A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

Urban Trawl: The City

2012-01-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

If you looked up above St Paul's Cathedral in the early afternoon of the 9th November, you could have counted at least three helicopters. Their deafening spiralling nearly drowns out what is happening below. They're the result of the ruthless over-policing of the slight return of last winter's student protests, currently marching nearby in Moorgate. This made the 9th a perfect day to explore this neurotically protected citadel of undead financial capitalism. Encircling St Paul's is Paternoster Square, or more specifically Juxon House, a nasty, Vegas via EUR via Duchy of Cornwall neoclassical superblock. In the last decade of pseudomodernism, this development has always stuck out for its kitsch revanchism, bolting onto itself Wren's Temple Bar, retrieving it from a garden in Enfield and plonking it a long way from the Temple itself. There's a ghost of a town planning idea in these Rossi-goes-to-Reading banks and offices, in the way they enclose the great dome with a series of narrow byways. Nonetheless this has long been one of 21st century London's most depressing, smugly jolly spaces. Not now, though.

The silly mock-pathetic columns of Juxon House, each topped by a broken, blank-eyed Grecian head, were covered on November 9 with an architecture more parlante – hundreds of small posters, flyers, messages, notes, manifestos, declarations. 'GENERAL STRIKE!' reads the aptest, with a wild-eyed cat below. 'THE BEGINNING IS NIGH!' reads one. 'BEAUTY IS IN THE STREET' another, which is quite Urban Renaissance of them, though the poster's image of a barricade-laden thoroughfare is not very Urban Splash – and nor is the highly developed public infrastructure of the camp they look out on. In tents large and small are a University, Welfare centre, Clinic, Restaurant, Public Toilets (the latter especially unusual in contemporary London). The tents themselves are a Drop City of simple, curvilinear frames with multicoloured tensile artificial fabric – high-tech, though their users might not always think so. A line of armoured riot police, shields and truncheons at the ready, stand at the other side of Temple Bar, with a pastiche of the Monument in the background. As an example of detournement, a subverting of private space into public space, you really couldn't do better; it's a wonderful irony that the square's part-ownership by the Church has meant that the encampment is at Paternoster Square, of all places (though there are subsidiary camps at the time of writing in Broadgate and Finsbury Circus). It's the most exciting thing to happen to the City of London since the Lloyds' Building. Or the fire.

The City is our last Urban Trawl, and it is the smallest and oldest place to be covered; the Roman colonial city that became English capital that became strange, depopulated autonomous centre of gentlemanly finance, or rather the expression in space of the British Empire's funding system. Since 1986 it has taken on another life. Still not residential, still unencumbered by representative democracy or common law, the City has become the fulcrum of a system of offshore, unregulated finance, sprouting colonies on the Isle of Dogs, Borough, Holborn (sorry, 'Midtown') and elsewhere. It is Old Corruption in 'transparent' braced glass. The place where Lehman Brothers did the things that even Wall Street wouldn't let them do. The heart of darkness at the root of the UK's malaise. Everything from slavery to suburbanisation, imperialism to deindustrialisation, can be traced to here. It is a place which has long deserved a serious reckoning.

It's also, and this should be somewhat shaming, perhaps the most coherently planned city in the UK of last 20 years. This is obviously something of a negative virtue. Compared with the planning of the inner areas of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, Peter Rees' tenure can be seen as a relatively benevolent despotism. New City buildings boast expensive materials, fine detailing, and sometimes a degree of wit and imagination in their adaptation to the old City's courtyards and alleyways. There's roughly one success to one howler; Eric Parry's elegantly stern Wood Street or Jean Nouvel's lumpen shopping mall; OMA's site-specific raised box or Foster's Rhinoceros round the corner; Levete's blinging neo-Seifert or the well-placed Salvation Army headquarters. Even the bad buildings here have a sensitivity of massing and materials that is deeply unusual in Britain. The Devil doesn't necessarily have the best buildings, but he can afford slightly more civilised ones. Don't think too hard about what goes on inside and there's something to grudgingly admire. But needless to say, nobody has animated the City's malevolence with the demented extravagance of Lloyds, a building which seemed to scare Rogers and his clients into 25 years of worthy sententiousness.

