A lesson from post-industrial Kent

摘要

Chatham looks at first like a normal town that has been smashed up and reassembled by a surreal-istically inclined topographical demiurge. The extreme dips and peaks of the land throw up all manner of chaos - usually of a fairly unpleasant sort - such as the road system that holds the place in a tourniquet. For the pedestrian, the result is that an approach from railway to high street, which should be a straight line, entails squeezing along weird half-pavements and crossing a baffling series of traffic islands, with entry points in the most counter-intuitive places possible. Across the brutalist shopping centre and Ahrends Burton & Koralek's law courts, a concrete flyover sweeps as if at random. An art-deco war memorial on a clifflooks over the general absurdity.