Photoblog re-vamped

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Last night I completed the painfully slow process of setting up a Picasa web photo account for my city centre redevelopment picture blog. This service has the advantage of easily displaying larger photos than I've been able to show on the Parish web pages over the past nine months. It's far better to view and much easier to manage. In fact, I'd not posted any new pages of pictures taken since July. Time has slipped by pretty quickly with the research project grabbing spare time, and then convalescing.

Creating a Picasa site and managing it is easy. It's uploading that takes time and patience, also finding the original pictures archived, editing them to a decent size so that pages don't render at a snail's pace, and uploading them, five minutes for a batch of five. It's all had to be fitted in around routine tasks, with a bit of burning midnight oil towards the end when the prospect of completion became tempting.

Anyway, now it's done, and pictures from yesterday are up there for the world to see. I still enjoy the buzz of watching the slide-show of demolition and now construction unfolding. It's hugely colourful and visually dramatic, given the great machines used each in its brightly coloured livery, set against the colour of local soil and the sky in all its variations. This is more my kind of urban magic than glitzy street signs. Having said that, we're promised a whole new make-over of the Christmas lights around the St John's and on St Mary Street this year. That may prove worthy of the technical challenge involved in getting good pictures of them.

In my appraisal chat with the Archdeacon I spoke about how I spend a lot more time looking than I do reading books these days, because there is so much to be read in the landscape, in the cityscape, in peoples' behaviour, their faces and appearance. The job of looking. The gratitude for having eyes that still work well and notice things. Whether I'm driving or a passenger, I'm always first to spot the bird of prey on a fence post or hovering. I've always been like that, and it's strange really that music rather than visual art has been my choice channel of creativity. The 'grace of seeing things whole' Pope Gregory talked about in the sixth century - uniting the detail and the big picture. In this age of science and technology we have ways of seeing into the past and into the heart of the cosmos our ancestors couldn't have dreamt of.

But will we let God's creation teach us how to be better people, more reverent, more compassionate? On times, I wonder.

Townscape without captions

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At last, the blue painted hoarding around the churchyard has some large prints of children's art work on it, the winners of a competition run by 'Keep Cardiff Tidy' in Cardiff primary schools. Although they are large posters, they float in an expanse of blue, so long and tall is the site hoarding. So far, three winning entries appear, and the best of them is duplicated at either end. All contain messages to encourage people to bin their litter. I wish they'd been as large as the full hoarding sized posters mounted by the SD2 developers (in English and in Welsh) trumpeting about their sponsorship. It's a glaring anomaly, not exactly conveying the intended message.

I heard today also that there's a delay on producing the posters to cover all the expanse of blue hoarding around the construction sites - posters meant to inform the public about what's going on behind, and what the outcomes will be. This merely makes it a lot more difficult to get the public on-site, make all citizens into interested spectator participants at least, rather than hoi polloi to whose social and cultural environment huge things can be done without the courtesy of a decent explanation.

There seems to be a lack of will on the part of SDII's high level of leadership to understand how it would be in their best interests not to leave Cardiffians in the dark, to compound their apathy and disinterest. These are the people who'll be needed eventually as loyal shoppers, maybe employees. They don't need to be convinced that none of this is for them at such an early stage.

Those at a high level concerned with the interface between the development enterprise and the public are neglecting to ensure that good ideas are followed through with efficient progress chasing, so that deadlines are met, so that staff on the ground are not constently left apologising for the failure of suppliers to deliver or people higher up to issue timely permissions. Not enough energy, nor, for all I know, money has been invested in selling the SDII vision of the future to those who'll have to live with it.

The construction companies plan well, work hard, chase progress and may well finish ahead of time. Delays cost. There are penalty clauses in contracts for failures to deliver to deadlines on which others depend. I wonder if those contracted to take on public relations aspects of the project have deadline penalty clauses, high level progress chasers and trouble shooters hounding them? It certainly doesn't look like it, judging by the lack of progress I am able to observe from the sidelines. I feel sorry for the people I know and see every day with worried looks, apologies and excuses to offer, rather than smiles of satisfaction at a successful achievement. At a most interesting time in Cardiff's history, we have a townscape without captions. Without them when we need them most.