That might sound counter-intuitive given the City's obvious vertical emphasis of late. Its new skyscrapers, adjoining or replacing Seifert or Gollins Melvin Ward's more sombre '70s efforts, are the result of Ken Livingstone's failed Faustian Pact in the early '2000s – skyscrapers for Section 106 agreements, a manifestly misguided attempt by a GLA without tax-raising powers to finance new social housing, resulting in a few 'affordable' studio flats slotted behind waterside yuppiedromes. The architectural results here too are often fair as these things go – American corporate modernism made more interesting by being slotted at random into the medieval street plan, creating strongly memorable accidental vistas. SOM's Bishopsgate Tower is ruined by its height restrictions, squat where it should be sweeping, but KPF's Heron Tower is less compromised. The Gherkin still feels barely corporeal up close, like a piece of GGI. And in typically, the new domestically-named towers under construction will entail both Vinoly's whimsical 'Walkie-Talkie' and Rogers' more rigorous 'Cheesegrater'. Seen from, say, the viewing area of Tate Modern, the new City skyscrapers compare well with Canary Wharf's axial beaux-arts boredom. But it's hard to ponder their architectural qualities in the face of the fact that, despite the bailouts, despite capsizing capitalism, the City is merrily going on as if nothing had happened. If you want to know why OccupyLSX is necessary, consider the fact that the public purse funds the City's new generation of financial phalli, while they squeal against a Tobin tax.

These new towers also have to replace something. Accordingly it is the architecture of the recent past that must go, from the attractive if privatised postmodern agora of Broadgate to Seifert's sinister, insufficiently cuddly corporatism. More sadly, there's the curbing of the walkways strung across the City after Patrick Abercrombie, which added another layer of topographical interest to the tangle of alleyways, byways and churchyards. Yet The City hasn't quite tidied up its edges yet. Sometimes it colonises them, with alarming effect – Foster's unforgivable emasculation of Spitalfields Market, Grimshaw's weirdly '80s blue-glass homunculus creeping up to Aldgate, and most obviously, the leap cross-river into Borough, in the form of Piano's Shard. It's arguably impressive from a distance, but shockingly overscaled at ground level. Elsewhere the border is a harsh them-and-us; the Griffins overseeing the faded technocratic murals of Telephone House or the rotting carcass of Smithfield. There are two moments, though, when the City meets the seeming antithesis of the rapacious capitalism it embodies and propagates.

Middlesex Street, 'Petticoat Lane', is full of public housing, from interwar tenements to a remarkable mini-Barbican of walkways and towers. It's a sudden plunge right into real London, and vies with Poplar for the sharpest meeting of rich and poor in Europe. These places were largely owned by the LCC, now Tower Hamlets, and hence are left to rot. The City's own postwar housing projects, however, are still a revelation. It's incredible at this distance to think that the City could have paid for Golden Lane, for instance, a place where evidently some of London's working class manage to live well next to architects who are paying over the odds for the same flats. The Barbican, into which it imperceptibly fades along Goswell Lane, is a more complicated proposition, never public housing in the strict sense, although certainly not intended as the luxury enclave it is now. The Barbican, aside from the sheer pleasure of its Brutalist-Baroque grandeur, is mainly of use for deflecting every anti-modernist, anti-urban shibboleth going – a high density arrangement of towers and walkways, without an inch of 'defensible space', in beefy raw concrete, that is doing very well thank you (it's also, like the City itself, a wonderful place to get yourself deliberately lost on a Sunday).

If there is hope in the City, it's in the conjunction of these two estates and the camp at Paternoster Square. Here the latter's direct democracy, their egalitarianism and anti-capitalism might lose its anti-industrial biases, their Transition Town off-grid narcissisms, and encounter the sensitively planned, egalitarian, modernist, industrial architecture of the Barbican and Golden Lane. That encounter urgently needs to happen. It is potentially where the future of British architecture and urbanism lies, if it is not to remain the elegant exterior decoration of evil.

