Georgy Chernoy, I had assumed, was bankrolling his lover’s project, though his name never appeared on the project’s paperwork, not even as one of the show’s more-than-a-dozen executive producers. I do know he arranged the permits necessary for Stella to film south of the Thames, in the purlieus of Medicine City. One bright August morning, when I should have been working through my second-year reading list, I went, armed with a camera, to help Stella to scout locations for her series.
It was my first visit to Medicine City, and for all the press that had greeted the project, both gushing and hostile, I was quite unprepared for what I found there. It felt as though the tram trundling us from London Bridge Station to Peckham Rye were slipping us through theatre flats into an entirely different reality. A weak enough commentary, since this was more or less exactly the impression the City’s designers had been aiming at.
I had been living and studying in London for slightly less than a year; in that time Medicine City had spread at visible speed across the compulsorily purchased streets of its south-east quarter, turning schools into clinics, cinemas into surgeries, whole avenues into ‘memory lanes’, re-creating Londons past and gone – and this with technology the Bartlett staff themselves could hardly fathom, let alone teach to us.
Who were the unknown architects of that extraordinary and controversial transformation of the south-east, from the Thames at Deptford, through Peckham, to the very mouth of Forest Hill and the valley William Blake had dubbed his ‘Vale of Vision’? How many of them were there? Where did they live and work? Had Medicine City’s construction relied upon ordinary, unaccommodated talents, thousands of them would have been needed to realise the project.
But it was no secret that the entire look and feel of Medicine City – ‘An Oasis of Reminiscence and Regrowth’ – had been envisioned by machine, down to the smallest details: the tasteful lighting embedded at the edge of every pramway; the walnut detailing of Medicine City’s step-free streetcars.
My sense of rushing disorientation began the moment our tram, starting from outside London Bridge Station, turned the sharp and squealing corner onto Tooley Street and a view of the first and most well-reported of Medicine City’s architectural novelties. Around the cool white walls and dappled niches of a second Saint Paul’s Cathedral – smaller than Wren’s original and opened out, a kind of exploded maquette – strolled the medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process.
Some infants wandered unaccompanied, but most held the hands of nursie. For those not yet able to walk, an elevated pramway swooped around the structure.
The point of the cathedral was simple: it existed to jog, in these ersatz infant minds, memories of the actual cathedral, which lay hardly a mile away on the opposite bank of the Thames. Much of Medicine City was directed to this purpose: it was a theme park dedicated to the awakening of memory. And if it seemed gimcrack, absurd, even insane – well, no one involved in the project, not even Georgy Chernoy himself, was likely to disagree with you there. It wasn’t as though they had planned it this way.
No one had guessed, at the start of the project, how difficult it would be for Chernoy’s Processed infants to remember their past.
And once the problem was recognised, no one had any idea just how baroque the solutions to this problem would become.
Memory, after all, was the most labile of mental gifts, the one most susceptible to suggestion – no? It would be enough, surely, to show these forgetful infants certain pictures; or play them certain pieces of music; or feed them, in extremis, mouthfuls of madeleine dipped in tea – no?
No, no, and no. The medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process turned out to be maddeningly resistant to reminiscence. Nothing short of full immersion in the past seemed capable of waking them to it.
So then the problem had become: how to immerse an infant in a vanished world? Various lacklustre systems of ‘virtual reality’ were developed: ugly concatenations of pressure suit, visor, gloves. Nothing worked. It proved cheaper, in the end, to re-create entire environments, at least in little. To resort, that is, to the artisanship of theatre makers, fairground engineers and theme-park designers.
Saint Paul’s was not only Medicine City’s most famous ‘attraction’; it was also, from Chernoy’s point of view, its most successful prompt to memory. It turns out that all of us hold Saint Paul’s in mind in much the same way. Most everyone, whatever their background and personal circumstances, remembers the same cathedral.
London’s less celebrated landmarks, however, were more of a struggle, requiring redundancy and repetition to be effective. Our route led through endlessly reiterated miniature versions of the same places. I lost count of the number of Oxford Streets we rattled by: tatty barrow and hawker Oxford Streets, shuttered and hostile Oxford Streets, Oxford Streets lit here by flames (a memory of the Great War), there (a happier, more recent memory) with Christmas fairy lights; all small, none built above waist height, a vast, cluttered multiversal Oxford Street containing all imaginable prompts to memory.
Vernacular memories were the hardest to bring to mind through this bizarre architecture. And this was an abiding worry for Medicine City: vernacular memories are, after all, what define a personality. Yes, everyone remembers visiting Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but few personalities are profoundly shaped by the experience. What shapes a person is the colour of the bedroom curtains; the pattern of the linoleum in the kitchen; the sound of muffled arguments in the hall. What shapes a person is the daily grind.
Bedrooms, bathrooms, office cubicles: these did not require endless versioning so much as an extensive, dull, generic running-through of elements. There was only one office building in Medicine City, but it stretched all the way from New Cross Gate, up and over Telegraph Hill to the leafy crescents of Brockley. It had been built outsize to most effectively prompt, in the infantile minds of Chernoy’s patients, memories of the times they had spent in such places. The cramped conditions. The irritation, the boredom, the drudgery. Here furniture substituted for buildings: desks five, six yards high, and office chairs as tall as street lights. Anglepoise lamps loomed over the street like great white eyes, while calendars as big as billboards scrawled over in marker-black (‘provisional deadline’, ‘sales strategy’, ‘accelerator hub’) provided curtain walls, dividing the district up into discrete memory-packets: post room, sales, marketing, human resources, even a trading floor.
This last was the most abstract area of all, a series of giant blocky, geometrically simple maquettes sporting the bright striped blazers (rendered in wire-reinforced tarpaulin) of the most venerable London firms. A bell tolled as we rattled by; more likely, the recording of a bell.
Hauled through a cutting at Telegraph Hill, at last Stella and I found ourselves amid a sanely proportioned architecture: a practical, habitable architecture built for use. We boarded an elevated travellator at Brockley which promised to take us to One Tree Hill and the southern edge of Peckham, but which for the longest time led us a circuitous dance through the thickly arboured avenues of Ladywell.
‘All the gentlemen from the City set their mistresses up around here,’ said Stella, pointing out handsome red-brick villas through gaps in the rhododendron. I glimpsed gabled frontages and doors and upper windowpanes heavy with stained glass.