decorativemankiness

I've been trying to think what encapsulates citiness and urbanity for me and passed these at lunchtime outside the conference centre. Although I was raised from threeish to sixish in a medium-ish-sized town we lived right on the edge of it and I can't really remember the town centre at all as I was probably never allowed there on my own but one thing which sticks in my mind (and was shaken out by the round bollardy flowerbed things above) as an early and lasting impression of what consituted a City is the journey from my gran's house to the centre of Northampton. Besides a few manky flats which were hitherto unknown in my world there was also some form of utterly hideous office building (which I recall being referred to as something to do with Barclaycard) which I hope for the sake of the locals has since been demolished or at the very least covered with a sympathetically-coloured throw and some cushions. The lasting impression is of some form of nasty concreteness coloured end-it-all greybrown and coated with that nasty reconstituted-looking pebble-concrete stuff. It might have had brown smoked windows too. If not it probably should have. It's the fact that it was a little bit more than a simple box and was obviously intended to be decorative as well as functional; it even had a few random additional structurally non-essential things about it which were evidently there to make some form of bold statement. They may well have done so during the sixties but which in the early eighties they just said (even to my small chlid's mind) "aren't cities gakky?" in a manky brown font.

That's why I quite like Edinburgh as such things are few and far between. There are some better examples in Lincoln (my other child-formative nearbycity) such as the Eastgate Hotel the building housing Binns and the whole of Pelham Bridge (but especially the manky bit underneath the south end).