“Visiting IKEA Croydon is very similar to the experience of visiting Tate Modern”, our guide said as he indicated left to turn the Fiat Cinquecento on to the Purley Way.
“Throngs of public circulating around, gazing at specially curated and tempting chunks of modernity. Rubber-soled feet on the end of combat-trousered legs squeaking on shiny, shiny floors.”
G had just noticed the twin IKEA towers – the old chimneys of what was the huge Croydon B Power Station, topped with their yellow and blue bands. He asked the guide whether he went there often.
“I used to go there for meatballs, gravy and chips when I worked around the corner. I thought about taking you all for lunch there today, but I thought you’d prefer Wing Yip….unless you’d prefer meatballs and gravy?”
“No! Definitely Wing Yip…I’d just forgotten that Purley Way was in Croydon”.
Choosing the Wing Yip centre as the place to lunch seemed perfect because of its irresistible kitsch charm and the happy Shanghai associations – but also because of its out-of-town road-side status. Particularly its out-of-town, road-side, Purley Way, Croydon status.
Along with the Hanger Lane Gyratory, Brent Cross and Lakeside Thurrock, The Purley Way Croydon (the A23) is one of the most familiar ‘place’ names in Greater London, if not the South East of England…if not in the UK.
The A23, Purley Way, is a key road in to (or out of) London. Made famous by countless Christmas blue-cross-sale adverts, the Eye in the Sky and possibly also because of Croydon Airport, London’s first airport.
On the IKEA map of London, the Purley Way is more prominent and important than central London, which is represented as a black hole. And more important still on IKEA’S map are of course the ‘IKEA towers’ – drawn lovingly as a friendly cartoon icon that dominates London.
In the real London (not IKEA map London) the IKEA towers don’t quite visually dominate the whole of the capital but they are landmarks in the London psyche. And as physical structures, they certainly do constitute a local landmark in south London. Travelling from all over London and the South East, IKEA day-trippers point their cars at the two blue-and-yellow-topped chimneys. For most, Purley Way, and especially IKEA and its towers are the only reason they would ever visit Croydon.
Unlike other car-centric, bland, out-of-town non-places, the IKEA towers actually create a sense of place at Valley Park, Purley Way. The bus and Tramlink stops next door also makes the place super-accessible via public transport meaning that unlike other out-of-town shopping environments IKEA even enjoys lots of pedestrian visitors and an interesting mix of people, age groups, gender and ethnicity. Put some homes there too and you might almost have a functioning city.
A trip to IKEA Croydon is a popular family day out (3 million visitors per year). It’s always chock full of consumers shuffling themselves around pseudo-Scandinavian room-sets, flirting with and then shutting out everyone else, gazing at contemporary perfection, projecting themselves a faultless, unique and modern life.
It’s an art gallery-like experience. More specifically, it’s very similar to a trip to Tate Modern (3.6 million visitors per year). Looking. Shuffling. Self-awareness. Hunger. Flirting. Looking. Imagining. Not quite enjoying. Smugness. Not quite understanding.
The route gets more frenzied when the abstract room-set realm of contemporary lifestyle projection gives way to the immediate temptation of take-away-able kitchenware, picture frames, candle-sticks, potato mashers, cushions, bedside lamps and the meat-ball bonanza of the IKEA restaurant. These parts of the store are where you get to either take a piece of the dream and put it in your basket or else put it in your mouth, chew it and wash it down with a cup of coffee. Haven’t got much change? Don’t worry; you can get an IKEA hotdog for only 35p. Like the Tate Modern gift shop and cafe, this is where all the real action is.
And what about the ‘warehouse’ zone of the store? In a piece for ‘Tate etc.’ in 2005, novelist Lawrence Norfolk writes about using the Tate archive as a researcher-consumer: “The Tate archive is to art what the warehouse section at IKEA is to home furnishings. Anything that one could want is here. All one has to do is get hold of it.”
Both Tate Modern and IKEA Croydon accommodate a shuffling mass of people viewing a perfect contemporary world which they are then invited to take away with them. Both places sell Mark Rothko prints.
To an extent, both places neuter, popularise and commodity 20th Century modernism (is Tate Modern an IKEA for the mind?). IKEA is successful at progressing the modernist agenda by empowering the mass public to improve their living environments and promoting a degree of supposedly progressive self-expression (remember ‘Chuck out your chintz?’) – Albeit from a limited palette. IKEA’s reach is impressive because it affects so many of our own homes physically. A Swedish home-furnishing brand has noticeably altered the taste and habits of a nation.
It is probably the associations with positive change and mass popularity that inspired the decision to make IKEA Croydon a Polling Station.
There are also physical similarities between IKEA Croydon and Tate Modern. Like the Tate, IKEA Croydon occupies an old power station. In fact IKEA’s inhabitation of the Croydon B power station site pre-dates the Tate’s move to Bankside by several years. Consistent with Croydon’s tradition of having the ‘first of’ or the ‘most of’ or the ‘biggest’ (but not always the best) Croydon B power station was among the fist ex-industrial sites in London to be ‘regenerated’. Having lain empty for several years, Croydon B was used as a set for Terry Gilliam’s film ‘Brazil’ before plans were drawn up for the ‘Powerhouse’ – a multi-million pound retail scheme that was designed to occupy the grand turbine hall of the power station.
Eventually IKEA purchased the site and, to the despair of English Heritage – who just missed the opportunity to list the Art Deco turbine hall – the main body of the power station was demolished to make way for the now familiar retail shed in the 1990s. The twin red-brick chimneys are all that remain of the original building. Now the chimneys create the biggest branded signpost in South London.
Strangely, in 2003 it was reported that IKEA were planning to demolish the chimneys to save the ongoing expense of maintaining them. Strange because IKEA did not initially seem to take in to account the inherent value to their brand and sales figures of owning these physical and psychological signpost-landmarks. Less surprising is how unaware IKEA were of the place that the chimneys held in the London’s cultural memory. Unaware perhaps of the poem about the chimneys submitted to the local paper and possibly also the role of the structures in Shena Mackay’s novel ‘Heligoland’.
When the news of the possible demolition went public, however, all hell broke loose. Local people wrote in to the Croydon Guardian and Croydon Advertiser to complain. Articles about the chimneys and Croydon B’s place in the history of Croydon followed and the Council attempted to list the structures.
In response, and surprised perhaps by the reaction, IKEA wrote an open letter to the local paper promising not to demolish the chimneys and called for ideas from the public for possible new uses for the much-loved structures.
Emerging ideas included using the chimneys to generate power again by installing wind turbines. Another suggestion was that a viewing gallery and suburban art gallery could be introduced around the chimneys. A suburban Tate? Now there’s an idea.
The similarities between Tate Modern and IKEA Croydon are symbolic of the overlapping of culture and art and architecture and shopping. Where Tate Modern is a monument to the fixing of modern art in to our common culture using ‘lifestyle’ as a way in, IKEA Croydon is about fixing a certain image of the modern life in to our common culture using the appeal of modern art and design as a way in. Both begin to feed back on each other and it becomes hard to find the joins.
