The railway arches at Peckham Rye, overlooked by the waiting trains, are like huge spilled toyboxes. The trick of perspective is currently reinforced by the massive spotlights waiting outside an exhibition space: they look identical to the plug-in spots used in recessed domestic lighting, only magnified ten times.
Once your eyes adjust to this, you can see that the yard handling steel girders is no more than an unpacked box of Meccano. Looking down, everything else is stacks of building bricks, string, more and more toyboxes.
Suddenly I can’t remember which way round it works: are our toyboxes enthusiastic microcosms of the grown-up world, or are our factories and shops in the end wistful recreations of those idealised ones of our childhood?
No comments:
Post a Comment