A Room at the Bauhaus

Dessau isn't the most attractive town in eastern Germany. The British flattened it in the 1940s and the Soviets towerblocked it after the war. The city seems an unlikely destination for an architectural pilgrimage, but hidden away behind the station is one of the great buildings of the 20th century, the Bauhaus.

I booked a room in the Atelierhaus [student wing] of the Bauhaus for 25 euros a night. The room was high up on the third level of the building with a shiny crimson floor and a tiny lipped balcony. Internal walls were painted white to create the illusion of more space and furniture was sturdy and functional; just a bed, coat stand, storage unit and two Marcel Breuer chairs tucked under a table. Two spotlights threw shadows around the walls and I quickly tidied my possessions away. This wasn’t a room that would tolerate mess.

I remembered my own halls of residence in the north of England; the nylon carpet and the wonky shelves. Nothing like this. I used the balcony and the clear February night to chill my Riesling.

There are other Bauhaus buildings dotted around Dessau. Walter Gropius designed a low brick Employment Office and a whole suburb was built to a Bauhaus spec. Beautifully preserved are the four Meisterhausers Gropius added for the college teachers and their wives. These are now open to the public and restored closely to their original design. Beautiful as they are they appear more museum than house. Door handles are gleaming and the smell of fresh paint hangs in the stairwells. The clutter and spills of daily life have been removed.

My favourite building was the Kornhaus restaurant, a lovely sweep of glass designed by Carl Fieger in the late 1920s. I got lost in the woods looking for it and then discovered I only had eight euros in my pocket when I arrived. I ordered a salad and a fruit juice from the menu and hurried out after leaving a measly fifty-cent tip. It was the last of my cash!

Before I left Dessau, I bought a 1950s Wagenfeld cup and double saucer from the Bauhaus shop. It was so nice I bought the rest of the set from ebay for about £100 when I got back to London. A week later I was photographing some Bauhaus-inspired houses in Stanmore and found an identical set in a charity shop for £5.

Lviv, Ukraine, March 2008

Patience, I was told. You need patience to travel in Ukraine. This isn’t a cheapjet central European destination and there are no stag parties or direct flights to Stansted. English isn’t a natural second language and the alphabet is cloaked in Cyrillic. These are the things that attracted me to Ukraine.
I flew into Kyiv and then directly up to Lviv or Lvov or Lwow or even Lemberg. This is a city with plenty of names and many previous owners. It sits in the far west and once formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before rapidly changing hands between Poland, Nazi Germany, USSR and presently Ukraine. The word Ukraine, means Borderland and Lviv was its literal definition.

It’s a pretty city with a beautiful main square and hundreds of churches. I rented an apartment above the Drama Theatre in the old quarter. Squeaky parquet flooring alerted my neighbours to my precise location at any time. A market filled the outside square selling wooden tankards and Soviet medals and in the evening drunks sang below my window.

Next to the Drama Theatre stood the Opera House, built during the Hapsburg years and gloriously ornate. Then, in front of the opera house; a pig! Its snout rooting in the grass as a crowd gathered. I bought a ticket to the ballet and sat dead-centre in the upper balcony, £5 well spent. The building gleamed inside and Swan Lake floated across the stage. This was my very first ballet and I was entranced.

This constant changing of hands has benefited Lviv’s café culture. Viennese espressos competed with thicker, sludgy coffees and Lipton’s tea, drunk black, was an everpresent. In the evenings I moved on to local lager or sweet sparkling wine from Odessa.

Under the watchful eye of Ivan Fedorov, Russia's first publisher, and backing against the Church of the Assumption was a book market. Tolstoy sat next to Thomas the Tank Engine alongside Reggie Kray's memoirs. I found two 1970s Soviet guidebooks, one with faded photographs of Lviv, the other with paintings of Minsk showing strolling couples in picturesque parks. In the former, Lenin statues kept an eye on proceedings and if you wanted culture where better than the Museum of Atheism, housed in a baroque church?

I stood for ages in the rain waiting for a marshrutka to the airport for the red-eye to Kyiv. These minivans hurtle around town following complicated routes. I deciphered the Cyrillic in the windscreen and flagged one down. Fifteen minutes later and we were still in the city. I double-checked with the other passengers, "Aeroport?" "Nyet!" came the chorused reply followed by furious pointing in the opposite direction. I jumped out in a dreary suburb, crossed the road and the rain fell harder. Eventually another marshrutka came along and this time my "Aeroport?" query was answered with nodding heads. I folded myself against the back windshield and passed my fare over many heads to the driver. My glasses steamed up. Finally, through a smeary window I saw a plane landing and squeezed out. Patience was the best thing I packed.

Kyiv, Ukraine, April 2008

I knew things would be a little difficult in Kyiv when I spotted Air Force One on the tarmac as I landed. Major roads in the city were blocked off and the police were at every junction. In Independence Square, scene of the Orange Revolution in 2004, an anti-NATO rally was in full swing. Hammer & sickle flags flew over a makeshift stage and martial music blasted into my hotel room at the other end of the square.

