Cities, towns and villages, by Elizabeth Kay

I may as well say it straight out: I hate cities. I hate the press of people, the lack of greenery, the rubbish, the exhaust fumes, the blank faces. But you can’t travel these days (or is it those days?) without encountering our huge conurbations. It’s reckoned that for millennia the average size of human communities was one hundred and fifty people. You knew everyone, and they knew you. Outsiders stood out immediately. But now? Cities can be absolutely enormous. Granted, there is some beautiful architecture, which wouldn’t be feasible for only a few hundred people, but there’s a lot of really awful stuff too.

Shanghai

China was a shock. We travelled by bullet train from Xi’an (population over 8 million) to Chengdu (population over 16 million), past various other enormous cities, their modern skyscrapers clustered together like children’s building bricks. All the new cities are built to the same plan, although they all look very different as the designs are imaginative and many-coloured – when you can see them through the smog, of course. This basic design makes it very easy for China to put a city into lockdown very quickly indeed. Round the perimeter of each city there is a people’s park, about half a mile wide. It’s full of basketball courts, outdoor gym equipment, table tennis tables. The high-rise population gathers there in the mornings to do their tai chi, the eighty-year-olds as supple and energetic as teenagers. But it means that there are only a few highly visible entrances to the city; the roads that enter the city through the park, and monitoring comings and goings is very easy.

There are some places which have made the architecture fit in with the environment – in the past, making your town as unobtrusive as possible was a safety feature. Matmata is the classic example, used in the filming of Star Wars. A huge round pit was dug, then the Berber inhabitants tunnelled into the walls of it and constructed many tunnels, leading to rooms. Until the advent of air travel, the village was virtually invisible. Perspective rendered the circular holes that led to the houses into short straight lines, easily obscured by the terrain. An amazing place. There was another village I visited in Tunisia where the houses were made of bricks the same colour as the sand of the surrounding desert. Patterns were created by having alternate bricks projecting out slightly further than the ones next to it, and the effect was like knitting; cable-stitched houses, that blended effortlessly with the desert. There is also a village in the Aosta valley, in Italy, where the roofs are constructed from slabs of overlapping stones, the same colour as the rocks in the surrounding mountains. The houses resemble dinosaurs, as the tiles look like huge reptilian scales.

Chichen itza

In Iceland, there are are houses where the roofs are made of turf. To my mind, these dwellings that fit in with the landscape are so much more relaxing and pleasing to see than buildings that try to do the exact opposite, and be as different as possible. The Scandinavians seems more in tune with their surroundings, as even their modern buildings have some connection with the land. Towns by the sea have all their houses painted different colours, and although these stand out they do not seem obtrusive – just a good way of spotting where you are from a boat, when in winter there’s very little daylight, and a lot of fog.

It can be a bit of a let-down when you visit somewhere like Karnak or Kom Ombo, in Egypt. Initially, it looks as though these wonderful old temples were also constructed to fit in with the landscape, as the stone is the same colour as the surrounding desert. But when you look up, and see the underside of the arches, you realise that they were all painted, and this is the only place where the colours have not really faded. It would have been a riot of colour, and rather garish, as would many of our ancient monuments. Knossos, Chichen itza, Angkor Wat maybe. The only places that seem to have retained their original colours, through many restorations which always used the old methods, are the mosques and madrassas in places such as Uzbekistan. Here, through the dedication of many different occupying powers, they tried to use the same glazes, and the same techniques. It may well be easier to retain original colours when you are working with kiln-fired mosaic tesselations and wall tiles, but there was a limited selection available, and everything fits. Only an expert can distinguish between the original, those restored by late Islamic rulers, the Russians, the current government. But these towns still have the aura of the places they once were, and are magnificent.

All of these buildings offer opportunities for writers. It’s very hard to imagine a building or a city from scratch, we take elements from places we have seen, use the bits that are appropriate, discard the bits that are not, and incorporate something lese entirely. The library in the Divide trilogy was based on, believe it or not, a café in Bristol:

They flew over another building. They were lower now, and Felix could see it more clearly. This one was made of wood, with asymmetrical window-frames and doorways. Pear-shaped windows, kidney-shaped windows, twisted beams, sloping walls, an undulating roof. It was almost as though the place had grown there, like a tree. The wood went from cream to chocolate, with every shade of coffee and caramel and butterscotch between. Each piece of timber was as smooth as a polished pebble, though whether it had become like that through craftsmanship or weathering was difficult to say. The structure was very big, although it was only one storey tall.

Bristol!