Summer garden with excavations underway, 7.09.11

Summer garden marked out mid way through regrading, 13.09.11

 

 

Regraded summer garden from sea end of garden, 13.09.1

 

 

Beach end of summer garden - the cedar step is in place but not permanantly fixed

 

 

Looking from the beach end down the summer garden, 16.09.11

 

 

Compacting the Calcaire into the flexiweb compartments, 16.09.11

 

 

The path areas of the summer garden are about 70% filled as of today, 17.09.11

 

 

 

 

All paths in summer garden filled and compacted with crushed limestone, 19.09.11

 

 

View from beach end of completed limestone base for paving, 19.09.11

 

 

Flagstones set out in summer garden, 20.09.11

 

 

Path across width of summer garden with flagstones set out, 20.01.11

 

 

Laying the flagstones onto compacted limestone base.

As seen above, the builders lay a continuous 20-30mm layer of 1:4 lean cement mix. Flagstones are then positioned on top, and the cement is scraped out between the joints. This is more time-effective than putting a separate cement layer under each slab and enables the flagstones to be set to the same height. After laying the flagstones and cement is watered in place to set it.

 

 

Close up showing flexiweb base filled with compacted limestone (graded 0-20mm), with flagstones sitting on cement base above.

 

 

View of summer garden with most paving laid in place, 23.09.11 (some adjustments still to be made)

 

 

Path towards sea end of garden, 23.09.11

 

 

Looking down the garden from the sea end, 23.09.11

This sense of otherness is even more pronounced on an island, bounded by sea and cut off from the mainland. Il de Ré is connected to the mainland by a 3km long road bridge, but people talk about ‘returning to the Continent’ when you cross the bridge.

The island is roughly 30km long end to end. There’s a constant breeze, stronger on the side facing out into the Atlantic. Along the shoreline, sand dunes protect the island from storms and sea spray.

Inland are salt marshes where salt is evaporated, and inland, fields of potatoes (renowned in France like Jersey Royals in Britain) and vineyards, growing cognac and rosé grapes.

Until the mid twentieth century Il de Ré was a poor, sparsely populated place. Its inhabitants scratched a living out of the poor soil, harvested seafood and extracted salt from the marshes. There are very few substantial buildings that predate the twentieth century, except for the large fort of St Martin, the island’s main town, designed by the famous French military engineer Vauban in the eighteenth century. Since the advent of tourism, this has become a highly desirable holiday home location. It’s exclusive in a very low-key way: there are no vast villas or obvious signs of wealth. Strict planning regulations govern the size and appearance of houses, almost all of which are single storey, and all painted white with pale blue or grey shutters. The result is that despite the large amount of development, the island has a certain visual consistency in its architecture.

An alleyway in Les Portes, one of the villages on the island

The Il de Ré’s beaches are backed by extensive sand dunes. These wind-sculpted shifting mountains of sand give a fascinating snapshot of ecological succession in action. At the edge of the beach, only the toughest wind- and salt-tolerant dune grasses survive. Their extensive root systems enable them to extract moisture from deep below and bind the unstable mass of sand together. A little further inland, other succulents and subshrubs grow in the slightly more sheltered conditions: drought-adapted Euphorbias, pale grey curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) and sea holly (Eryngium). Even further, the higher levels of organic matter from decomposed plants support tough coniferous trees – mainly pines and Monterey cypresses.

The dune landscapes along the shoreline are protected, for very practical reasons. The large masses of the dunes, and the vegetation that holds them together, are the first line of defence from waves and storms battering the island. The plants found here are largely self selecting, consisting of those able to cope with the dessicating winds and sandy substrate. But this is not a pristine ecosystem. Many of the dune-adapted plants actually hail from other regions: yuccas from the beaches of Atlantic North America, Monterey cypresses from the rocky headlands of northern California, and evening primroses from central America, garden escapees now found on dunes and dry waste ground throughout Europe. Apparently there was a fashion for planting the cypresses about thirty years ago, and today there are thousands. They cope well with the sea winds and can grow in pure sand, but look rather straggly when planted in dense stands. When allowed space, they can develop into gnarled and characterful trees, although they probably won’t reach the great age and venerable appearance of their parents

I’ve spent the last three weeks here, working on a seaside garden at the far end of the island. The plot is about a hundred metres long. From the road, a path leads through a small belt of woodland, to the house, and beyond this, a sand bank planted with pine trees that protect the house from the sea beyond. Luckily the house faces east towards the mainland, so that the beach at the end of the garden is sheltered from the worst of the gales the blow in off the Atlantic.

The garden here offers an opportunity to create three distinct landscapes, which can represent, in a stylised way, the distinctive maritime landscapes which can be found here. In the woodland zone from the entrance to the front door, we will augment the existing evergreen cypresses with flowering shrubs which can survive in the shelter of the existing tree canopies: flowering Hydrangeas and Fuschias, and strongly scented shrubs like Osmanthus and Philadelphus. To allow the more water-thirsty flowering shrubs to grow, irrigation will be needed, but this will extend the season of interest and keep things looking fresh in mid- and late- summer, when the house is used as a holiday home.

To one side of the house, a ‘summer garden’ of aromatic shrubs and flowering perennials will be created. This part of the garden is more Mediterranean than Atlantic in inspiration, consisting of the evergreen aromatics that grow wild on Mediterranean hillsides: Rosemary, Lavender, Myrtle and Germander (Teucrium). Amongst these will be flowering perennials that appreciate hot, dry conditions. The intention here is to create something naturalistic in appearance, that requires little or no irrigation. Something between Beth Chatto’s gravel garden in the dry, gravelly soil of Essex, and the late Nicole de Vesian’s refined Provence garden of clipped Mediterranean shrubs. Both these gardens make a virtue of the constraints of their site: dry, free draining soils that will not support masses of lush, herbaceous growth in the manner of an English herbaceous border. Instead, they use tough, drought tolerant shrubs and perennials that will thrive in the conditions. By adapting to the constraints of the site, rather than trying to change it, de Vesian and Chatto created something elusive, that many people strive for but few achieve: gardens that are of the landscape that surrounds them, not imposed upon it. In short, gardens with a sense of place.