(Originally published in Building Design, 24 November 2011; photo set of the City here.)

Urban Trawl: Belfast

2012-01-02T03:34:00.000-08:00

The Morning Star newspaper always runs reportage from Belfast with the proviso 'from our foreign correspondent'. No offence is intended when I say that the first feeling when in the Northern Irish capital is intense familiarity. It looks at first like a 'regenerated' northern English industrial city – bigger and grander than most, a proud and demonstrative Leeds rather than a minor mill-town. It's a great deal more familiar, in fact, than anything in Scotland or even Wales. Walk round the centre of Belfast and it's all there – towering red brick linen mills, dressed in Venetian styles; sandstone baroque commercial palaces; Portland stone civic buildings with domes and abundant Edwardian statuary; Festival Style buildings of the '50s; bland post-war office blocks; 80s vernacular; an 'iconic' shopping mall; riverside regen; phoenix-from-the-flames public art. Only the weather and the mountains in the near distance remind you you're not in the West Riding.

By the second day you start to register something different in the centre – 1980s buildings like the BBC's fortress-like Northern Ireland department or the weird Vegas entrance to the Europa Hotel that doubles as a screen against bombs; or the more recent Court buildings, with their conspicuous lack of windows. These unnerving moments are far outnumbered by northern industrial vitality and post-industrial regeneration. BDP's Victoria Square mall has a Fosterian glass dome 'contextual' with that of the enormous, overwhelming Edwardian City Hall and the multi-storey Victorian insurance offices nearby. Here there's a slight hint of Glasgow as well as Northern England, in the clear, legible grid plan, opening out to the wild landscape just outside the city. The Mills of 'Linenopolis' are pure Lancastrian-Yorkshire, however, and the place of labour in the city is stressed by the city centre's best post-war building, J.J Brennan's Transport House, a tower and wing clad in green tiles with a magnificent Constructivist mosaic running down the façade. It was occupied until recently by Unite, who should be ashamed for abandoning this building.

Walk a bit from here and the grid's coherence is replaced by the mess of speculation. That's especially sharp where the Westlink slices across the city, an urban motorway comparable in its destructive effect to the M8 more than the Westway, leaving a straggling landscape in its wake. Next to it at one point is John Smylie's ridiculous St Anne's Square, where an ill-proportioned neo-Georgian car park becomes an enclosed 'Palladian' courtyard, with detailing so cack-handed it makes Paternoster Square look like Aldo Rossi. It's hard to imagine Leeds or Manchester standing for this. Walk from here and you're in Laganside, the obligatory riverside brownfield Disneyland. Naturally, the possibility of extending inner Belfast's grid would have involved too much planning and expertise, so the place is a collection of disconnected towers, of different eras. Era one, the BT tower and the Hilton Hotel, is still fortified, stock-brick clad with ground floor blast walls; the post-Good Friday agreement era two is more optimistic, its spec residential towers boasting lots of glass and extraneous bits and bobs, like The Boat flats' brightly coloured picture frames, randomly hung onto the curtain wall. A domed concert hall is a tad more civic, but turns its back on the river. This place has some sort of record for Carbuncle Cup nominations – in 2010, it boasted the The Boat, Broadway Malyan's Obel tower (the best of this bad bunch, to be fair, as its east façade has some grace), plus St Anne's Square. The latter was surely robbed only by the fact none of the judges had seen it first hand.

