Around the age of ten, I travelled alone once a month to visit my grandmother who lived on the far side of the city. My mother always accompanied me on the short walk from our house to a bus stop stood beneath a 1970s Brutalist concrete flyover on the outer lip of town. Enroute, we passed a row of prefabricated bungalows built, in the aftermath of the Second World War, to house ex-servicemen and their families, and those whose homes had been lost to bombing. The first postwar efforts to deal with social housing on a budget. The prototypes of these steel and later aluminium units were called ‘Portals.’ Many people might have assumed the name was chosen to suggest metaphorical gateways to bright futures, but they were in fact named after Viscount Wyndham Portal, the then Minister of Works and Planning. One Portal design, called the Phoenix, no doubt to evoke the glorious rebirth of the people who were assigned them, had only been designed as temporary accommodation until residents transcended their postwar ashes. The thin, rudimentary structures, however, were still occupied, forty years after their construction, long after they had exceeded their intended purpose and proposed lifespan of ten years.
        Directly across the road was a small spiritualist church built on an otherwise unusable patch of dead land. The church had begun life as little more than a glorified shed, but over the years had been added to piecemeal—a roof here, a porch there—made possible by the proceeds of charity drives until it became a more robust construction. The only indication that this basic, functional building housed a church was a small sign displaying service and healing times affixed to the pebble-dashed wall beside the already peeling front door.
        It was likely that some of the long-term occupants of the supposedly interim prefab homes attended the spiritualist church to hear assurances of the eternal paradise that awaited them if they endured their transitory lives with dignity, humility, and made the best of their humble lots. Then, after the service, they would return to their squat homes, their once white-washed walls flaking away to reveal the gun-grey metalwork and corrugated asbestos sheets beneath. Inside each unit I imagined families left behind, frozen in history, still existing in black and white in a world since evolved to colour. Between these flimsy walls they waited in perpetual hope, faithfully persisting in their beliefs, not only in the spiritual afterlife, but also in the exceptionalist stories that the nation’s leaders tell citizens, especially to placate those most needy: The promise of an inevitable, utopian society, if only we—or at least some of us — are willing to abide hardships with no end in sight.
        When the bus came my mother always made sure I took a seat close to the driver. The stink of the bus always turned my stomach: damp, the mildewy smell of the orange, brown, and black patterned seat upholstery; burnt diesel and rubber; adult sweat; nauseatingly sweet aftershave and cheap perfume; the revenant aroma of alcohol, vomit, and urine. It all trickled down the windows in dirty rivulets when the bus steamed up in winter, and it was through these grimy streaks that my mother would wave at me until the bus was out of sight.
        Though there were many stops, through a variety of neighbourhoods, a change of buses was not required and meeting my grandmother at the other end was always prearranged. There was a brief delay while the bus changed drivers at the city terminus with its shadowed huddles of despondent alcoholics, depleted sex workers, and aimless drug addicts, but I only ever observed them through the bus window; they were as remote as characters on television.
        Ordinarily, the driver changeover would be swift, and the bus soon on its way again, but one trip in early January did not go to plan. The driver switch did not happen. Passengers were told instead to alight and await a replacement bus. I had never got off the bus at the terminus before. It was like stepping off a boat into shallow waters aware that something is slithering below the murky surface. An angry shout echoed from one end of the gloomy cavernous depot. I ignored it as best I could, which was not at all, and adhered myself to the drivers’ office door from which radiated a dingy light, tinted queasy green by glass so thick it can only have been designed to withstand attacks: Blossomed splatters of dried liquids drooled down to the ground where the remnants of pulverised beer, gin and whisky bottles sparked like sticky, dirty emeralds. I dared not look deeper into the vast terminus in case I caught the eye of one of its shadowy denizens—ghosts in bundles of clothes; urban stragglers who converge on stations the world over as if summoned by a forgotten deity. Soon I was safely ensconced on a new bus, but my relief was fleeting: The bus had to be rerouted. The distorted tannoy announcement assured me I would eventually reach my destination, but not before passing through an unfamiliar quarter of the city.
