Architecture without Architects

It all started more than 25 years ago when I bought a book called Architecture without Architects in a second-hand bookshop. The book, pithily subtitled A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture, and authored by Bernard Rudolfsky, came as a revelation, presenting all manner of strange and wonderful vernacular buildings from all over the globe.

The book was actually a follow up to an earlier exhibition of the same name at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Within its pages were numerous black and white photographs of African mud huts, Galician stone granaries, Cappadocian cave dwellings and the tightly clustered dwellings of Italian hill towns. What struck me most though was
three grainy old photograph of titled: The fortified villages of Svaneti. Of all the fanciful structures depicted in the book, the buildings in these images looked the oddest, the most improbable of the lot – menacing stone skyscrapers set against a snow-covered mountainous backdrop. Accompanying the photos was a little text that explained that they
dated back to the 12^th-century and were built and maintained by local families as defence against the ‘blood feuds and vendettas that raged unchecked’ in the region. It didn’t even say which country they were in, just ‘western Caucasus’. They were, I subsequently found out, in the Georgian SSSR of what was then still the Soviet Union.

Almost two decades later I get to visit Georgia – following the breakup of the USSR such things have become altogether easier – but it was not until my third visit to the country that I finally managed to travel to Svaneti and see the towers for myself. Svaneti happens to be home to some of Europe’s highest villages, with permanent settlements where snow lingers late into May, but the region is better known for its unique ancient culture and for its somewhat sinister reputation. Even within Georgia, the Svan inhabitants of the valley are treated with suspicion as Svaneti is usually thought of as a backward, lawless region with a reputation for brigandage. This certainly used to be the case, and until a decade ago Svaneti was a risky place to visit with robberies at gunpoint not uncommon. Thanks to a big clean-up operation a few years ago – the Georgian government is keen to develop tourism – it is now pretty safe.

Visiting Svaneti  for the first time I realise that the place I saw in Rudolfsky’s book all those years ago was a collection of villages  called Ushguli, nestled beneath high Caucasus peaks and stretching high up a valley. At 2,200 metres altitude, Ushguli is probably the highest permanently inhabited settlement in Europe (although currently no-go Dagestan on the other side of the Caucasus range also has contenders to the title) but it is its magnificent medieval towers that make it truly extraordinary. Some have collapsed over the years but there still sufficient to present an imposing spectacle and render Ushguli’s towers a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There has never been a better time to visit Svaneti, although things are changing fast – too fast for comfort perhaps. Following centuries of isolation – both the wheel and the internal combustion engine arrived here at roughly the same time during the 1930s – Svan villagers are starting to leave their high valleys for an easier life in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. The building of a new road will no doubt help accelerate this change and the days of unadulterated Svan culture may now be numbered. For the time being though, travelling there is still to take part in an adventure.

Bradt Travel Guides have a good guide to the country. Authored by Tim Burford and recently updated by yours truly for the 4^th edition, it contains all that you need to know about Georgia – Svaneti and Ushguli included.

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Norwich Underground

Norwich’s network of underground passageways is the stuff of legends. Many of them may be the work of over-active imaginations but others undoubtedly do exist as relics of the city’s medieval glory days when a little subterranean expediency came in handy in times of religious persecution or civil war. Of course, even those that exist solely in folk memory still make for a good story.

The city’s bedrock is pitted with less glamorous tunnels too. Chalk and flint mining was a Norwich tradition for centuries and both materials were necessary for building the extensive city’s walls and numerous churches of what was England’s second largest city in the medieval period. As a result, certain areas of the city have long been synonymous with subsidence problems. A reminder of this came to the fore in 1988 when a double-decker bus was unexpectedly swallowed-up by the earth on Earlham Road close to the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist. Thankfully no-one was hurt. This bizarre event made for some entertaining postcards and even gave the opportunity for the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s to promote one of its products using a photograph of the unfortunate bus alongside the slogan, ‘Nothing fills a hole like a Double Decker’.

Walking recently in a formerly unexplored corner of a familiar haunt at the city outskirts I stumbled upon an entrance to this chalky underworld. Long sealed-up with steel to deter would-be intruders, this one had been recently prised open – by shadowy urban explorers, no doubt, keen on charting this unmapped terrain. Resistance was futile – there was no way to turn down such a serendipitous opportunity.