So far, the only worrying thing about the Belfast landscape is the lowest-common-denominator approach to redevelopment; its sins are the sins of other cities. Things are different once you go beyond the ring road. Drastically so. Inner Belfast is demarcated by a cordon sanitaire of wasteland and surface car parks, just to make the change more obvious. It's not the most obvious barrier, though, in a city which still has 48 'peace lines'. The most famous of these is in West Belfast. When you first see the Loyalist Murals in the Shankill, you suspect they're being kept for tourists; there are black cab tours available and everything. On closer investigation it's obvious that this is real life. The Shankill, like most working class areas of Belfast, was redeveloped in a manner which makes clear the roots of 'defensible space' planning. Tiny houses in cul-de-sacs, with plenty of room on the ends for Oliver Cromwell, William of Orange, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. Grim open space runs between the artworks, and a leisure centre tries to keep the kids busy. Walk past a large flour mill and the peace line (a gated wall open during the day, closed at night) and the murals are more right-on (Free Palestine, Frederick Douglass, Che Guevara). The Falls Road shows identical defensible-space urbanism to Shankill, although the lack of ubiquitous union jack bunting and punctuation such as the Divis Tower (no longer serving as a British Army watchtower), a more attractive keep-the-kids-busy leisure centre by Kennedy Fitzgerald and St Peter's Cathedral make it feel slightly less bleak.

There are parts of Belfast that weren't completely redesigned into encampments. Much of South Belfast, in the vicinity of the University, is a tad more normal, with terraces both regency and Victorian seeming not to be divided by walls, bunting, murals or conspicuous swathes of wasteland. There are buildings here as good as anything anywhere in the UK or Eire – Francis Pym's unprecedented, unsurpassed Brutalist extension to the Ulster Museum, Richard Turner's first ferrovitreous Palm House just round the corner, and in the residential streets, O'Donnell and Tuomey's recently completed Lyric Theatre, well-made contextual modernism pitched somewhere between James Gowan and the British Library. All of these are buildings worth an architectural pilgrimage in themselves, but the notion that such visits could help the city in some way is hard to believe. Especially so, on the other side of the river, in East Belfast.

I thought it would be interesting to see if it was possible to walk from the residential working class areas of East Belfast to the new 'Titanic Quarter' adjacent. It is, but I felt lucky to be alive at the end of it. That wasn't because of the sectariana, alarming as that is. You walk through a gap so small it may as well have a turnstile, and suddenly street signs are in Gaelic as well as English. This is Short Strand, an tiny nationalist enclave in loyalist territory. Here the Peace Line is fortified and recently extended. You find out why when you squeeze through the wall out into the surrounding area. You don't know the difference from the buildings – both consists largely of defensible space cul-de-sacs, with fragments of Victorian streets marooned in them – but instead from several new UVF murals, marking an area which had a full-scale sectarian riot in June, somewhat overshadowed by the riots in England two months later.

Northern Ireland, with its large public sector, is one of David Cameron's targets for 'shrinking the state'. To see the remains of non-state employment, you have to traverse a terrifying maze of motorway intersections to that Titanic Quarter. The planner here, Bluewater architect Eric Kuhne, made not even the slightest attempt to connect it to residential East Belfast. In fairness he'd have had to demolish part of the motorway to do so (it is instead, in an act of pure folly, being extended). There's nothing surprising here other than scale – the presence of Samson & Goliath, the astonishing cranes which tower over much of the city, and the semi-derelict sheds around it. The slogan for this apocalypse is 'we used to make ships here – now we make communities'.

There are counter-proposals for Belfast – the Forum for Alternative Belfast have published a plan for building on the surface car parks and wastes around the ring road. Architect Mark Hackett of the Forum drove me around North Belfast at the end of my visit, where the relatively simple demarcation of Shankill and Falls is replaced by an illegible chaos of peace lines, new and long-lasting, with some often handsome Victorian housing left derelict then demolished when tensions between areas run too high. This is a city riven with divisions whose post-troubles redevelopment has multiplied walls both real and perceived. It's incredibly disturbing, not for its difference from the rest of the UK, but its similarity. All the factors – rampant inequality, deindustrialisation, social divisions and poverty – are as familiar as the city centre's buildings. Sectarianism might just have lit the torchpaper. With unemployment about to explode, what will happen here in the next few years? But for the rest of the country, contemporary Belfast might be a vision of he future. It's not hard to imagine peace lines in Clapham.

