BENNY HILL SPOTTED IN UXBRIDGE

 

High seriousness was buried beneath an avalanche of toytown rustication

 

Boots, Sports Direct, Superdrug, Pret A Manger (closed) a second Pret A Manger (also closed) Costa, Boots, Piazza Express, another Costa: It was all here at Pavilion Shopping Centre all here to enjoy.

 

On a sunny Saturday afternoon people are milling around, mothers barely controlling pushchairs, the tune from of an out of tune busker floats comes across the square.

 

Outside Boots four guys in black T-shirts with the slogan “Jesus loves you” are busy preaching into a microphone. Their words of hope are quickly carried away in the fresh breeze.

 

This is Uxbridge town in Middlesex and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Hillingdon a mere fifteen miles west-northwest of Charing Cross.

 

The real reason for being here was to seek out was has been described as ‘the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: course, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, and accessible’. *

 

We found it. Hillingdon Civic Centre, lots of red brick that seems to rear up at you as if bumped into by accident. The whole thing is rather gloomy even in the sunshine. The building, which was designed by Andrew Derbyshire, was applauded as one of the most famous buildings in the British neo-vernacular style.

 

My current crush, Jonathan Meades, described the civic centre thus. 

 

‘Here in the wilds of suburban Middlesex was a suburban town hall composed apparently of several dozen suburban villas suburban bungalows which had through their keys into the centre of the room and which were now conjoined in cosily elephantine abandon.

 

Like any suburban orgy (think South Ruislip) it was more comical thank sexy it broke so many rules and way so wholly divergent from the precepts of canonical modernernism that it was revolutionary – in the snuggest homeliest most carpet- slippers way.  It was the architectural equivalent of Benny Hill or Sid James: course, matey, blokeish, undemanding, unthreatening, and accessible.  

 

High seriousness was buried beneath an avalanche of toytown rustication, inverted Diocletian windows and distended columns.’ 

 

*From Museum without Walls   Jonathan Meads Published by Unbound Books 2014, the book is a compulsive read for anyone who is fascinated by the ordinary and sees most places as extraordinary. For any topophilic a real treat