Revisiting Peterlee and Victor Pasmore





Among my earliest memories are ones of living in Peterlee, not long after Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion was built. We lived in one of the little box houses on the gently landscaped green slopes, quite near to this celebrated Modernist monument - (it's a one-ended bridge over a lake on an estate.) We revisited this weekend and the place still felt like somewhere magical and out of the future. My whole early life was lived amid concrete brutalism - in the estates of the north, and on university campuses outside Lancaster and Norwich. The Pavilion felt like the acme of brave late 60s adventurousness and invention, and I'm proud, in retrospect, to have spent that early part of my life there. I learned to read there - from the Ladybird fairy tale books my mam bought me each time we went to the corner shop (also a futuristic cube of a building.) It was fun to show Jeremy where we lived. Also, I like Victor Pasmore's abstract drawings.






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