New Julfa is the Armenian quarter of Isfahan, possibly Iran’s most magnificent historical city. Shah Abbas I, the greatest of the Safavid monarchs, transplanted the Armenian community here in the sixteenth century to give a boost to his new capital. Inveterate traders and artisans, they were intended as the entrepreneurial seed for Isfahan’s economy. They might not have had much choice, but the Armenians did well: Abbas built them a huge cathedral and New Julfa contains several large merchants’ houses. Today there is still a strong community of Armenians here, who have retained their language and culture. Even under the Islamic Republic, their religious rights are guaranteed, and they are exempted from the nationwide ban on alcohol.

Wandering through these streets in search of an Armenian church, we came across something unexpected.

Above the entrance to Polsheer House. Yes, that's the coat of arms still used by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

A rainy day in the streets of New Julfa

Polsheer House is a remarkable place in several ways. A building with Persian, Armenian and European identities, it has been the headquarters of a trading family, served as the British consulate in Isfahan, and now houses Polsheer, a contemporary Iranian architecture firm. The story of this building, and the firm that restored and now uses it as a studio, is also the story of Iran, but not the one familiar in the western media.

Polsheer are one of Iran’s leading architecture firms, designing private and public projects within Iran and beyond. Its founder, Mohammad Reza Ghaneei, studied and worked in Iran, France and the USA. His experiences working on the restoration of French chateaux helped inform his work on the restoration of Polsheer House, a 400 hundred year old mansion built by the Aghanorourian family, who owned it for seven generations.

The family acted as agents of the British government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This explains the presence of the British royal coat of arms above the building’s entrance, as well as some curious Victorian engravings set into the otherwise quite traditional interiors. There are line drawings of steamships, buildings in London and notable Victorian personages. It’s quite unexpected to see in a seventeenth century merchant’s house in the heart of Iran.

When Dr Ghaneei’s team started work on restoring the house, it was in an advanced state of dilapidation. He explains:

‘Our restoration work has inspired us in our own work. For example, how do you get into the house’s interior spaces? It is not in a single direction, not axial. Instead the circulation pattern rotates around the central courtyard. We are using this kind of thing in our work, but not exactly. We are not copying this in our work. Some critics say we are presenting the new face of Iranian contemporary architecture. Our work is contemporary, but not just western. We are presenting a form of architecture that is unique to our country. It is uniquely Iranian, and contemporary.’

What is so interesting about this place is its multilayered identity, both past and present. In its basic design it is an example of Persian domestic architecture, attuned to the extremes of the central Iranian climate. Rooms are arrayed around a central courtyard, designed to be used according to the time of day and season.

The eastern side of a house is called the Shahneshin, or ‘seat of the king’, because of its cooling breezes in hot summers. In the winter, south-facing rooms would be occupied to get the benefit of solar heat; wheras in the summer, the north-facing rooms, which get less heat, are used.

What remains of the former house is just one courtyard, the public and reception rooms of the former family mansion. The interiors are both intimate and fabulously grand.

In restoring the building, Dr Ghaneei and his team have added another distinct historical layer. The building’s original fabric and decoration have been respected, but where new intervention has been necessary, it has avoided historical pastiche. Traditional Persian architectural vocabulary has been deployed in distinctly new ways. Mirrored tilework is found in many older buildings in Iran on walls and alcoves, to bounce sunlight into the darker corners of rooms.

Mirrored alcove in the Chehil Sutun Palace, Isfahan

Contemporary mirrored mosaic wall in Polsheer House, bouncing light into an otherwise windowless space

Dr Ghaneei is part of a generation of architects in Iran who draw on both their own country’s cultural heritage and International Modernism. For him, the choice is not either/or. He cites the American architect Louis Kahn as an important influence on his design philosophy. His work, he says, is ‘contemporary, but not just western in spirit. We are presenting a form of architecture that is unique to our country. It is both uniquely Iranian, and contemporary.’

Polsheer

…And this

And this…

This smallish village, located in a remote rural region at the northern edge of Madhya Pradesh, is famous – world famous – for its dozens of stone temples, built between the 10^th and 12^th centuries AD. These are remarkable for their design – compositions of repeating shikars (spires) which proliferate up and outwards to make gigantic mountainlike forms of sculpted stone.

Side elevation showing one of the Western Group of Temple, Khajuraho

What makes this place really famous though, is the sculptures which adorn the outside of these buildings. And of the tens of thousands of figures of humans, animals and gods on the Khauraho temples, it’s the ones that show scenes of extremely graphic and imaginative scenes of sexual congress that are the most well known.

Visitors’ fascination with the sculptures is understandable. They are jaw dropping in their liveliness, sense of personality and sheer quantity. In high season, thousands of tourists arrive here every day by bus. Groups of European, Japanese and (increasingly) Chinese tourists walk around the complex of temples,  photograph the sculptures pointed out to them by their guides, then pile back into their buses and leave, either for the resort hotels in their walled grounds on the edge of Khajuraho, or for the airport 12 kilometres away onto the next stop in their tour of India.

The manicured landscape around the Western Group of Temples is basically a form of nineteenth century English park, interspersed with 'picturesque' monuments.

India is a vast place with much to see. Most tourists on guided tours have only two or three weeks. But this way of seeing a place like Khajuraho has limitations. It tends to make historic monuments, cordoned off in landscaped grounds, seem the only thing worth seeing about a place. Instead of seeing them as integral to a wider landscape of natural and cultural meanings it turns them into objects, divorced from their setting, and thus their wider meaning as a part of a place.

