Epic Space Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Case of the Missing Parisian Absinthe Kiosk

  The Betjemanisation of South London

  The Dreamed Vortex

  Simpering Psychomuff

  The Vegetable Liberation Front

  The Shitley Experiment

  The Slightly Underground Railway

  An Abridged Larkin Poem

  That Giraffe’s Head Was Always Coming Off

  Twitterborough

  The Age of Oxygen

  A Multi-Dimensional World

  There Is No Rationalism but Rationalism

  How Kryptogel Will Change the World

  Zeppelins Full of Shit

  Velvet Smackpad

  The Molecules of Swinging London

  Hubmakers v Spacesmiths

  Youthanasia

  Slow Modernism

  The Irony Bridge

  Pathetic Fallacy 1, Emphatic Delusion 0

  The Decadent Egg

  Remagination

  It’s the Sulk I’m Really After

  One One

  Pudding Gateshead

  The Collide-O-Scope

  A Strange Glint

  The New Pop-Uption

  19th-Century Brickdust

  The Certification of Public Space

  The Blard

  A Cross-Vectored Media Partnership

  The Airpunch

  Goodbye Olympic Rebadging Task Force

  Magnetic Values

  The Chapel of Notre Dame du Marmalade

  Latest Books About Icons

  An Analogue Underground Cotswolds

  Little Stripey Crestfallen Moons

  The Jockular Campus

  Metarchitectural Sausages

  Looks Nice Theory

  Battle of the Styles

  The Hard-Working Class

  Dysgustopia

  Windhampton

  I Am Grand Designsy

  I Sense My Enemies Massing Like Simpering Starlings

  Five Versions of Me

  Kenny Axe-of-Wrath, Meet Julie Bloodbath

  Diana Princess of Wales Laying a Wreath at an Accident Blackspot Wearing Sunglasses Plus She’s in a Wheelchair

  The People’s Centre for Cultural Transmution

  The K’buum el-K’buum Residuals Farm

  If Only Time Will Tell, Should Architecture Really be a Narrative?

  Back to the Futurniture

  Right Enough to be True, True Enough to be Trite

  Human Content Management

  A Critical Stream of Piss

  Obituary: T. Dan Hooker

  Little Gatsby

  Ha Ha Ha You Fucking Ants

  This Sorry Cabal of Pretension

  The Plagiarism Assizes

  Cross-Glaminated Poverty Style-Out

  Eurafrica: A New Bivalve of Hope

  Masked Grans Dancing on a Bungalow Roof

  From Fenestrated Parabola to Melty Fucklump

  The Strategic Mentalising Unit

  Supra-Heezy Ionised Piff

  Insulational Rescue

  An Inspector Calls

  Owning the Vagination

  A Bubble of Absence Enclosed by Sentient Retardant Foam

  Get a Grip, Munchniks

  Laughable Bear in a Frock

  Extended Prison Break

  Yesterday’s News Is Tomorrow’s Emergency Clothing

  The Emptiness Between All Particles

  Fuck Shitter

  The Epic Space Foundation

  Oligarchitectural Capitalism Versus Patriarchitectural Sexism

  The Right to Let Die

  Evil in a Pork Pie Hat

  Rough Concrete and Mulleted Genitals

  The Henge

  Curse You, Buildings That Resemble Breasts Quarterly

  Yipster Gentrification

  The Dalek Clusterfuck

  Honeycombed Privatised Air

  Twirly Atlantis

  Austerity Christmas Human Turducken

  The Worm Is Cast

  This Feudopolitan Life

  Hello Kinky Pinky

  Post-Ecological Re-Regeneration

  If It Ain’t Broke, Amend It

  History Eats Itself

  The Twelve Step Plan

  Not Being Funny but Black People Don’t Do Gardening, Do They?

  The Bees Have It

  A Sense of Placenta

  Acknowledgements

  Supporters

  Copyright

  Ian Martin is an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer. His credits include The Death of Stalin, The Thick of It, Veep, Time Trumpet and In the Loop. He writes regularly for the Guardian and the Architects’ Journal. His book The Coalition Chronicles is published by Faber & Faber.

  To my beloved wife Eileen,

  who has put up with this shit since 1973.

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type epicspace in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, unbound

  Foreword

  Ian Martin is many things. He is a man, certainly. I know this to be a fact as I was once behind in him in the passport queue at Baltimore Airport and the lady doing the checking didn’t so much as flinch. He is unique among people who don’t actually behave as if they’re the only person in the world to have written and acted in both The Thick of It and its American cousin Veep. He is what certain kinds of journalists would call ‘an ex-rocker’ who can be provoked to violence by three bars of jazz and soothed again by being shown a picture of Bach. And he is without doubt my very favourite writer of comic prose in the English language.

  The best comic writers are those who not only squirt their ink at the right targets or hammer out the perfect images, they make the language itself funny: the rhythm, the sound, the colour. They’re the ones who make you laugh at the very words they use. That’s Ian Martin. He can spin the English language round his fingers like a conjuror’s coin.

