The desire to own what can never be owned
I promise I was not drunk when I wrote this
Yesterday, on a London day to meet my agent and editor for lunch, I made my first visit to Battersea Power Station since its transformation. My first visit to Battersea Power Station at all. For those not in the know, this weird and wonderful upside-down table of a building sits on the Thames and, until recently, had lain abandoned for most of our collective lives, having ceased operation the year I was born.
Here is my confession. I’ve had a long, secret love affair with this building. The railway passes right by it, and on my inbound train to Victoria station, I would choose the side of the train that would give me the best view. Even if it meant spending the preceeding hour’s journey battling bright, blazing sun, that was tuppence to pay for the twenty-second chance to take in those six million bricks. And on the way home, I would choose the opposite side, pressing my nose to the window. I remember once realising that nobody else was looking. They were all staring at their Blackberries or first-gen iPhones, rustling the pages of newspapers, probably having passed the forlorn, forgotten structure so often that they forgot it themselves.
As for me, I was in the midst of a fully raging crush. There was something so lonely and beautiful in the way it stood neglected on the side of the Thames. F*ck you* it seemed to say to the phallic towers forming in the near distance, all greedy for attention with their flashy shapes and facades. F*ck you it said as it crumbled, as birds made nests in its ruined walls. It was no longer productive in the way London demands. It held its own, an outlier, a relic of our industrial past. A lazy, wasted piece of real estate. Go you, I thought.
I would fantasise about breaking in with my camera. Who would I have to bribe. At the time, I was forging a career in photography, and my London days would always include an exhibition or a gallery, a wander through its streets, my pocket heavy with a spare lens. I looked for light everywhere, training my eye to notice what I had never seen before. I was drawn to the battered building in Battersea with its broken windows just as I was repelled by the honeyed money dripping through and gentrifying London’s streets.
There was always talk of redevelopment, but that seemed far off into the future. I was in my mid-twenties then. The future was far off. What even was the future. Back and forth I went on that train line, long enough gaps between trips meaning I never got bored, the building dazzling me with its vast wastefulness each time.
And then I stopped taking that train. I moved to a different place. I went from being solely responsible for myself to being a mum of three, and gradually I picked up a camera less often and instead picked up a pen. Things changed without me noticing. A choice made on one day altered that of the next, and so the colours of my life began to shift.
Fast-forward to yesterday, fifteen years on. Finally I got to explore a place I’d always wanted to visit. It was not how I imagined.
All that abandoned loneliness has been eradicated with a rooftop garden and designer stores. A tasteful architect refurb has kitted out a building that stood testament to industry from another age with…bricks-and-mortar shops?….surely also industry from another age? Don’t mind me, I’m not much of a shopper so perhaps that’s just my cynicism coming out. But in the modern age when the act of physical shopping seems virtually (ha!) dead, it’s confusing to find regeneration based around an old-fashioned pastime. The truth is we live in screens these days, not buildings.
The left side of my brain applauds the regeneration, relieved that this beaut has not been bulldozed and replaced with tower blocks. Apparently 1.75 million bricks were specially made and replaced. That’s dedication. The inside, if a little dull and consumerist for my tastes, shows the bare bones of the building and is in keeping with its industrial roots.
And yet. The right side of my brain is selfish and bitter. It wanted this lover all to itself. It alone gazed from a train window while everyone else looked down. In my head lives a kind of ownership, a snobbish I knew them before they were famous vibe that, I hate to admit, I have about many things in life. I loved this building. I dreamt of exploring it alone, not with people who walk staring down at screens. I wanted to lean against those decaying walls and feel the history, not read about it on billboards as shoppers and North Face bags get in the way. Of course I would never have been able to explore it alone so this is all irrational and crazy, but then so are dreams themselves. They too live on the right side of the brain.
But perhaps this reaction is not so irrational. Enter left brain, stage left:
I’m not going to compare myself to Battersea Power Station (that would be weird, even for me), but….there is something about the change in this building that mirrors the change in me.
I don’t take that train anymore. It leads to a different hometown. I am no longer footloose in London the way I once was, with few ties forcing me home. Now I hold the lives of several other people. I am responsible, a word and state that always made me want to run. I no longer feel that way (I tell myself), perhaps forced by circumstance, but it has always felt more natural to me to be wandering and wondering, than be a leader who must know.
Fifteen years is short enough to remember and long enough for nostalgia. I stood outside that regenerated building and looked up at the train passing by, remembering who I used to be. I thought about the number of times I looked down from that train at this exact spot, where fifteen years later a restaurant would stand in which I would meet my agent and editor for lunch to discuss my next Penguin novel. Mid-20s Jodie would not have believed it.
We often take ownership of public places in our private heads. If you kissed someone you loved goodbye in Trafalgar Square, there would always be a piece of you left on that empty plinth. Each time you saw it in life, films, books, you would remember kissing that person and it would take you back to a time that would never be again. It would no longer be just Trafalgar Square, but the setting of your life. Every change in layout or flow of traffic or teeny tiny alteration would push you and your memory further into the past. You would grumble about the changes, however beneficial they may be, for reasons that have nothing to do with the place itself. You don’t own those acres of grey stone, but in your heart, they’re yours.
I do this with faces too. I’ve (accidentally…) trained the algorithm to show me reels of nineties Leo, whose face I plastered all over my bedroom wall. The Hollywood man does not own that face. I do. And that is why a little piece of me dies inside each time its modern 50yo iteration pops up, a face now resembling James Lipton far more than the floppy-haired heart-shape that stared at me Claire Danes through a fish tank. Is it really almost 30 years on? How can this be? *stamps feet* No, I refuse to believe it.
It’s time, bitch, as Jesse Pinkman would say. That’s the rub. That’s the bee in my bonnet, the itch I can’t scratch. I will never stop time. It steals everything: buildings, views, faces. It’s not even about the buildings or faces. It’s far more narcissistic than that. Their changes are simply a reminder of my own. I will never own the ticking of the dial or stop time from pickpocketing the moments of my life. Time has made true all of the words of the forty-somethings who said ‘ah enjoy it’ when they saw me heading out in a short dress to dance. I’m still partial to a short dress and definitely still in love with dancing, but I’m the forty-something now. I’m responsible. The future arrived, as I hope it does for a good while yet.
I will never own time. That person passing by on the railway was already in a state of flux, grabbing twenty seconds of staring before the millions of seconds to come would transform all she knew. I loved that building for it’s f*ck you nature, for its ability to stand alone, but change was coming for both of us.
Even if I wanted to once more take that train out of Victoria station, I could never enjoy that twenty-second gaze again. A tower block now stands between the building and railway. I’d probably get ten seconds, tops.
*I feel like a fraud censoring swearwords here when I don’t in real life but I think my mum reads my Substack so the least I can give her is asterisks in my f***s.