A sense of dislocation pervades modern Khajuraho. It’s evident in the way that visitors are bussed in to look at the temples, stay one or two nights, and leave. This is not just a problem of aesthetic theory. The result of this excessive focus on the objects of the temples has been to the detriment of the place. Scrappy, unplanned tourist development has mushroomed around the temples. The main street is lined with curio shops, restaurants promising the best pizza in India cooked ‘under Swiss supervision’ and some of the sharpest, sleaziest street hustlers I have encountered anywhere in India. Away from the main street, litter blows across open ground. The wider landscape beyond the temples has become just the hinterland where the hotels, shops and restaurants servicing visitors are sited. As long as the monuments themselves are protected, the thinking seems to go, the degradation of the landscape around it by unplanned development can be met with indifference. There is, apparently, a World Heritage Site management plan, drawn up to protect the character of Khajuraho and its surroundings. But you’d never know it.

It’s interesting then, to come across an example of a heritage-based project here which is everything that the tourist industry here generally isn’t: long-term, concerned with historic buildings as integral parts of a wider landscape, and concerned with spreading the economic benefits of tourism and heritage to a wider range of people across this rural area.

The Lost Gardens of Khajuraho are not (yet) as famous as the Lost Gardens Of Heligan in England, from which they borrow their name. But they are every bit as interesting – evoking a whole vanished way of life.

The buildings in Rani ka Bagh (Queen's garden)

Each consists of a rectangular space, enclosed by five foot high walls and with a single entrance gateway. Inside, raised stone channels, fed by a deep step well or baoli, supply water to the garden. Controlled by simple sluice gates, the channels directed the water to where it was needed in the garden. Gardens of this kind are irrigated by controlled flooding – planting beds are divided into small cell-like compartments with low earth ridges, enabling each to be flooded in turn.

Vegetable beds divided into compartments which can be flooded in sequence by moving the earth ridge along the right.

At the centre of the garden is a pleasure pavilion, where one can retreat inside, or up to the roof, in the heat of summer. This is the model of the Islamic paradise and the prototype of gardens across the Middle East and the Islamic world.

Except these gardens were not in fact made by Muslims. They were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Maharajahs of Chatturpur, local Hindu aristocrats who despite their religion, who were a part of the hybrid, but largely Muslim courtly culture of the rulers of much of northern India up to the rise of British power in India in the nineteenth century. Much of this culture derived from the Mughal imperial court with its Persian and Turkic Central Asian origins. Like their nomadic ancestors, the Mughals used the gardens they made as resting places on their travels across their domains, staying in permanent or temporary tented pavilions within the garden, and using the garden’s water supply and produce to supply their needs.

There are ten gardens in the vicinity in varying states of preservation. One of the best preserved is Rani ka Bagh, the Queen’s Garden. This was a summer resort for the ladies of the court, which followed the Muslim practice of purdah [purdah link] in which women were cloistered away from public life. Long after the effective end of the Mughal empire as a political force, the culture of the Mughals continued in the culture and social rituals of regional royal courts across India. Khajuraho was a part of the kingdom of Oudh, before coming under the rule of the British East India Company in 1856.. This elegant and doomed world is chronicled in Satyajit Ray’s 1977 film The Chess Players. Two members of the local gentry play endless games of chess, while the Company moves to engineer a takeover of the kingdom and its revenues, bringing about the end of the reign of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Oudh and his refined courtly life of music, poetry, kite flying and courtesans. As the Company troops advance on Lucknow to depose the king, the chess players continue their games in an abandoned garden on the edge of the city. The following year (1857), the end of the last independent Muslim kingdom in northern India helped create the resentment that exploded into the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence, as it is officially known in India). The repression which followed the uprising and the assumption of direct rule by the British Crown (the beginning of the Raj), was the death blow for the late Mughal cultural world. With the political decline of the ruling class who created them, the Khajuraho gardens fell into decline at around this time.

The entrance to Rani ka Bagh

Entered through a gateway lined with small turreted kiosks, Rani ka Bagh is around four acres in extent. Roughly in the centre are the only two permanent buildings: a long Kothi or storehouse, with a flat roof and small tower from where one can survey the garden, and just next to it, a square domed temple.

View from the roof of the Kothi in Rani ka Bagh

The Kothi would have been used as a storehouse for produce from the garden, and as a place for eating and sleeping under cover. Flowers and fruit from the garden were presented as offerings to the deity housed in the temple, which was the family’s private chapel. Although no longer owned by the original family, the temple is still in use. Not far away are two wells on octagonal plinths, connected by raised channels.

Restored and operational raised channel in Pateriya ka Bagh, another restored garden

The temple in Rani ka Bagh with one of the garden's two wells in the foreground

These still supply the garden with water although for now, water is pumped into plastic pipes rather than the raised channels which still await restoration. The wells are marvels of engineering, with descending flights of steps that enable access when the groundwater level is low and precisely made decorative detail like the brick bands laid in herringbone patterns at intervals, and the small arched recessed niches in the wall, which may have housed oil lamps or statues of deities.

Circular step well

The concept of the garden – a secluded pleasure ground for a noble family and its retinue that combines productivity with pleasure – and its architectural vocabulary of domed pavilions, water channels laid out at right angles and round, and octagonal water sources, are Islamic. But this vocabulary has been adapted to a specifically Indian context. The temple bears a clear resemblence to the Mughal tradition of garden pavilions and tombs that created the Taj Mahal, but it houses a Hindu god. And the practice of presenting the resident deity of the temple with offerings from the garden around it is an old Hindu one.

When I visited Rani ka Bagh, barley and mustard, the signature spring crops of northern India, stood in the clear January sunshine. Other areas were planted with vegetables – potatoes, radishes, onions and garlic – planted in long strips. While Raju Khan, the owner of a local guest house who oversees the restoration and management of the garden, talked with the workers weeding the beds, I walked around the perimeter, looking across swathes of yellow flowers to the the temple at the centre.

