This helps explain why, in a world where people are always trying to innovate, some things turn out to be surprisingly immune to change.

Mourning the Biosphere

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in December 2023. Subscribe here.

Today more than ever, there is a strong dose of fantasy in the British dream of home ownership. The ideal house is no longer a comfortable dwelling and a way of accruing capital; it is a sandbox to be customised so that it reflects a personal vision of domesticity. This is nicely illustrated by the winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ house of the year award, announced last week. What began as a detached house in a Tottenham alleyway has been transformed into an airy interior courtyard, inspired by a traditional Moroccan riad.

The most striking feature of this enchanted space is what RIBA calls its “biophilic design,” meaning that it is teeming with plants. The front of the building is buried behind a lush screen of bamboo leaves, while the living room is a “domestic greenhouse” looking onto a no less verdant garden.

The biophilic environment is part of the zeitgeist today. It is not new of course; Le Corbusier introduced the roof garden to the repertoire of Modernism back in the 1920s, while the glass-walled conservatory with its pot plants, radio and reading chair has long been a domestic institution in Britain. But in recent years it has become fashionable to douse spaces in so much greenery that they begin to resemble garden centres.

Since around 2017, a whole genre of magazine articles has emerged to puzzle over the millennial “obsession” with houseplants. They cite testimony from fanatical young plant-lovers, and report on Instagram subcultures where every apartment has become a jungle of Monstera Deliciosa and Dracaena Trifasciata. Meanwhile no digital rendering of a new housing estate or office building is complete without at least a token smattering of trees. At Google’s new HQ in London, 40,000 tonnes of soil have been carted up to the roof to lay a garden along its entire 300-metre span.

Then there are the urban greening schemes. Manhattan got its High Line park a decade ago, and London tried to go one better with proposals for a dramatic Garden Bridge across the Thames (predictably scuppered by runaway costs and planning issues). In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo plans to turn the Champs-Élysées into “an extraordinary garden,” while Saudi Arabia’s imagined cities of the future show forests growing in the desert.

On its face, this looks like a straightforwardly positive trend, and not an especially mysterious one. The sublime beauty of the plant kingdom – the beauty of stem and leaf, fruit and flower, root and tendril – is one of the few aesthetic facts that does not need to be relativised. It sings out from artistic and ornamental traditions around the world. A garden is a profoundly human space because nothing so poetically captures the astonishing fact which alone underwrites our existence: that there are things which live and blossom. As for modern life, the company of such things is probably the simplest way to ease the burden of alienation from nature. There is plenty of evidence that plants make us happier and healthier in various ways, but then few people need to be told this before appreciating their presence.

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And yet, there is also an undercurrent of sadness here. Like many things which have ended up under the dubious headings of “wellness” and “self-care,” plants are not just a tonic for 21^st century life; they are a symbol of its painful shortcomings and a distraction from its consequences. Accounts of the plant craze among twenty- and thirty-somethings always come back to the same set of explanations, often given by the biophiles themselves. Plants soften the impersonal feeling of rented apartments; they provide an outlet for nurturing instincts at a time when family formation feels impossible; tending to them is a way of escaping the frantic, ephemeral experience of digitised life; and above all, for people who are always moving around and working long hours, a pet that lives in a pot doesn’t require a significant commitment, and can ultimately be abandoned.

In other words, the houseplant belongs to that increasingly common pattern of existence where good things take the form, not of simple pleasures, but of consolation for deeper deficiencies. My own experience is a tragicomic variation of the same theme. I would probably trade one of my kidneys for a garden, but in lieu of that, I’ve been amassing a small collection of botanical encyclopaedias. I lovingly study the illustrations, try to remember the names of the species (Latin and colloquial), and sometimes look up the histories of their discovery and cultivation. Yet I’ve moved house so many times in recent years that, at some point, I lost the habit of actually owning plants.

Something similar can be seen at the level of buildings and cities, where the appeal of urban oases and hydroponic facades must stem in part from collective feelings of guilt and regret. Even as our economic activities turn the planet into a vast toxic dump, we long to make our cities into shrines for worshipping the biosphere, or perhaps mourning would be a better term. Of course urban greenery can represent something less sincere, namely, a convenient fiction adopted by a highly destructive building industry. Still, it is a fiction we eagerly accept.

Plants cleanse our air and minds, but no less important, they allow us to stage the fantasy of a reconciliation with nature. That is a role they are increasingly called to perform in public spaces as well as in award-winning London houses.

