Architecture and Photography and Bognor and Regis.

I can state with complete certainty that I know nothing of any worth about any of the subjects I've typed in the title of this posting.
But, like all self-righteous lunatics, that isn't going to stop me displaying my astonishing ignorance.

As I posted here, I have become interested in photography and spend most of my days wandering around the local area snapping anything I find interesting and many more things I have no interest in at all.
Soil for instance.
The suprising aspect of my newly discovered past time is that I truly don't care what anybody else thinks about the pictures I take which is liberating in a way I can only describe as 'heady'.

Over the past weeks I've noticed I seem to favour taking pictures of buildings and particular types of buildings.
Usually white, usually cube shaped, usually built sometime around the 1930's.
Art Deco I suppose.
There's quite a few of them around Bognor Regis and even more in the larger towns around here.
It strikes me as odd that they still seem to look 'modern', optimistic even, after around 80 years.
Most have had their Crittall Windows replaced with uPVC double glazing units but, having lived in a flat with poorly maintained Crittall Windows, I feel the owners probably did the right thing even though it removes one of the key features of the style.

Of course I've had to lay off photographing the local examples.
I might start making the owners anxious when they notice me outside taking pictures again so last week I turned my attention Bognor Regis's town centre.

As with most towns and cities the interesting bits aren't at street level, the real character is to be found from the first floor up.
Suddenly the town stops being a boring identikit shopping opportunity and begins to reveal it's history and, dare I say it, beauty.
There are some astonishing flights of fancy around Bognor.
Delicate cast-iron balconies, enamel work and leaded canopies lots of different styles from lots different eras clashing and higgledy-piggledy.
Bognor Regis, along with most towns, has lost many interesting buildings, I know, I've seen pictures of them in the local museum (don't get me started on what I like to do to the philistines who, in 1994, removed the art deco  Southdowns bus station from the face of the earth, bastards!) but I'm not obsessed with the past just interested in it.
The area around Queensway was re-developed, I'm guessing here, around the 1970's in the brutal style of the time.  I'm not using 'brutal' in a pejorative sense  just as a way of describing that distinct urban concrete, pebble dash and glass way of building that was fashionable at that time.
O.K. it's bleak and showing signs of it's age but what strikes me is how the whole area feels 'unified'.  It doesn't look like the work of a committee. It looks like the vision of one man (and it would have been a man).
Another aspect of this area that dawned on me was, with all the flats built into it, it's probably the most densely populated area of central Bognor Regis. People actually live here.

Now to a side issue of my photography and another realisation.
Using a camera it's really easy to make anywhere look like a dystopian vision of hell on earth and my first sets of pictures certainly did that.
Barbed wire, broken fences, abandoned spaces. blight and decay.
To my shame I admit it was exactly what I was trying to achieve but, not only is it unfair, it's lazy.
Finding beauty and wonder is difficult, it requires effort and understanding. It requires the ability to cast off the caustic cynicism that seems endemic in our species.
I can't see angels in the architecture yet but I'm beginning to see the places where they briefly landed.