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Mechanical Operations – idealism and community, or the creation of the model village.
Picking up this slim volume and flicking through it, the black and white illustrations and text seem uninviting. A closer look reveals a series of detailed instructions for living in Cambourne, a new village built in the Cambridgeshire countryside.
This bookwork challenges our notions of cultural identity – can an identity really be created, engineered – through architecture?
A commentary on today’s society, this bookwork is at times laugh-out-loud funny and at others challenging when you look at the detail. And perhaps this is the point – look beneath the surface and see the real English village existence – see more than some well-intentioned planning officer.
Using the layout and jargon of council-speak with which we are all familiar, Helen Stratford and Lawrence Bradby are subverting the continuous stream of instruction to the public from the authorities. It is a different, innovative take on these familiar instructions and it challenges our thoughts on communities, on who creates them and on how they evolve.
A village once grew organically, first a farm and manor house, church, then a school and park. Does the building of a village from nothing create a sanitised, empty environment? The attempts by local developers to recreate the ‘organic progression synonymous with the traditional English village’ have been supplemented by Stratford and Bradby with their own ideas to ‘aim to ensure that village life is consistently reproduced at all levels of activity and inhabitation.
Are they looking at ways to complete an otherwise sanitised version of community?
The title implies going through the motions, something formal and structured. However, a much more irreverent tone emerges, adding snowmen-building and hopscotch to a list of acceptable front door colours.
Are they suggesting life would be better for obeying their additional instructions? It seems not. In some cases they are adding in some realistic, if unsettling, aspects to modern living, from doing ‘donuts’ in the village car parks to free-range firework parties. In others, like the adapted van-driver hand signals, they provide a new, cheerful selection of positive hand gestures.
It flips the glossy ad ideas of village life (which ignore, or try to ignore, the realistic downsides of human existence). It is easy to imagine a local council initiative to create a more harmonious society by carefully planning the open spaces and walkways. Stratford and Bradby take this one step further, they set out in detail how to maintain one of Cambourne’s cycle ways:
“With gouging movements extract weeds from any voids between kerbs upstanding and cycleway surface…..
Twist torso anticlockwise whilst reaching right arm (with trowel) across body and forwards so that weight is over left (supporting) hand. MOPs passing during this phase of movement may produce barking sounds/negative comments.”
Other similarly subversive instructions include the best methods for skimming stones: “turn away nonchalantly afterwards” and a scheme where workers at the local business park can earn points by using local shops and paths.
What does it say about our preconceptions of village life? About Englishness? It is an ad-man’s dream to create idealised Englishness, rural life in 2D, the snap-shop, freeze-frame village perfection. Re-packaged and re-branded to be appealing to buyers, can Cambourne live up to its ideals? Advertising has become an intrinsic part of our narrative, we are in its thrall – we can enjoy a perfect existence as long as we buy a house here. This bookwork reminds the reader that this cannot be so.
Although much of it is tongue-in-cheek, there is a serious message about community. Can it be built along with the bricks and mortar that have created this village?
Residents are compared to newt colonies in the ‘creation of optimum conditions for new communities.’ Are the authors poking fun at this idea, or disturbed by its social engineering?
Many of the community planners are acknowledged at the end of this book and I am curious to know what they thought of it. Would such a satirical examination of the Cambourne project have been knowingly supported?
The motivations of the developers’ ‘masterplan’ are to sell this perfect ideal and they would surely not welcome their polished image of village life being reinterpreted in this way.
The final pages feature a checklist and route plan for the road sweeper. The poetic list of the day-to-day routine includes ‘teach yourself German CD/up in the cab, on show to the world…./clean/then dirty…../for as long as it takes.
The village idyll is such a familiar construct – recognisable in everything from the Romantic poets to popular culture – that it is largely accepted. This bookwork asks the reader to take another look and to see more.