Ashes and images

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I don't much like Mondays, because Sunday generally leaves me feeling wiped out. For me it's recovery day,starting with an unashamed lie-in plain and simple. I have 'God on Mondays' in the afternoon during term time, and I need not to feel jaded for that. Not this week, after half term holiday however. This week, an early start. A nine fifteen whole school assembly to celebrate Ash Wednesday five days late, with a simple ceremony of ashing for teachers and children, together with Fr Roy Doxsey, my colleague and neighbouring pastor in Adamsdown.

Some of the younger children looked a bit uncertain and apprehensive during the ashing. The older ones, who have experienced it before and are well instructed, were happy to follow their teachers' example. It made me wonder if this was altogether the right thing to be doing with a whole school group. I think I need to do some 'educational' homework on the age of reception for activities like this, which, when all is said and done, are a bit arcane by the side of other ceremonies we perform.

Later I took my camera with me to do a circuit of the building sites in the centre, continuing my photo-logging of progress made. A week after the car park closures, people are still driving in to try and access them, still unaware that the new replacement ones have opened. I wonder if the promised signage has turned up?

Talking of signage, the expanse of hoarding surrounding the churchyard renovation site was due to be covered with blown up versions of children's drawings on an anti-litter theme for the duration of the work. After a month of them being up, the hoardings are still clear blue paint - even the town's graffiti squad seem to be stricken with indolence. I received two different emails last week promising the posters would be up there today. At four thirty, the hoardings were still blue.

I'm impressed at the co-ordinated progress being made by both demolition and construction teams, not to mention the good morale and confident pleasure in the faces of some of the workers I've met. The people doing the community liaison and public relations side of events just don't seem to be able to deliver as efficiently. They're nice people, but often seem to be anxious, let down by others in the chain of command. Some people higher in the pecking order seem not so interested in pursuit of excellence, in keeping would be future shoppers on-side, as they are in building shops. Strange really.

One nice thing, I bumped into Peter Blake the official site photographer for Bovis Construction, kitted out with hard hat and florescent jacket, and free to access all areas with supervision. We compared notes about our pleasure in all the visual elements of a big engineering project, and joked about our different roles. I told him how jealous I was of his photo opportunities, also about my photo-blog.
He said he wasn't web-publishing. I hope he gets the opportunity to do something similar with his pictures, so that they don't just end up being seen as décor on a shareholders' report. What's going on behind the blue hoardings needs to be valued more widely.

Scores of people and machines are now at work under the skies come rain or shine - vital stages in wealth creation, not mention social engineering. The brown soil, the bright colours of the equipment, and the backdrop of buildings all add up to some unusual beauty, even surrealistic, sinister de-constructive images of demolition are food for thought. I look at them, and see complex human creativity on a big scale, designers, engineers, team workers, and a public interface with the city about its business - taxi drivers, deliverymen, business 'suits', porters, hawkers, stall holders, druggies furtively looking to score, mums dragging kids around, newspaper vendors, old men sipping from styrofoam cup at the Hayes Island snack bar - people all relating to each other - workers and those like me watching others work, trying to uphold its value by looking, photographing and thinking about what it all means.

Is this what contemplative life in the heart of this city is all about?

Overheard on the Hayes

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"It's disgusting .... How can they do this .... It's such a waste .... It's the Council's fault ... No, it's that Assembly's fault .... "

"When I walk around here, suddenly I don't know where I am any longer."

While I am busy standing in awe of great mechanical monsters chewing the concrete platforms and pillars of Oxford House to dust and transportable rubble, I hear comments from passers-by un-fascinated by the logistics of demolition like me, shocked at this assault on their sense of a familiar urban landscape. It's been happening for many months, but people are so entrenched in routine ways of negotiating themselves through the city centre to buy, park their cars and catch their buses, that any change which eventually has impact upon them is disturbing, disorienting. Older, rather than the younger among citizens, I guess.

Many of grumblers were growing up when the first construction phase of the St David's centre cleared out almost all the remaining city centre residential quarter that Hitler's bombers hadn't destroyed. There was prolonged open resistance to the project, attracting public interest and debate, but in the end the developers' arguments prevailed. The new building project was finally completed. Generations since then grew used to the benefits of a new city centre shopping centre, with added parking and office facilities thrown in.

However, the same generations of people lived long enough to see an environment destroyed which they may once have resented or resisted, but have long gotten used to, such is the nature of changing times. They don't understand why it's happening now any more than last time. They feel as powerless to shape the course of events now as then, despite all the best intentions of City Government and Development Corporations to make their intentions known, and persuade people of the benefits of their decisions.

