The Brickmaker's Arms

I am not one for Christmas television but I have to make mention of BBC's Victorian Farm. I could have done without their cracker-making and bon-bon pressing, and as for their marbled wrapping paper, if a body wants to cover their gifts in layers of Jackson Pollock-had-a-nightmare type stuff, then I can think of easier ways to bag it then by filling a vat with expensive, coloured dyes. Nor can I see me stitching flannel underwear or making pots of frightful goo to rub on chilblains. Outside was better. I adored Clumper the horse, loved their exploration of early farm technology, and the scenes of their choosing a ram to impregnate breeding ewes had me rolling in hysterics. The most intriguing item, however, was their demonstration of Victorian brick-making.
Farmers generally didn't make bricks but the team wanted to restore a derelict forge with authentic brickwork, so they called in experts in historical brick-making. Their techniques were a revelation; the preparation of the clay, the moulding of the bricks in wooden frames, their drying out and firing. The last process was the most captivating of all. There is nothing spookier than a kiln filled with items for firing being sealed with spade-loads of clay, then being lit and fed with fuel for days to keep the furnace at the required temperature.
There was another method, more fuel-efficient than kiln firing but taking longer to complete. It involved building rectangular pyres of thousands of bricks, covering the outside layers with clay and then firing with furnaces lit beneath the stacks. According to their firing expert, entire suburbs were built this way, millions of bricks at a time fired on pyres a quarter of a mile long. The one big advantage of this method was that the bricks could be fired, then used on site, rather than relying on the mass-transportation needed for industrially-fired bricks.
It makes my hair stand on end, the thought of suburban skies alight at night with the glow of millions of baking bricks.
The VF team had, of course, great fun during it all, throwing about bits of building history along with potatoes they baked in the ashes of their pyres. It was all very comfortable, filled with camaraderie and self-congratulations - and totally belie-ing the conditions that brickmakers actually lived in. Readers of Bleak House (Charles Dickens) will recall the squalor and misery of the brick-making family, a strand in the complex plot of the story. This family was lost to that Victorian scourge, alcohol, but in reality all brick-makers lived short lives, succumbing to lung disease from ingesting dust, fumes and other byproducts of their trade. Or they simply dropped dead from years of punishing, unrelenting labour, the average of death being forty. They say civilization was built on sacrifice, a sobering thought on looking about the average, Victorian-built suburb.

Oh dear, no deer...

It is almost a year to the day that I reported on an extraordinary happenstance in the south of England. A group of angry people claimed that they were duped into handing over money to gain entrance to a “Lapland” theme park in Hampshire’s New Forest. When the punters arrived, they found themselves in a muddy field surrounded by wooden builders’ hustings, instead of the expected vista of Arctic snow. The only visible “reindeer” were ponies with antlers attached. According to one punter, the promised Christmas bazaar resembled a car-boot sale. At a level, these people had a grievance. All had young children and many had travelled a long way to the rather remote Lapland, believing it be an off-shoot of two other, more successful Laplands. To make a long story short, the angry punters were reputed to have “rioted” in frustration and Lapland was shut down only two days after it opened.

On reading all this I wondered: why do we go to theme parks, at all? Theme parks and themed events bring a dimension of fun and fantasy into our humdrum lives. We go to a theme park in the same spirit that we go on summer and winter vacations. When we return from afar we pour over our photographs and souvenirs, treasuring them as little pieces of the places we have left behind. The desire for pastiche is as profound as the need to keep possession of a lock of hair from the head of a loved one. Without artifice life would be unthinkable. Without our ability to create artefacts we would still be living in trees. Man has pushed this atavistic longing further and further. It brought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the ancients, gothic cathedrals to medieval citizens and Stourhead to Gloucestershire. In more recent times it has brought us Las Vegas, every Disney park on the planet - and Palm Jumeirah.

Christmas is the ultimate pastiche. We all create it in our own way, every year; in our dwellings, shopping malls, streets, hospitals, schools and factories. Just take one plastic tree strung with baubles, a supply of wine and mince pies, add a few people and – hey presto! Wherever it’s at, it works. To pay a pile of money to travel many miles to find seasonal pastiche in a place that is a take-off of someplace else seems rather sad to me. Of course, it was novelty punters were seeking, rather than the place. – what will we do when the novelties run out, I wonder.