Aby Warburg and the Memory of Images

This essay was originally published by Engelsberg Ideas in November 2023.

In June 2020, everyone was ‘taking the knee’. Protests had erupted in the United States and spread to dozens of countries around the world, after the killing of an African American man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis. The act of kneeling on one leg, en masse, quickly became one of the most resonant symbols of opposition to police brutality and racial discrimination. Crowds gathered to perform the gesture in London’s Hyde Park, outside the Palais de Justice in Paris, on the streets of Sydney and before the US consulate in Milan. In Washington, nine Democrat members of Congress donned West African scarves and kneeled before cameras in the Capitol Visitor Center. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau observed the ritual, as did members of the National Guard in Hollywood and Metropolitan Police in Westminster. In Britain and beyond, ‘taking the knee’ became part of pre-match proceedings in professional football.

Just three years later, it is difficult to recount how dramatic these events were. Without any planning or coordination – at a time, in fact, when many countries had social distancing measures in place due to the Covid pandemic – a global protest movement had sprung into existence virtually overnight. It was clear that iconography, striking visual gestures and symbols broadcast through social media, had been part of the mechanism that made it happen.

Where did ‘taking the knee’ come from? The American Football player Colin Kaepernick, who began using the pose as a protest during national anthems in 2016, is credited with inventing it. Yet the gesture is freighted with older meanings. Open a book of Christian iconography and you will see kneeling men and women across the ages, symbolising devotion, humility and respect. Even in relation to the cause of racial equality, the pose has – in the ambiguous phrase used by numerous press articles – ‘a long history’. At the bottom of the Wikipedia page for ‘Taking the Knee’, for instance, there is a curious section noting two precursors. In February 1965 the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr led a group of civil rights protestors in praying on one knee outside Dallas County courthouse. Meanwhile, more than a century earlier, the image of a kneeling African man had been a popular symbol of the Evangelical movement for the abolition of slavery.

What should we make of these precedents? None of the publications that noted them suggested any actual link with Kaepernick or the later protests. Yet I could not dispel the feeling that, in the summer of 2020, the past was speaking through those crowds of kneeling people. We are today so immersed in media that a sense of imitation, of the re-enactment of some earlier episode, hangs over every public act. Even the violent scenes that accompanied those protests, the pulling down of statues and the torching of buildings, seemed to function as a kind of familiar iconography, symbols of revolution that had somehow sprung from our cinematic imagination into reality.

My attempts to make sense of all this brought me to a rather unexpected place. They brought me to the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; or rather, to a vision of the Renaissance put forward by a singular thinker, the German art historian Aby Warburg. Though he died almost a century ago, Warburg thought about images in a way that seems highly prescient today. He recognised that the power of iconography lay in its potential for transmission across space and time, its ability to accrue new meanings in different contexts. He warned, moreover, that this power could be destructive as well as creative.

Warburg is probably best known today as a collector of books, and for good reason. Born in 1866, he was the eldest son of an illustrious Jewish banking family based in Hamburg and New York. As legend has it, the thirteen-year-old Warburg gave up his claim on the family business to his brother Max, asking only that he would never be short of money for books. By 1919 he had collected enough to establish the Library of Cultural Studies in Hamburg, a setting famous for its esoteric approach to classifying knowledge (one section was titled ‘Religion, Magic and Science’). Together with the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose work on symbolic forms drew heavily from this library, Warburg helped to make Hamburg one of the most innovative sites in the intellectual landscape of the Weimar Republic.

Warburg died in 1929, and four years later, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, two steamers evacuated his collection across the North Sea, carrying some 60,000 books, along with 15,000 photographs and thousands of slides. These riches ended up at what is today the Warburg Institute and Library on London’s Woburn Square. Above its entrance, you can see engraved in Greek capitals the idea that Warburg pursued throughout his career: MNHMOΣYNH, Mnemosyne, memory.

The most extensive exposition of Warburg’s ideas comes not from his writings but from a remarkable project called The Image Atlas of Memory (Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne), on which he was still working at the time of his death. It consists of nearly a thousand images, arranged on a series of 63 dark blue panels, tracing the evolution of visual expression from the ancient Greco-Roman world to the Renaissance and then into 1920s photojournalism. The principle behind this work, which would influence the philosopher Walter Benjamin among others, was that visual symbols and motifs are a form of cultural memory. As they are transmitted and adapted through time, they reveal a dialogue in which the past infuses the present and the present reinterprets the past.

