GULLIVER IN SALTDEAN



"Oi, ginger bastard, we're gonna get you", a boy in a gang, pockets bulging with spray cans and markers shouts in semi-welcome by the new skateboard ramps. Like the doomed Apollo monument of Peterloo new town by Victor Pasmore, skate-park designers use the best brushed steel to compose their whoops, pipes and ramps with the soft flare of a Caro. Checks and balances, harmonies, repetitions. But, hey! - Functional as well.

On Oval park, the1930's Lido, echoes with verruca'd children and swimming contests. It's the same as the Acropolis of the Ocean View hotel, sitting on the hill, like the control tower to a huge holiday barracks. A monument of neo-classical social engineering, streamlined with cross-channel tearoom views.

Oswald Mosley (confidante of Billy Butlin), held summer camps in Pagham Harbour and the Witterings, in the mid 1930's, those holiday caravan 'statics' echo and pre-empt the bungalow hutches, crouching on doglegs. Large tracts of the south coast got round planning laws by these static holiday lets. 360 days only allowed. Aerodynamic, oceanic, pacific - the least possible resistance to the salt winds and crumbling cliffs. Peacehaven, that ex-Indian Army Colonel's temperance town.

A more mobile fleet of Romahomes and pearlescent plastic caravans, in all shades of off-white, bone, ivory and beige huddle nose to tail beneath the sycamores of Oval Park. Only their bright orange gas-tanks relieve the eye from their magnolia graphics. A silver police transit hides behind a pre-fab "Temporary Surgery", questioning two traveller boys. A girl-crew, with their shiny, pinned-back hair, rendezvous by a line of concrete bollards, bunny hopping over them. A more sedate tennis practise takes place behind veils of high-sided chain link fencing, between two teenage boys and a mature lady coach. Screened off behind the permeable gauzing, the fluorescent ball oscillated through the screens, to the accompanying grunts.

Earlier, a woman in curlers had asked me for money for the snap of her coast road garden. I stepped nearer, asking for permission for a portrait and framed her at the porch between two huge, concrete pelicans. Cement tortoise and squirrels clamber up her cobalt-blue wall whilst she brandished a child's plastic 'Conan the Barbarian' hand-axe. A Honda Gold-Wing dozed by the wall of her middle earth garden - a fantasy of keeps, moats and Lux-Crete dinosaurs. A dungeons and dragons role-playing fantasy game in 3-D. Huge Cambrian ferns jostled for space between rockeries and gorges, making a Lilliput of her garden. I remember as a child the Gulliver effect at the Torbay miniature town, where being 3' high, I could stride over half-timbered streets and famous landmarks. This scale inversion would seem to manifest itself in the alcoholic minim of the 'Little People', resistant fighters, insurgents the size of your thumb. We miniaturise to patronise. Another youth buzzed up Bannings Vale Road, on a 1/8th scale factory Honda motorcycle, in full racing trim, making giant dollhouses of a trio of half-timbered rough-cast houses. Giants stride in 7-league boots, that pill or potion that Alice would drink.

Pyracanthus blazing in the yard. Dwarf conifers sit in half-coopered barrels on the crazy paving driveway. A miniaturised Shakespearean fantasy, a Landseer Lion gateway was again de-scaled by a pneumatic 4 X 4 Shogun Hunter or Daihatsu Dominator. Next door to Dino-World a pre-pubescent girl's pool party came to an abrupt halt as hubby returned in another pick-up and parked by his unfinished garage. "Show your workings", "to be continued", to be iced over like the birthday cake sponge with a spackled, unctuous plaster of cod-vernacular. The Hacienda villas' B&Q swimming pool had barely recomposed its chlorinated level, from the flat-chested bikinis bombing it, when the mothers in their Landcruiser's and Nissan Predators roared off dwarfing the occupants; a hazelnut golden brown mother and day-glo kiddies strapped in for a moon-landing. A baby-blue birthday cake lay massacred on a combo of plastic garden chairs, loungers and table. Flaccid pink balloons floated about the garden like condoms, gaseous bubbles of materialised contraception - these prophylactics were a testament to the perverse joy of childlessness in garlanding the celebration of a birthday.

This aspiration to fantasy buildings seems limitless, an Oriental palace on the Sussex coast, a Dino-World or an Augustan balcony with Imperial balustrading. Symptomatic of the yearning and idealising to make outwardly visible what moves us from within.

Next door again, the addiction had gone into overdrive. Pyramids of sand and gravel made instant Turkish Delight dunes by hotels of Wealden tiles. A sun-lounger with missing slats stood proud amongst this rubble. Its parasol, drinks table and sun-bather fast-tracked to that magazine fulfilment, where what is built is now doing its job; of hosting fondues, family reunions, and meditations in the shrubberies. Idling with cocktails in a cheap version of Dynasty on a high-cam budget. Stephanie Powers sun-bathing on the deck of an overcast, cross-channel ferry. A process of endless nesting and blowing up. A Chevrolet Hi-Lux piggybacked a spotless Metro-orange cement mixer. An engineered marvel of economy and design, an unconscious badge like the Nike sweat tick.

On Longridge Avenue, drivers sat outside the mini-cab office, waiting for the call-up, raking 5 o'clock shadows making quite a North African street of this parade. Is the real Spain or Morocco here in this back alley where the garaging scales the hillside in Cubist steps, an Escher of Californian blocking? When is a wall not a wall? When it's Californian blocking. Light emitting, Mozarabic stars and petals. The split tarmac, dog shit, ragwort and chain-link, the car kennels. See the kitchen porter ducking out for a quick burn. The bus stop on the coast road teetered on the crumbling Madeira cliff as the overhead lighting plinks on like translucent jellybeans.


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