london flip sides

In the British library, I fail to locate the Freeze catalogue, 1988, on their system. Stymied, I approach the bookish man on the desk and shamefacedly admit my incompetence. He asks for the publisher or the gallery and I cannot help him. A quick recce informs that it's not held by the library. I feel like I'm wasting his time. He gets to work on twin computers. In no time at all he's hacked into three dozen libraries, sourced five locations where the catalogue is housed, three places I can catch the Omnibus video and printed all the information out. When I thank him he looks at me as though to say that he would have been disappointed in himself if he hadn't come up with the goods.

Ten minutes walk away I go to the Brunswick centre. The Bruswick centre has always been a sanctuary of scruffy seventies utopianism. Plastic bags foundered in puddles as the wind howled through a concrete landscape. Defiant in the face of revival, an oddity, adorned with the Renoir, the second hand bookshop, a greasy cafe and not much else. A forgotten pearl in the heart of capital. Not any more. The developers have arrived. Every shop is a brand. The spaghetti western wasteland has been sliced in half, the market taking over. Bright, shiny, aspiring to sleek. Maybe in another 30 years the Brunswick centre will have rediscovered the desolation it is heir to.