Warburg’s inspiration for these ideas came from Renaissance Florence, a city he considered ‘the birthplace of modern, confident, urban, mercantile civilisation’. The Florentine elite – a milieu of great banking families, artists and private scholars, for which Warburg felt a strong affinity – had developed a new synthesis of medieval Catholicism and ideals adapted from classical Greece and Rome. Warburg was especially interested in the role of iconography in creating that synthesis. He observed that Renaissance artists had not simply been inspired by ancient sources; they had borrowed a distinct catalogue of expressive gestures, ways of representing the human body that communicated movement, energy and confidence. These borrowed gestures were like visual quotations, ‘migrant images’ drawn from the past to serve the expressive needs of the present. Warburg called such images ‘pathos formulas’, and he came to see them as the vehicles of cultural memory.

One such formula was a woman in swirling garments, ‘the Nymph’ as Warburg dubbed it, a figure he documented with more than fifty images in the Memory Atlas. A vivid example appears in Dominico Ghirlandaio’s fresco, The Birth of John the Baptist, where, on the furthest right of the painting, we see a female attendant carrying a plate of fruit with an almost absurd dynamism – an ancient figure literally bursting into the late-fifteenth century. Another formula was the chaotic melee of warriors, a scene portrayed in ancient sources, such as the Arch of Constantine, and imitated by numerous Renaissance artists down to Raphael’s own Battle of Milvian Bridge in the 1520s. Still another was the figure of the pagan goddess Fortuna, a female nude with a billowing sail, as seen in the family crest of the merchant Giovanni Rucellai, where it sat uneasily above a Christian coat of arms. Fortuna had come to symbolise an ethic of prudence, calculation, and trust in one’s own judgment; the Runcellai crest was echoed in a phrase that sometimes opened Medici business documents: Col nome di Dio e di Buonaventura, ‘In the name of God and of Good Fortune’.

The search for such patterns might seem out of place today, given the vast number of images created on a daily basis, but, as Warburg realised, mass culture is perfectly suited to the transmission of pathos formulas, since the most resonant images tend to be the most widely circulated and reproduced. In the Memory Atlas, photographs of antique coins and oil paintings sit alongside modern advertising imagery and magazine clippings. A quick glance at the images that populate our own media reveals countless expressive gestures that could be called pathos formulas: the ecstasy of footballers celebrating a goal, the stance of actors assembled on a film poster, the pose of models on the covers of men’s magazines, the wooden bearing of a politician shaking someone’s hand, or the conventions dictating how people present their bodies on Instagram.

Warburg’s notion of memory emphasises that, when we need to express or represent an idea, we draw from a stock of gestures and symbols whose meanings are kept alive in our culture by the presence of earlier representations. In this way, images can travel across centuries, being recalled repeatedly into new contexts and acquiring new layers of meaning. This is what we saw with the re-emergence of Christian body language as a way of galvanising protest. Only in light of its deeper history, its long passage through time, can we understand the various connotations of ‘taking the knee’ in 2020. When performed by figures of authority, for instance, it did not express defiance but contrition and repentance; an idea we could find in any number of Hollywood films, but which we could equally trace all the way back to images of medieval kings kneeling in penance to the church.

Warburg’s study of the Renaissance also brought him to reflect on darker aspects of iconography. Like his contemporary, the sociologist Max Weber, he understood the emergence of the modern world in terms of a ‘loss of magic’. (Weber’s term, Entzauberung, is normally translated as ‘disenchantment’). Warburg saw the Renaissance as a crucial moment in this process. It was a time when astrological beliefs and practices were still widespread, with the movements of planets and stars held to predict everything from natural disasters to the course of an illness and the qualities of a person’s character. Yet the era also saw a growing tendency to view the cosmos in terms of impersonal laws, which for Warburg signalled a movement towards greater creativity and reason.

Again, iconography had played an important role. Images had always been implicated in magic, mediating between human beings and the forces of the occult. They could serve as fetishes and idols – objects imbued with magical powers – or as superstitious forms of representation, as with astrological symbols and charts that projected the presence of terrifying deities onto the planets. According to Warburg, Renaissance artists undermined the psychology of magic by presenting mythology in a new way. Their style produced a ‘distance’ between the viewer and the image, a mental space that allowed astrological figures to appear not as active, daemonic forces, but as abstract ideas. Warburg writes of Albrecht Dürer’s portrayal of Saturn, for instance, that ‘the artist has taken a magical and mythical logic and made it spiritual and intellectual’, transforming a ‘malignant, child-devouring, planetary god’ into ‘the image of the thinking, working human being’.

