Though little written about – a bit terra incognita for the Puxi hugging Shanghai foreign press corps – Yangpu (formerly Yangtzsepoo) has seen massive destruction in the last couple of years – road widening for EXPO as well as the relentless march of the bulldozer in Shanghai. Many intentional slums have been created across Yangpu in the last few years – roofs destroyed etc – to encourage clearance. Yangpu is architecturally important – a historic working class district that was the ‘Eastern Division’ of the International Settlement.
There is a lot of traditional and, unique to Shanghai, lilong and shikumen housing as well as some western style buildings and, perhaps most importantly, Yangpu is the repository of the majority of the remainder (much has obviously gone already) of Shanghai industrial architecture. While industrial architecture is increasingly valued in other places there is absolutely no value attached to it in Shanghai. Given the low media profile of Yangpu, the relative low incomes of the majority of residents and the low priority (if any) place don working class residential property and industrial architecture by what passes for preservation in Shanghai it has also seemed to me most likely that Yangpu will be completely cleared in a Ground Zero type movement with nothing whatsoever preserved.
Now according to Shanghaiist and Le Monde things have turned unsurprisingly ugly as they often do when people are a little slow to move! The main disputes seem to be around Tongbei Road, formerly Thorburn Road. The street was named after William Thorburn, the original Trustee of the Riding Course in 1854 and from a tea trading family from Leith in Scotland. Thorburn came to Shanghai in 1847, was a prominent member of the Municipal Council and Chairman between 1855 and 1856. Thorburn was a partner in Hargreaves & Co. as well as several other major trading companies including the long established opium dealers Blenkin, Rawson & Co.
I believe the dispute is, as usual, over compensation, or the lack of it to be precise.
A slightly strange article on the history of Sinan Road (formerly Rue Massenet) on CNNGo’s Shanghai site. Sort of a list of rather odd bullet points and one solitary photo. I’m a little worried about CNNGo and what’s happening over there. Phrases like the following are a bit of a mouthful and, I assume the editors realise, are politically massively loaded:
“After Liberation, the rightists and the foreigners ran away or were given the boot.”
Fine if you’re a Maoist or some sort of unreconstructed communist – a little strange in the mouth of CNN, all that Liberation and those Rightists!!!!??? Are CNN now Jiefang types fearing Capitalist Roaders and chasing foeign capitalists out of town?
Can a rogue sleeper from Xinhua’s 1967 ‘infiltrate the western media’ team have infiltrated the editorial department at the once harmless CNNGo?? I think we should be told…
When it is announced in a novel of intrigue, bad goings on and violent murder that a character once lived in ‘…Shanghai, before the war’, you know that character is going to turn out to be interesting one way or another – invariably mad, bad and dangerous to know as well as sexually loose and probably with a mild perversion or two and a whole closet of secrets. When a bunch of characters have Shanghai pasts, well…and so Elizabeth Wilson’s War Damage, a tale of murder and intrigue in barely post-war London is a great read with some regrettable and shady Shanghai pasts thrown in. As ever blurb below and also a plug for Wilson’s excellent previous novel The Twilight Hour, which I also enjoyed immensely.
London in the aftermath of WW2 is a beaten down, hungry place, so it’s no wonder that Regine Milner’s Sunday house parties in her Hampstead home are so popular. Everyone comes to Reggie’s on a Sunday: ballet dancers and cabinet ministers, left-over Mosleyites alongside flamboyant homosexuals like Freddie Buckingham. And when Freddie turns up dead on the Heath one Sunday night there is no shortage of suspects. War Damage is both a high-class thriller and a wonderful evocation of Britain staggering back to its feet after the privations of the War. And in Regine Milner it possesses a truly memorable heroine. She’s full of secrets — just what did happen in Shanghai before the war? — and surprises — Reggie’s living proof that sexual experimentation was alive and well long before the sixties.
