THE SOUNDFor George Thomson, JG Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘The Sound-Sweep’ provided the

essential springboard for a short animated film centred around the M25 and Bluewater.

The super-regional shopping centre is transformed, after a series of targeted attacks,

into the Great London Sewer. The narrative is told through the medium of sketchbooks,

produced by the Old Man of this lost community surviving in no-man’s land.

88

STAGEJG Ballard’s short story ‘The Sound-Sweep’1 provided astarting point rather than a narrative framework for theSound Stage project, which is located within a futurevision of the M25 after a series of attacks on theBluewater shopping centre – a notion suggested byBallard himself – now known as the Great London Sewer.The notion of collection is borrowed from the Ballard text;however, it now has an architectural implication, asartifacts washed up from the sewer are used in theconstruction of the community infrastructure andeventually the creation of a performance space: theSound Stage. The project is based on a sketchbook (itselffictitious) retrieved from the ruins of the community anddrawn by the central character, the Old Man.

The project exists beyond this proposed future andimagines an excavation of what the community was like,illustrated in film to create an animated version of the

sketchbook, describing the development of thecommunity and its eventual failure within the no-man’s-land of the Great London Sewer.

The community abandoned the old M25 motorwayafter the attacks; protection, they decided, came with aperimeter fence, a no-mans-land, border zone, a gateway.The M25 was once the connection to London; now, itsdefensive barrier.

The Old Man had been living out of his car before theattacks, washing in the toilets of the Clacket Laneservices; now he remained in this abandoned monumentto the old road. No one maintained the zone. Cracks filledwith weeds spread across the road surface, as water rosefrom beneath. The blind paranoia that created the zonecalmed in the ensuing years, and the community decidedto reclaim it. The old infrastructure was beyond repair, sothey proceeded with the plan for the Great London Sewer.

George Thomson, TheSound Stage, Iver,Buckinghamshire, 2078Artwork from the finalscene of the film. Thearea of Farlows Lake,Iver, was eventuallyflooded, submerging theSound Stage. Thestructure thus becomes aforgotten remnant of thelost community of theGreat London Sewer.

89

the gramophone. The large horn would play the vibrations of water,ripples of sewage replacing the grooves of vinyl. Vibration and movementwere inherent to the floating existence of the community. Performanceswere held in the vast amphitheatre below the horn, a notion that hadbeen lost in the paranoid and oppressive existence within the Londonwalls. The Sound Stage, as it was known, was the community centre, acathedral built on the tenets of collection, performance and mobility.

The community had sustained life in the zone, and word of theSound Stage spread beyond the city walls. Its performances, events, the spectacle, reminded the dwellers within the walls of whatthey had lost.

Gradually rising rainfalls and breaches in the sewer wall completelyflooded Farlows Lake and the surrounding area of the zone. The SoundStage had been abandoned long ago, after sanctions forbidding publicgatherings spread to encompass the zone. Perhaps somewhere on theconcrete bed of the flooded motorway, a part of the Sound Stageremains. Now, this cathedral of performance, which had offered adifferent way, lies drowned as another monument to the derelictmotorway, a relic of what could have been. 4

Note

1. JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, HarperPerennial (London), 2006.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © George Thomson

The Old Man was not a labourer before the attacks, butdecided to enlist in the sewer construction. A life in theuncertainty beyond the walls was better than thecontrolled existence within them. After construction theOld Man, and the growing community of zone inhabitants,surveyed the empty landscape, searched for possibilitiesin the wilderness, and collected waste brought by thesewer current and items from the ruined road.

The community settled in Farlows Lake near the parishof Iver, once a popular fishing spot, which had high stocks of big catch, eels, pike and perch that swamamong the shopping trolleys and traffic cones. Thefloating market was built directly on the lake from metalcarcasses salvaged from the old road. The adjacent plots of land were cleared of rubble and used to growstunted vegetables.

The community was built and run on collected items.Scaffolding, clamps, cones and road signs could all beused in its construction. The prize find was agramophone, a forgotten object. The wind-up mechanismwas a revelation. This was a community beyond theinfrastructure of the domestic city: no gas fires, no lightswitches, no electricity. With only one record it wasdecided that a large structure was to be built to replicate

Artwork from the film indicating the Sound Stage afloat the Great London Sewer. The film providedan animated version of the drawings from the fictitious sketchbook of the lost community.

Artwork from the film showing the amphitheatre in front of the Sound Stage.

90

Extract from the foundsketchbook of the Old Man,indicating his sketch designfor the sewer stylus, a meansof playing the vibrations ofthe sewer current, amplifiedby the Sound Stage.

Extract from the sketchbook indicating the detail of the Sound Stage’s perimeter staircase.This would have served as a construction drawing within the community.

Extract from the sketchbook showing Farlows Lake market, constructed from the detritus washed up by the sewercurrent and from the remnants of the Great London Sewer’s previous incarnation as the M25 motorway.

91