Barley and mustard in Rani ka Bagh

Raju Khan, supervisor of the restoration of the Lost Gardens, on the roof of Kothi in Rani ka Bagh

This garden and another nearby, are undergoing restoration by INTACH, working in partnership with the garden owners. Before restoration began, the garden had been put down to a wheat monoculture using agrochemicals to boost yields. Now, under the guidance of soil conservation and permaculture specialists, the garden is being returned to the mixed model of production that was used before, using organic methods to restore the life of the soil. Restoring the mixed production basis of the gardens creates greater employment opportunities for local people than before and gives a broader base of marketable produce to sell. Fruit trees have been planted around the boundary – mango, Amla, Jalebi and other local species suited to the climate. These will give greater shade and provide more products to raise income for the garden. In the longer term, the damaged and missing lime render on the Kothi and temple will be restored. The restored gardens could have multiple roles and benefits: as a model for sustainable agriculture and soil conservation for local farmers; a source of employment in growing and processing produce from the garden for the local and tourist market, and as a living heritage tourist attraction with a very real sense of place. I walked through the garden with the afternoon sun glancing off the mustard flowers, picking out green pea shoots to eat, then took tea on the roof of the Kothi. It was a memorable afternoon.

Weeding in Rani ka Bagh. In the background is Mr Jyodi, the current owner of the garden.

It is early days for the Lost Gardens of Khajuraho. The restoration of these fascinating, romantic places is an opportunity for truly sustainable development. They offer a glimpse into a vanished cultural world. But more significantly, they can become an example of living heritage, with a real sense of place and connection to the landscape around them, so unlike the in-and-out, dislocated experience that visiting the more famous temples of Khajuraho provides.

The Lost Gardens of Khajuraho

Cow and Kothi in Rani ka Bagh

Shrine outside house in Baga

Goa is a small part of the lush Konkan coast that runs along the western coast of India south of Bombay. The coastal plain of this region is backed by the forested mountains of the Western Ghats. These trap rainclouds coming off the Arabian Sea to create a steamy, lush landscape of coconut palms and paddy fields in the coastal plain and moist tropical forests of the hills beyond.

Before the authorities clamped down, Goa was famous in the nineties for gatherings of thousands of disreputable western youth, dancing to the monotonous beats and squiggly acid sounds of Goa trance, Goa’s unique gift to the world of electronic music. Apparently when djs first started playing dance music from records here, the vinyl would warp in the humidity, and so music was played off digitapes instead. This constraint of playing premixed tapes, rather than vinyl discs mixed on the spot, gave rise to Goa trance’s insistent, unvarying rhythmic signature.

Goa’s history as fleshpot of music and liberated youth goes back further than this of course. It was the final destination for many on the 1970s overland hippie trail, who tuned into pychedelic vibes on the beaches under the curious gaze of Goans and Indians, who used to turn up in coaches to goggle at the strange white people.

Taking drugs while lying around naked on a beach, surrounded by a highly conservative traditional rural society might seem culturally insensitive to some, but it isn’t the first time that foreigners have arrived in Goa to foist their ways on the locals. Perhaps the Spanish Inquisition, commemorated in the eerie-looking effigies of monks and bishops which fill the churches of Old Goa, and the hippies and freaks of the 1960s and since, have more in common than they think.

The altarpiece in Sé Cathedral of Santa Catarina, Goa Velha (Old Goa)

I spent the weekend with a friend of a friend who lives in Baga, one of the northern coastal villages that these days is most frequented by package tourists. Based in Goa, Jessie runs Video Volunteers, a charity that trains and equips people in the villages and slums of India to create and produce their own films that deal with the issues that they face in their everyday lives. The critical difference between this and other worthy-type aid work is that the people in the communities where VV works are in control of the media. Films are screened to large audiences of local people, galvanising action on issues like access to clean water and waste collection, often embarrassing relcalcitrant authorities into action.

I’d come from the largely alcohol-free, vegetarian heart of India. So I was unreasonably excited about sampling the illicit pleasures of alcohol and meat. Thanks to the sinful Portuguese legacy, these are present in abundance here. On Friday we had dinner at Le Poisson Rouge, a rather lovely restaurant close to the river in Baga serving ‘Indo-French’ cuisine, set in a garden of bamboo and tropical plants. The food is essentially French-European with an Indian accent – like chocolate brownies for pudding spiked with cardamon. Truly wonderful, after two months of dal and roti, especially with a decent bottle of red.

The next day we drove down to the far south of Goa, to what our host described as ‘one of the classiest places in Goa’ (an easier accolade than you might think). Agonda beach is a good two or three hours south of the northern tourist centres, reached down a narrow and bumpy road off the highway, through thickly forested hills. Except for the odd glimpse of an iron ore mine off the highway, this part of Goa is little affected by large scale development. Mining is big business here. Day and night, a continuous stream of cargo ships issue out of the mouth of the Mandovi river, carrying iron ore from Goa’s hills to feed China’s growing industrial appetite. Mining companies are extremely powerful in Goa, with close links with the political elite that enable them to operate with minimal social and environmental restrictions.

Monsoon guest house, Agonda

This is what Goa should be like, I thought as we arrived. Heaven on sea.

Aerial view showing Agonda beach, enclosed by hills to north and south

There isn’t a great deal to do in Agonda. You can get up in the morning and walk to the end of the beach, where there’s a freshwater pool. You can sit and read a trashy novel in the shade. You can swim in the warm Arabian Sea from the gently shelving sandy beach. An itinerant herd of cows shuffles up and down the beach, wearing the same placid expression as if they were holding up traffic in the centre of a city. As a temporary respite from India, it’s wonderful. There are some hermetically sealed five star resorts along the coast in Goa, where you could spend the same on two nights as you might for three weeks here. But places like this are much more agreeable – clean and comfortable, but pretty lofi. The guest houses in Agonda are a grown-up version of backpacking. At about £14 a night, it’s neither bedbug-cheap nor business-class plush. There’s no air conditioning, the shower dribbles precious fresh water and a crow might steal your breakfast if you leave it unattended long enough. But with a beach as lovely and empty as this, you really don’t need much else.