(Originally published in Building Design, 20/10/11. Photo set of Belfast here)

Urban Trawl: Aberdeen

2011-10-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

It often escapes attention, especially south of the border, but the UK is a petrol state. Although, unlike that riot-torn paragon of inequality, violence and social collapse Norway, the British government had the good sense to leave North Sea Oil in private hands, much money has been generated by the oil deposits off the north-east coast of Scotland, and it should have left some interesting effect on Aberdeen. This former fishing and shipbuilding town should, in theory, be a pulsating hub of the enterprise economy, it should glitter with gorgeous architecture, vaulting forms and general pugnacity. Full of petrodollars and a large population of 'wealth creators', it ought to be a thumping vindication of British free market capitalism.

Strained sarcasm aside, it isn't quite that. Aberdeen, when it was a pejoratively thin-lipped and Presbyterian town that made its money from fish and boats, had the kind of proper architectural and urbanist ambition so common to Scotland and so foreign to England. Strict building laws, a focused and clear town plan, decent upstanding architecture, all worked together to create a unified, coherent urban identity. It also had the luck of ready supplies of granite. It is odd to find an entire city made of this stuff, to put it mildly; under the slate grey skies, it is an environment so regionally specific that it could easily get lachrymose; literally almost everything in sight is grey. You can just imagine the likes of Will Alsop, Christophe Egret or AHMM having coronaries in the face of it. 'But where is the vibrancy?'

In fact, Aberdeen is bustling most of the day, with the colour scheme obviously not having an immediately depressing effect, and in that at least the traces of the oil money can be seen. The central paradox of Aberdeen, though, and it can be expanded across the UK as a whole, is as follows. When it was a relatively poor town, Aberdeen spent enormous amounts of its time and money on architecture and planning; Union Street nearly bankrupted it. Architecture from the 1930s to 1970s shows a decent, if sometimes dour municipal standard being kept up. Yet in the thirty-five years since Aberdeen has been The Oil Capital Of Europe, the city has not seen a single worthwhile building in the city centre. Not one. Over a quarter-century of parsimony and mediocrity has been wealth's bequest to the city. In fact, as you soon find if you cross the Dee into the tenements of Torry, not even wealth has been wealth's bequest to the city. Maybe for the first few years, until the gold rush calmed down, there just wasn't time – but the recent proposals, and recent buildings, are perhaps worst of all. That this isn't even surprising is indictment enough. How on earth did we settle for this? How did Aberdeen settle for it?

Often, the reason for the poverty of architecture in the UK is easily ascribed to industrial decline. The story is the same whether the site is in Wapping, Govan or Holbeck; shell-shocked municipalities agreeing to anything that might possibly reinvigorate their moribund economies and generate jobs and investment; fancy architecture can wait, but for god's sake don't put off Persimmon, Tesco or Travelodge. What makes Aberdeen an almost shocking experience is that here it doesn't apply. There's a port, and it's working all day, with ships and dockers in constant movement. The harbour area reflects that, from the new hotels to the signs in Norwegian in the waterside theme pubs, to the monumentally obnoxious traffic, with endless lines of lorries and the longest pedestrian waiting times imaginable. Unlike the superficially comparable nuclear port of Barrow it doesn't feel like a strange securitised graft onto a dying town, but very much part of it, organically connected to the life of the city. Yet just next to it is a new Ibis Hotel that is every bit as dismal as every other Ibis Hotel in the UK – more so perhaps because of the way it clumsily spreads itself out across a sloping cobbled street, which terminates in a miserable Vue cinema. Aberdeen's planning department surely knows that Ibis needs them more than vice versa. It can't have come from lack of confidence. Yet the exact same racket is at work here as everywhere else.

