Multi-Story

 

All Images: Central Leicester, August 2023

In a return to the dense heart of the city, here's a brief meditation on one of my current favourite Leicester buildings. For many years, this ugly little charmer was a working motor garage (specialising in Italian marques - I believe). I was always impressed by it's ingenious use of space - making excellent use of a compact site tucked just inside the inner ring road. That tight, ramp/canopy arrangement is both a clever means to open-up the roof space to cars, and a geometric assembly of considerable aesthetic appeal. It's a building which seems to give a full account of both internal and external spaces simultaneously, whilst representing exactly the kind of unglamorous, functional Modernism to which my lens is often drawn.

It's no secret that I harbour a perverse fascination with urban car parking provision, and the ways in which it reveals the tense relationship between motor vehicles and the urban environment. Here we can certainly see that shifting economic conditions, along with changes in the ways that space is monetised within cities, have seen the site transformed from one in which vehicles might be maintained - to one in which they are simply left dormant. The building was clearly ideally suited to just such a change of use, but it is still one of the most compact 'multi-storeys' in a city that boasts several much grander (if distinctly dilapidated) period examples. 

Of course, the other reason for this building's visual appeal is there for all to see, in its multiple textual elements. The functional signage certainly tells a clear story about the financial  exploitation of territory, but it's the polychromatic graffiti which tells the real story about urban  opportunism. In the city, it seems, no space/edifice is sacred enough to escape the attentions of the aerosol enthusiasts. But this kind of 'unofficial' calligraphy is surely just another way in which space can be annexed. Such wild-style legends are simply another (less enfranchised) means to stake a claim on the urban organism in the name of a parallel culture, after all.

In formal terms, I'm delighted by the way many of the stylised characters adapt themselves to the geometries of the available surfaces - but even more so, by the way that the largest example simply refuses to be confined 'inside the lines'. Beyond the purely visible dimension (and with space inevitably at a premium in the inner city), it seems only fitting that the building should serve a dual purpose - as both parking garage and unofficial bulletin board.

Multi-storied indeed...