Local cows chilling on Agonda beach

I left Agonda with a real pang that I couldn’t stay longer.

The postscript to this interlude of loveliness was an afternoon in Anjuna. I walked up over the scrub-covered rocky headland that separates the northern beaches of Anjuna and Vagator from Baga, where I was stayin. From the top of the hill, fun-seekers launched themselves onto the thermals on paragliders, soaring above the blue of the sea, the chain of sandy beaches and continuous canopy of coconut palms which ran up to the base of more scrubby hills further inland

Looking down on Anjuna, north towards Vagator

Closer to, the view of Anjuna is less idyllic. Two weeks before Christmas, there was scarcely more than a handful of tourists. Perhaps in a valiant attempt to attract the meagre custom, commercial dance music was pounding out over empty sunloungers from several of the wall-to-wall ramshackle bars that line the high ground above the beach. Since I’d last come here fourteen years ago as a freshfaced eighteen year-old the crowd had changed (unsurpisingly, I guess).

The florescent lycra-clad global youth of the 1990s had been replaced by middle aged German men in G-strings playing pingpong. Interestingly, there were several Indian tourists as well – largely groups of young urbanites rather than families. The hawkers of jewellery, clothes and coconuts were all still there – still selling the same psychedelic tie-dye sarongs and pseudo-hippy tat. Back from the beach, Europeans here for the winter season were sitting in a collective topor on the verandahs of rented houses. Despite more than thirty years of being the heart of the ‘Goa scene’, Anjuna remains a sleepy village set in a forest of coconut trees, albeit one whose economy is heavily tilted towards the presence of the hundreds of Westerners who spend several months here every winter.

The Russians have arrived. There goes the neighbourhood.

Initially I was a bit aghast. Had I once thought that this was the height of cool? Has the place gone downmarket or have I grown up, I wondered? I was shown some shawls and jewellery that I didn’t want to buy. I walked up to where the beach ended in some sharp rocks, littered with plastic debris from the bars and restaurants lining the beach.

Towards sunset I found myself at the Shore Bar, which sits on the seawall at the edge of the beach, perfectly positioned to view the sun setting over the ocean. The last time I’d been in the Shore Bar, large numbers of people gathered inside the bar and spilled out onto the beach, to dance or watch the sunset to the accompaniment of pounding techno. Now a handful of people sat around picking at salads or idly browsing magazines as generic chillout music burbled in the background.

As the evening wore on the clientele of the bar changed from tourists on holiday, to the long-stay foreigners who rent houses for the winter here. I talked with a Nigerian man in India on undefined ‘business’, and a thirtysomething mother from London called Kelly, who’d just enrolled her daughter in a school in Goa for the next few months. We talked about India, about London, about her daughter. All of a sudden I was seeing another side of Anjuna. Westerners have been coming here for so long that it’s no longer just a centre for youthful hedonism. Several generations are now represented here, from the sun-wizened old hippies speeding around on scooters, to a new generation of kids growing up and attending school here (not the local schools usually, but those set up by other expats).

After dark, the conveyor belt of cargo ships out to sea was still evident, a wall of lights extending to the horizon. The atmosphere in the Shore Bar was agreeably relaxed. The sea lapped a few feet from the laterite wall on which the bar sat, the stars were visible above, herbal tea and juices were being drunk, joints rolled. The louche appeal of a place like this is easy to understand. Yet I couldn’t help finding something vaguely disquieting about the line of ships in the distance.

People from Europe and other places come to spend the winter here for the cheap living, the relaxed pace of life, the bohemian atmosphere. Who can blame them? We sat around watching the waves lapping the beach, while a line of ships loaded with raw resources stretched to the horizon, fuelling the full throttle industrial civilisation that we’d presumably come here to escape. It brought to mind ‘Plastic Beach’, the Gorillaz album vaguely themed around a beach paradise whose inhabitants pursue hedonism even while the signs of its degeneration are all around them. ‘I know it seems like the world is hopeless / It’s like wonderland.’

From public garden to corporate plaza: Piccadilly Gardens and the new civic landscape (PDF)
A critical analysis of the ‘regeneration’ of Manchester’s central public space. Published in the European landscape journal JoLA, and based on my masters dissertion.

Best Value (PDF)
Article published in the Garden Design Journal about the role of cultural values in plant selection for designed landscapes.

Mughal gardens of India (PDF)
Theatres of courtly power: Mughal gardens of India

Along the approach up to the northern gate of Mandu citadel

Mandu ticks lots of interest boxes for me: a dramatic landscape of hills, hollows and lakes, littered with medieval Islamic architecture, set atop a Lost World-like plateau 360 metres above the surrounding Narmada valley.

One of the ravines that cut into the plateau - the view from my hotel terrace.

This is a place is of more than just aesthetic interest though. The onetime capital of the kingdom of Malwa is sited on a virtually impregnable table of volanic basalt, part of a vast range of ancient lava flows that forced themselves through fissures in the earth millions of years ago. Geology created an almost perfect fortress, ringed by steep slopes and ravines. But this city was only feasible on a high plateau because of ingenious rainwater harvesting systems, exploiting the topography to feed a network of lakes, cisterns and tanks to supply water during the long dry season.

A map showing the plateau with steep slopes and ravines around

One of the many lakes scattered around the plateau - some natural, others created by dams

As if this combination of ravishing architecture and landscape was not enough, Mandu also has one of the greatest romantic tales of medieval India attached to it. It’s not surprising really: if a romantic legend about such a place did not exist, it would have to be invented. The story of Bayazid, known as Baz Bahadur, the Muslim ruler of Mandu, and his beautiful Hindu-born lover Rupmati, is part of local folklore, but it has a factual basis too.