I felt as if I was an extra in a cold-war drama & began to double back on myself to shake off potential spies. I kept getting lost, frantically turning corners like a headless chicken. Kyiv was difficult to map mentally and I pitied those on my tail, real or imaginary. The hotel was owned by the Ministry of Defence and my room felt as if Stalin had broken in and stolen everything that wasn't brown. Twice the phone rang and yet each time I answered, there was silence.

In a way George Bush helped me out. I had to find a way around the blockages and followed the locals scaling walls and sliding down grassy banks. I saw a side of the city that was off the map and a little muddy.

I walked to Dynamo Kyiv’s stadium, sunk into a bowl and surrounded by chestnut trees. A statue to legendary coach Valery Lobanovsky sat outside, perched on the bench in an era before chalked technical areas. He looked trim in bronze but an adjacent billboard showed him in later years, bloated and blotchy. A bridge spanned the ring-road below and connected the parks on either side. Clamped to the bridge, amid the football graffiti, were thousands of padlocks; lovers initials etched or inked into the metal.

In two days, I covered a lot of ground, visiting the monasteries of Pecherska Lavra, discovering a glimpse of the intensity of Eastern Orthodox religion in the caves that ran underneath. I ate at a restaurant with an 18th century rustic theme and watched football in a modern Irish pub. On the Andriyivskyi Descent I was confused by Bulgakov’s birthplace and sobered by the Chernobyl museum in Podil with its mutated river creatures and ghost town signs. And all the time behind and in front of me, the golden domes of Kyiv’s churches.

I left Kyiv, walking up to the metro station under a night sky just beginning to blue. Aside from streetsweepers and dog walkers, I was on my own and the city looked peaceful; no barricades or police or Death to the Imperial West banners. I dived into the metro, down into the depths of the earth, through beautiful brick arches and clean-tiled caverns and followed the President of the USA back to the west.

Northern Ireland, Nov 2007

At George Best airport in Belfast, I cleverly bypassed the bag-in-the-hold queues by forgoing toiletries. A sprint around the chemist replenished my needs. In retrospect, I should have paid greater concentration in the dental section. What appeared to be some kind of Irish branded toothpaste turned out to be denture cream. I found out the hard way, scraping the gluey gunk from the roof of my mouth. The memory still makes me gag.

Architecturally, Belfast is defensive looking. Even the new boutique shops and 'cathedral quarter' redesignation can't hide the recent history and where other cities would have smothered facades with glass, Belfast is more hesitant. Whether this is the subconscious working, I don't know. The black taxi tour of 'The Troubles' was grimly fascinating. On the Protestant Shankill Road, blue skies shone on the Red Hand of Ulster mural and a powerful painted image of a lone UFF soldier trained his rifle as I crept past.

On the other side of the dividing line, the rain came down on Bobby Sands and the wall of empathising murals ranging from Palestine to the Basque Country. Even the weather seemed split by the sectarian divide.

Samuel Johnson once said the Giant's Causeway was "worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see." This was a time before the Antrim Coast Road had been blasted through the rock. The modern route from Belfast is dramatic, the sea spraying the road, and Scotland visible on the horizon. The modern pleasure lies in the journey too.

At the Causeway, unexpected November sunshine played across the stone polygons and, squinting, I thought of a tumbled Inca wall. I preferred the myth to the science, the clever giant over the cooling lava.

I went to Derry because that's where the Undertones were from and therefore it couldn't be bad. I was surprised at the clarity of the murals in Catholic Bogside. No ambiguity here. Multi-coloured provocation, pushed right against the city walls, "You are now entering Free Derry" says one, another depicts a jailcell and all the people represented, were dead.

Galician Mist

At Baiona, a medieval fortress juts into the Atlantic. Within is a modern manor house built with honey stone on older foundations and furbished as a Parador. Canons and turrets ring the island and a causeway separates it from the mainland.

In the town below hardy pilgrims stamped past, on their way to Santiago, following the lesser-stomped trail up from Portugal. We did our own penance, hauling our luggage up to the hotel from the bus stop under deep blue skies amid map-related arguments.

From the bedroom window the view spanned across the bay to the offshore islands. At least it did until the mist rolled in. Those deep blue skies from a paragraph ago quickly blanked and thickened. From a clear vista of crashing waves, you suddenly couldn’t see the hand on the end of your arm. It was strange and amazing and I couldn’t stop staring at the place where the view used to be.

The mist lay thick and low and as the streetlights flickered on, dim yellows swirled into the mix. Suddenly, the whole cloud lifted and the view was back, the evening silhouette of the earlier panorama. The bay looked sharp and the tips of the waves so white against the night. I turned away, searching for a camera. By the time I unearthed it, the mist was back and I wondered if I imagined the whole thing.

