Old but Modern, and Isolation

I ventured into town with only vague intentions; to observe, to feel, to think. I took my camera but put no pressure on myself to use it. Always finding the wealth and grandeur of central Cambridge too full of cliché and post-card tropes, I visited the adjacent area of the Grafton Centre, an eighties shopping mall development that was built at the expense of bulldozing an area known as the “kite” comprised largely of Victorian terraced housing and extremes of socio-economic-status. Ironically since the covered shopping mall in the centre of Cambridge was re-developed in the 2010’s to update it from the 60’s semi-brutalist concrete incarnation that was Lion Yard to become the cathedral of consumerism which is in the same location but now the Grand Arcade, the Grafton Centre and it’s feeder streets are the second choice and now earmarked for redevelopment once again for residential and office space.

The Grafton Centre itself that had once housed Debenhams is perhaps now only 50% occupied. Burleigh street feeds the main entrance from one direction and includes a large retail unit, once the temporary site for John Lewis while development of the Grand Arcade forced its relocation but now the home of Primark. The remainder of the smaller units are almost exclusively charity shops, a revolving door of struggling independent cafes, nail salons and hairdressers.

Fitzroy Street, the other pedestrianised shopping arcade that leads up to and ostensibly feeds into the main entrance of the Grafton Centre once housed a Habitat store in a most decadent building comprised of two mezzanine floors (the first and second) that in a rectangular building flank a central oval cut-out of perhaps twenty by ten meters; pure luxury in a city with some of the most expensive property prices in the world. The site now houses a discount retailer, just as the rest of the street (aside from the independent and chain café’s) is populated by used electronic/video game shops, vape retailers, and phone repair and resale shops. Two local institutions have remained a reassuring constant on Fitzroy Street throughout the changes of the past two decades, the family owned and run Greengrocer’s Stall, and the mobile hotdog stand. Like millennia old rocks in a Thomas Hardy poem, they are silent witnesses to the landscape changing around them.

Being economically inhibited but also enjoying a bargain and providing items with a second life, I always visit if I can the several charity shops on Burleigh Street when I’m in this part of town. I like objects that have character and implicit stories but, in the past, have also found high quality clothes barely used that fit and that I couldn’t afford or justify buying otherwise. No such luck this time although it is fun to look anyway. After my hypothetical retail therapy, I decided to settle outside Café Nero on Fitzroy Street with a coffee. It was chilly but bright and I was warm enough in my black woollen over coat and as I wanted to both observe the world pass and smoke while enjoying my coffee it was necessary to sit outside. As is required by my field of research I tried to keep gender in mind throughout my observation. But if anything struck me at all on this front it was different the real world and real people are to the idealised and aspirational norms that various media surround and bombard us with. Baggy, inexpensive, figure-disguising clothes on both sexes and even couples together were more common than clothes that emphasised either sex. Visually and photographically there was little of interest and there were only a couple of moments were I was tempted to pull out my camera, both of which bore similarities and consistent with my belief that photography is not primarily a tool for capturing external truths but rather a practise that reveals the “truth” of the photographer, an always subjective rather than objective medium despite claims by some that it can be otherwise.

The first picture that I didn’t take was of a delightful older couple, probably wealthy enough, slim and slow in their movement. Walking arm-in-arm, he caried a woven shopping basket with the handle over the crook of his right-angle-held left arm while she on his right held onto his left arm for support on that side and relied on a walking stick on the other. To me there was something delightful about this simple, ordinary partnership. Similarly, the second picture I didn’t take contained the same sort of romantic domesticity but was much more potent visually.

Another older man, perhaps in is seventies gain walked away from me down the slight incline of Fitzroy Street, away from the crass architecture of the Grafton Centre towards the mature trees and green public spaces of New Square and Christ’s Piece. Black felt beret on a bowed head, rounded, hunched back, and a royal blue (fishermen’s cotton windbreak?) top garment, black trousers and a bulging royal blue cotton tote bag in each hand. The image was delightful in its depiction of gentle domestic masculinity and embodied a chromatic equilibrium that seemed to stimulate my reticular activation system as thereafter I kept seeing the same shade of blue where I might not have noticed it before. Beyond this aesthetic reverie though, I also could not help but wonder if this man had consciously chosen bags-for-life in a blue that matched the blue of his windbreak.

My old blue man with blue bags resonated with me. He made me think of when I had a black and white motorbike, I went to some trouble to ensure I had black and white leathers. In turn I thought about how in either case the implication was the sensitivity to an outside observer, a phenomenon and experience generally considered to be female. And while there are many of examples of men explicitly embracing subcultures that celebrate their aestheticism it is more generally outsourced to the objects they possess and not reified in more personal expression that risks alienation form the club of masculinity.

The other take away from my observation and contemplation was the degree to which I am isolated. The sense I had of being an observer, an outsider was not from a position of superiority but certainly outside looking in, and not from a position of judgement but rather envy for the people with and amongst other people connected and connecting going about their ordinary day-to-day business. I did used to have that, the connectedness but it somehow slipped through my hands and now I’m not sure how or if I can retrieve it.