Inside the Bunker - the jungle

In World War Two the Nazis took to building massively re-inforced ‘Flakturm’ vertical bunkers in the sky as anti-aircraft citadals to protect their premier cities. With walls feet thick it would have taken a series of direct hits to dent them. Wien got four of them. They are imposing brutalist sheer concrete cliffs with balconied walkways close to the summit for anti-aircraft batteries.

Now an imaginative reversal has turned one of them into a zoo and aquarium - complete with hanging jungle gardens with monkeys roaming around. It’s a private enterprise and not perfectly achieved but nevertheless it’s still a feat to have sharks and huge turtles swimming around massive tanks encased in a bunker in the sky.

if it had been a school trip I would have said that my favourite creatures were:

- the seahorses- because of their heartstopping delicacy and transparency in the way they do everything - the way they breathe, the way they move, the way they eat, even the way they excrete. And because they pairbond for life. They meet first thing in the morning to reinforce their pair bonding with an elaborate courtship display. The female meets the male in his territory and as they approach each other they change colour. The male circles around the female the pair often spiral around an object. This display can last for up to an hour. Once over, the female goes back to her territory

- the red ants - because they were escaping from one of the plastic tubes that ran around one of the galleries to exhibit their complicated, intricate world. That’s the way it starts with the ants escaping…

- the turtles - because they are stoic little dinosaurs that still exist

- and the jellyfish - because they look like an animation 

Picture of the bunker during WWII

Thickness of the walls

View from the balcony

The jungle

Borsec part two: places to stay - or not

Don’t think the Nostalgia villa was taking guests but I would recommend the Anna Villa. One of the most traditional wooden Villas still standing and open to guests. Very friendly and welcoming host.

The dis-used Hotel Transylvania is not taking guests anymore. Though you could wander around it. Creepy like The Shining. I heard a door slam upstairs and fled.

The gentle ruination of a spa town called Borsec - part one

Borsec (Borszek) was once the most fashionable and elegant spa resorts in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It’s clear clean air, it’s magnificent position in the fairytale Carpathian landscape, and the reputation of its waters - led to the development of a leafy garden resort of bath houses, restaurants and pavilions, as well as 72 elegant beautiful wooden villas. The last throes of the Hapsburg Empire were quite something if the flair, brio and pleasure of the architecture in Budapest, Oradea and Borsec are anything to go by.

Now Borsec is like some kind of benign Chernobyl. Taking the waters is not the draw it once was. This innocent craze has burned itself out, leaving mansions like beached liners. The population and the visitors have dried up. Many of the Villas are slowly falling apart - rotting where they stand.

If this was Britain they’d be boarded up, vandalised or burnt out. But here you are free to wonder around the ruins - or even inside them. And not just the villas but a relatively modern concrete ‘Hotel Transylvania’ and a hospital of some kind.

But still the place is breathing. The wells still run. The public gardens are beautiful in their ruin. There’s just enough people around so that you don’t feel uncomfortable - but not so many that you aren’t left to you own devices. You can walk out of town and up through the forests to the ridges of the Carpathians that look like they go on for ever. There’s a quality to the air and the light.

It’s the kind of place that stays in the mind as a refuge.

I had a strange dream…

I dreamt I was on a bus as it went down and down a long tunnel deep beneath a hill. Down into a cavernous saltmine. And when I got there, there was hundreds and hundreds of people down there. Playing table tennis and badminton. Eating picnics. There were sandpits, swings and helterskelters…

Blackpool

I needed a day out at the weekend and was strangely drawn to Blackpool.

Blackpool is culture shock- staggeringly and comprehensively ugly. The definition of seedy. Massively poor.

Ten thousand clapped out B and Bs under the sky. Every now and again people try and re-frame the place through ’iconic’ regenerative gestures (Blackpool is immune to the healing sedative powers of these post-modern glitter balls). Or they try and say it’s Britain’s answer to Las Vegas. It isn’t. It’s Blackpool.  The end of the line for the drifter and the lost cause. One gigantic estate pub. The fun never stops.

Plus whenever I usually go it’s blowing a force nine off the North Sea and the rain is hitting you horizontally.

One day somebody is going to get this place right - and write something really good. Best I know of so far is Blackpool High Flyer. Spookily evocative of Edwardian Blackpool (and Halifax) - let down by a crimetime plot that has no traction. And for the Fifties and Sixties there’s the Foxline series on the town and its railways.

First I took to the back streets - couldn’t take the main drags to the sea front. Bergman thought that the coast in strong summer sunlight was the best atmosphere for portraying despair - and I think about that some times when I have a very powerful urge to flee from crowded seaside streets.

And the place was giving me the creeps - kept thinking of this article i’d read about just how seedy Blackpool can get.

The inner suburbs were much quieter, more comfortable - kinda fugue’d out - lost. Trying to zero in on Bloomfield Road.

Watched Blackpool draw 1-1 with Coventry for the absurd entrance fee of £28. What a joke! Strange ground - two sides with stands the rest with nothing but a good atmosphere. Won £50 on a rare bet - I had a very strong hunch that Newcastle would lose to Blackburn 2-1 and they did!