Czech Republic Wanderings

Brno
Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Villa Tugendhat is the twin of his Barcelona Pavilion. Roadside it conceals its beauty, squat and defensive. Inside, the house begins to make sense. The footprint of the villa is embedded into a hillside which drops away to the rear. The back wall is all glass and retracts into the floor in a Bond-villianish way. Natural light bounces off an Onyx wall and van der Rohe’s Barcelona and Brno chairs split the internal space. Dark bookshelves line one wall and the divide between indoor and outdoor space is blurred by plants and textured stone tiles. Internal photography was not allowed. I had to focus sneakily when the guide turned her back, creeping around in my squeaking plastic overshoes. Outside the rain poured onto a tatty canopy.

Hotel Avion was the creation of Bohuslav Fuchs, a local architect whose adversity to decoration came to define Functionalism. The hotel was built in the 1920s but was subsequently given a communist makeover. What's left is the anthithisis of the boutique hotel.

I walked into reception and was immediately asked to pay. This made me a little wary. My room was on the fifth floor, a juddering lift ride away. Beautiful views and just as well as the room was spiritless. By the bed sat a chunky radio from Dubceck's era, complete with imprinted stations for Bratislava and Praha. A phone from the 1980s and a button-less television from more recent times completed the entertainment, inoperable without remote. The bathroom contained one of those horrible sticky shower curtains which attached itself like a second skin.

The brown decor covered all the shades of the Communist rainbow. A faded square of brighter brown told of better days, days of pictures on the wall. Outside was where it was at; a terrace twice the size of the room and all mine. I plugged in my ipod, opened some Moravian wine and the terrace became my private dancefloor.

Railway Station
I walked downhill to the railway station along cobbled streets cut with tramlines. Teenagers dressed in orange t-shirts swarmed around the entrance hall. Nuns with huge rucksacks fussed and organised. One group assembled in the corner and sang and clapped. The words were religious, I’ve no doubt of that, but the harmonies and beauty of the song made the hairs on my neck stand to attention. In a city that delights in functional architecture, these students took a different approach, using the building’s tall ceilngs and natural acoustics to create something unexpected. I bought my ticket to Olomouc from a man behind a dusty screen. Even he was in awe.

Olomoucs
Olomoucs was a ‘look up’ city, a neck strainer of a place. I arrived in the main square at midday, just as the astronomical clock sprang to life. Clicks and whirrs sounded from within and painted figures danced a mechanical waltz. A crowd gathered amid the clangs and bongs and kids gazed at the stilted and primitive performance.

Telc
Telc is a gorgeous place, a medieval square decorated by Italian masons and surrounded by ponds. Outside a new town encroaches but doesn't overlap. Telc’s geography has preserved it. Outside one chequerboard mansion sat a Skoda, parked like a photographic spoiler but at least it suggested Telc wasn’t just camera candy. Real people lived here too. Telc’s beauty has created a tourist boom and pizzerias and souvenir shops peep behind the renaissance facades.

Hayling Island

My childhood holidays began in Essex caravans. From Southend and Clacton to Walton-on-the-Naze, these summer breaks were all about buckets and spades and digging to Australia. I would start the holiday full of excitement but usually ended it with a foot injury. I either stepped on something sharp or was stung by some evil Essex sea creature. After a week we drove home, windswept and happy, with me in a surgical sock.

Then in the summer of '77 we spent a week on Hayling Island. Hayling is attached to the Sussex mainland by a thin causeway. "We're going abroad!" joked my dad as we sat in the queue to Northney Holiday Camp. I joined the kids group, The Wagtail Club but the pouring rain kept us indoors for most of the week. I have incomplete memories of a visit to a funfair and scrambling for copper coins across wooden boards. My dad recalls a sombre breakfast conversation: Elvis had died! At the evening talent contest, a camper blasted out Blue Suede Shoes and [in Hayling Island at least] the King lived on.

Thirty years on I came back and the sun was out as I crossed the causeway. The holiday camp [Warners very first] is long gone, but others remain in rude health. I returned to Hayling for two reasons: to photograph the island's modernist homes and to run around my childhood memories. I snapped away. Hayling is full of seaside modernism; white cubes with flat roofs and Art Deco flourishes. They sit among older thatch and ornament-clad bungalows, policed by gnomes.

I walked north to the site of the holiday camp, now a nature reserve flanked by blackberry bushes and full of rabbits. Chalet lines are traceable but a 90s housing estate rudely encroaches onto the reserve. Only the boating lake remains, its curve too perfect for nature but the outer wall is gone, reclaimed by the sea. I took some photos but they were mainly of spaces where the camp used to be and were as empty as my memories.

In 1978 my dad moved jobs and we went to Ibiza. Proper abroad! No causeway links the Balearics to the Sussex coast. We flew back [my first flights!] with leathery tans and my annual foot injury was a minor one. At Hayling Island we needed a tractor to tow my dad's Scimitar from the car park. I recall much of the Ibiza holiday but at Hayling Island I remember mostly rain.