Meanwhile, beneath the bridge, there are other architectural fantasies. To the east, you look at a spider’s web of steel and glass; down below, you find a city of cardboard inhabited by those whose risks no one thinks it worthwhile to insure. The urine-perfumed alleys and stairwells under the South Bank concert halls house people who have fallen through society’s floor.
Their impromptu shelters seem to imitate the whimsies of Richard Rogers, whose building can afford to joke about its own flimsiness. But on the embankment the joke is sourer. Last summer a family lived behind a barricade of cartons below some stairs leading down from the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The space was dry, but cramped: they could only crouch inside, or – literally – squat, since their box had a roof of looming concrete. For their outer wall they had chosen a square of cardboard with a wine glass stamped on it, next to the cautionary word “fragile”.
We are, or are exhorted to be, a property-owning society. What’s heartbreaking about the papery suburb on the South Bank is its unrepentant faith in this notion. Everywhere you stumble on parodies of domesticity. A man lounges in a carton, feeding himself a packet of crisps. He looks exactly as it he were lying on a sofa in front of a television set, except he has imagined the sofa, the television, the walls around him and the ceiling on top. Someone else, erecting a concertina-shaped screen of cardboard for modesty’s sake, has gone to sleep behind it. Unconscious, he sits up holding in place his symbolic roof, which is an umbrella.
Extract from an article in the Observer magazine by Peter Conrad
