I’ve noticed a trend lately in British city centres. Alien architectural forms have been appearing amongst the dirty sandstone Victorian halls and glass and steel redevelopments that make up the 21st century urban centres.
When you’re arriving in Sheffield by train from the North, as you skirt the old steelworks and mills in the basin of Attercliffe, you get a view of the central skyline that has something very out of place about it. Amongst the familiar shapes of the Arts Tower swathed in plastic, the top of the Town Hall, the bright white rectangles of Hallam University, the brick red smudge of the Moorfoot Building and the grey spires of churches, the smooth circular crest of the ferris wheel on Fargate emerges clearly above the mass of the city. This bizarre shape came by itself, but recently the whole centre has periodically found itself filled with fun fair rides, appearing apparently out of nowhere and disappearing just as suddenly.
City centres have always used their public spaces as places for recreation and leisure, but before recently the garish and noisy excitement of the fun fair was never allowed to enter the heart of the city. This trend probably began with the London Eye, but since then almost every city centre in the country has hosted it’s own ‘eye’ for a while, and brought a host of other carnival rides with it, presumably to keep it company.
Now against a victorian backdrop, rides adorned with hyperrealist paintings of smiling faces and flashing lights blare out loud music. People queue to climb aboard them and carve out new neon-lit vectors of movement in the space above Fargate and Barker’s Pool. Very different from the wooden helter skelters and hook-a-duck stalls that occasionally appeared on the same spot during my childhood. While I was being cynical about why these new forms had suddenly appeared in the midst of the city, the punters were enjoying a completely new way of experiencing the built forms around them, and I’m now pretty pissed that I missed the chance – since most of the rides have now departed for pastures new.
Historically, these temporary travelling fairs with mechanical rides emerged in the 19th century, at the same time as most of Britain’s present cities. Usually they were pushed onto the physical and social fringe of urban society because they were staffed by Roma Gypsies and Irish Travellers, and seen as a place of sin and danger. Mostly they set up their spaces of leisure on pieces of wasteland on the urban fringe, far from the metropolitan centre. Since the 1960s they’ve started to migrate onto pieces of post-industrial wasteland and public parks, but never intruded into the heart of the city until recently.
Fun fairs were geographically confined to the margin because they represented the margin of society. They were a place where youths could go to misbehave – get drunk, spend money, win prizes, have sex, fight – a suspension of the norms of everyday society. Funfairs still retain an atmosphere of threatened danger and transgression (which is part of their exotic appeal), and young city dwellers still use them as an excuse to get pissed and get up to no good. Indeed, the whole appeal of fun fair rides is based on simulated danger. Nowadays urban fun fairs appear in the most heavily policed and monitored area of the city, but still carry an element of danger – if only in the imaginations of the crowds.
This inventive use of the city centre is a testimony to how adaptable urban public spaces can be. Despite this, one of my first (admittedly cynical) thoughts about the appearance of such garish and apparently old-fashioned forms of leisure activity in the city centre was that it was a symbol of desperation. City centres have been in long decline since the 1970s, accelerated through the ’80s and ’90s by the growing privatisation of public urban spaces (as excellently described by Anna Minton in the excellent Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City) and I viewed the fun fair as a symbol of how much effort was now required to entice people into the city centre.
The Victorian civic planners and Modernist architects who defined Sheffield’s built form shared an ideal of the centralised city. This ideal has been replaced by the dream (imported from the States) of a vast ‘mulitnucleated’ suburbia. British city centres have increasingly become irrelevant, with their function as commercial, economic and social centres being usurped by suburban developments - the conversion of abandoned industrial sites into giant exurban business and leisure parks. For much of the ’90s the councils of northern post-industrial cities were terrified of their urban centres becoming ghost towns – this was the fear that inspired the ‘regeneration project’.
Whilst no one would deny that regeneration has revitalised urban areas previously in permanent decline (particularly in the case of Sheffield) it’s not been an unqualified success. Many of the city’s wide, regenerated pavements that were built in anticipation of hordes of consumer citizens returning to the urban centre remain empty and lined with unused benches. Most new economic and commercial initiatives still focus on the edge of the city rather than the centre, and with the rise of internet shopping and the onset of the most recent recession, the city centre is increasingly irrelevant to people as a leisure zone.
The counterpoint to the decline of the city centre has been the rise in the exurban developments. Most obviously in Sheffield we have good old Meadowhall. This palace of commercialism and leisure is a privatised space to which people travel from across the region to shop, see movies, meet friends, eat food and enjoy their weekends. In many ways it has usurped the role that Sheffield city centre used to occupy. Similarly, dotted throughout the country’s post-industrial suburbs, nestled amongst decaying factories and victorian terraces we have identical malls and ‘leisure parks’. The same cinemas, bowling alleys, games arcades and chain restaurants that cluster around the car park of Valley Centertainment can be spotted in matching configurations across the country.
As many people have noted, these malls are theme parks for a society in which leisure is increasingly equated with shopping. The city center uses the antiquated side shows and glitzy neon-lit rides of the fun fair to bring people back into it’s public spaces, because it is competing with the delights of commercial theme parks in the suburbs.
Of course, the main difference between theme parks and fun fairs is that where the latter are temporary uses of public space, the former are permanent, privatised leisure spaces. So while the fun fair is potentially exotic, dangerous and mysterious, the commercial theme parks of malls are rigorously supervised and secured private spaces.
American sociologists have written extensively about the politics of security in the theme park/mall. To them, the vast malls of LA represent the militarisation of leisure space – commercial fortresses of privatised space. The modern mall has an immensely sophisticated, yet largely invisible, security system, thanks to CCTV and bar-code monitoring of its consumers’ purchases. Some have compared it to the 18th century concept of the Panopticon – a prison structure in which a single observer could monitor all prisoners without their knowing whether they were being watched. While these American militarised leisure spaces represent an extreme, the same logic underpins similar theme parks of commercialism across the globe.
Perhaps Britain’s urban population should be grateful. We are the one of the most heavily monitored societies in the world, and our city centres are still at risk of becoming ghost-towns as their leisure functions are exported outwards to the fringes of the city. But we haven’t yet seen the complete division of our public spaces into privatized, militarized commercial-leisure zones as is often the case elsewhere. The appearance of the alien forms of carnival rides amongst the familiar shapes of the city should remind us of this.
In the two centuries that Britain has been a largely urban society, it’s cities’ populations haven’t lost their appetite for garish, melodramatic spectacles of leisure. So if the choice they are given is between fun fair and theme park – between the lingering public leisure-space of the centre and the vast private leisure-space of the exurbs – I think we should be grateful to have the excuse of gigantic ferris wheels and carnival rides appearing apparently out of thin air to spend time in the city centre and allow us to reinvent the spaces around us.