The genius of the Renaissance, for Warburg, was that it could retrieve the energy of past eras, whether the pagan cults, which had created figures such as the Nymph, or the magical traditions associated with astrology, but could also interpret these influences in a way that was aesthetic and rational. Developments in Warburg’s own lifetime made him realise that the modern mind was not immune from relapsing into a primitive relationship with images. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he observed with horror the role of visual propaganda in fomenting hatred, and then suffered a lengthy nervous collapse punctuated by psychotic episodes. As he later wrote to his family, the war ‘confronted me with the devastating truth that unchained, elemental man is the unconquerable ruler of this world’. Warburg did not live to see the political spectacles of the Third Reich, though he did witness Italian fascism. He was at the Vatican in 1929 when Pope Pius XI signed an accord with Mussolini, quipping to a friend that he’d had ‘the chance of my life to be present at the re-paganisation of Rome’.

Likewise, many of the contemporary images Warburg chose for the Memory Atlas hint at the darkness underlying the sophistication of modernity, albeit in a somewhat ironic way. On the panel dedicated to Mars, the ancient god of war and astrological harbinger of violence, Warburg pinned images of the huge airships that captivated the German imagination during the 1920s. The mesmerising power of modern technology, he seems to be saying, threatens to collapse the critical space of reason, imbuing images with magic once again.

This loss of distance is another concept we could apply to our own visual culture. To a far greater degree than the photojournalism of Warburg’s time, internet media tends to diminish our ability to reflect on the feelings that images provoke. Designers are incentivised to make platforms immersive, not to mention addictive, through algorithms that manipulate the limbic system; we often now consume images in a state resembling a trance. More subtly, social media blurs the generic boundaries that, in older media like films and video games, distinguish between reality and unreality. Much of what passes across our screens now, regardless of whether it is genuine, curated or simply fake, appeals to our emotions with a sense of raw reality, of unmediated and authentic life. All of this encourages those impulsive responses – of anger, jealousy, fear or desire – that notoriously govern the online world.

We should not overstate the role of images by imagining they can somehow determine events in isolation from the conditions in which they appear. To suggest that a symbol or gesture exercises power over us regardless of context is itself a kind of magical thinking. Nonetheless, seen through a Warburgian lens, iconography is still a potent force. The events of the summer of 2020 seem especially significant because they illustrated two contrasting ways that emotion can be visually communicated and spread. It can be expressed through a rhetorical gesture like ‘taking the knee’, which is, whatever one thinks of the message, a meaningful political act. It can also – as we’ve seen on many other occasions in recent years – be channelled into contagious images of violence.

London: Zombie Capital

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in November 2023. Subscribe here.

In a world of mass media, we are ruled by the tyranny of comparison. We are surrounded by images of beauty and style, of fulfilment and success, that make us feel inadequate by contrast. Sometimes it is even an image of ourselves, a glimpse of what we once were or could have been, that we yearn to emulate.

What if something similar can happen to a city? Could an entire metropolis be oppressed by an idealised version of itself, as seen in films, advertising, and the imagination of the wider world? This seems to be the case in London today, and no doubt in other famous cities too. A caricature of the British capital, part period drama and part Richard Curtis romcom, has been sold to a global audience of nostalgic Anglophiles. And because London is where the UK welcomes with the world, all the other twee fantasies of Englishness are expected here as well. Increasingly, the city is being warped under the pressure of its own whimsical image.

Consider the Londoner, a new themed resort in Macau, off the south coast of China. Visitors are treated to every English cliché imaginable, from Scotch eggs and scones to David Beckham and the Spice Girls, not to mention replicas of various London landmarks. A correspondent for the Times describes it thusly:

As the actor playing Her Majesty waves demurely from a balcony, Grenadier Guards and a few Metropolitan Police bobbies dance to fanfare all around the Crystal Palace — a glass-topped atrium inspired by the building which once adorned Hyde Park. All the while, hundreds of people delightedly video this twice-daily performance… from either side of a replica of Eros from Piccadilly Circus.
…
I make pretend calls from red telephone boxes before boarding an imported, 1966 Routemaster bus. Looming near that is a full-size duplicate of the Elizabeth Tower, aka the home of Big Ben; behind, the building’s intricate lower façade apes the Houses of Parliament. Airport transfers involve vintage Rolls-Royces.