Aberdeen's 'civic heart' is going to undergo changes, as the REGENERATING ABERDEEN posters everywhere make clear. Regenerating it from what, you might ask? From what recent period of decline in this highly economically successful city? That noted, something strange happens to dereliction in Aberdeen. The pristine granite doesn't really age, but of course things grow on disused buildings here as much as they do everywhere else, so there is the interesting spectacle of shrubbery growing out of otherwise sparkling grey stone buildings, seen most vividly on the Edwardian baroque Mackintosh department store, which also boasts some nice Jules Verne external walkways. The general standard of 18th and 19th century buildings in Aberdeen is impressive, partly for rectitude, partly just for consistency, and that tradition of slightly staid but dignified architecture was obviously continued in the early 20th century, as in the ghostly neo-Gothic of Alexander Marshall Mackenzie's Marishal College and his conversely amusingly stolid neoclassical St Mark's Church; and the American classical RBS building on Union Street showed metropolitan flair. The 1960s municipal buildings are similarly flattered by their material. The only pre-petrol disappointment is Aberdeen Market, its ungentrified space clearly very important to the city's liveliness, but architecturally sadly introverted.

Where it gets really interesting, however, is in the sweep of the Rosemount Viaduct, whose dramatic engineering leads up to tall, thin tenements and eventually to A.B Gardner's Rosemount Gardens, a delightful mini-Karl-Marx-Hof in granite. Copying practically to the letter albeit on a miniature scale the precedent of Red Vienna, this is a curving courtyard building enclosing secluded gardens, decorated on the street façade with optimistic Eric Gill-like sculptures. Very interestingly, and unusually for a non-new town in Scotland, post-war modernism was of exactly the same quality, although on a far greater scale. In fact, they emphasise their size fearlessly; the especially dramatic hilltop Gallowgate estate features maisonettes and then towers stepping upwards from a vigorously modelled car park. What is unusual is the level of upkeep. Whatever scorn should rightly be poured upon Aberdeen's recent architectural commissioning, they can't be faulted for maintenance of their council housing estates; one of the city' many puzzles. Yet these towers were clearly of a high quality from the start. Under the control of municipal architect George McKeith rather than Wates or Wimpey, there was no system-building, no cheap solutions, but in-situ concrete, sharp Corbusian designs, and granite infill that glows beautifully in the (admittedly rare) sun. And somehow, the city has neither privatised them or let them rot. It's a wonderful surprise. They were still building tower blocks to this standard as late as 1985. Why here? It doesn't seem to exactly fit with the city's other priorities. But at least the money went somewhere decent, for once.

But conversely, walk around the Victorian tenements of Torry, and you could be in a granite Gorbals, depressed and sad as the ships go in and out of the dock just adjacent. The walk there goes through some of the places where the oil money went, most of which is mercifully confined to the suburbs. A drab 70s office block with a new, even cheaper new glass bit added, is the offices for Sodexho, ODS Petrodata, Atkins – a strange mix of engineers and our usual outsourcing vultures. Further on, the wipe-clean business park nonentity of the Bridge View office block, and then Union Square, the city's new megamall. In the centre of town, just opposite Marishal College, there's a city council poster of Union Square's surface car park, its grim exurban-imposed-on-inner-urban expanse in front of Marks & Spencers, as if they were proud of it. Next to it is a clumsily massed Jury's Inn, but the mall itself commits its own acts of civic thuggery – namely incorporating and swallowing up part of Aberdeen Railway Station next door, which has instead a reduced, unimpressive back-side frontage to the street. It's so much less important.

The real disaster hasn't happened yet. Union Terrace Gardens is a fabulous public space carved out of infrastructural accident, a bowl curving down from a viaduct along a railway track, a magical little place of mature trees, strange steps and courting goths. It's completely unique in its topography, a park with real terrain, not a mere civic concession. It is scheduled, despite heavy opposition but with the assistance of local oil millionaires, to be levelled, to create an underground shopping mall, or rather a 'cross between an Italian Piazza and a mini-Central Park'. Is there anything more provincial than that statement? We could be a great Scottish city, but instead we'll settle for a crap version of somewhere else. Like so much else in Aberdeen, it is baffling.

