In the gallery of the old Corn Exchange lies Grallow at one part in a hundred: every street, lamp-post and resident, the residents cast in white metal and painted by hand. The Planning Committee meets above it, because a town is easier to decide from up there. The model runs eighteen months ahead of the town, so families still living in their houses find those houses already gone from the table, and their figures laid in a felt-lined drawer until they are rehoused somewhere beyond its edge. Written as the Keeper's own visitors' guide, sold at the desk for fifty pence, this story by Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum, turns the satirist's change of scale onto housing, planning and the word decant.
by Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A guide for visitors to the Corn Exchange, written by the Keeper of the Model, and sold at the desk for fifty pence
You are standing in the gallery of the old Corn Exchange, eleven feet above the floor, and the town below you is Grallow. Please keep your hands on the rail. The model is made at one part in a hundred, so that a man of six feet stands a little under three-quarters of an inch, and a house of two storeys comes up to about the height of your thumb. It is thirty-three yards long from the gasworks to the Pelling Road and nineteen yards wide from the river to the railway, and it shows every street, yard, shop, chapel, bus shelter and lamp-post in the Borough. It shows the people too. There are eleven thousand and forty of them on the table this morning, which is very nearly everyone.
I have kept the model for twenty-two years. I made most of the people myself, at a bench in the room behind the desk, at the rate of about ten a week, and I can tell you who most of them are. If you would like to know where you live, ask me and I will point it out with the long pointer. Please do not point with your own fingers. Fingers drop things, and a dropped thing is a long way down at this scale. A pen cap once fell on Market Street from where you are standing and flattened the war memorial, and I was nine days putting the names back.
People ask what the model is for. They suppose it was made for the schoolchildren, and the schoolchildren do come, but that was never its purpose. The model is where the Borough makes its decisions.
A town is a large thing, and it is hard to see. A councillor standing in Cinder Lane can see Cinder Lane and perhaps the end of Tallow Street, and the rest is hidden by the houses. He cannot know, from the pavement, what he would gain by knocking down Cinder Lane, because he cannot see what would go up in its place, or how the light would fall on it, or where the cars would go. From this gallery he can see the whole town at once, as no one standing in it ever has. That is why the Planning Committee meets up here, on the first Tuesday of every month, at the long table behind you, with the rail between them and the town. They have found that they decide things far more quickly than they did in the Council Chamber, where they could only look at each other.
I am sometimes asked whether it would not be simpler to walk round the town itself. The Committee tried it, in my first year, and it took the whole of a wet Saturday to get from the gasworks to the railway. They were stopped forty-one times by residents, who all wanted to talk about their own houses, and they came back with nothing decided. In the gallery a councillor can see Tallow Street in four seconds, and nobody on it stops him.
The first thing visitors notice, if they live here, is that the model is not quite the town they walked through to get to us. This is not an error. The model shows Grallow as it will be when the schemes now approved are finished. It runs, on average, about eighteen months ahead.
So you will see, by the river, the four towers of the Waterside Quarter, in white plastic with green glass. They are very handsome, and lit inside, and there are small trees in pots on their roofs. They have not been built yet. Where they stand on the model, if you go down to the river after your visit, you will find the Brickfield flats, which were put up in 1961 and have three hundred and twelve households in them. The Brickfield flats are not on the model. I took them off in the spring of last year, when the Waterside scheme was approved, and put the towers on in their place.
This is how a model must be kept, if it is to be any use. A model that shows only what is there is no better than looking out of the window. The Committee does not come up here to see what Grallow is. They know what it is. They come to see what it is going to be, and I must have it ready for them before it happens, as a cook lays the table before the guests arrive.
The gallery is kept at sixty-four degrees all the year round, and at forty-five parts in a hundred of moisture in the air. You may see the gauges on the pillar by the stairs. Paint will crack in the cold, and glue lets go in the damp, and the people come off their bases. There are two heaters under the table at the river end and two at the railway end, and a machine in the corner which draws the water out of the air and empties it into a bucket. I empty the bucket at five o'clock. It fills to about a third most days, more in winter.
The lamps over the table are changed every fourteen months. The roofs are dusted on Mondays with a goat-hair brush, the streets on Thursdays. The river is a sheet of tinted resin, and must not be breathed on.
