Chelsea Barracks Frieze
One Grenadier Gardens, Chelsea Barracks
This extraordinary collaboration with Eric Parry Architects, Qatari Diar and Tom Perkins resulted in a frieze poem that is now perhaps the longest continuous building inscription in the west.
I began by looking at the differing views of nature that the four façades of the new building looked onto, from the formal lawns of “Five Fields Square” (East façade) to the sylvan parkland of the Chelsea Pensioners Home (South façade). This led me to the idea of writing a history of the garden through the history of poetry; that is, looking at gardens as they had been imagined in poetry across time. I began by using verse fragments from other poets as found objects, drawing on everything from Gilgamesh to T. S. Eliot. This genre existed in antiquity as the cento (“patchwork”), while today you might call it a mash-up. The unifying idea behind the fragments was to be the “anthology,” a garden of word-flowers (anthology = anthos, “flower” + logos, “word”). I also studied buildings like the Alhambra (13th – 14th century), which has roughly 10,000 poems inscribed on its walls, and dedicatory inscriptions like that on the campanile of S. Chiara in Naples (early 14th century).
The inscriptions for the four walls of Building 7 will also situate it in the surrounding historical contexts of London, not only the more universal history of the garden. As the North Wall never receives direct light, the inscription deals with the unchanging and eternal garden; it recounts the Garden of the Sun (a proto-paradise inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh), the Garden of the Moon (a pendent of my own invention), and between the two the Garden of Words and Verse. The South Wall instead responds to the lush park of the Chelsea Pensioners to personify the cycles of nature in the Green Man (the Celtic life-force famously figured on cathedral vaults), and the nourishing rain that feeds both the vegetal earth and flows down under Chelsea Bridge Street to Father Thames. The East Façade is instead inspired by the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens (opened in 1742) which formerly occupied the site across the road and where the Chelsea Flower Show is now held. Finally, the West façade takes its cue from the proximity of the Chelsea Physic Garden (established 1673) to speak of herbs and cures. Thus, the inscriptions aim to be as historically referential as the overall masterplan and individual buildings of the new Chelsea Barracks complex.
I first experimented with writing the verse in unbroken lines around the building, but realised it would risk becoming too muddled to read. As poetry is always written in columns, I decided to use the three epigraphic lines given to me to compose three-line stanzas (predominantly in slant verse). Although these are conventionally read from top-to-bottom, and then left-to-right, observers may also find they link adjacent lines and words to form serendipitous new readings. As the composition has evolved, the earlier quotations have fallen away and an original composition taken their stead. But writing poetry is always like that.