An obvious farce, yes, but a farce that many people love. Besides, the Londoner is far from the only simulacrum of British culture in China. Imitations of prestigious public schools and colleges have been cropping up around the country. One university in Hebei is modelled on Hogwarts.

The TV and film industry are of course the greatest purveyors of fantasy Britannia. Much as western audiences like exotic portrayals of the East, foreign audiences like old-fashioned portraits of England and its capital city, normally involving the upper class. Global hits include Downton Abbey and The Crown, Harry Potter and James Bond, and of course Titanic and Notting Hill. Arriving in Shanghai two years ago, the first person I spoke to referenced the 1980s comedy Yes Minister, which seemed rather niche but still proves the point I think.

It just so happens that many Europeans, Brits included, like this picture of Englishness too, but the enormous markets beyond Europe would be enough to justify it in commercial terms. As the FT’s Stephen Bush puts it, “left to the market alone, the UK depicted on screen will look rather like the India presented by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: not a country that any of its citizens would readily recognise, but one that reflects foreign customers’ idea of it.”

What goes for the screen increasingly goes for London itself, as the city is transformed to realise the commercial potential of its brand. Its historic centre has become a theme park rather like the one in Macau, catering to tourism, shopping and hospitality to the extent that it no longer really seems to belong to the city. Most Londoners can’t afford a drink in these areas, let alone to live or run a business there. The capital’s most famous monuments, including the buildings where the country is governed, are so tied up with marketing and merchandise that it’s sometimes surprising to be reminded they are real places.

The irony, of course, is that much of London’s living history – such as the independent bars and shops which thrived in Soho even a decade ago – has been strangled by this process. It is being replaced by something I’ve previously called zombie heritage, whereby the city’s architecture comes to resemble a series of waxworks recreating an older London for commercial purposes. In many cases, such as the revamped Battersea Power Station (luxury apartments and shopping) or the recent redevelopment of Kings Cross (prestigious art school, corporate offices and shopping), these new “old” places have essentially been designed as giant magnets for global wealth.

And make no mistake, there is money to be made from Anglomania. In 2016, an academic at the London School of Economics estimated that the Harry Potter franchise generated £4 billion for London in that year alone. The question is whether such returns can justify, in economic or social terms, surrendering much of the capital to tourism and novelty consumption.

In a recent essay, Deyan Sudjic has also noted the “creeping fossilisation” of London, as the city’s productive capacities are crowded out by the hawking of heritage. Sudjic acidly observes “the Old War Office building on Whitehall, from which Winston Churchill led the defence of Britain against Hitler, has become the Raffles OWO hotel where bed and breakfast starts at over £1,000 a night.” Meanwhile in Camden, “facsimile punks” perform for tourists “as if they were Beefeaters on parade.”

If this trend continues, encouraged by white-collar professionals evacuating the centre to work remotely, then London’s old urban core will eventually resemble a cross between Austin Powers and Hogwarts: a moribund museum of British kitsch, stretching from Shepherd’s Bush to Hackney, from Kentish Town to Southwark. By way of warning, Sudjic cites Venice, the infamous case of a city frozen in the form of a luxury destination. Maybe it’s already too late, for right next to the Londoner in Macao is another hotel and shopping complex modelled on a famous city: the Venetian.

Food: It’s Complicated

This essay appeared in my regular newsletter, The Pathos of Things, in November 2023. Subscribe here.

At some point in the last few years, I gave up on food. I didn’t stop eating food, of course, or even enjoying it, but I stopped aspiring to any kind of skill or refinement in the matter of what enters my stomach. I enjoy a meal in the same way I enjoy a pint of Guinness or a walk: a simple, ritual pleasure. I am not trying to master a craft, scale an aesthetic peak or broaden my horizons. Most weeks I eat the same thing more or less every day (since you asked: pasta with aubergine, or fish with rice).

I sometimes wonder what this loss of culinary ambition says about me. When a man tires of food, is he tired of life? Should we not seek beauty in gustation as we do in the other senses? Is this how I begin my transition into an incurious bore who likes things a certain way, and no different?

Ok, maybe these questions aren’t very interesting. But I do find it curious that they can be asked at all: that such profound meanings can be looked for in the digestive tract. For the vast majority of people, there used to be just one salient question relating to food: do I have any? Now, thanks to modern agricultural productivity, that single pressing concern has been replaced by a range of often neurotic issues. Am I eating too much? How healthy is my diet? Can I impress people with my cooking? Am I bored of my usual fare? Am I causing deforestation? Have any animals been tortured for my weekly shop? How badly?

