The monuments of Kings Cross: a visit to the new ruins of London

ABSTRACT

In his 1967 photo essay “The monuments of Passaic” the American land artist Robert Smithson presented a New York suburb as a seedbed of urban entropy. His research methods, publication strategies and reflections on decline provided a touchstone for the generation of cultural mappers that followed. But have theoretical expectations of metropolitan space perhaps shifted? Is it not in the city centre, rather than periphery, that decay is thought to set in? In which case, what forms – material, cultural, political – does it assume? And what, meanwhile, has become of the suburbs? In an inversion of the Passaic essay, this narrative takes the reader, first by train and then on foot in search of new ruins at the heart of a metropolis. The city is London and the destination Kings Cross, the largest building site in Europe and marketed as tomorrow’s neighbourhood of leisure and information. By way of an art practice, and through the lens of an art and architectural history, the paper reports on the site – its structures and objects, as well as the acts and interventions that the Kings Cross marketing machine has failed to sublimate.

KEYWORDS:

• Monuments of Passaic
• Kings Cross
• ruins
• regeneration
• urbanism
• psychogeography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nick Ferguson is an artist and Assistant Professor of Research Methods, Richmond University, Richmond upon Thames, London.

ORCiD

Nick Ferguson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8361-2595

Notes

1. The structure and claims in this paragraph are appropriated from the opening of Robert Smithson’s photo essay, “The monuments of Passaic” (1967). Smithson reports that he bought a copy of Earthworks at New York Central Station before boarding the bus to Passaic. In so doing, he casually acknowledges Aldiss’s (1964) science fiction novel, replete as it is with themes of earth moving, entropy and the dystopian city, as a primary source of inspiration. Smithson went on to use the term “Earthworks” as a descriptor of his art practice, and to produce the earth moving pieces for which he is best known: the Non-sites (1968 onwards), Asphalt rundown (1969) and Spiral jetty (1970).

2. An earlier version of this essay was given as a talk at the symposium In This Neck of the Woods, Central St. Martins, London, 4 June 2015.

3. For Google’s proposed new European headquarters, see the website of architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris [online]. Available from: http://www.ahmm.co.uk/projectDetails/116/Google-KX/ [Accessed 6 Jun 2015].

4. “The monuments of Passaic” was reprinted as A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (see Flam 1996, pp. 68–74).

5. Compare also Smithson’s essay Entropy and the new monuments, especially his quotation of Vladimir Nabokov: “The future is but the obsolete in reverse” (see Flam 1996, pp. 10–23). 

6. For the references in this section I am indebted to my colleague Helen Wickstead, especially to her book chapter “The goat boy of mount Seething. Heritage and folklore in an English suburb” (see Wickstead 2013, pp. 199–211).

7. Moore said “Once I have been asked to consider a certain place where one of my sculptures might possibly be placed, I try to choose something suitable from what I’ve done or from what I’m about to do. But I don’t sit down and try to create something especially for it” (Seldis 1973, pp. 176–177, cited in Kwon 2004, p. 63).

8. Here, in the grounds of a disused silkworm factory near the village of Barjac, southern France, between 1992 and 2007 Kiefer constructed multiple concrete towers and spaced them as if to suggest an ancient kingdom. They are made in sections, about six or seven per tower, each one crudely cast from the corrugated walls of a shipping container and stacked on top of the next with calculated carelessness. On each floor there is an opening, as if for a door, only there is no room or balcony onto which it might open. In accordance with Kiefer’s vision, they are gradually being overrun by nature (Davey 2014). Kiefer’s towers are also the subject of the documentary film, Over your cities grass will grow (Fiennes 2010).

9. Earlier in the same documentary Louis Kahn is described by his son, Nathaniel Kahn, as wanting “to build modern buildings with the feel of ancient ruins” (2004).

10. The idea of derivative architecture is proposed by Eyal Weizman (2000).

11. The Monument (1677) in the City of London provided a view from which to survey the city which was replacing that which had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London, 1666.

12. The Monument to the Resistance, 1962 (unrealized), was to be a memorial on a ridge in Cuneo, Northern Italy, to commemorate local resistance to the German advance. Visitors would climb up inside the memorial and look across the landscape that had been defended.