  Take the occasion – as related in this book – when he was appointed Architectural Nickname Czar to ensure that new buildings are given better epithets than ‘The Shard’ or ‘The Gherkin’. The list of suggestions that follows is a sustained cannonade of impossible inventiveness and comic poetry, including but not limited to: The Shiny Tumulus, The Stilty Lump, The Skyfister, The Extrudel, The Glandmark and The Sentient Plume. And I simply cannot imagine any other columnist currently thumping a key
board on a regular basis who would title a piece anything like ‘I Sense My Enemies Massing Like Simpering Starlings’.

  That voice is beguiling, unique and rather influential. You’ll find it, among other places, in the mouths of Malcolm Tucker and Selina Meyer, even when it isn’t Ian himself doing the writing. The great Tony Roche, one of the original quartet of filthpots who dishonoured the BBC with the vilely crude unnecessariness of The Thick of It, has said that he coined the word ‘omnishambles’ – later named Word of the Year 2012 by people who imagine such things are a worthwhile expenditure of calories – partly in homage to Ian’s style.

  The present volume which you hold in your hands – or, for future readers, which you have think-accessed on the Kindle Mindwave Intranexus™ – is essentially a long bar on which are lined up over a hundred espresso shots of pure Martin. A collection of satirical pieces written for the Architects’ Journal, they naturally, and indeed contractually, take architecture as their subject, but their targets are far wider ranging than that. If you’ll allow me to be a ponce for a minute – or more realistically, if you’ll allow me to continue being a ponce for quite a long while – I would say that they are satires on an entire culture: our politics, the inanity of the consumer society, journalism, faddishness, regional developmental funding, social media, ‘Heritage’ and, in fact, pretty much everything else.

  But more than anything, they are a satire on language itself. Or rather, on the way that it’s used now: the self-satisfied idiocy of corporate-speak, the emperor’s-new-clothes-pretension of architects and ‘creatives’, the banality of marketing. I’m reminded about seventy-four times a day of ‘I need some marketing blurt in a nice font. Neutral to the point of meaningless’ from his piece ‘Magnetic Values’. He catches the tone and the timbre of the use and misuse of English and twists it into his own filigree comic structures. By turns angry, contemptuous, resigned, pitying, self-pitying, mischievous, despairing and hopeful, these pieces are never anything less than whirlingly funny; inventive and invective in perfect measure – like S. J. Perelman stubbing his toe.

  I once met Ian for lunch. (Not the time he threatened to stab the music speaker with a fork if they didn’t turn the jazz off, but another one.) I was two minutes late, and on arriving at the table I discovered him already seated and a cocktail by my place setting.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, fishing an olive from his drink, ‘I ordered some martinis.’

  Then he got us some stout to go with the chicken livers (you can take the boy out of the East End, etc., etc.), wine for the mains and Armagnac with the dessert.

  ‘It’s so nice,’ he subtly belched as I tried to remember how to sit on a chair, ‘to find someone who’ll stick with you right from the martinis through to the brandies.’

  And that’s what I recommend you do with this book: Don’t dip. You’re in the finest, most entertaining company you could want. Just start with the martinis and go on through to the brandies. Your head will be joyfully spinning as you leave.

  Chris Addison, 2016

  With Special Thanks to the Enlightened Patrons

  Chris MacAllister, Richard Newman,

  Paul Vincent and Robert Willis

  EPIC SPACE

  The Case of the Missing

  Parisian Absinthe Kiosk

  MONDAY To Lourdes, where I’m creating a boutique hotel. It’s 150 years since an innocent 14-year-old country girl experienced visions of 280 saints, some of them robed, in en-suite bathrooms. Now that dream is a reality.

  My own contribution to the town’s tradition of five-star indulgence pushes innovation to new levels of luxury, or possibly the other way round. The spa’s got a Vatican-approved infinity pool, for instance. Each room has a 50-inch ectoplasma TV, wi-fi access to purgatory, plus underfloor healing throughout.

  TUESDAY Finish my design for The Amazin’ Amazon Rainforest Experience, just south of Blackpool.

  I’ve had local scepticism from the start, e.g. why would Lancastrians pay to see rain-themed anything, rain is our AIR, if dozy bastards are that desperate to see rain INSIDE a building there are several shopping centres within driving distance of Blackpool all built in the 1970s, can’t we just have a nice dry supercasino instead with a karaoke bar you daft southern trollop.

  Sometimes I think people simply refuse to understand the principles of critical globalism.

  The architectural establishment’s pissed off, too, because I’ve taken over the gig from Jacob Kinderegg. The world’s favourite jabbering death fetishist parted company with his clients when they refused to sign off on the concept drawings.

  They wanted an immersive environment suitable for school parties and coach outings. Jacob wanted to explore the mournful cadence of human suffering, with the entire contents of the biodome obliterated over the course of a year by ruthless loggers in Nazi uniforms, two performances daily. The empty biohusk would remain as a public shrine to loss and absence.

