Modern Norwich

I used to think that modern Norwich would one day look like this.

Ostentatious Norwich , quaint Norwich , now modern Norwich. All the buildings in this latest Album have been constructed in my life time, from the late fifties onwards. I remember being excited as a child seeing these smooth and clean lined modern buildings going up. I easily and enthusiastically connected with modernism; in fact if I had had my way old Norwich would have been flattened and something looking like a city from the old Dan Dare adventures thrown up in its place. Modernism, to my mind, was all about a potent and formidable functionality. Why was there any need to indulge a taste for quaint and finicky filigree when the best art were these structural conquests demonstrating a mastery of science and technology. A towering wall of steel, glass and concrete was not only the best symbol of that conquest but it was also the best form of art. The elegant repeated sequences set up by many floors and windows spoke of the elementalism, order and precision of mathematics. Fourier was right: From this simple periodic pattern all functions could be constructed. An elemental mathematical periodicity was the key to the universe.

One of the first modern buildings in Norwich

Norwich by modern standards is not a big city and neither are its buildings very large, but in the 1960s the common 17th 18th , 19th century vernacular buildings of Norwich were being dwarfed by constructions that in comparison seemed huge especially to a child. There is a line in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" that expresses it well for me: The Time Traveler is on his machine as it plunged into the future and he describes what he saw:

… so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. ..presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind – a certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread – until at last they took complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought might appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time…..

As I read that passage as a teenager I no longer wanted to be Dan Dare, but Wells’ Time Traveler instead. Just like the Time Traveler I was seeing the future fast developing around me. But as I read further into the book I was in for the shock that Wells had carefully prepared for his readers. The Time Traveler eventually emerged into a world that cut across his expectations and which he struggled to understand; yes, technical advances had been put into place but paradoxically and ironically they had brought about a humanity that had “devolved” into two competing species; the whimsical Eloi and the practical Morlocks. Both species were a shadow of their distant ancestors. The Time Traveler called it the “Sunset of Mankind”. Just like the Time Traveler I too found a strange place waiting for me in maturity; the Eloi vs. the Morlocks was a fine metaphor for the heart of man vs. the head of man, a dichotomy everywhere to be found.

Norwich Today: Is that Dan Dare's Rocket I can see?