Terry Prone: Even water pumps were beautiful in Victorian times. What’s wrong with us?
A vintage water-pump, although it is without function, is a delight now as it would have been when first created.
On a corner of the village close to where I live is a pump.
One of those Victorian jobs with a curved handle and spout, through which, in its functional days, water would issue.
It’s painted green now, which gives one to wonder if, like the post boxes of that period, it was once painted an aggressive scarlet.
Someone, presumably from Fingal County Council, has placed a wooden container in front of and below the spout, the container seasonably filled with wild flowers.
Even though it is without function, it is a delight now as it would have been when first created.
It has that in common with dozens of pumps and drinking fountains for horses scattered throughout the capital city: beautifully designed right from the beginning, staying beautiful for more than a hundred or two hundred years.
Structurally strong, easy to paint or clean, unobtrusive, amenable for adaptation as seats or leaning posts.
Something to outlast the prevalence of the animals for whom the watering stations were originally designed.
Not something a tourist would visit, like the Famine figures on the quays, or become a meeting point like Clery’s clock once was.
Just something that said to the citizens of Dublin, even those of the equine persuasion:
“You matter. What you use should be more than functional. Like a statue or a fountain, it should cause you to pause and appreciate it for its craftsmanship, down all the days.”
Somewhere along the line, it died, that notion of the public space as worthy of careful design and implicit respect for the passerby.
Planning is a careful and complex issue, but does not seem to influence or control the placement of visual insults.
That seems to be left to those who, in theory, re-cycle our waste.
To be trapped behind one of those vehicles picking up domestic waste is to see more ugly wheelies than you ever imagined possible.
Depending on the area and the particular day, they’re grey, black, raucous orange with green on top, blue, or brown. All they have in common is their ugliness and their disorganised street presence.
On my way to the city, I drive though a revolution. That’s what’s happening between Portrane and Donabate on Dublin’s northside. Thousands of homes going up or already built.
Apartment blocks. Single bed homes. Four bed mansions. Some of these already occupied, some waiting to go on sale. Not all of them visible from the road because of great soil berms.
However, the one thing that’s clear is what’s missing. Not one single residence in any of the developments has a recessed area at the front, or a fenced-in place, or a corner with plants for concealment purposes.
Not one has anything to make the weekly public presentation of household rubbish less offensive to everyone involved.
It’s as if all of these appalling wheelies were an inevitability outside either the planning or design processes, despite the fact that they are at least as visible as a car and in most cases, measurably uglier.
Well, in fairness, that should be singular, because the one thing modern wheelie bins do well is contain the stink of garbage. And access to it by rats.
But the very containment of the wheelie as it stank like hell has given rise to a new industry and related advertising which stops just short of poetry.
Attracted by a pretty pastel container in the supermarket, carrying the label “Happy and Blissful”, I discovered the Active Bin Deodoriser, and its lyrical label.
I have to tell you that this was the second ground-breaking, life-changing discovery in the same week, which revealed to me that Mr Price stocks a version of Lynx deodorant scented with Marmite.
I yield to nobody in my appreciation for Marmite, although Marmite-scented armpits might be a challenge. However, let’s concentrate on bin-deodorising, which doesn’t involve Marmite.
“Bin Buddy’s range of holistic fragrance experiences are here to help you not only combat odours, but will leave a fresh scent to evoke your mood,” the miniature wheelie bin told me.
Someone find the copywriter who came up with those lines and give them an award.
Even though I had never thought of bin-sniffing as a way of easing my tensions and “building a sanctuary of serenity and restoration”, could I resist these claims?
No, I could not. I bought a tub. Just as a clinical trial, you know yourself.
I am now serenely confident that any critical bin-sniffer who tries out my black bin will want to come and live with me, so redolent of class is my garbage, thanks to Bin Buddy.
Except, of course, the wheelie itself, lined up alongside its green and brown siblings, is a visual assault on anybody dropping in to my home.
But what about the public spaces dominated and demeaned by the oversized relatives of our individual wheelie bins?
These are the bottle banks and soft clothing catchment banks.
Some of them lurk in the car parks of supermarkets, which is fine, because a car park is a car park, not a place for leisure walking and looking at the scenery.
The difficulty is when — as is the case in my local area — these monstrosities are positioned squarely in the main street, so you have to go on your tippy toes to see the little public park behind them.
The 19th-century architect Louis O’Sullivan laid down the rules for every structural design, saying:
“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.”
You could say that because these banks have holes in which to shove items, they fulfill their function.
You would be wrong — as the constant complaints about the clothing banks prove, although the litter surrounding them may be caused by pick-up trips being too widely spaced out.
Neither in function nor form do these huge excrescences work.
They serve the system, certainly: spare five minutes to observe the collection truck in operation whenever it does visit your area, and you’ll see that, operationally, it works fine. Which is decidedly not the point.
Affronts to the public space, by the way, aren’t confined to the waste business.
A competing example is the metal street art placed around the Toll Bridge some years ago. Ugly to start with. Now rusted into what looks like determined vandalism.
Victorians expected even a public pump to be beautiful. We don’t. What’s wrong with us?
