THE PHILOSOPHY OF EXPLODING BUILDINGS : 29 October 2000

On October 29th 2000, I witnessed a sight I will take with me to the grave. I'm not sure - with the benfits of two years hindsight - exactly what it meant - if anything.

The silence of a grim Sunday morning. Grey, overcast skies. Silence all around. peace. Helicopters hovering, people waiting. A siren. The helicopters go to a safe distance.. if you didn't know any better, you wouldn't have a clue that these two, 200 foot tall concrete monstrosties of pioneering postwar habitation were to come crashing down in seconds. Vast, huge, empty buildings. Hollowed out, stripped of its guts. The water, the gas, the electricty, the carpets - everything -stripped clean. Places where we lived. Places where we loved. Places where we died. Empty.

The air was still. Grey clouds watched impassively. A seagull circled the towerblock. Landing on the roof, yet somehow tense. As if they - in some way - sensed that something was wrong. Feeling something inperceptable in the air, the seagull lifts off from the roof seconds before the siren sounds, as the amassed crowd boos, hisses and groans perversively. Theres a siren, ten seconds of loud penetrating noise. Silence. Then there's a bang, as a series of explosions, invisible to the naked eye, tear through the building. The building collapses in on itself. One side is sucked into itself, as if a black hole had suddenly landed on the 9th floor. A second explosion, milliseconds later detonates about thirty feet from the base of the previous one. Then another, then another. The first tower block collapses in on itself, sinking into the ground into nothingness as dust spreads in the way you only see on television. It collapses first right, then shifts left, then counterbalances itself a fraction of a second later. Falling into the dust.

A matter of seconds later - to offset the sudden change in air pressure - the towerblock in front also descends, collapsing in the way that archive footage of nuclear explosions played backwards might look. Again it dances - left, then right, the left again, as a ripple of explosives detnotate across its collapsing body. A sea of dust and rubble rises into the air and advances directly beyond the safe perimeter into the crowd before the wind sweeps it away and into the sky. It quite literally disappears before your eyes. In the silence that follows there is nothing. Not even silence - a complete absence of any sound. Sirens fill the air. Cheers.

And then you can see the skyscrapers behind them and the rubble of what used to be peoples homes, where friends met, people made love for the first time, and people died. Maybe one of them is there right now, watching as the last trace of a dreadful relationship is wiped from the earth.

Breathtaking. People built lives in those rooms. Hopes. Ambitions. Fears. And Laughter. Gone. Wiped clean. Time to begin again, start a new life.