Just a few metres beyond the entrance the absolute darkness is intimidating – the light of torches too feeble to identify much more than where the tunnel floor is and highlight spray-painted ciphers marking dead ends and potential exit routes. The photos taken here with flash were made by simply pointing and hoping for the best: a strange turn of events in which the results reveal detail unseen by dim yellow torchlight at the time of their taking.

A troglodyte world such as this is a starkly alien environment that can bring out the most atavistic of fears. Past underground visits have been to well-lit caverns filled with phantasmagorical stalactites and stalagmites, or tropical caves in south-east Asia populated by strange blind fish and albino insects — beautiful unthreatening spaces. My only previous mine experience was a terrible, yet fascinating, place on the other side of the world: a Bolivian silver mine at over 4,000 metres altitude at Cerro Rico (‘rich hill’) near Potosí, where visitors are expected to bring along gifts of Coca-Cola, bags of coca leaves and sticks of dynamite – the necessities of a Bolivian mining life. The miners in turn offer their own gifts to El Tío (‘The Uncle’), the spirit of the underworld – a pact with the Devil that permits them to scratch a dangerous living from the earth for their short tough lives. Since this visit I have always afforded miners the greatest respect.

It might seem odd that a short excursion beneath the ground just a mile or so from home can feel almost as alien an experience as a visit to a Bolivian silver mine – even without a cheek-wad of coca leaves and the necessity of appeasing ‘The Uncle’. There again, the juxtaposition of a jarring new experience in a wholly familiar setting is always going to be disturbing.

Time and Tide

Great Yarmouth’s excellent Time and Tide Museum continues to fly the flag for that town’s half-forgotten herring industry. Located near the old town walls just off South Quay in a former herring smokehouse, the museum informs and charms in equal measure. With mock-ups of 19th century ‘rows’ – the tiny terraced back-to-backs that once housed Yarmouth’s men and women of the sea – and with plenty of newsreel and black and white photographs of whiskery sailors and itinerant Scottish fishergirls it transports the visitor back to a time when the herring was king and Yarmouth served as his palace: ‘the fishiest town in all England’ as Charles Dickens once observed. Such erstwhile fishiness is tangible: the very walls of the museum are still redolent of smoked fish — rich, evocative, appetising. Once, the whole of South Quay must have smelled like this.

Yarmouth has had to reinvent itself several times over the past couple of centuries: prosperous periods as a boatbuilding hub, fishing port, herring processing centre and seaside resort have come and gone, overlapping one another as palimpsests of industry. These days, although a vestige of low-expectation tourism still clings on, it is more an ambience of low-rent charity shops, Portuguese cafes and boarded-up businesses that characterises this urbanised sand spit on England’s easternmost shore.

The Time and Tide Museum is struggling a little despite numerous plaudits since its establishment that include becoming a Gulbenkian Prize Museum of the Year finalist in 2005. Recently the Silver Darlings cafe in the museum courtyard was forced to close through lack of funding – a soft target for funding cuts in this penny-pinching era. The vending machine that has been installed is scant compensation. To Yarmouth’s credit, there was widespread dissent about this. People here are proud and do not like to see the ongoing decline of their town, especially considering that it once held such an elevated position in Britain’s maritime heritage.

Nowhere is this proud heritage better displayed than at the Britannia Monument at The Denes a mile or so south of the museum. The monument was erected in 1819 as a memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson, Norfolk’s most famous son (give or take Stephen Fry or Delia Smith). Standing 44 metres high, just eight metres short of the Nelson monument in London’s Trafalgar Square, the column appears anachronistic towering above the humdrum low-rises of an industrial estate: a weather-stained monolith to past glory and the red-jacketed hubris of empire. Over less than two centuries, a booming herring trade, bucket and spade holidaymakers and lacklustre industry have all had their place in the sun here beneath Britannia’s unwavering gaze: such has been the drift of Yarmouth’s cultural topography.

But there is an undeniable glory to it too: a thick-set Doric column topped by a pergola framed by six caryatids that in turn supports a figure of Britannia atop a globe inscribed Plamam Qui Meruit Ferat (‘Let him who merits it take the palm’), the motto of Nelson’s coat of arms. All is not quite what it might first appear: you cannot tell from the ground but Britannia and her caryatids are modern fibreglass replacements of the stone originals — if you come here hot-foot from the Time and Tide Museum then you will already have seen the original head of Britannia there. I mentioned hubris; one might assume that Britannia would be facing square-jawed out to sea warning continental upstarts not to mess with the Royal Navy but no, she faces inland — towards northwest Norfolk and Nelson’s birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, some say.