The Earls Court exhibition hall is to be demolished and
replaced with a 70 acre ‘super village’, the villagers occupying ‘penthouses
with floor-to-ceiling glass and roof terraces’ which the media reports as already
being sold with prices beginning at £1.5m. God knows the poor huddled masses
within the M25 desperately need housing and the promises of a public library, a
new high street and a park are to be seen as welcome relief for them. As
selfish and anti-social as it may then seem in this season of goodwill I
nevertheless mourn the loss of yet another place which features so strongly in
my personal memory. In this instance, given the scale of the building and the
range events of events it has hosted, I would imagine that thousands will also
regret its passing. For that reason alone I was surprised that the 1937 art
deco building known, in recent years as Earls Court 1, was not listed. Clearly
it was not recognised as a national monument but it should perhaps be
remembered as having been a national institution.
It was, for example, the venue for the Royal Tournament an
event which in its day may certainly be described as such an institution. As a child I recall that we
watched it as a family year on year and admit that, for me, the only
item of any real interest or excitement was the Field Gun competition. That,
much like the varsity Boat Race, generated vocal and partisan support for the
rival crews around the family hearth, despite the fact that no one knew or cared
where Gosport might be. Those who weekly scratch away at the bottom of the
barrel called televised light entertainment might well consider reviving the
Field Gun Competition with teams comprising so-called celebrities and live
ammunition.
The first time I can recall visiting Earls Court was for the
International Cycle Show around about 1967 as the pubescent part of a small and
unruly delegation from the Port Talbot Wheelers. I cannot recall what logic informed
the day trip to London where we looked at state of the art equipment that we could not
afford because we had spent the money on train tickets, refreshments and
admission to the International Cycle Show. I then recall we walked for several
hours trying to find Paddington Station, probably because we had no money left
for Tube tickets, and caught the last train home.
Prior to that Earls Court had featured as the first real landmark
you saw on a car journey to London, a looming grubby white monolith glimpsed
from the A4 as you left Hammersmith and crossed the bridge to the West Cromwell
Road. It was something you looked out
for, a nice shiny sixpence on offer for the first one who spotted it. Then, if
travelling onward to Greenwich via the Chelsea Embankment and Vauxhall Bridge, we
would pass the front of it and never failed to be impressed by the sheer scale
of the façade. We might have compared it to an Odeon on Steroids but I’m not
sure steroids had been invented then. It was that abiding memory of scale and
solidity that perhaps led me to make the presumption of permanence- the erroneous
assumption that it was as inviolable an object as Buckingham Palace.
But it was that oblique view from the A4 of Earls Court against a London
sky which resonated later. When Pink Floyd released the Animals album with Battersea
Power Station on the cover against such a sky it could just as well have been
Earls Court, which had the same Pharaonic scale and the more direct association
with the band. We probably saw them as often, if not more, at the Wembley Arena
but the abiding memory is always one of Earls Court. Certainly that is the
recollection of the early 70’s and the peak of their achievement with Dark Side
of the Moon. It was of course where they then did The Wall which everyone
thought was amazing at the time- but now realize was not really. Then later, the
final Waterless shows in 1994 which dispensed with all his My Dad Died In The War For
You material and served up the goods with Earls Court as a massive psychodisco.
Then that was pretty much it until the one-off reunion in Hyde Park for the Bob
Geldof Pension Fund in 2005.
So, the memories are there and are obviously coloured by the
occasions and more than a dram of nostalgia. Leaving aside that sentiment and its indisputable place in popular culture in this country for 77 years one
might still conclude that Earls Court deserved to be recognised as a piece of Britain’s
heritage. My more objective memory is that it was, in truth, a bit of a shithole with
unpleasant staff and lousy, overpriced catering which, for the provincial
visitor, distilled the principal features of London itself. English Heritage should have given it Grade II* as being an exemplary building of its time.
The 'I was there' image. Their very last show (until of course the last, last one...)