        For the next twenty minutes my onward journey was a disorientating detour through looping dual carriageway exits bordered by barren, nascent industrial land; recently laid smooth ring roads; a dozen seemingly identical flyovers, and meandering routes so new they were yet to be named.
        In the darkening late afternoon, a new, sprawling housing estate appeared ahead on the horizon, which had, less than a decade before, comprised ancient farmland and villages, allegedly of the bucolic type featured in children’s illustrated books and the dubious nostalgia of reactionary traditionalists. Now, much to the clamorous indignation of the latter, the English countryside had been decimated and discarded. Mostly, anyway. As is often the case with such formidable housing developments, there was one building whose owners had refused to sell up and the developers had been obliged to work around it. A mid-nineteenth century house with peeling, faux-Tudor beams, moss-stained brickwork, boarded up windows and graffiti. No doubt it had been a desirable property in its early history, but was now an incongruous, anachronistic, and even surreal vision, relegated to a scrap of grass verge no longer safely accessible by foot. It was besieged on all sides by concrete megaliths, corrugated crash barriers, municipal signage, gaping entrances to bunker car parks, and sleek Wellsian streetlamps with their hooded, alien cyclopean eyes. As the bus passed the house, I saw that a slender portion of its exterior was lit, but only because it happened to fall within the outermost range of the municipal lighting, newly installed, not to light the house but a road sign at the entrance to a small roundabout.
        I imagined that behind the house’s boarded windows the Victorian owners were, through a paradox of time, somehow living out their existences parallel to ours. Right now, they were going about their daily lives, only psychically aware of the future outside. They might occasionally sense a faint presence, hear a distant, out-of-place echo, see abstract flashes in dreams, or experience the kind of nagging inexplicable unease that leads people to speculate supernatural phenomena.
        I was mesmerised by the housing estate looming ahead. To my young eyes it was part industrial complex or prison, part child’s playset with its simple geometric blocks: Cars driving up and down the estate’s own simplified road system looked like toys. There was something clean and neat about the ordered lines, wide featureless walls, and predefined negative spaces. It looked fake, perhaps because it was not part of a conurbation that had evolved over decades or centuries like a real, human town. It stood apart, removed from the natural growth of a town, arriving fully formed outside the city, separate and alien, as if waiting to be attached like a donated organ.
        The bus neared the long blocks of flats, which at first looked like immense, straight walls but were in fact arcs with duplicated rows of uniform windows and elevated walkways. At the base of these inhabited ramparts lay shallow, artificial grassy mounds. Intended as recreational areas, they were stylised simulacra of the countryside that had been erased to make way for them. Frail, wilting saplings dotted the mounds like spent matches jabbed into discarded fried eggs. On this insufficient land sat a pile of debris, a battered caravan, and a bonfire, but no people were visible. Only two dogs could be seen leaping and snapping at each other. Graffiti beside a smashed telephone booth read: ‘Pig free zone,’ ‘welcome to hell’, as well as the usual litany of scrawled obscenities, threats of violence, and incitive political symbols.
        The bus drew up at a traffic light beside a small gang of cocky, young teenage boys. They were puffing on joints, the smell of which quickly permeated the bus even though its doors remained closed. The boys taunted the bus driver—a nominal authority figure—challenging him to stop their flagrant lawbreaking, goading him to fight, neither of which he had any intention of doing. When he refused to open the bus doors to them, they picked on a passenger, racially insulting them, pressing their faces up to the glass and spitting. When the bus moved forward again, I heard a hard bang: a full can of beer struck the side of the bus, a fan of foamy liquid gushing down the window.