The model costs the Borough ninety-four thousand pounds a year to keep, of which a little over half is my wage and the rest is heat, light and materials. I give the figure because visitors ask, and because I think they should be told that it is less than the cost of one new house. A house shelters one family. The model shelters the decisions of the whole town.
I will say something about the people, since they are what most visitors come to see.
Each of them is cast in white metal from one of nine moulds, three for men, three for women, two for children and one for the elderly, and then painted by hand. I do not paint them from photographs, which would be an intrusion. I go out on a Saturday and walk along a street, and note down what people are wearing, and paint them from my notes at the bench on Monday. The colours are as close as I can get them. A man in Tallow Street wears a red cap all the year round, and so does his figure. A woman in Malt Row has a blue pram, and it is on the model, and when her second child came I put a second figure in it.
A figure stands outside the house where the person lives, on the pavement, facing the street. I tried for a time putting them inside, but the Committee could not see them there, and a model must be seen. When someone dies I take the figure off. When a family moves into the Borough I make new ones. The children I repaint every year in the next size up, and that is most of my winter.
You will notice that the figures do not stand evenly. There are a great many in some streets and very few in others. On the four towers by the river there are only nine. These are the show-flat staff and the concierge, whom I have been told to expect. The flats in the towers are to be sold mostly to buyers from outside the Borough, and I cannot paint people I have not seen, so the towers are lit but empty. I am told this is normal for a new building.
When a street is to be cleared for a scheme, the people who live in it must go somewhere else for the duration of the works. The Borough's word for this is decanting, and it is the word you will find in the Committee's papers. I was puzzled by it when I first came, and looked it up. To decant is to pour wine gently out of its bottle into a finer vessel, so that it may breathe. I have always liked the word since, because it describes the care that is taken.
On the model it is done like this. When the Committee approves a scheme, I go along the street with a pair of long tweezers and lift each figure from its place, in the order of the house numbers, and lay it on a tray. I make a note of the address on a paper label, and tie the label round the figure's ankle with a cotton thread. Then I take the tray to the room behind the desk and lay the figures in the drawer.
It is a plan-chest drawer, three feet by four, lined with grey felt, and the figures lie in it in rows, on their backs. I keep them in the order of the streets they came from. I do not melt them down, because they are going to be rehoused, and when they are rehoused they will need to be put back.
The difficulty is the edge. You will see that the table ends at the Pelling Road at one end and the gasworks at the other, and the river and the railway at the sides. That is the boundary of the Borough. A great many of the families who are decanted are found new homes outside the Borough, because there is more room outside it, chiefly at Pelling, which is forty-one miles off, and at the new estates beyond the ring road at Scarrow Moor. These places are not on the model. They are not in Grallow, and the table is the size of Grallow.
So the figures stay in the drawer. There are at present one thousand eight hundred and six of them. Three hundred and twelve households came out of the Brickfield flats alone last spring, which is about seven hundred and forty people, and I was a fortnight with the tweezers, and had to start a second row of felt.
I have suggested more than once that a further table should be built, and joined to the end of this one, on which the families at Pelling and Scarrow Moor could stand. The joiners have quoted for it. The Committee declined, on the ground that those places are the responsibility of other councils, who have models of their own if they choose to keep them, and that it would be presumptuous for Grallow to model a town it does not govern. I accept this. A model must have an edge, or there would be no end to it.
Some visitors find their own house is not on the table. When this happens they are sometimes upset, and I would like to say here, so that I need not say it at the rail, what I do.
Mrs Agnes Fennick of 7 Cinder Lane came up the stairs on a Wednesday in March of this year. She is a woman of sixty or so, with a grey coat and a brown bag on a long strap, and I have painted her four times, so I knew her before she reached the top step. She lives at Number 7 with her grandson, who is fourteen. The back bedroom has been black with damp down one wall since the autumn before last, and the boy sleeps in the front room with the window open, for the smell. She has written to the Borough nine times about the wall. I know because she brought the letters with her in the bag, with the replies, which said that no works would be undertaken on Cinder Lane, as Cinder Lane was within the area of an approved scheme.
She looked over the rail for some while. Cinder Lane, on the model, is the bus turning-circle for the Waterside Quarter, with a strip of planting round it and a shelter. It is very neat. She asked me where her house was.
I explained to her about the eighteen months.
She said, "But I'm still in it."
