The Concrete and the Clay

 I loved the Flintstones cartoons. The creators were so imaginative in their ideas of how a modern stoneage family would function. Fred played ten-pin bowling with stone bowling balls and stone pins. It was fabulous. The cars had stone wheels and were operated by the legs and feet of the characters. 

The later movies, with actual actors, were so very clever, set in the stone age equivalent of Las Vegas and in the quarry where Fred worked as a crane driver - the crane being a dinosaur. When water floods the quarry, it mixes with the stone dust, creating concrete - a new invention to be named after the quarry's owner's daughter Concretia. Amusing to think that might actually be the way that the ugliest buliding material ever availabe to man began. 

Concrete is the scourge of urban development. I will never forget the eyesore building on Blackpool's Golden Mile. A huge, hideous grey blot on our coastal landscape that has thankfully been recently demolished.  This kind of Brutalist architecture sprung up all over Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, While lauded by some, these buildings  have brought about many depressive environments.

The term Brutalism was coined by the British architectural critic Reyner Banham to describe the approach to building particularly associated with the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, The term originates from the use, by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le Corbusier, of ‘beton brut’ – raw concrete in French. Banham gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain.

Many high-rise apartment blocks and municial buildings employed the use of raw concrete, including London's National Theatre. 

Talking about concrete brought to mind a song by Unit 4 + 2 in the 1960s. As I don't have a poem about concrete, although I have written 'concrete' poems. (poems written to form a specific shape on the page), I have decided to share the song lyrics with you.

Concrete And Clay  

You to me

Are sweet as roses in the morning

And you to me
Are soft as summer rain at dawn, in love we share
That something rare

… The sidewalks in the street
The concrete and the clay beneath my feet
Begins to crumble
But love will never die
Because we'll see the mountains tumble
Before we say goodbye

… My love and I will be
In love eternally
That's the way
Mmm, that's the way it's meant to be

… All around
I see the purple shades of evening
And on the ground
The shadows fall and once again you're in my arms
So tenderly

… The sidewalks in the street
The concrete and the clay beneath my feet
Begins to crumble
But love will never die
Because we'll see the mountains tumble
Before we say goodbye

… My love and I will be
In love eternally
That's the way
Mmm, that's the way it's meant to be

Thanks for reading. Adele

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