Geology, topography, architecture and (most crucial of all) water. All the elements which give Mandu its significance are, curiously reprised in the legend of Baz Bahadur and Rupmati. You can read it in full here.

In a nutshell, the story is of a passionate romance across the religious divide, one that led ultimately to the downfall of the kingdom when it was invaded by the army of the Mughal emperor Akbar. What’s so interesting is how the plateau of Mandu and the presence of water figure in the tale. Rupmati and Bahadur meet by a pool in the forest where she is bathing with her ‘handmaidens.’ In L.M. Crump’s florid 1926 The Lady of the Lotus: Rupmati, Queen of Mandu: A Strange Tale of Faithfulness, a translation of a Mughal manuscript, the story is given a rather European medieval flavour. Upon seeing Rupmati, Bahadur

‘made protest of the love which had sprung into flame in his heart, vowing that, whether she would or no, she must with him to Mandu to be his bride and queen..’

It was one of those instantly magnetic attractions:

‘Rup Mati answered never a work but gazed enrapt, on the fact of the king, and thus for a while they stayed, the eyes of each feeding on the other’s face and form.’

Initially, Rupmati refuses Bahadur, saying that she will only give herself to him when the waters of the goddess Rewa (another name for the Narmada river) ‘flow through the royal city there on high.’ Later, the goddess visits Rupmati in a dream, indicating a place on the plateau of Mandu, under a Tamarind tree, where a spring would be found, whose waters would be of the Narmada.

The Rewa Kund, next to Baz Bahadur's palace, seen from under the branches of a Tamarind tree

‘The waters of the spring he held back to make a pool for his lady’s bathing, and from it he led the waters by a lofty aquaduct within the palace walls, so that even there his fair queen might lave her golden body in the waters of the spring, whose gushing marked the fruition of their love.’

Sure enough, at the southern end of the plateau is a spring-fed pool, today called the Rewa Kund. Close by is a palace topped with chhattris, known as Baz Bahadur’s palace. At the top of an outcrop above it is Rupmati’s pavilion.

Rupmati's pavilion, at the highest point of the Mandu plateau

It sits right at the edge of the plateau, with a drop of hundreds of metres down to the Narmada valley below to the south, and commanding views over the Mandu plateau to the north. The building itself consists of a massive basement of basalt masonry, which houses a large water cistern under a vaulted roof in the basement. On top it is crowned with two chhatris with the ribbed watermelon-like domes characteristic of Mandu. At sunset, it’s something else up here.

Late afternoon view from the pavilion over the plateau

‘Here she bade Baz Bahadur build her two chattris on the roof, that she might come at will to gaze and dream. Many a day they sat here and sang together.’

It’s more likely that Rupmati’s pavilion was in fact built as a look out tower, enabling the defenders of Mandu to keep an eye on movements in the plains below. Water from the flat topped hill is collected and directed into the basement cistern to provide a water supply. Like almost all the surviving monuments of Mandu, proximity to water and commanding views over the surrounding terrain determine its siting. The architecture here is superbly adapted to climate and landscape. Deep overhangs around roofs direct monsoon rains away from the building and shield it from the sun. Open-sided pavilions (chhattris) on roof provide a place to sit and catch cooling breezes. Jalis - carved latticed screens pierced with geometrical designs – in the windows  allow air to circulate and cast intricate shadows onto the floor. For the hottest time of the summer, there are underground basements, which stay several degrees cooler than above ground, where the priviliged could escape the dog days of April and May, before the relief brought by the first rains in June.

Today Mandu is a pretty sleepy place. There are two or three hotels, a small village centered on the vast mosque at the centre of the plateau, and scattered smaller settlements. You could spend more than a week wandering around on a bicycle, exploring the many buildings and monuments, and taking in spectacular sunsets from the edge of the steep ravines and precipices. Both times I’ve been here, the place has had a rather folorn but attractive feel, as if it’s been forgotten about by visitors. There were a handful of Indian families who’d driven up here for a night or two from Indore, but otherwise I had all 47 square kilometres to myself. A sign that the place doesn’t get all that many foreign tourists is the absence of any restaurants offering muesli, banana pancakes and other backpacker staples. The best bet for breakfast here is Pohar – steamed flaked rice with spices, topped with namkeen (Bombay mix) and coriander. Young children greet you with ‘byebye’, or sometimes, ‘byebye chocolate?’ as you cycle past. But unlike many other places in India that see more foreign tourists, you are not pursued.

In the folds of one ravine, a spring emerges from 7th century rock-cut caves into a small rock pool where you can swim. Lovely place.

Apparently it’s at its best during the monsoon, when streams fall off the hills, the tanks and pools fill and everything is verdant green. Eighteenth and nineteenth century desciptions of Mandu talk about the monuments poking out from dense jungle. Since then large areas have been cleared for farming, but the sides of the plateau are still thickly wooded.

Spiralling water channels that feed one of the highly sybaritic pools on the roof of the Jahaz Mahal, the 'Ship Palace' thaat overlooks lakes on two sides

Water is still a critical issue here. In March, I saw water tankers supplying villagers with water – a sign that the reservoirs on the plateau were not enough for people’s needs. This October I expected to find the lakes and tanks full, but they were alarmingly low. The monsoon was patchy this year – despite the cataclysmic floods in Pakistan, it brought much less rain than usual to this part of the subcontinent.

I came here expecting to find some company with whom I could share a beer or two. Staying in a holy Hindu city is fascinating but the religious atmosphere tends to preclude meat and alcohol. As it happened, Mandu was almost deserted. I chatted with a family from Indore and a party of hard drinking Sikhs, from whom I couldn’t escape without ‘just one peg.’ But most of the evening I sat under the stars on the lawn of the hotel alone, with a book from the motley collection of paperbacks left behind by former travellers. Near my room, a nonedescript looking shrub opened its flowers at night to release an incredible sweet smell detecable from several metres away. Raatrani (literally ‘Queen of the Night’) or Cestrum Nocturnum, originally from the West Indies, but grows well here and seems to be widely grown in India, given that it has a common name in Hindi.