Since the 1920s, but especially after the second world war, estates such as these were touted as urban utopias, symbolic of mankind’s evolutionary leap forward into the space age. Even the architectural style of such housing, dubbed Streets in the Sky, evoked the pages of children’s comics such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but not only: serious-minded, reputable publications the world over commissioned illustrators to render lavish, cross-sectioned visions of multileveled cityscapes with pseudo-aerodynamic, rocket-shaped, art-deco skyscrapers; vast, crime-free boulevards and suspended monorails, all below protective domed skies studded with orderly queues of flying cars. The metropolis of tomorrow—the year 2000 was most often invoked to exemplify the utopian future—was to be a benevolent machine, whose sole function was to create an egalitarian, uncomplicated society. We were to be the fulfilled recipients who want for nothing. In these detailed depictions, everyone in the future is smiling; there is no poverty; all menial work is fulfilled by mechanical servants. Diseases such as cancer, if indeed they still exist, do not have devastating, terminal outcomes. Treatment requires little more than a brief, unflustered visit to a state-of-the-art hospital with five-star hotel trappings. More a social visit than a cure, like meeting friends at the Ritz for tea as respite from an afternoon’s shopping.
        The so-called Streets in the Sky were elevated decks that ran the length of the blocks, but true thoroughfares they were not; they did not lead anywhere. They were more akin to the blind alleys of the labyrinthine tenement slums they were supposed to have replaced. Because these housing blocks numbered seven or more storeys, the elevated walkways, combined, ran for many miles and policing them became impossible. This was compounded by elevators becoming the first victims of vandals, who were of course absent from the neat, miniature models submitted by architect firms hoping to impress government housing departments and visitors to world trade fairs.
        The estate, towering over my bus like a spaceport in a science-fiction film, opened in 1972, but within only two years of welcoming its first tenants to the Elysian future it was no longer deemed safe for children and became an adult-only housing project. Design flaws swamped the utopian vision: The estate was invaded by vermin due to ineffective sewage and heating systems. An overabundance of asbestos had been employed in the estate’s construction, not to mention substandard building materials in general. The balconies were treacherous and at least one child fell to its death. But if these were the maladies that debilitated the body of the estate there were also its psychological afflictions, invisible but no less damaging: The estate’s layout alienated residents from each other—an oversight of the planners—and a new dual carriageway further isolated the estate from the nearby city.
        The estate’s tens of thousands of residents had been promised a future, but instead found themselves abandoned at the spaceport whose walls turned out to be as flimsy as two-dimensional scenery flats on a Hollywood soundstage. The future was not awaiting the tenants. Once again, they had been lured away and outcast like medieval pariahs at the margins of communities. Even the local council itself eventually turned its back on the estate, washing its hands of its responsibilities and duty of care. The site subsequently fell into disrepair and became infamous for its drug addicts, criminals, and bohemians before its demolition a mere twenty years after its construction.
        At some point in the early 1970s, we suddenly stopped believing in the future. Yes, we had just reached the moon, but in many ways, it was a hollow gesture: a performative, costly act owing more to primitive one-upmanship between squabbling earthly nations than mankind’s destiny among the stars. Less than half a decade after the moon landing, broadcasters did not bother televising NASA’s Skylab 3 splashdown. Chief astronaut Alan B. Shepard said it was ‘disturbing that we're becoming so blasé that we didn't even cover the landing on TV.’ Networks instead favoured broadcasting shows like Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, and in the UK, The Onedin Line and Upstairs Downstairs. Instead of focusing our ambitions on a bright future, as we had done for decades, we began looking back over our shoulders at the comfortable past, a deodorised confected one at that. It’s possible that averting our gaze from our interplanetary aspirations was a sign of our reflexive embarrassment, our shamefaced acknowledgment that we might have got carried away with our comic book visions after all. Though science fiction had opened a gateway to myriad new and exciting worlds, the results of our enthusiastic efforts to reach them had been meagre, our progress comparatively negligible. We were not years but centuries, maybe even millennia, away from realising the visions that had galvanised us. The utopian future was on hold; it was just too much like hard work. We were like children on Boxing Day already bored with the musical instrument we had pestered our parents for; less keen upon realising that one does not simply pick up an instrument and play it like a virtuoso on the first day.
        Was it really any surprise that tenants, consigned to the ruins of a social experiment gone wrong, turned their rage against the insubstantial walls around them? Not to mention the fickle, overreaching society that had, in only two decades, first uprooted these families, destroyed vast areas of the Victorian city that it deemed unsightly and anachronistic, then just as quickly turned its back on its failed endeavour, and its casualties, to instead dream nostalgically about ‘the good old days’ of cosy Victoriana.