Despite costly efforts made in public relations exercises, the level of common understanding about what is needed to ensure a city lives and has a future,is still poor. Consumer culture doesn't encourage anyone to think broadly or freely, nor to exercise understanding or judgement about what's in the common interest. The world is still divided between the doers and the done to, the haves and the have-nots. We're still a long way from the 'just, participatory and sustainable society' we need to be to face a future in which we need to pull together against the threat of ecological catastrophe.

During my melancholic musings, I began to wonder what it must have been like back in the middle 1880's, when my giant of a predecessor Canon Charles Thompson 'redeveloped' St John's church, adding a north and south aisle, moving the ancient south porch out by thirty feet into the churchyard, demolishing and rebuilding the chancel, removing the recently-installed (i.e. 35 years earlier) stained glass window from the sanctuary to the east wall of a newly built vestry, expanding and transforming the 'look' of a church that hadn't changed that much over the previous four hundred years.

On top of that Thompson agreed that the City could dig a path through the churchyard. After a hundred years, the church only recently agreed to the making of a second path, now in progress. He would have been backed by the church officers and council, a few dozen at the most, among thousands of churchgoers. What did they all think when builders moved in? What did they say? I'm not sure if anyone recorded anything by way of protest or criticism of the Canon's ambitious plans, but I'd love to know.

I just wonder if 'disgusted' of Whitchurch or Roath in those days was overheard by anyone like me or whether people kept their thoughts to themselves and waited to see if they could live with the outcome. Whatever you feel, it's clear that we've been here before, albeit, not on such a grand scale.

Disturbing images

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For the past few days, I've had enough time to get on with producing the fourth edition of 'Capital Ideas',a newsletter about the city centre from my viewpoint as an urban missioner. It's a good three months behind schedule, as a result of the extra 'terminal care' demands of the Benefice of Central Cardiff, but my three weeks away from Cardiff did me the world of good. I was able to tackle necessary writing and layout tasks with gusto, and enjoyed the task greatly.

Naturally at this time, when redevelopment work gathers pace, there's much to tell about what's going on, to 'Capital Ideas' readers across the diocese and the city. I'm often out and about with my camera recording visually extraordinary moments (I must find time to get a photo narrative website up and running) and it's irritating to find that when I write about what I've seen, the matching photograph may not be there among the hundreds I've taken. What's eye-catching and what's relevant is not always the same. So, make myself a 'shopping list' of images to match the text I've put together, and try to capture them next time I'm out.

With this as context, it was a co-incidence when, yesterday evening, I was making my way back to church to collect my bicycle for the journey home, when I spotted of one of the demolition machines at work on the Oxford House site - they seem to operate in bouts of activity with long pauses in between - so I stopped to take a photo. It was using its long claw like arm to pick up pieces of wood and metal and deposit them in a giant skip. As I was getting the camera into focus for a shot, it picked up what I soon realised was a tree trunk shorn of its branches, but still attached to its roots.

Earlier in the week a colleague remarked on the sudden disappearance of several trees from the northernmost end of the demolition site. I'd just assumed that a team from the City Parks and Gardens outfit had been in and removed them, perhaps to a better home, since they were healthy well established specimens, not so big that moving them would have caused them serious injury. Now, it was evident that nothing of the kind had happened. Indeed, I noticed that bark had been stripped off the tree trunk in places, in a manner that implied the tree had been dragged from the ground by some machine's powerful claw, swiftly and efficiently.

Now I've seen the master plans, so I know the uprooted trees are to be replaced. I don't recall what if any proposals were made to take out and re-cycle the existing trees that could be removed. I must presume that somebody somewhere evaluated the situation and made a decision based on what would be the most efficient procedure. If they were worth saving and could be saved, somebody more conscientious and capable than I would have insisted on it. So why do I go on about it at length?

In my last posting I mentioned, without knowing anything about the fate of the trees, how demolition machines of this kind (Made by Caterpillar Corporation of Peoria USA) have been used by the Israeli military in Palestine to demolish Arab homes, AND to uproot thousands of olive trees, some of them hundreds of years old.