  I ring Jacob just to make sure there are no hard feelings. He’s cool. And busy. Just landed a Museum of Fatal Illnesses in Antwerp. His Potato Faminarium in Baltimore tops out next month. Plus, he’s now guest lecturing at the University of Kent on the fractal aesthetics of torture.

  WEDNESDAY My friend Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist calls to cancel our cycling tour of Cumbernauld. He’s appearing as expert witness in a high-profile case at the Old Bailey.

  Six criminal Cockney types are accused of stealing a priceless Adolf Loos building from a suburban street in Zurich. In a daring armed raid, the seminal Montessori House of 1911 was snatched from its site over the course of a fortnight by a gang posing as international building inspectors.

  Very little has been recovered. A couple of window frames, some floorboards, a ‘Novelty Native American Cigar Dispenser’. Police believe most of the house has been reassembled as a villa in northern Cyprus, which doesn’t acknowledge architectural extradition protocol.

  Dusty is rightly alarmed at the recent spate of building heists. This year alone we have lost a Le Corbusier gymnasium from Chandigarh (brutally dismantled and resold in pieces on eBay), a Frank Lloyd Wright pharmacy in Michigan (loaded in sections onto a flatbed truck by ‘bug exterminators’) and a unique 19th-century Parisian absinthe kiosk by Viollet-le-Duc (wrenched from the ground in an audacious daylight helicopter raid).

  I agree with Dusty. The world made more sense in the 20th century, before sharp-shouldered yuppies and the internet ruined everything. When people didn’t lock their historic buildings. When St Petersburg was called Leningrad and didn’t have a Malaysian skyline. When you could still smoke in church. Curse this century.

  THURSDAY Redesign Vancouver, making it less ‘Vancouverised’.

  FRIDAY I’ve set aside the whole day for CPD, or Contiguous Pretentious Development.

  I put on Radio 3, adjust my cravat and start sketching. They’re not just sketches, obviously, they’re an unfurling of sequential insights into the world around me. Today I’m using my favourite insight-enabling tool, Ixworth & Donningfold’s Traditional Draughting Pencil for Gentlemen. Lovely. Especially thick and black.

  I’m sketching on baking paper, too, for extra gravitas. The morning passes in a delirium of abstract geometry and intuition. What do these sketches represent? The question is as pointless as it is impudent. Let posterity decide what they mean!

  After lunch, urban collage-making in a collarless blouson.

  SATURDAY Five-a-side sociological football. Driveable Suburbanism 2 Walkable Urbanism 1, after extra-time sudden-death runover.

  SUNDAY Work on my Lourdes project in the recliner. After a while, have an ‘out-of-body’ axonometric experience.

  February 14, 2008

  The Betjemanisation of South London

  MONDAY It’s an ill wind that blows nobody a job. My friend Loaf, in his capacity as Cadbury’s Creme Egg mayor of London, has just handed me an amazing commission. ‘Fancy reworking south London, matey? All of it. In the style of John Betjeman
…’

  It’s part of his four-year plan to ‘literate’ the capital into distinct quadrants. The East End is to be redesigned as The Complete Dickens, featuring lots of characters and bankruptcies and poor houses. The Olympic site is exempt, obviously. No such thing as a Dickensian Olympics has ever taken place, so far.

  ‘We enjoyed great expectations of course,’ says Loaf, in Latin, ‘but now we are obliged to plough through hard times.’ Oh yeah, the Olympics, I’d forgotten. Let’s hope they don’t make a ‘complete Dickens’ of that. His giant egg suit gives a little shrug.

  Meanwhile, the built environment of north London will be nudged gently into Shakespearian tragedy with some cathartic social housing and moveable trees. Loaf says he’s inclined to leave west London as it is, tightening the conservation regime to keep that ‘terrific, fizzing Martin Amisy feel’.

  None of these has the allocated budget of MY quadrant though – enough to sink a small nationalised bank. I feel giddy with power. If we’re going the full Betjeman, can we bring back rationing, illicit sex, horse-drawn milk carts, telephone kiosks with big buttons and smoking on the top decks of buses?

  Loaf considers for a second. ‘Look, let’s just keep it Betjeman-esque, OK? I have no intention of alienating the gay community. Or the formidable cancer fun run women. Betjeman is simply a developmental theme. I have a vision of the future, old chum, and it is to make south London the most dynamic, the most dazzling residential heritage zone in the whole of Cadbury’s Europe.’

  Within that massive comedy egg there’s a demonstrably strong intellect at work.

  TUESDAY Redesign Yorkshire, expanding the borders slightly so it’s less full of itself.

  WEDNESDAY Sketch out some preliminary ideas for my Bath Drawing Board Museum.

  I say ‘sketch’, though a) I’m using beta software developed by rocket scientists, and b) the heavy lifting’s being done by my nanofuturologist friend Beansy, who illegally downloaded Vectormatique 2.0 for me. ‘I didn’t realise Classical pastiche involved so much repetition,’ he says. ‘We’ll have this banged out by lunchtime. Not rocket science, is it?’