La Cage aux Folios

Friday, 21 December 2007

Euston Station has a sort of Depressed Café Area (DCA), though I am sure they have some nice corporate-approved name for it like Food Court. It is still, however, a DCA no matter what you call it.

Efforts to brighten it up and make it look cool have enjoyed, er, partial success. The decades-worth of DCA-ness is encoded into the walls, which breathe it back out over the grim-faced traveller, making his oh-so-2008 skinny mochafrappalattecino taste like the ghost of 1970s Nescafé clots in cold milk, cruelly Frankensteined into quasi-life with the steamer. Pssssssst (gnah! wagghh! ungghh!!) etc.

I was going to start this piece with "7.03am isn't a good time to be sitting in the café at Euston" and then I thought, "bl**dy idiot, when exactly is a good time to be sitting in the café at Euston?" Answer came there none. Some ideas just aren't worth pursuing. (Indeed, most of my ideas aren't worth pursuing, but that's another [non-]story.) And anyway, I am not sure that anyone has really written anything worthwhile about Euston since the blessed and brilliant Cassandra, and I don't have a strong feeling that my choice of opening sentence is about to change that. Ho, hum, and indeed ho hum.

Anyway, so here I am with my coffee and strikingly unFrench croissant, gazing dispritedly round the DCA and wondering what magic salve or herbal ointment might ward off an incoming depression. Then I see it - books! Lots of books! This is marvellous - what it is, is that the café is divided into a number of zones, perhaps to try to differentiate between the different food concessions or perhaps at the random choice of some design wonk. Who knows/cares? The important bit, you see, is the nature of the ah interzonal barrier: a quite pretty, lightish-wood fence-like thing supported between panels by little square "towers" which are panelled up to maybe a metre then finished off with a shelf at the top. This shelf has opposite pairs of sides solid and open so that in one direction you can see through.

And when you do look into or through this little shelf, this exquisite lovely little hidey-hole on top, what do you see? Books! Hurrah!! Lots and lots of books!

Reader, imagine my delight. A moment ago I was in a bit of a depressing dump of a caff: now I'm in a library! For a short while (but blissful) I am quite transported by the imaginative and enlightened approach. Sure there must be problems with theft, but presumably it's copable with: maybe they're buying in old stock cheap, or something. Whatever.

You see, it's not even that I'm desperate for something to read: it's the matter of principle, the statement about the value of books and reading, the way they've chosen to communicate all this. That's what thrills me.

You know where this is going, don't you? You've sussed it, right?

The books are locked in there.

THE

BOOKS

ARE

LOCKED

IN

THERE

Oh great. They're locked in. All of them. The shelves aren't really shelves, they are cages or prisons. Those books must have done something pretty bad because it doesn't look like they're getting out any time soon. You and me, sister, brother, we aren't going to be reading those books at 7.03 this morning nor any other morning. Nor at 8.03 or 9.03 nor some other time. Nor in the afternoon, nor the evening, nor the night, nor the strange nameless times that only stations and airports can access.

So, what were these books doing there? Difficult to say really. A book not for reading is a sad, enigmatic thing, its existence tenuous, its usefulness in terrible doubt. These book-shaped space-fillers are:

• Less useful than wallpaper
• Less useful than paper hankies
• Less useful than toilet paper
• Less useful than an origami crane
• Less useful than a paper aeroplane.

All the above, it seems to me, have some integrity of purpose whereas these display-only non-book bookoids have none. Once you realize what you're seeing, the best bit of the display is the few places where a shelf is left empty: you have a clear view right through because no books are there, indeed no anything at all is there. At last, an honest proposition: you can't read from this shelf, because there's no books here: an indisputable truth.

What a lousy, miserable apology for a design.

You see, it's not even that I'm desperate for something to read: it's the matter of principle, the statement about the value of books and reading, the way they've chosen to communicate all this. That's what chills me.