Mandu is such a unique and atmospheric place that the lack of company really didn’t bother me in the end. Not that much anyway – although Rupmati’s pavilion is one of those romantic places that really ought to be enjoyed with someone special. If you can bribe the caretakers to let you to spend the night there, as one guide told me he’d done, so much the better. He’d taken his girlfriend there as a surprise for her birthday, equipped with blankets, biscuits and a bottle of rum.

From the Gazetteer of Gwalior State (1907)

The palace on its island, reached by the bridge at far right

The palace itself sits on an island in the river, reached by a stone bridge. It overlooks a series of tanks cut into the stone bed of the river, lined with stone chambers along each river bank and with three stone pavilions standing in the river channel. Located on an outcrop of stone just before a drop of about three metres, the flowing water is directed through a series of narrow rills to fill the tanks, set into the descending topography of the river bed.

From the palace side, looking across to the pavilions and riverside galleries

At the edge of the outcrop, the water emerges from the channels to fall off the outcrop over angled chadors – water chutes of Persian origin (the name is from the Persian for veil – the same word used to describe the black ‘cape’ worn by women in Iran). In most gardens, a gentle trickle of water over a chador is animated by the carved surface of the chute, designed to produce patterns in the flowing water. Here, the swollen post-monsoon river makes them roaring cascades.

Not sure whether the Sultans of Mandu ever imagined that their water palace would be used for washing motorbikes

Chador

The Mughal Emperor Akbar is recorded stopping here in 1599, when the Mughal historian Abul-Fazl described the site as ‘one of the most delightful places in t he world’. Although most of what is visible here was built by the Sultans of nearby Mandu in the fifteenth century, they built over a temple dedicated to the Sun god Surya that was already here. They extended the tanks and channels that already existed here, adding pavilions and terraces, and building their palace on the site of the temple building.

The palace is now abandoned and semi-ruined, although still apparently owned by the Scindias (who are now prominent politicians in the modern state of Madhya Pradesh, the successor to Gwalior State). In the entrance hall are some very thirties-looking glass cabinets set into niches in the wall. An effigy of Surya has been installed in the central chamber on the ground floor, denoting the reinstatement of the site as a Hindu temple. You can just about make about the pale skinned god standing in the gloom, behind a metal grille.

From the corbels on the left, you can see that the verandah is a later addition

On the terrace outside are the remains of flowerbeds and a couple of ragged palm trees, clearly vestiges of the twentieth century planting scheme. I can just about imagine the Maharajah’s guests standing under the verandah, armed with gin and tonics, looking out over much the same scene. This is a quite inspired work of landscape architecture. Perhaps rarely for landscape architecture, it is truly worthy of the term – a work of architecture that adapts the regular, formalised use of water in the Islamic tradition to the natural topography of the place. The result is something than the sum of its  natural and manmade parts – a third nature.

The palace - the core medieval, the verandah a later addition

On the terrace of the palace

One of the pavilions in the river channel

View of the temples and step well at Ram Janardhan, just outside Ujjain.

I got to Ujjain on Tuesday. Going to be here for the next three months, working on a heritage architecture / landscape project with Dr Meera Dass, a conservation architect from Bhopal. She has developed a masterplan for the landscape around the Rudra Sagar, a lake overlooked by the Mahakal temple, the largest and most important temple in Ujjain. I’m helping develop the planting strategy and implementation for the landscape. The idea is to recreate a ‘sacred forest’ landscape around the lake, using native species with sacred associations to Shiva, (also known as Lord Mahakal), the presiding deity of the temple and of Ujjain. Given the currently degraded condition of both the lake and the landscape around it, this will be quite a challenge.

Step well and pavilion at Ram Janardhan temple.

Most of Ujjain looks nothing like this of course. It’s a smallish (429,933) Indian city – dusty and noisy. It has a very ancient history – the earliest references to the city date from the time of the Buddha. The great Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka lived here as a governor. According to Hindu legend, Krishna studied here. The ancient city of Ujjain was known to both the ancient Greeks (referred to as Ozene in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a description of the seaports of the Indian ocean) and the Chinese.

Although there are older architectural fragments scattered around the city, most of its buildings date back only to the eighteenth century. In 1235 the forces of the Delhi Sultanate, the leading Muslim power of north India at the time, razed the city and most of its temples.

So the fabled ancient city of Ujjain now exists mainly in the mind. In the early twentieth century, the novelist E M Forster was private secretary to the Raja of nearby Dewas, and wrote about his experiences of the area in The Hill of Devi. (This book I have to track down).  But I found this reference to Ujjain from an essay of Forster’s called ‘The Consolations of History’:

“We cannot visit either the great or the rich when they are our contemporaries, but by a fortunate arrangement the palaces of Ujjain and the warehouses of Ormus are open for ever, and we can even behave outrageously in them without being expelled. The King of Ujjain, we announce, is extravagant, the merchants of Ormus unspeakably licentious…and sure enough Ormus is a desert now and Ujjain a jungle. Difficult to realize that the past was once the present, and that, transferred to it, one would be just the same little worm as today, unimportant, parasitic, nervous, occupied with trifles…”

Modern Ujjain is noisy and polluted, like most Indian cities. But it does feel palpably old. It’s no longer a jungle: almost all the surrounding countryside is intensively cultivated to feed India’s ever growing population. Nevertheless, you can see huge bats (I’m talking small cat size) flapping over the city at dusk, and this morning a couple of evil looking monkeys were throwing chairs around outside my bedroom.

