Museum Without Walls

Jonathan Meades Museum Without Walls. by Michael Loughrey. Jonathan Meades is a prodigious, idiosyncratic and unequivocally singular writer and broadcaster who eschews prosaic and insipid commentaries, so is possibly fleetingly vexed by the sycophantic spouting of hoary old chestnuts kowtowing…

Jonathan Meades Museum Without Walls. by Michael Loughrey. Jonathan Meades is a prodigious, idiosyncratic and unequivocally singular writer and broadcaster who eschews prosaic and insipid commentaries, so is possibly fleetingly vexed by the sycophantic spouting of hoary old chestnuts kowtowing him - Meades’ brain is bigger than Yorkshire, Meades’s knowledge is beyond encyclopaedic. Meades is the brainiac’s brainiac… Before reading the book, my interest was piqued by the truant full stop in the title between Meades and Museum. Meades currently hangs his béret in France, so speculation concerning the absent punctuation might be that punk polemicist Meades has been clapped up by a Francophilic social more, the acte manqué, whereby Museum Without Walls is Meades’s self-defining sobriquet. Brain bigger thanYorkshire? Beyond encyclopaedic knowledge? Brainiac’s brainiac? Never mind the bollocks, here’s Museum Without Walls. Architecture and place are the book’s nexus. Ever since Baedeker shrunk planet Earth to fit into mink lined pockets of tailor made tweed anoraks worn by highborn Henrys embarking on Le Grand Tour, many a pillaging hack journalist flatulated ink on architecture and place, cobbling together column inches by plagiarising from tourist guide books without ever setting a gout-ridden foot in the places and buildings they where paid to whet their reader’s wanderlust with. Conversely, the peripatetic Meades is an intrepid and infatigable explorer who does hike, climb, clamber, leap, loiter, dive, shimmy, tunnel and trespass to get down and dirty with architecture and place. When Meades makes a just-browsing voyeuristic sally into cities, towns, exurbia and scapes and pronounces reprobatory verdicts on ignoble architecture or execrable man-made place which ruffle his aesthetic sensibilities, his essays are a wrecking ball which demolish architect and edifice without mercy. When he does approve of a place, architect or building, his eulogy awards the recipient with a bespoke bricklayers hod laden with an unctuous aggregate of judicious adulation. Swathes of the green and pleasant land have permuted into a gory crime scenes where unbridled environmental and ecological malfeasance and skulduggery is committed with impunity by Lords and louts alike. Posturing protesters bleat and bemoan about pollution in the air on the land and in rivers and seas, yet rarely spew vitriol against the pandemic of visual pollution, undistinguished architecture and characterless man-made place which induce a lockjaw yawn. Yet when soapboxing on places blighted by regenerated chicken coop social housing and high-rise impotency, Meades predicates a mischievously perverse view that there is no such thing as a boring place, and visits and writes about such loci with wry and wrathful bemusement. Fanatically militant protesters decrying visual pollution might opine that there is faint whiff of fetishisation in Meades’s suggestion that such necrotic lesions should not be avoided, but embraced. Across the nation, there are inevasible near-future points of convergence where metastasis of neighbouring subtopias will occur, begetting Zwiesenstadts of monotonous cookie-cutter dwellings, blundering bricolage of sub-standard building materials, no more than regurgitated and reduxed WWII prefabs tarted up with estate agent gloss, vomit coloured pebbledash, PVC window frames, unappetising island kitchens, underfloor heating, wet rooms, solar panels, hot tubs and wall to wall ennui, a mock-Arcadian vista where the minds of the Dunroamin’ mob are appropriately semi-detached, their common address 13 Comatose Crescent. An agent provocateur with a lickerish for controversy, Meades often takes a diametrically opposed stance as an antidote to the plague of second-hand off-the-peg half-cocked opinions. His sermons on place and architecture are wafer and wine to the converted, but fire and brimstone for Philistine mongers who profit from pimping the third rate. Nor do his words reach putative dignitaries whose collaboration culminates in the cutting of ribbons with ceremonial scissors to herald the grand opening of shabby shrines to nullity. On the topic of place and architecture, Meades is a peerless writer, his inimitable perspectives and grandiloquence of his writing spiked with a spritz of the ludic offer a feast of fortifying and elucidating cerebral pabulum. Do visit Museum Without Walls, and fret not, Jonathan Meades will never herd you into a gloomy breeze block subterranean exit via a tacky gift shop and expound as to why the place is not as discreditable, soulless and dishwater dull as it appears. But then again, Meades can be mesmeric, so might just try to entice you into seeing that boring is in the eye of the beholder. e-mail: michael.loughrey@icloud.com