City & County 12: Coronavirus Cities Dispatch #4 At home, mixing metaphors
A Room for London on top of the Southbank Centre. Photo by Alan Wiig, June 2013.
For the last ten-plus weeks, like everyone, I’ve been self-quarantined in my apartment except for grocery shopping and occasional exercise: living a contained life. The streets remain emptied out of the usual traffic and passerby. Massachusetts is about to “re-open” the economy beginning this week, but the potential for infection is still there, and the daily death toll remains high. The domestic, residential city of homes and apartments has transformed into thousands of stationary, landlocked vessels where we ride out the pandemic, outfitted with two weeks of groceries, soap and hand sanitizer and other necessary supplies, while we all do our best to stay healthy, occupied, and employed, venturing out after donning a face mask, seeking a respite of fresh air, avoiding fellow citizens with at least six feet distance. This newsletter is written by Alan Wiig, a Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development at University of Massachusetts, Boston. You can subscribe or unsubscribe at the bottom of this page.
The waiting is unbearable, but we bear it, because what else is there? Still healthy, the home becomes a ship for carrying us into a post-pandemic future, someday. We may not be able to leave this vessel, but we can look out at the seasons turning, we can read or watch and listen to the news of illness and death and unknowing, of economic catastrophe compounded by political failure. The constant, the anchor, is the home and our domestic routines, cooking, working, and the digital ties to friends and family through the multitude of texts and videos and apps. Home, for those fortunate to have a space large and comfortable and safe enough to enjoy it, contains the entirety of day to day life, much like a ship at sea.
These heavy-handed metaphors of pandemic life operating like living at sea are inspired by a replica Victorian boat that was mounted atop the concrete mass of London’s Southbank Centre, overlooking the Thames River at Waterloo Bridge to commemorate the 2012 Olympic year. Modeled on Joseph Conrad’s Congo River steamer Roi de Belges from the Heart of Darkness and titled ‘A Room for London,’ this art installation and lodging offered a night’s stay by lottery to Londoners and others. Interspersed among the paying guests, writers, musicians, and visual artists were invited aboard for a few nights to use the setting and the view as a stationary departure point for composing words, sounds, or images reflecting on their stay. Granta published A London Address collecting these essays; you can also listen to the authors read their pieces here. The boat's library was stocked with books about London, which is a lovely idea that resonates today. Given that actual libraries are closed, we are all assembling our own Covid-19 reading lists, whether about life during pandemics or intentionally about other, lighter topics.
The installation was so popular it stayed in place until 2016, offering:
Guests a place of refuge and reflection above the flow of traffic at an iconic location in the capital: the Southbank. The lower and upper decks gave extraordinary views, by day and night, of a London panorama that stretches from Big Ben to St Paul's Cathedral. Inside, the boat is a beautifully crafted timber object, full of nooks and crannies, along with all the creature comforts one would expect in a good hotel. (source)
An immobilized steam-powered ship offering a place and time to contemplate the swirl and churn of the capital city below, a form intended for travel up and down river instead stuck, part of but at a remove from London itself. I passed through London in June 2013 on the way to an academic conference at Durham University and managed to snap a picture of A Room for London while walking through the neighborhood. Wherever the installation is stored today, I imagine many Londoners would happily see it returned to its perch to again offer a space within but apart from the pandemic city. This is an apt metaphor for life today, stuck inside, observing the world going by both through our literal windows but also (and perhaps more-so) thorough our computer screens.
The Thames River looking downstream at central London from Waterloo Bridge. Photo by Alan Wiig, June 2013.
Much like this tugboat marooned on the solidified, concrete ‘sandbar’ of the Southbank Center, today we are all stuck in the ‘sea’ of the coronavirus. The virus traverses the landscape, and we stay put within the swirl of fear and stress, illness, death, and digital sociability at a distance, seeking the lifelines of positive news, compassion and recovery. Our homes are fixed but we remain adrift, our individual and collective psyche is unmoored, blown one way or the next by personal and political stress, pulled by unseen currents first one direction then another, becalmed here and there by small comforts like a nice meal or an entertaining book, but unable to return to the safety of an uninfected city.