Walked on the big empty beach.

Even Blackpool looked good today at the end of the Indian Summer - warm but with the sharpness of Autumn light - the best light.

Watched the strange procession of trams rumbling down the front at walking pace. That isn’t a fleet - it’s a veteran’s parade of individual patch and mends. Like the much loved contents of an old toy box. Depot is something else - like something you might find in provincial India.

Even found some half decent pubs near Blackpool North.

The second one was nearly empty - good beer and some great soul music. Then this statuesque drag queen enters to do a Karaoke set for a birthday party that hasn’t showed up yet - and may never show up. Old man sups his half in the corner.

Very Blackpool.

It was a good day.

Oradea Part Three

Like many Romanian cities, in Oradea the atmosphere is relaxed and the economy is on the up. But Oradea’s ghosts at the table are the Synagogues. Recent travels in central and eastern Europe have brought home the holocaust in a way that somehow I wasn’t expecting. You know about the camps but visiting cities where a substantial proportion of the population were taken away and murdered in a short spell of time - it brings it home in a different way.

There’s a full account at this site but Oradea had one of the largest Jewish populations in Romania  - making up a third of the city’s population. They made an enormous contribution to the city - most visible today in the Art Nouveau buildings many of which they financed and designed.

Persecution by the Romanian ‘Iron Guard’ fascists began in the late twenties. Things worsened in 1940 when the region became part of Hungary again and Jewish men were directed into labour battalions. In 1944 the surviving population were concentrated by the Hungarian authorities into an appalling, uncovered ghetto before later that year they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau on cattle trains (90 people to a wagon for a four day journey).

After the War the remaining Jewish population regrouped - but the Communist regime was hostile and many emigrated when they had the chance. Now the Jewish population is down to less than a thousand (but still the largest in Romania). There’s a Jewish community centre (with police guard) within a coral which keeps the flame alive - and looks after two synagogues. Elsewhere, right at the heart of Oradea, is the enormous Zion Nealog Synagogue. Abandoned relatively recently it’s now slowly falling apart - too big to keep up for such a small Jewish population. Despite being in the city centre you access it down a rough path where the caretaker hangs out in the porch - a dishevelled but friendly old guy with a dog, some chickens and a rubber truncheon for company.

The ruined Synagogues are unsettling - hit you hard.

You can still sense what a vibrant community it must have been - dynamic and creative. The totality of the violence. The madness of it - 1944 - the war was already lost. The vacuum.

Oradea Part Two

If you are visiting Oradea you can stay at the (very) faded original Art Nouveau ‘Park Hotel’ for a handful of lei…

Oradea Part One

The city of Oradea in Northern Romania has the most exuberent and extensive surviving Art Nouveau cityscape in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. This last extravagent flourish of belle epoque has survived not just in the main square but out into the side streets. The anti-glamour of the eastern bloc flat blocks mass and glower at the city centre edge - but as their concrete crumbles, key art nouveau buildings are being restored. The Cathedral is fabulously embellished baroque - dripping in florid detail, gold leaf and marble. Overpowering - but pick out a single door or a vista and it all works of itself.

Whatever you think of the style - what’s uplifting is the care and attention the architects lavished on giving each building an individuality - rather than churning them out. And the lightness of touch, the airy graciousness, the levity - in creating these confections of the imagination.

If you want to gorge more on Szecesszio architecture this is a good site

Barbara Castle and the story of the 1968 Transport Act

 

My booklet on Barbara Castle and the story of the 1968 Transport Act has now been published. It’s an interesting tale. She inherited a transport system in a mess in the mid-Sixties. She responded with an impressive combination of hard work, determination, clarity of analysis, a flair for public relations and the clever and pragmatic application of principles. The end result was the 1968 Transport Act - a mammoth piece of legislation that among other things, created urban transport authorities for the conurbations (Passenger Transport Executives and Authorities), stabalised the railways, saved the canals, and pushed on with road safety improvements. It nearly also included provision for road pricing. The more background research I did the more I was impressed by the way she went about the job at Transport.  

The booklet tied in with the naming of a train after her. The event went well - and her family were a really nice bunch who really seemed to enjoy the day.

Cool bus station cafes of Central and Eastern Europe: an occasional monograph

Bus station cafes are not renowned for their imagination or attention to detail - and they don’t usually make many design concessions to the mode of transport their customers departed and arrived on (unless its some faux references to Greyhound buses). However in Szekelyudvarhely (Ordorheiu Secuiesc) which is in Szekely Land in Translyvania in Northern Romania - someone has put a great deal of effort into an elaborate bus motif for the bus station cafe. Paying particular tribute to the phat, chunky Comecon designs of Hungarian ‘Ikarus’ buses - though the main feature - the bus bar is a German import.

Pictures taken during brief period when there were fewer of the scary looking men who hang out in bus station cafes

It’s banging house music at full volume and treble strength espressos from early morning to midnight - totally wired…

If you ask her - she will flash the headlights…

Bad Bahnhof indeed