The sight of an uprooted tree in the grip of a demolition machine outrages me. It reminds me of the proud Palestinian farmers I met when I stayed there two months in 2000, rendered helpless by the violence meted out by both sides to no good purpose, left angry and quietly despairing of humanity. And it only gets worse for them.

These vehicles remain impressive as pieces of modern technology - they show what the machine-human interface can achieve. But, they are tainted by what men, notably armed men do with them in the Holy Land. Destroying homes and communities with them is bad enough, ecocide is another. It's the solemn guarantee that nobody wins.

Invent such capable machines, and somebody will work out how to misuse them. Do the manufacturers ever think of things like that? We can't undo what's been done. Will there be enough future for us to try and change things for the better?

Monster machines at work

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Demolition of the Oxford House shopping centre and office block on the Hayes has now begun in earnest with the arrival of even larger machines with even longer articulated arms and threatening looking pincers attached for chewing through walls and girders. The largest of them stands fifteen feet high and can reach up 60-70 feet. Yet their operators can manipulate them with great dexterity and what seems like delicacy in the way they can home in on, and pick up quite a small piece of wood or metal, as well as pull things apart. I was most impressed by one operator who made his machine pick up a long plank right in the middle, and then use it like a broom to push a bizarre mix of concrete and bricks plus polystyrene foam bits in their millions from some discarded insulation material.

If only I could stop myself from thinking about the use of these self-same machines (offspring of the Caterpillar Corporation of Peoria USA) in the Holy Land, where the Israeli Army have been using them to destroy Palestinian Arab homes and uproot olive orchards (deemed a 'security risk'), since long before I was there in 2000.

But, back in Cardiff, at the same time, scaffolders are at work creating temporary platforms up to the highest points of the external surfaces of the buildings, section by section, to allow access to window frames that are to be removed piece by piece. It came as a surprise to see in one of the gutted sections already exposed to the elements, washbasin water pipes hanging off the tiled wall of a toilet, and the hot air drier still there on the wall opposite, probably adjudged not worth recycling.

On the site between Bute Terrace and Bridge Street, cleared before Christmas, where the new John Lewis department store will be constructed, there's now a forest of huge mobile cranes up to two hundred feet in height. Attached to them is specialised core drilling equipment, linked to hydraulic rams, which push cylindrical steel tubes into the ground to a depth of 40 feet or more, as soil is removed. It's an great piece of modern engineering technology, accurate and efficient able to deliver an impressive rate of progress with little noise, compared to the pile drivers of yester-year. Thousands must be inserted around the perimeter in order to contain the empty space which excavation of the basement parking and service areas will produce in the year ahead.

Wherever I can, I take photographs, which I'd like to publish to illustrate what's happening as it happens. Yesterday I met one of the project managers when I was out and about. He told me about the webcam mounted on the roof of the Alto Lusso apartment block on the South side of the site, to give an up to the minute overview to site supervisors. I was told that the URL of this will soon be made public, so that we can all share in watching progress unfold day to day. I hope to be able to bring that link to you soon.

It's pleasing the way some of the workers, when they see the cleric with the camera, enjoy a brief chat when they are taking a break. The older, more experienced ones are quite excited about participating in such a high tech building project. I confess to wondering what they felt about the presence on this site of a ladies', as well as a gents' loo among the stack of portakabins that serves them as office, canteen and stores - just where the checkout in Toys 'R Us used to stand - but I didn't ask.

In the lunch time period, the area is full of guys (and gals too) in hard hats and hi-viz jackets queuing with all the rest to buy lunch, making the most of the fact that it isn't raining at the moment. It makes a change from business suits and overcoats. Retailers, apart from the fast food outlets are noticing the impact on trade, with the downturn in the number of regular shoppers. Yet, it'd like to think that the centre could be flooded by Dads and their offspring at weekends and half terms, all come to see the monster machines in action.

Wales play Ireland this Sunday afternoon. It'll be a huge challenge, not only for the hospitality industry locally, but also for retailers and others hoping to make the sporting event worthwhile to accompanying families as well as fans. The Park and Ride schemes are up and running, but the new surface car park in Adam Street is not yet open to visitors, and won't be until the multi storey parks due for demolition have been officially closed (they have already been deserted by the punters despite being open). As yet there's been no success in getting a shuttle service organised to link the Adam Street parking to the shops, despite a year's worth of calls to ensure this happens. On some fronts, there's impressive progress. On others, it seems very jerky indeed.