I said that she was, and that she would be until the decant, which the papers gave for the autumn. The model was only showing her what was going to happen, so that she could prepare for it, which most people never get the chance to do.
She asked where she was, then; she meant the figure. She remembered that I had painted it; she had seen me in the lane with my notebook, and once she had asked me what I was writing and I had told her.
I took her round to the room behind the desk and opened the drawer. I found Cinder Lane on the second row, and her figure was the seventh along, in the grey coat with the bag on the strap, and the boy beside her, in a coat that would be too small for him now. Their labels said 7 Cinder Lane.
She looked at them for a long time. The drawer is warm, because that room is heated too, and dry, and she put her hand flat on the felt next to them, not touching them.
"It's warmer than mine," she said.
I told her the room was kept at sixty-four degrees for the paint.
She asked if she might take the figures home. I had to tell her no. They are the Borough's property, and they are needed for the rehousing, when they will be put back on the table; besides which, a figure taken out of the drawer and lost would leave the Borough with no record of where she had gone. She understood that. She asked instead if I would put them back on Cinder Lane until the autumn, since she was in fact still there.
I could not do it. There is no Number 7 on the model now to stand them outside. If I put them on the planting strip by the bus shelter, the Committee would see two people standing at a bus stop in a scheme that has no residents, and would ask why, and it would be confusing.
She asked where they would go after the autumn. I said that the papers gave Scarrow Moor. She asked if I would stand them there, then, when the time came. I said that Scarrow Moor was not on the table. She asked where it would be, then, if it were on the table, and I showed her from the window: about fifty yards past the end of the Pelling Road, through the wall of the Corn Exchange, across the car park and on the far side of Exchange Street, where the bookmaker's is.
She shut the drawer herself, quite carefully, so as not to jolt it, and thanked me, and went down the stairs.
I record this because I think visitors should know that the people in the drawer are well kept. I dust them on the first of every month with the goat-hair brush, the same one I use for the roofs. None of them has cracked.
Why are the figures not inside the houses? So that the Committee can see them. See section 5.
Can I buy a figure of myself? No. The figures are not for sale. They are a record.
Why is my street a car park? Your street is probably within an approved scheme. The model is about eighteen months ahead. See section 3.
Why is my house on the model but I am not? You may have moved in since I last walked your street. Please leave your name and address at the desk, with a note of what you usually wear, and I will make you. There is a wait of some months.
What happens to the drawer when it is full? I have asked for a second plan-chest. It has been approved.
Could the families not be rehoused in Grallow, so that they stay on the table? This is the question I am asked most often, usually by children. It is a very natural question. The answer is that there is no room in Grallow for them, because the land is needed for the schemes; and the schemes are needed because the Borough must raise money to build homes for the people in the drawer. When enough schemes are finished, the Borough will have the money, but it will then have no land, and the homes will have to be built elsewhere, which is to say at Pelling or Scarrow Moor, which are not on the table. Children usually stop listening at about the second part of this answer, and I do not blame them. It took me some years to follow it.
Could the Borough not mend the houses that are there? This would mean keeping the model as it is, and not eighteen months ahead, and then there would be nothing for the Committee to decide. See section 3.
Could the Committee not walk round the town? See section 2.
I have lived for twenty-six years at 3 Lantern Row, which runs off Cinder Lane at the gasworks end. You may see it on the model, or you may have seen it, since the Committee approved the second phase of the Waterside scheme at its meeting in September. Lantern Row is now a service yard, with bins.
I followed the procedure. I went along Lantern Row with the tweezers in the order of the numbers, and when I came to Number 3 I lifted my own figure, which I made in my second year, in the brown cardigan I still wear, and tied a label round its ankle, and laid it in the drawer at the end of the third row, which is where Lantern Row comes after Cinder Lane. I was surprised how light it was. I had forgotten that we are all hollow at the back, to save metal.
My decant is given for February. The papers say Pelling. It is a long way to come in, and the Committee has kindly said that I may, in the meantime and after, if I am not yet suited, sleep in the room behind the desk, which is warm and dry and kept at sixty-four degrees. I have put a camp bed there, beside the plan-chest. Visitors who come up the stairs before nine may see it through the door, and I ask them not to mind. I find I sleep very well, with the drawer at my head, and the town at the end of the corridor, where I can see all of it at once.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ab Iōnathā Swiftiō, simulācrō, per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Jonathan Swift, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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