Blog archive October 2025
06.10.25 / 01 / jeff hawke
I’ve had a couple of images from Jeff Hawke floating around my mind since the early 70s. One is of a scary woman called Lilith. The other is Hawke and a companion driving into a future London - it would be great to see that now for comparison. I did find Lilith, but not yet the London picture.
Jeff Hawke was a daily comic strip by Sydney Jordan that ran in the Daily Express from 1954 to 1974. In the early years it was drawn and mostly written by Jordan, and was a standard space action series, set in a 1980s and 90s that looked like the 50s but with '2001'-style aerospace technology - moonbase, space station, supersonic airliners etc. Jordan had studied aerospace engineering so the strip showed actual advanced projects that didn't make it in real life.
In 1960 Jordan’s dialogue writer Willie Patterson took over the plots and storylines as well, and the strip took a highly imaginative turn, featuring weird and very various aliens who bickered and schemed and dragged Hawke and friends into bizarre or perilous situations that had nothing to do with the usual invasion-of-Earth stuff. Patterson retired in 1969 and the strip was never as humorous and clever again. By then the aliens were often scantily clad women and the strip took an erotic turn with much partial nudity. In 1974 the newspaper suddenly cancelled it (not because of the nudity as far as I know).
Jordan began a new strip in 1976 called Lance McLane, set in the late 21st century. This ran in a Scottish paper until 1988, but to sell it for syndication Jeff Hawke was 'transmitted' into the body of McLane and the strip continued in two versions as Jeff Hawke and Lance McLane. There was no continuity with the original strip, Hawke didn’t even look the same. The artwork and writing were often done by others with variable results.
Jeff Hawke was popular in Europe (quite a lot of strips on this site, but in Italian! Go to the bottom for the links.) You can buy the full run in Italian, but the English language republication has been limited. There are a couple of anthologies of 60s stories by Titan Books, and the Jeff Hawke Club published the whole lot in a limited edition 2003-2018 but appears to be defunct. The early-00s version of their website is fun though.
I was too young for the best years of Hawke, and since I didn’t read the newspaper daily I couldn’t follow it anyway - there were some striking images, but in truth it was too sophisticated for me then.
05.10.25 / 01 / postmodern or post-modern?
I don't quite know whether to hyphenate or not. Jencks always hyphenated, to emphasise that it was a work in progress, moving away from modernism but not yet definable as a single new thing. To me, the hyphenated form suggests the early stages in the 60s and 70s, experimental mutations of modernism in many directions, all sharing an impulse towards metaphor and communication. By 1981 this had converged almost everywhere to a form of classicism, which is what most people now think of as post[-]modernism. It feels more comfortable to drop the hyphen for postmodern classicism. There isn't any real consensus yet.
04.10.25 / 03 / postmodern colour
Postmodernism was the last architectural style to be developed entirely as hand drawing, making particular use of coloured pencils, crayons and pastels. The drawings were often saleable as art. So colour was an essential part, built into the design from the first sketches - the challenge was often how to realise the design colours in the actual buildings. Colour systems for architectural finishes took a while to catch up.
But colour is a vulnerable element in buildings. It weathers and fades, it goes out of fashion and is replaced. In the 80s people were reacting against the greys and browns of 1960s and 70s architecture - how drab, let’s have red and green in stripes and grids. And now people say, how overbearing and obtrusive, let’s replace it with black, grey and brown.
Modernism in the 1920s was often brightly coloured, inside and out, because it sat close to painting. But it was published in black and white photographs, giving the impression of a 'white architecture'. After WW2 much had been lost, and restorations tended to omit the colour, which had been forgotten or lacked evidence. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye was restored as the epitome of the 'white architecture', but the curved walls on top had been blue and pink - like a Corbusier still-life. It still hasn't been recoloured. Corbusier continued to use strong colour in his buildings, but this wasn't much copied, while the raw concrete was.
High-tech and postmodernism brought the colour back, but it was controversial, because colour stands out from the context. The convention is to blend in. Architects play safe rather than have a scheme rejected because of the colours. How did John Outram get away with his outrageous schemes? Is it because they are so bold - an argument for being braver? Is it because the forms are historicist, and this disarms traditionalists who would oppose an equally brazen modernist building?
04.10.25 / 02 / the vanishing 80s
In the last couple of years I’ve been photographing 80s and early 90s office buildings in London, which are being pulled down en masse at the moment. Certainly they are tired and unfashionable, but the reason to demolish 40 year old buildings is because the land values will now support 40 storeys rather than 10.
Buildings usually can’t be listed for preservation before they are 30 years old, so many 80s buildings are vanishing or being radically altered before they can be reassessed for historical value. The demolition of much of Broadgate - an admired and coherent scheme that seemed surely destined for listing - made me pay attention. As usual this happens just as a period starts to be interesting again for designers, which is when it is at the nadir of value for the world in general.
