Broadgate

My camera is broken.

I am deeply upset by this fact for a number of reasons, but thankfully, I discover I’ve built up a silly archive of pics from the last few months, and since I dislike blogs without at least the odd splash of colour here or there, I figured the time had come to write a bit more about favourite topic 1; London.

To be exact…

Broadgate.

I think the best thing to ask about Broadgate, is why.  I mean, not why write about it – I write about it because it’s a not-particularly well-known, rather-obscure-unless-you’re-looking, yet-up-in-your-face-if-you’ve-found-it bit of London that’s worthy of some mention.  No – the question is… why, Broadgate?

First up, Broadgate is sharing a common name, sitting as it is between Moorgate and Aldersgate, above the a road pointedly called London Wall, and none too far from Barbican and Aldgate.  Sensing the pattern here?  There also used to be a Broad Street Station on the site, which was demolished in order that Broadgate as we know and love it, a purpose-built commercial district designed for the financiers of the city could be plonked down next to Liverpool Street Station in the 1980s to general fiscally glamorous rejoicing.  Traffic does not get inside Broadgate, the entire area is pedestrianised and to a large part, raised away from street level by its walls of black-grey and pink-bronze office blocks within which can be found floor after floor of computers, suits and the occasional tax-deductible shrubbery.

It is not what you’d call a discrete, subtle bit of design and yet, rather like the Inns of Court, has pulled off that trick of managing to occupy a considerable splash of land bang smack in the heart of the city without ever really inviting general members of the public to come inside and mull.  At the age of 14 I considered myself to have stumbled on a big secret when, instead of just walking straight out of Liverpool Street Station to catch the bus at Moorgate, I tried climbing those unlabelled silver stairs to one side of the exit, and found myself next to an ice rink, in a wide circle of towering buildings within which lives thronged and passed.  At the age of 21, living in a halls of residence near Brick Lane, I wandered into Broadgate again, and discovered that my initial discoveries had barely scratched the surface of this maze, but whole lost lakes and waterfalls, bars and cafes, tiled passages with glass roofs and carefully tended trees sprouting besides concrete works of art where the skaterboarders liked to learn their trade.  In winter there is indeed an ice rink in Broadgate which is perhaps one of its few public claims to fame; in summer, that same arena can be used for pretty much anything – I think last year it was a site of basketball competitions between well-paid and surprisingly still employed financiers of the city.  An unmarked glass box dropping down through leopard-skin furnishings to a bunker below a courtyard criss-crossed with underfoot LED lights turns out to be a bar where gentlemen of a certain income may flirt with their secretaries.  When the sun comes out, awnings go up by a crystal-clear perpetually flowing shallow waterfall, at the end of which another glass-clad cafe looks down – a long way down – onto the platforms of Liverpool Street station and the freshly painted rolling stock heading to Norfolk.  (Freshly painted, dear reader, because the Norfolk line seems to change ownership every 2 minutes, and heaven forfend a company should keep its predecessor’s colours, if perhaps their inefficiencies.)

For the suited gentleman of Broadgate, Liverpool Street Station itself is an architectural wonder, a reinvented Victorian station whose every bit of iron has been painted and every walkway crammed with shops selling shampoo, soap, ready meals, designer reading glasses and ties.  Do not try to buy a tin of beans on Liverpool Street Station, but if you’re looking for fashion accessories, there’s no where handier within the EC2 postcode.

At the age of maybe 9, I would visit a friend’s house every Friday, and we go swimming and play games for hours on end.  One game I vaguely remember playing (and which I only ever got the demo for, sigh) was called Sim Tower, in which you built, as it suggests on the package, a tower, and populated it with little tiny people who you could see going about their daily lives.  You’d watch great queues forming for the lift, and couples eating in little restaurants on the 7th floor, and security guards with radios on their rounds, and men working late at work, and meetings happening in specially tailored board rooms, and slackers slacking in the rooms next door.  Walking through Broadgate on a winter evening, when the lights are on in the offices and the workers still at work, reminds me of that – a whole little bustling world busy with whatever it is it’s doing, lit up behind glass for me to watch and wonder at.

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