A Clockwork Jerusalem

A Clockwork Jerusalem explores how a specifically British form of modernity emerged from the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. It explores how responses to the industrial city combined with traditions of the romantic, sublime and pastoral to create new visions of British society. These visions looked simultaneously back- wards and forwards, and combined in one sweep, science fiction and historicism to form ideological and aesthetic approaches to the contemporary city. The Industrial Revolution set in motion enormous changes in the physical, social and economic landscape of Britain. A particularly British response developed in return. For example, the strange text of William Blake ’ s Jerusalem railed against the ‘Satan- ic mills’ and merged religious visions and paganism into dreams of social reform. Je- rusalem , the stirring unofficial second national anthem – sung by socialists, suffra- gettes, and patriots alike – can be thought of as the founding text of British moderni- ty. From it, springs a narrative of struggle with the forces driving modernity, which echoes down the centuries. The long-standing British cultural interests and obsessions found within Jerusalem were absorbed into the body of continental Modernism to make it as much a product of the Picturesque, of landscape, of narrative, of pastoralism (a tradition of Capability Brown, John Ruskin, William Turner and Sir John Soane) as it was a product of the industrial and technological (the tradition of Isambard Brunel, Joseph Paxton and Spitfires). Indeed, British Modernism was shaped into a unique and sometimes sur- real phenomenon, evoked in the New Jerusalem of post-war reconstruction. The ob- session with these interests is written into the visions of techno-pastoralism that span such diverse examples as Garden Cities, Non-Plan and Milton Keynes. A Clockwork Jerusalem describes a world where ruins become utopias, where histo- ry is written to alter the future, where archeology and futurism merge, the Pictur- esque is rebooted as concrete geometry, the pastoral is electrified and where pop culture, history and social ambition fuse into ways of imagining new national futures. Taking large-scale projects of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies as a point of depar- ture, the exhibition explores the late, last flowering of radical British Modernism: the moment it was at its most socially, politically and architecturally ambitious but also the moment that witnessed its collapse. It is a period that saw both epic ambition and a complete loss of nerve. The grand utopian projects of this period were a high point for a vision of society that was being remade through modern architecture. In parallel to this, the exhibition also tells the story of how these modern visions were absorbed into the popular imagination. They became the sites of new imaginative speculations in the form of novels, films and music that both documented the experi- ence of modernity and also propelled futuristic visions into the mainstream in ways that still resonate today. Ranging from Stonehenge to council estates, Ebenezer Howard to Cliff Richard, ru- ins and destruction to back-to-the-land rural fantasies through architecture, records, books and adverts; from William Blake's Jerusalem to the New Jerusalem of the post-war welfare state, and into the landscapes that this created, A Clockwork Jeru- salem explores the culture and products of British modernity as an architectural pro- ject and as a wider cultural experience. This tradition is still relevant now that our cities and regions face issues of unequal development, affordability of housing and social tensions, while public planning and architecture seem unable to convincingly address these challenges. What is needed are not simple solutions, but new visions, new dreams, a new Jerusalem to mobilise architects, politicians, activists and developers. The attitudes and imagination that characterise the architecture and planning described in A Clockwork Jerusalem can be the starting point for new visions of Britain to face the challenges of 21 st -century modernity, as we attempt to answer once again Howard's central question: ‘ The People: Where Will They Go? ’ Sam Jacob and Wouter Vanstiphout