Not all 80s buildings are postmodern, but postmodern styling is vulnerable to unsympathetic treatment. The Landmark House refurbishment is symptomatic - strip the obvious postmodern elements and paint the windowframes black for a fashionably neutral look. The refurbishment contractor's website talks of 'releasing its asset potential' which sums it up - owners and agents don't want architecture as such, they want maximised floorspace in a generically fashionable style that's easy to let to tenants who want whatever looks 'prestigious' at the moment.
Maybe 1980s buildings had too much architecture on too small a scale - a frequent fault of the period. 80s stuff was small by today's standards, but didn't know it. Everyone was over-reacting against 1960s monolithic modernism - hence complexity of form and elaboration of detail. I know, I did it! When I look at those facades I know how someone sweated over every pilaster and balustrade.
We wanted to revive the richness of ornament of pre-Modernist work, but there was seldom the budget to do it properly. Postmodern architecture was historicism done cheaply - the simplification, the cardboard-model effects. This could be witty in the hands of a knowing architect, or dull and debased otherwise. The style was meant to be a new beginning, but quickly got a bad reputation. Architects, and clients, returned to a more stylish modernism. The heritage challenge now is picking out the good postmodern work from the commercial rubbish.
04.10.25 / 01 / terry farrell
Postmodern architect Terry Farrell died at the end of last month. I had just photographed Landmark House in the City, which I hadn’t looked at before but remembered from a fuss about ten years ago. It had been subjected to a makeover that removed its postmodern entrances and red granite cladding stripes. Farrell and others protested - he considered it to be one of his best.
And then I visited the Comyn Ching triangle in Covent Garden - listed at the time of the Landmark House fuss to prevent similar damaging changes. Comyn Ching is a wonder - sensitive restoration of 18th/19th century buildings with bold but appropriate postmodern additions. The doorcases and ironwork are reminiscent of Mackintosh - a definite 1900 feel. Mackintosh was a big influence on British postmodernism in the years around 1980 - this was when he became an important figure again. His grids and abstract-classical mouldings were an accessible and affordable way to do ornament. We didn't attempt to imitate the complex Art Nouveau stuff!
I should go and look at some more of Farrell's work, before someone spoils it. I've tended to take it for granted. 125 London Wall aka Alban Gate is next on the list.
01.10.25 / 01 / blitz kids
More of my life as museum exhibit - the Blitz Kids at the Design Museum. That post-punk movement that started as Bowie nights run by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan for their select friends, hit the media in 1980 as ‘Blitz Kids’ and “New Romantics’ and became the mainstream of early 80s British fashion and pop.
Strange and Egan innovated in British club culture - the club was no longer the venue, but the people and their music. The venue was anywhere that would have them - Strange and Egan would guarantee a crowd of customers on an off-peak night. The club moved around - the media caught up with it at Blitz, a 40s-themed venue in Covent Garden that had nothing to do with what went on - but there was never a fixed location or name. ‘New Romantic’ was a media headline that stuck for lack of anything else. The Face called it ‘the cult with no name’. This ‘portable club’ model became the new norm for the 80s and beyond, at the sharp end of clubbing.
The movement was entrepreneurial. People made their own clubs, fashion labels, shops, furniture, music, magazines etc and hyped them mutually - in the recession no-one else was going to help you. The fashion designers in particular suffered from lack of financial backing - it’s sad to see the quality of work that never made it big - it would be different later, in the days of McQueen and Galliano.
I never went to Blitz or its associated clubs - I was a student in Bath at the time. But we were doing similar things, and so were people in Sheffield, and other places around the country. It was the next logical step - after punk the rules of fashion were suspended for three or four years, you could wear anything, and people wanted to dress up. When we saw the Blitz Kids in the papers we said, “oh they’re doing it too”.
The Blitz Kids’ advantage was that they had real fashion designers among them who were making and wearing couture outfits to the club. The rest of us were restricted to creative salvage. In those days ‘thrift stores’ (a much later term) were not curated - full of the contents of dead people’s houses, and therefore much more interesting. Cool stuff from the 50s and 60s, but the body shapes were not the same as young students. Black and white tie evening dress was the thing for men - tuxedos and tailcoats, cummerbunds and waistcoats, you could get the whole thing with some shopping around. The issue was that this stuff had usually been made for short fat old men. Women went for ballgowns, or 50s-60s dresses and shoes, with similar size issues. The size issues did perhaps assist with the cross-dressing though.
Many of the key players at Blitz lived in squats in Fitzrovia. The photos are astounding - it’s hard to believe that parts of central London were that derelict less than 50 years ago. There is a little video of scenes from the late 70s which shows the shabbiness and drabness of London then. This is where creativity thrives - see also the state of New York at the time, and what it birthed.
Club for Heroes is now Club for Pensioners. Everyone who was there is now old - the exhibition was full of old people. I paid a ‘concession’ ticket price for the first time ever - I was bemused that nobody questioned it - I must be looking old today, I thought. The interview clips of Blitz Kids as they are now were barely recognisable - except for Marilyn, who looks the same but older in a Helen Mirren sort of way. Steve Strange sadly died ten years ago.
It was a period I went through, it was fun at the time, but it didn’t stay with me - whereas acid house ten years later did. I was wryly amused by the exhibition, but don’t want to go back there.
