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MAKE DO & MEND
Nobody will believe us but Fox & Angel came up with the slogan MAKE DO & MEND long before anyone else; before the crash, the crunch and the squeeze.
Of course we know it is not new. I first saw this slogan at Art School when I was writing a dissertation on art in World War Two. And in any case the concept was in my blood; my grandmother had been a dressmaker; I used her rag bag to dress my dolls, and I made all my own clothes (and I mean all) for a decade from the age of fifteen. Such productivity ended the year I cut out costumes for the entire cast of the “The Gondoliers”; I realised I had out-sown my strength.
Unfortunately since sewing is no longer taught in schools I am wondering how the mend part of make-do is actually going to work?
Art students are great at creating looks and know the way of mixing a jumble sale fifties skirt with a pair of up to the minute shoes but I don’t see this flair in my local high street.
Down here in Sussex all you see is ghastly trainers and track pants; if you suggest to people that they go more colourful red track pants will be it. Florida seems to have come to the UK but in grey or mushroom, (although admittedly this is better than turquoise). Even if it’s called taupe or charcoal it’s still beige or grey. The worst thing is the contagion; I have found myself shopping in old sweat pants “because it’s only local”, what the hell, no one will see me. It is said that women express themselves in clothes. Well, not here they don’t. Or only as a long running tragi-comedy.
And what applies to the people is even truer of the buildings. I hate to think what effect make-do will have on the buildings. It seemed to be the mantra even before the down-turn. We are no longer a visual nation. Our medieval buildings were beautiful, our Georgian cities were striking, there is majesty in our great Victorian town halls but since then it has been all down-hill. I don’t want to necessarily embrace the “Neo” look…. (Poundbury etc.) but something has badly gone wrong. Even our great new architectural projects lack the vision and bravery which is so obvious in Paris, Berlin and New York.
We major in dull as ditchwater, (which happens to be the colour of the river that flows through my nearby town). Our streets are grubby, we look lumpen and as a nation we are ashamed.
Even in the good times the only “improvements” were dodgy replacement windows. The flat roofs remain; so do the run down thirties tudoresque, and all manner of fill-in badly-proportioned buildings. And if we do try to up-grade our town centres they are bulldozed and with the wave of a counsellor’s wand magic-ed into fairy castle supermarket architecture. The first one must have been “designed” but the rest were plonked down just about anywhere.
England is supposedly a country with strict planning laws. Not where big business is concerned it isn’t; not that you can see anyway. A new development means a large bulldozer and a rolling out of wall to wall concrete. Conservation is a lip-service word usually applied to a flower bed full of wood chippings and dried out plants. Sometimes bald patches of barren, neglected land scattered with litter, are brazenly sign-posted “conservation areas”.
To compound the problem most builders themselves seem to be completely non-visual; aesthetics obviously isn’t taught at construction college. Leave the average painter and decorator unsupervised for five minutes and your apple-white will have turned into magnolia because they had a tin left in the van. It’s all the same to them. This is the supreme danger of “make-do & mend”. It won’t be colourful, quirky and charming; it will be magnolia.
This lack of upkeep, not to mention the look of the thing, is no more obvious than in our railways. I made a journey to London last week on our local line. The ticket office was unmanned, the train seats were filthy, the one loo that was working had no paper and the rail cutting was swathed with litter and detritus. Where attempts had been made to paint or fill cracks it looked as if it been bodged by a load of amateurs; gimcrack and cheapskate.
We don’t do big projects well (remember the Dome and the Tunnel) but we do small ones even worse.
There needs to be a sea-change; we should have ambition and want to see beauty again in our streets as well as our countryside. We need more green spaces, clean pavements, flowers and plants and that old-fashioned thing civic pride. It is something of an irony that it is Bill Bryson, an American by birth, who can see Great Britain more clearly than we see ourselves, who is trying, (without much success it has to be said with this intransigent, stubborn nation; our stoicism undoubtedly works against us in peacetime) to spearhead a “Clean-Up Britain” campaign.
What England needs during the next decade is nothing dramatic. Maybe we should even put vision and beauty, (too highfalutin?) on hold for the future? Perhaps this is a mind-set and expectation too far just now. Perhaps better to aim for a lick of paint and a general clean up. During recession, we are sure to have the surplus man-power. Is this kind of “make-do & mend” really so much to ask?
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.