The Contradictions of Culture

Elizabeth Wilson

By David Kendall

On the edge of the sea nothing changes...

Bricolage City - Elizabeth Wilson
Not a novel, not a short story, not a play, not a film script but an essay in the collection Hallucinations: Life in the Post-Modern City*. Yes, I know it has the dread PM in the title but honestly this isn't full of meaningless ivory tower argot. This is the core of Brighton..
*Originally published under this title

'People come here to die, to escape, to live out their fantasies.'

I read Bricolage City two years before I moved to Brighton. The article is now over twenty years old but its vision of Brighton as an eccentric, recycler of possessions is still accurate. Brighton is the petrie dish for all manner of reinventions, from a snazzy new religion to youth cults.

'Brighton is alive: a cultural sponge that soaks up the contemporary experience and reproduces it in an intensified form.'

Wilson's clean vision and crisp prose marks changes in commercial culture, and shows the similarities between Brighton and the Third World by this reuse of commodities.

'There are used saucepans, electrical gadgets that no longer work and dog-eared volumes of Judith Krantz and Jeffrey Archer - a whole other (nether) world of pleasure sand anxieties, of breakdown and bricolage, of the accumulation of personalised oddments, the refuse of the consumer world, the 'Other' of the bright, smart chain stores up on Churchill Square.'

Reading that article and living in Brighton has recorded it on my brain. It's not often we get to see a theory sprouting in our minds and then be able to watch it in real time. It gave me a key to understanding how the city works, an undercover view of its economics, people, aesthetics.

I still regard the health of shops in Trafalgar Street as the economy's barometer. Once they start to shut down it's time to stop shopping at Waitrose.

In ten pages Bricolage City captures Brighton better than most novels. Here there are no characters to distract from what we are really interested in: the sea, the seediness, the jumbled architecture, the lifestyles that set Brighton apart from most of Britain's Mctowns and cities. Despite its heritage Brighton is no historical theme park selling itself on what it had hoarded.

'Brighton is for the flowering of eccentricity, and eccentricity is absolutely excluded from any theme park.'

Bricolage City cuts shows us how it Brighton's magpie heart ticks and why in an age of affected "strangeness" Brighton manages effortlessly to be different just by being itself. A million miles (and braincells) from the media pap of the place to be

David Kendall is a freelance reading promoter who used to live in Brighton and is now based in Shropshire.