The Search for the Elusive Antepavilion:A Very Brief Odyssey in E2.

I've made bigger fuck ups in my life, that's for sure. But yesterday's hunt for the 2019 Antepavilion on Brunswick Wharf off Laburnum Street in E2 certainly proved to be just that. A fuck up. One that, to be fair, was not entirely my fault.

I'd read, in The Guardian, about the 'comically rackety' edifice 'inspired by Monsieur Hulot’s tumbledown building in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle' and how it resembled an 'architectural battenberg cake' but could I find it? I absolutely could not.

Catherine Slessor's Guardian piece had linked it in with Junya Ishigami's Serpentine Pavilion and the Colour Palace in the garden of Dulwich Picture Gallery and having ticked them both off, somewhat perfunctorily I'm ashamed to say, over the last twenty-fours I was eager to complete the set.

I took the tube from Lancaster Gate to Liverpool Street, scoffed a packet of very vinergary Discos as I walked up a wet and windy Norton Folgate and through Shoreditch to Hoxton where, on reaching the mosque, I turned down Laburnum Street. The mosque was architecturally pleasing, the canal looked as good as it always does - in its usual post-industrial way, and there were architectural delights en route in the form of the gaily painted Laburnum Boat Yard and the imposing, yet welcoming looking, Bridge Academy but there was no bloody Antepavilion. No matter how hard I looked.

I made it all the way to the end of Laburnum Street, I wandered out to the canal again, I occasionally glimpsed unusual buildings on the horizon (when you're looking for unusual things, life tends not to disappoint) but none of them even remotely resembled a battenberg cake.

I checked the GPS on my phone and walked to the exact spot where the Antepavilion was supposed to be. There was just a graffitied wall and some boarded up windows looking across to an impressive brick chimney. There was no Antepavilion. Maybe the Antepavilion has gone. I'd e-mailed the Architectural Foundation behind the project and their response was minimal at best so I'd not been able to find details of how, and when, I could visit.

I thought I'd chance it. I thought how hard can it be to spot a rickety battenberg cake towering above the canals of Hackney. It turned out be very difficult. In fact it turned out, for me, to be impossible. I walked back to Shoreditch Overground station. The pubs were too busy for a solo drinker intent on a pint and a crossword so I took the tube to New Cross Gate where the train terminated (despite its planned destination being Crystal Palace). It was one of those days, yet again, so I walked home. I stopped for a couple of pints in The Ivy House. Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick were playing at The Goose Is Out folk night in the main room but it was sold out and I didn't have tickets. I walked home, I watched the news and then a documentary about Joan Armatrading while drinking San Miguel and eating mashed potato. I felt like I'd morphed into a real life Murun Buchstansngur. I went to bed.