the wherewithal

In our everyday journeys through public space, I was reminded recently that, when it comes to walking, it’s not simply where that matters, but how. The ‘how’, I will return to – the ‘where’ in this instance was the gleaming air conditioned interior of the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

It came in the shape of an encounter, a negotiation, between me and Imran. Between me, a bored civilian, waiting to pick up his girlfriend, and him, a bored representative of the state. Imran (a pseudonym) was a police community support officer (PCSO), a few hours into his shift, who stopped me for questioning. It was an exchange that left me somewhat bemused, holding a Metropolitan Police 5090 form (a sample of which have been uploaded onto Flickr here), whose ballpoint inscriptions acted as evidence that our conversation had been circumscribed by certain norms of officialdom. The form (an identical carbon copy was whisking its way to what I imagine to be the nebulous caverns of a Metropolitan Police records department) recorded, as might be expected, my personal details, and that our negotiations had satisfied Imran that a more invasive form of interaction, a search, wasn’t necessary.

Let me be clear. I wasn’ particularly shocked. Or outraged. Or distressed. Partly, I am sure, this is because I was, without too much critical thought on my part, adding my contribution to the largely passive acceptance on the part of many global city dwellers of what seem to be the norm of increasingly intrusive urban policing. But partly it was because the episode had been so very congenial (I do, of course recognise, that this is not always the case – in particular, I can’t help but wonder what the atmosphere would have been had my ethnicity and appearance more closely approached a terrorist stereotype). In fact, once Imran had left, my realisation that it had taken up a whole 15 minutes of my time meant that it was, on one level at least, far more successful, and cheap, than the coffee and muffin which I had just finished nursing, aimed at achieving the same result.

My bemusement emerged more from the reasons given for me being – literally – stopped. When Imran halted me, passing a peculiarly alien-shaped Krispy Kreme stand, he told me he had noticed me ‘wandering around’. Well, of course, he was right. I had. More precisely, I had been engaged in a kind of shuffling, meandering, time wasting gait, taking in the full scope of the arrivals hall, and lacking any clearly defined destination. It was the kind of ambling that, I now fully realise, can attract attention, if performed in the wrong places. I actually suspect, however, that it was not just this that attracted Imran’s gaze, but the combination of this haphazard stroll with another suspicious tendency: a lazy wandering eye, as I sought to take in the vaulting interior of the latest addition to London’s global transportation infrastructure. I can only presume that, for Imran, this behaviour sat in visible contrast to the more directed activity of others in the terminal.

It would be easy to be reactionary about this. But perhaps, in this case, a little too easy. The result might be to obscure the specifically mundane character of our encounter. As Imran told me, he been engaged in a wandering activity of his own before noticing me, up and down the length of the terminal concourse, in the hope of spotting someone, anyone, that he felt he could, with at least some justification, stop. This would enable him, he implied, to feel like he was doing his job. Because Imran was bored and, it seemed, demoralised. The problem was, he said, that his transfer to Terminal 5 had meant that his days had slowed to an ambling pace. Having previously worked in the older, more ramshackle and chaotic Heathrow terminals, with the hustle and bustle excitement of too many people crammed into spaces too small, Terminal 5 with its open, empty spaces (a feature central to the recent ‘Terminal 5 is working’ campaign) was plain and simply dull. ‘What I really want to do’ (I paraphrase), ‘is bag thefts. Here, there’s not enough people around. Who would try to steal a bag here?’. No bag thefts meant no chases, not much excitement, and hence, a life of slow, gallery-paced walking. Imran had, therefore, requested a transfer back to Terminal 4, to where his daily life could accelerate to a pace he preferred and where he could feel like (to echo The Wire), ‘real police’.

There is, however, an absent third figure in this encounter, invisible to Imran, to whom I am tempted to attribute at least some causal responsibility. Immediately prior to my stroll, while finishing off my coffee, I had been reading Michelle Murphy’s excellent book, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty.¹ It provides a sophisticated historical analysis of the interplay between the fabric of, in particular, office buildings and the people that work and move through them, focusing, as the title suggests, on the emergence of the, prior to the 1980s, non existent sick building syndrome. The specifics of the analysis are compelling, but it was the more general attention to the innards of modern buildings that got me thinking then, while passing time in Terminal 5. It was the book that prompted me to look up, to see if I could see the air ducts, the cables, to think about the work that had gone into making Terminal 5 itself work. And, after looking up, it was the book that prompted me to begin to wander, to begin to try and understand how the building was moving people around, keeping them settled, funnelling them in and out, directing their attention, keeping them cool. This was then, a very direct example (even if perhaps not quite what Murphy has in mind), of the way in which, as she put it in a paper presented yesterday at the Oxford University Scalography workshop, ‘one’s own analysis re-narrates or disrupts the terrain of matters’.²

This re-narration continued for me once Imran had left. As I began to process what had just occurred, Murphy’s theoretical analysis of the relationship between buildings and people came into focus. She considers some of the results of considering buildings as ‘assemblages’, existing in a dynamic relationship with the bodies that inhabit them; of tracing their ‘mutual presupposition’, their transformative ‘mutual capture’ (12). In particular, she traces the ongoing coming into being ‘regimes of perception’ in which these assemblages are implicated. These regimes, she writes, ‘establish what phenomena become perceptible, and thus what phenomena come into being for us, giving objects boundaries and imbuing them with qualities’ (24).

The assemblage of Terminal 5 consisted, on that day, of not only me, Imran, thousands of other visitors, and the full range of material devices to transport us there and feed, heat, and entertain us. For also incorporated in amongst the assemblage was the necessary legal architecture that provided Imran with the power to stop me in the first place. As a Community Support officer, his power to stop and search is limited to specifically designated areas, as laid out the Terrorism Act 2000; Heathrow airport, I have to presume, is such a place. It was this that made me perceptible to Imran, as much as the fact that my trajectory through the terminal’s interior and my wayward gaze didn’t quite match up to that expected of its visitors.

Terminal 5 Flickr fragments

Richard Rogers’ building, whose initial design was first put out for planning approval in 1994 (the process lasted until 1999), has been hailed by some as a ‘cathedral to flight’. The analogy only goes so far, however. A cathedral invites contemplation, both of its interior detail and exterior grandeur. However, Terminal 5 – along with other new airport buildings I suspect – practically forbids both. The difficulties for the public in seeing the building as a whole can be evidenced by a quick search on Flickr.³ The results (a sample of which are above) are a myriad collection of fragments – some external, but most internal – comprising the largely empty open spaces that Imran found so frustrating, as well as supporting beams, courtyards, fountains, announcement boards, train terminals, shopping zones and, of course, the panes of the glass cladding which cover much of the building. Only a tiny minority capture the building as a whole (most are tiny, from plane windows). But the kind of contemplation of internal detail that these photos allow online, are, as I discovered, similarly difficult to achieve in situ (I wonder if some of the Flickr photographers, presuming they lacked permission, like me, also ended up clutching a 5090 form). Given the sensitivities around the security of airport spaces, the ‘regime of perception’ at work in the Terminal 5 assemblage does not, somewhat ironically, permit a gaze too focused on its much vaunted splendour. It is a building that is not only designed to be passed through without noticing, but is also policed as such. In such a situation, aimless ambling coupled with a deliberate attempt to notice, poses an unlikely, if mundane, challenge. Not that Imran minded; I got that distinct impression as he walked away to continue his far longer daily wander, that my minor inadvertant challenge, and our subsequent conversation, had ever so slightly improved his morning.