Concrete and Clay – my feet begin to rumble

I have never lived in a city, have no desire to, but I have worked in several. I don’t have the experience of regularly waking up to a background of living and working noise

What I encountered, quite naively, on this walk, was the disjoin in scale, the lack of synergy between old and new, and, perhaps due to the passage of time had blended everything together create a mature setting which I was now, temporarily, a part of.

Not sure whether they are occupied or not.

When I started work in the design side of the construction industry I worked with concrete structures a lot, and grew to like the material as it can be sculptured to provide fluid shapes.

Intrinsically I still do, but now recognise the errors of our ways with regard to the details we used to shed water from the surface, and acknowledge cleaning properly is difficult and has to be done to maintain appearances.

Was this a loading bay? Or just a very big air intake grill.

Existing housing dwarfed by this concrete structure. The elevation at the time must have seemed appropriate, but in my opinion could/should have be more considerate to the scale and style of its neighbours.

I hope we would detail the concrete in a different way now to avoid the discolouration of the surface.

I can’t tell the age of the buildings in the first or last photograph as they are quite possibly new ‘in the style of’ so it is unfair to comment about them not blending into the new concrete structure: it could be the other way around.