Have been noticing acts of vandalism and their connective tissue. It's part of the Protestant spirit, no doubt, as established by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Goes further back though, to those eponymous Vandals who also plundered Rome. A different Rome. Is it bound up with our love of ruins, or is our love of ruins a simple Romantic (there's that Rome again) regurgitation?
The railings near the canal are all intact but the ones guarding the terraced housing hereabouts are gone. Who made that decision? The sad fact is that the mass culling of railings for the World War 2 effort merely resulted in a load of scrap - the vast bulk of the iron was not even used in the war. So, rather than depositing our rich heritage of railings back over the lands and heads of the Vandals as shrapnel, we ended up with a few more useless scrap heaps that gradually rusted away.
What with that and Kent Meters down the road - roof taken off and left to the elements. Was a perfectly serviceable factory 3 or 4 years ago. Developers bought it to build anew for the those deserving new housings. They weren't counting on a recession. Short-term, short-sighted: gain today, gone tomorrow. Maybe the Dissolution of Monasteries should be seen as the first step towards our Nation's very own brand of Capitalism. Recall, Weber himself linked the origins of Capitalism with the rise of the Protestant work ethic. Work is the wrong word though. I have noticed the niff of Patriotism lurking beneath many of these seemingly wanton acts. Do we have a nostalgia for destruction and ruin that is redolent of the birth juices of our dearly beloved System? Was Kent Meters merely metering its own inevitable demise?
Get in there and grab what you can, don't be concerned about consequences or aesthetic loss. In which case, the sack of Rome should be seen as a prescient beacon to us all. Get down those shops and grab what you can - 'tis patriotic after all.
Here's what I grabbed from one of the walls in Kent Meters:
