Travels in Lounge Space
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Travels in Lounge Space Placing the Contemporary British Motorway Service Area Samuel Austin A Thesis submitted in candidature for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Welsh School of Architecture Cardiff University 2011 2 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed ………………………………………… (candidate) Date ………………………… SUMMARY This thesis reads contemporary British motorway service areas as questions of place, and as instances of what I call ‘lounge space’, a space of transient consumption that conceals the power of the host. Motorways and service areas are sites where clear boundaries have been asserted, materially as well as theoretically, between local and national, traditional and modern, country and city, place and ‘non-place’. Through close readings of service area forms, details and materials in context, this thesis shows how such absolute distinctions cannot be maintained. Rather than instances of ‘non- place’ – Marc Augé’s term for spaces lacking social relations, history or identity – service areas show place as process: as never absolutely fixed and always dependent on interrelated material, socio-cultural and historical contexts. This is not to dissolve the differences between places, but to show how they are contested and the power relations involved. The thesis thus explores a notion of place informed by what Jacques Derrida calls ‘iterability’, a logic of irreducible contamination, of repetition with difference. Chapter 1 considers two typical recent service areas, Hopwood Park and Donington Park. It shows how boundaries of place are dissimulated and yet tightly policed, how allusions to ‘public’ space also recall the ‘private’ space of the home, and how an illusion of unlimited hospitality conceals the power of the host. By comparison, ‘independent’ operator Westmorland, the focus of Chapter 2, appears to be an exception. On one level, the company’s Tebay Services reclaim the roadside for the locality; on another, however, the sites, and the region they represent, become caught up in the cultures, forces and economies they claim to resist. Westmorland the company is conflated with Westmorland the place. As this ‘natural’ host offers an idyllic Lakeland refigured for the outsider’s consumption, it contests how and by whom that place is to be consumed. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was funded by the Architectural Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to Cardiff University and The Welsh School of Architecture for their support and confidence in the completion of this project. I would like to thank Adam Sharr for interesting discussions, helpful feedback, and, above all, for patience and encouragement through challenging times. Continuing to teach architectural design has been a vital distraction, as well as income. I am grateful to Adam, Juliet Odgers, Sam Clark, Mhairi McVicar, Allison Dutoit and Jacob Hotz-Hung for these opportunities, and for the thought-provoking conversations they have allowed. Flora Samuel, Sophia Psarra, Simon Unwin and Richard Weston all in different ways encouraged and inspired me, at crucial points, to consider architecture as more than a profession. Edward Wainwright brought energetic music, debate and café culture to otherwise ghostly spaces of PhD research. Steven and Victoria Coombs offered a place of welcome escape. Nicolo’ Riva, Nicole Carstensen, Nuno Fontarra and Johanna Irander gave me inspiration from afar. I thank all for their friendship. Thanks to Ed (the ungodly parent), Chris Mueller, Mari Lowe, Ruth Austin, Matthias Pfannebecker, Peter Pfannebecker, Jilly Boyce Kay and Chris Richards for babysitting and variously supporting me at different times over the last year. Bernhard and Sieglinde Pfannebecker have always given generously of time and fine wine to keep the thesis moving in the right direction. Thanks to Jeremy Pine for the gift of plasticine, which arrived at just the right time. I thank my parents, Graham and Wendy Austin, for their unwavering support and understanding, when time has been stretched, and life intense. Mareile Pfannebecker, thank you for everything. And thanks to Theo for keeping me very much in the real world. CONTENTS Abbreviations 1 Introduction 2 Placing the service area 3 Moving with the times?: non-place and nostalgia 16 Architecture’s other and the limits of place 36 Modernity, mobility and the motorway 63 Chapter 1 Hopwood, Donington and relations: the homely city ever-present 77 Inside without outside, the outside within 77 Lounge space: a home without host 103 Chapter 2 Westmorland: the place of the road 122 ‘Rejoicing in being a “one-off”’: trading traditions on the ‘new way north’ 122 ‘Capture the essence’: rural architecture on the road 145 Marking difference, communicating place: buildings without significance 167 Westmorland past and present: Tebay and regional representations 195 The place of power 225 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 255 Appendix I: List of figures 277 Appendix II: Figures 280 1 ABBREVIATIONS (IN FOOTNOTES) CPRE Council for the Protection of Rural England DfT Department for Transport HA Highways Agency ICE Institute of Civil Engineers MoT Ministry of Transport MSA Motorway Service Area RER Réseau Express Régional (a rapid transit network serving Paris and its suburbs) SRN Strategic Road Network SuDS Sustainable Drainage System TRL Transport Research Laboratory 2 INTRODUCTION This thesis reads contemporary British motorway service areas as questions of boundaries of place: in space, in time, institutionally, materially. It is not a history of the service area, architectural, cultural or otherwise, but a close reading of three sites in their diverse material, socio-cultural, political, historical and commercial contexts. This reading is informed by cultural theory, especially texts associated with post- structuralism, including those by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. I describe service areas as instances of what I call ‘lounge space’, spaces of contemporary consumption in which boundaries are dissimulated and the host concealed. In this sense, I see service areas as symptomatic, not only of contemporary travel spaces, but of wider trends in architecture and material culture, whereby unpalatable interrelations and arrangements of power are disguised by allusions to unlimited hospitality, freedom, choice and familiarity. Contrary to descriptions of transport and commercial spaces as ‘non-place’, ‘simulacra’ or ‘junkspace’, which emphasize their apparent superficiality, this thesis focuses on where significance, as material as it is cultural, lies within the apparently meaningless. The thesis is original in three ways. It reads the siting, forms, materials and spaces of specific motorway service areas – buildings overlooked in architectural history, and, until recently in cultural history – in greater detail than previous studies, and with more attention to the complexities of their particular contexts. Second, this way of looking at, but also beyond, the surface signs and simulations that dominate contemporary accounts of commercial spaces advances a different approach to the interpretation of such buildings, one in which architecture continues to play a significant role. Unlike those studies, this thesis questions the notion that architecture has been lost or eclipsed. Third, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of ‘iterability’, ‘hospitality’, pharmakon and ‘differance’, this thesis contributes to a rethinking of place as de-centred, interrelated and in motion, which has begun in other disciplines, but is yet to be given sufficient attention in architectural discourse. The thesis focuses on two very different service area conditions. Chapter 1 explores Hopwood Park and Donington Park. Operated by the two biggest nationwide service area providers, they typify the dominant contemporary roadside culture. Within 3 the apparent neutrality of sites and buildings, I read processes of placing that, in their multiple allusions and in the power relations that they conceal, defy simple categorization as ‘non-place’. In Chapter 2, I focus on two exceptional sites: Tebay East and West, operated by Westmorland, an ‘independent’, ‘local’ company. I trace how the promise of a much closer relation to ‘local’ place turns out to be inseparable from the culture of the roadside that the company claims to resist. I explore how the implications of this contesting of place reach well beyond the boundaries of service area sites. To give context to these readings, this introduction explores how, in cultural histories of, and commentaries on, the roadside, service areas are bound up with questions of ‘non-place’. I then trace how different notions of place and ‘non-place’ figure, first, in socio-cultural readings of historical change, and, second, in philosophical and architectural discourses