London, 1947: it’s freezing winter in the shabby, bomb-damaged city. Young socialite Dinah Wentworth, a bright, innocent newcomer to the Fitzrovia scene, becomes embroiled in a dark scandal when she discovers the corpse of surrealist artist Titus Mavor. Not wanting to explain her reasons for being at Mavor’s flat that evening, she decides against reporting her grim discovery to the police. But her silence has terrible consequences. Her husband?s friend, Colin Harris, is linked to the crime and arrested on suspicion of murder. Dinah realises someone is trying to frame him and knows she must uncover the real villain before Harris is hanged. Set against the background of the Cold War, post-war shortages, and the struggling British film industry, Elizabeth Wilson’s elegant noir vividly evokes the fashions and politics of a bohemian community flourishing in defiance of austerity. The Twilight Hour is a riveting thriller with a corkscrew twist.
Pursuant of nothing except the previous post on Frankfurt’s trams and plane trees I will note and show a couple of pictures of Frankfurt’s Kennedyallee district which I’ve had the opportunity to stay in several times regularly and come to like a lot. It is close to the River Main and the bar and restaurant district of Sachsenhausen. It is also an architecturally fascinating area of villas, museums and wonderful apartment buildings – so worth noting on this blog as a deviation I reckon. I always stay at the Villa Kennedy and, while I’m loathe to ever really recommend hotels for various reasons, this is a good one. There’s more details on the Kennedyallee area here and better pictures than mine.
Those pictures of Frankfurt’s trams reminded me that I’ve also moaned about Shanghai’s increasingly arbitrary approach to its plane trees (platanus x hispanica), especially good at creating shade oxygen while tolerating water deficiency well (i.e. they’re an environmentally very good tree). Though they seem to be reasonably well protected (though far from universally – a couple of dozen recently got down around the hideous redevelopment close to Fuxing Road and Maoming South Road) in the former French Concession and the External Roads Area (huxi), a great many have been uprooted, junked and lost in Hongkou, Tilanqiao and throughout Yangpu (where the tourists and the foreign hacks don’t go!). A great shame – as argued before, trees are history as well as buildings.
So great to see, as I posted a while back, New York consciously planting a lot of new plane trees on the lower west side (see here). As we’re mentioning cities that seem to look after their plane trees better than the authorities of Hongkou, Tilanqiao and Yangpu I’ll give a mention to Frankfurt and the well maintained stock of planes that line the southern banks of the River Main along the pathway (now there’s another idea for the authorities of Hongkou, Tilanqiao and Yangpu- why not open up the northern bank of the Yangpu to the public rather than allowing the Port of Shanghai group to control all of it just for themselves and their property investments?).
Part two of the weekend’s double bill of tram systems!! Yippee. Yesterday Rotterdam; today Frankfurt – again, apologies for the quality of the pics again – extreme cold and very early hour combined. These trams are pictured in the area of the rather swish and architecturally interesting Kennedyallee area of Frankfurt (I’ll post some pics of rather good period architecture from Kennedyallee some time) near the south bank of the River Main.
So, to feed the eyes of the tram hungry who live in sadly tram-deprived environments today’s pictures are of Rotterdam’s stylish trams (apologies for quality – it was a very cold and a very early December morning) and tomorrow, wait for it (but please don’t hold your breath), Frankfurt’s trams!!
It’s been years since I read Ella Maillart’s Forbidden Journey and then when in Paris earlier this year I wandered into the marvellous Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank. Pressed for time I didn’t know where to start but knew I only had about ten minutes before a meeting to ‘browse’ and also needed a book for the Eurostar back to London. I wandered to the back of the shop and there, sitting alone on a shelf, was a battered but rather beautiful copy of Forbidden Journey for the very reasonable sum of euros9.
It is of course a great companion to Peter Fleming’s One’s Company, his account of the same journey. Maillart got annoyed with Fleming for rushing along so at to get back to Scotland for the start of the Grouse Season, Fleming (who had no sense of smell or taste) ate anything and Maillart photographed everything. Indeed they neither fell into bed together nor shot each other but remarkably remained great friends.
The edition I found is from 1938 from a publisher I’d never heard of before – The Albatross Library. But Albatross Library books do pop up now and again. They were a 1930s series which included about 100 works of literature, plus the Albatross Crime Club. Some have suggested the Penguin imprint, Allen Lane, nicked the biord logo from Albatross who did it first. The interesting thing is that Albatross was an English language publisher based in Leipzig, Paris and Bologna. They printed a lot of great authors, mostly English but obviously others such as Maillart (Swiss). I think I might start a collection of Albatross’s to go with my Penguins!