Green roofs in India

Dr Suresh Billore, former professor of Botany at Vikram University, Ujjain, and his green roof

This is the most exciting thing I’ve come across so far here: Dr Billore is an Indian pioneer of green roofs. Using suitable succulent plants, grown in a medium of crushed bricks, he has created a green roof on part of his house in Ujjain. Climate amelioration is a major potential benefit of these roofs in India, particularly in urban areas. Dr Billore is measuring the relative temperatures of his green roof and another part of the roof without vegetation. If these roofs were created on a large scale, they could have significant energy saving, climate moderation and habitat creation benefits in India.

My new single speed Indian wheels

I bought a bicycle. A single speed, robust Indian style bicycle. Modern, as they say, with a vintage feel. My Indian hosts – young architecture students studying in Bhopal but working on our project – think that bikes like these are not very cool. I think I’d get more respect from them if I got a motorbike.

Since the end of the ten year construction boom which ended so abruptly with the financial meltdown of late 2008, Dubai has become an allegory of financial hubris, and a favourite subject for western journalists in self righteous mood. The evident unsustainability of building a city of air conditioned skyscrapers, indoor ski slopes and vast malls in a desert, the exploitation of the mainly Indian and Pakistani workers who’ve built the whole thing… There’s lots of mileage there.

Despite all this – and perhaps because I’m a visitor rather than a resident – I actually quite like Dubai. It’s a strange city. It is at once unlike anywhere else, while it aspires to be a bit like several other places all over the world (Its whole marketing strategy seems designed to distract you from its actual location). The skyscrapers signify its desire to be a global city in the mould of New York (despite the absence of the same pressure of limited space and high land value that was the rationale for building upwards in New York); the plethora of branches of this or that famous restaurant or shop in London, Beruit or Sydney. Much of the architecture is incredibly vulgar, it’s true. Each skyscraper screams ‘look at me!’. The landscape in between is a tangle of highways, flyovers and irrigated road verges. But you can’t fault Dubai’s rulers for their lack of ambition and vision. Whatever its economic future, what has been created is one of the most remarkable urban skylines in the world – most of it in the space of about ten years. It’s a phenomenon of early twentyfirst century global capitalism: a city created from globalised money, by a globalised workforce, on a strip of desert by the sea.

Welcome to Everything

There is enough hyperreality here to keep a Baudrillard or an Eco in theories for quite a while.  This sense of unreality is added to by the fact that (as a priviliged visitor or resident at least) most views of the outside are through tinted glass, looking out from airconditioned indoor space. When you go outdoors, the real climate of the Gulf hits you as a muggy blast of humid air.

Dubai skyline through tinted plate glass

The visible landscape in Dubai is generally of two kinds: newly developed roads, buildings and ornamental, irrigated planted landscape in between; or undeveloped desert. Here and there you can get glimpses of something else – the urban landscape that used to exist here before the building boom. At the foot of Downtown Dubai, the planned district around the base of the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, there are low rise housing compounds dating from as long ago as the 1970s (gasp!). There’s even a farm. The sight of  scrappy sheds and pens for sheep and goats in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa is highly surreal – and you see a lot of surreal things in Dubai.

Urban fringe goats

I met a landscape architect who works here. Despite the end of the construction boom that provided so much work for architects, landscape architects, engineers and others, there is still some work to be had here for bluesky projects. Nothing grows here without irrigation – except for the Ghaf tree (Prosopis cineraria), an Arabian native that survives because of its long taproot which reaches down to groundwater below the soil surface (up to 35 metres, apparently). Even cacti and succulents need irrigation. There’s some interesting cactus planting around the base of the Burj Khalifa.

Looking out from the interior of the Burj Khalifa - at the base

The world’s tallest building AND freestanding structure looks like it will stay that way for some time yet. Even looking at it, it’s clear that the tower’s designers have stretched the limits of skyscraper design – not least in terms of the lift technology needed to service a building this high. The Burj’s tapering, slender shape appears to maximise the height it can reach while minimising the mass that the foundations need to support. Viewed at the base, its footprint is actually quite small. The footprint of the very uppermost floors (it goes up to 160) must be barely that of a single room.

The base of the Burj Khalifa

From the viewing gallery on the 124th floor, you can feel the building sway. Dubai looks like an architectural model below. Despite the great height though, the view lacks the drama and scale of going up say, the Empire State Building in New York. Unlike the Empire State, the Burj doesn’t emerge out of a forest of skyscrapers but stands relatively isolated from Dubai’s main cluster of skyscrapers along Sheikh Zayed Road. Having said that, the view is not to be sniffed at.

The shadow of the world's tallest building

In the photo above, you can see the abrupt transition from brand new mega development to a more traditional landscape of residential compounds. There is something other than long-term ‘organic’ urbanisation going on here. These developments have not just come about through ‘market forces.’ They are the creation of an act of will by the rulers of Dubai: an ambition to create a global commercial centre in a fraction of the time it took cities like London, New York or Tokyo to achieve such status.

Dubai can be criticised on a number of grounds: its profligate use of water and energy, the vast disparity between the priviliged Emiratis and expats who run the place, and the army of generally poor foreign labourers who swelter in 40 degree (and higher) heat for six days a week, with virtually no employment rights. These things cannot be denied. But they should also be placed in context: next to the regional giants of Saudi Arabia and Iran, between which the UAE is sandwiched, Dubai is a cosmopolitan and open place, where as long as you remember where you are, you can feel (relatively) free. For the army of Asian immigrants who keep the place running, it’s a place of opportunity, stability and (within certain well policed boundaries) relative freedom. This city is built on exploitation, it’s true. A lot of its new development is vulgar – although the Burj Khalifa is actually rather beautiful. And you could say the same about the armies of exploited labourers and workers who built nineteenth century London and New York. Like Dubai, they must have been pretty vulgar in their day too.

City of superlatives: the world's first camel milk chocolate, on sale in the world's tallest building