Food is bound to be complex because, to state the obvious, it is something every one of us puts down our throat on a daily basis. This makes it rather personal, but also ensures that it will be caught up in all sorts of social and moral considerations. Our attitudes to food are shaped not just by the privacy of the palate, but by the social aspects of the plate: by family, religion and class, not to mention beauty standards.

From a design perspective, food could be compared with clothes and buildings. These are all things people need to survive, which have also become mediums of cultural expression and identity. In their traditional forms, cuisine, fashion and architecture are vernacular: they have local accents, reflecting the history and conditions of a particular region. In their modern forms, all three have been transformed by mass production, on the one hand, and by notions of artistic creativity on the other. To oversimplify, the journey from homespun clothes to Nike and Alexander McQueen – or from traditional building methods to concrete, steel and Zaha Hadid – is echoed by the journey from local cuisines to McDonalds, Tesco and deconstructed cheesecakes.

To a far greater extent than buildings or clothes though, modern food continues to invoke an idealized image of its older, traditional forms. Authenticity and heritage are appealing concepts in many industries, but nowhere are they promoted as widely or enthusiastically as in gastronomy. Whether describing flavours and ingredients or the agricultural practices that produce them, the marketing of food skews heavily towards ideas of the time-honored, the local, the artisanal, the small-scale, and above all the natural or organic. Economists may classify food as manufacturing – the UK’s largest manufacturing sector, in fact – but the rest of us prefer not to.

There are all kinds of illusions at work here, some of which George Monbiot has tackled in a recent essay. In reality, traditional peasant diets were both meagre and dull. Places worshipped for their agricultural heritage have, in most cases, been transformed by tourism and commercial farming. “In the famous cheesemaking regions of France,” Monbiot writes,

you will scarcely see a dairy cow. Instead, vast tracts are cultivated for maize… to feed the cattle stalled in the vast steel sheds – cow factories – that have sprung up from Brittany to Savoie, a business as brutal and industrial as any other. Milk is trucked across hundreds of kilometres, trade fairs market the cheese from Dubai to Shanghai.

And the more industrial the reality, the more romantic the advertising, with its “close-ups of cracked and dirt-grained hands, chickens clucking through buttercupped meadows, girls in Heidi costumes and all the other autophagous nonsense of the Spectacle.”

But why does food demand this veil of nostalgia more than other, similarly brutal industries? We hardly expect fashion retailers to pretend their clothes are woven on handlooms, or property developers to make as though they are employing Gothic stonemasons. This surely comes back to the intimate dimension of food. The scary aspects of mass production – the chemicals, the pillaging of nature, the inhuman scale and the indifference to suffering – are that much more scary when they are directly connected to our body and the innocent comfort of eating. When it comes to the gut, our feelings are just more, well, visceral.

This is why the aesthetics, the emotional powers of imagery, play such an important role. I am probably less sentimental about animal welfare than the average British person, but I was revolted by photographs of the high-rise pig farms which have appeared in numerous Chinese cities. These buildings are enormous, extremely plain, utterly utilitarian; even if the horrors inside them are sadly not unusual, their unmistakably industrial appearance made my stomach turn. After that, I longed for the pictures of dirt-grained hands and Heidi costumes.

There are other, more subtle reasons that authenticity and heritage are so valued in relation to food. As consumerism erodes the traditional core of culture, it creates the idea of heritage as a way for tradition itself to be consumed. How do we consume it? Via the mouth, of course. And in the era of multiculturalism, there is plenty of heritage to sample. People from around the world can bring their identity to the marketplace in the form of cuisine, and customers can enjoy not just the variety and novelty, but the satisfaction of being the open-minded, cosmopolitan sort. Such transactions rely on the pretense that food somehow contains the authentic essence of a culture.

But maybe all these fictions are only possible because, while food may be just another industrial product, there is still something ancient and hallowed in the act of eating together. The shared meal, with its endless variety of settings and formats, is a rare survival from a much older world, and one of the few practices that retains the aura of a sacred custom. The conversion of countless British churches into cafés in recent decades could be taken as a metaphor: meeting and eating has a central place in what remains of associational life.

As for my relationship with food, the more boring I become in my everyday choices, the more I appreciate the role of a good meal in marking an occasion, grand or simple, elegant or trashy. At these moments, food becomes something different, something more than nourishment or satisfaction. It becomes an expression of joy.