Urban Trawl: Edinburgh

2011-09-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

For those of us, like the present writer, who have never been to Edinburgh before, Waverley Station offers two very different introductions. First, you arrive in the most chaotically planned railway station, much of it under scaffolding, a multi-level maze; the first thing you see when leaving the Kings Cross train is a cluster of Police vans. Walk around this station a little bit and you find a grand, top-lit neoclassical entrance hall that was clearly once very elegant. At the centre of it is a little pod housing a branch of Costa Coffee. Anti-pigeon netting hovers above it like cobwebs, and no less than twelve CCTV cameras flank the edges, in case you were planning to loot a latte. Scottish home rule might perhaps be making this overwhelmingly left-of-centre country a more humane place than its southern neighbour, but this station is a sight which could only be found in Great Britain. Heavy security, blaring commerce, mistreated imperial grandeur, confusing non-planning, all are present and correct.

Find your way out of the station and you see something else, and the suffocating Festival crowds become irrelevant. A Victorian-futurist high bridge soars overhead, and it plunges bisecting two tall towers, masonry on steel frames, baroque in theory, Gothic in practice. It's a scene as excitingly metropolitan as anything you'll find in Scotland's de facto rather than de jure capital in Glasgow, and it instantly replaces the initial feeling of irritation and dread with one of expectation and anticipation. Look to one side of this amazing mise-en-scene and you find a brutally craggy acropolis; look to the other side and there's a planned neoclassical city of great urbanity. Familiarity with Edinburgh might well breed contempt, but these first impressions are of awe. And awe also, at how this unusual and dramatic form of urbanism can have become so popular, with the teeming crowds all around. Take Edinburgh and make it into a list of things people like in cities, and you'll find it highly counter-intuitive. What people like, apparently, is highly coherent and even authoritarian town planning, steep and melodramatic topography, very tall buildings, the total dominance of flats, with hardly any single-family houses to be seen - and sombre, dark colour everywhere, with only tiny hints of the rustic or the twee. While with other places that it might be compared to – a Bath, a York – there's the sense that if tourism was taken away the whole thing might disappear, in Edinburgh you feel that it could get along very nicely without all this unseemly bustle, thank you very much.

I received a quick lesson in Edinburgh topography by travelling through the coherence of the New Town, watching it gradually devolve into tenements that could be easily relocated to Glasgow (although their settings could not be), then past a large (and here, especially incongruously crap) PFI school to Fettes College, who are hosting a public art event of some description. Tony Blair's alma mater has a darkling presence on the skyline in this end of Edinburgh. David Bryce's blackened, gory design towers domineeringly over an area of privilege as marked as anything in Mayfair. Yet it is also an area of flats, and flats built as flats. The axis leading away from it is lined by interwar tenements, showing the basic components of Scottish mass housing – the stone, the dignity, the high windows, the scraggy backsides – beginning to accommodate a few cosmetic features from the modern movement, such as moderne typography, glazed stairwells and the elimination of previous tenements' already minimal ornament. You wonder what might have happened if this minor reform had been taken as a model for post-war urban mass housing in Scotland rather than a botched revolution (or at least, until you find their much less attractive working class equivalents elsewhere in the city).

Edinburgh has within it a planning tradition which is the opposing force to all grands projets – the legacy of Patrick Geddes, the late 19th/early 20^th century planner who recommended 'conservative surgery' to repair slum districts – such as the tall late medieval/renaissance tenements of the Old Town were when he started writing. One of the things about Edinburgh that makes it charming rather than merely impressive is the results of this at the bottom end of the Royal Mile. Here, tiny council estates, designed alternately in an unpretentious grey and brown Scottish Brutalist-Vernacular or in a arcaded neo-classicism evocative of reconstructed post-war Central Europe, are as dignified and undemonstrative as their repaired and renovated pre-modern forbears. The Gorbals or the East End of Glasgow should have been treated like this in the 1960s. However sensible Geddes-style incremental planning might be for these sorts of dense, highly developed areas, they also rest on a certain degree of architectural skill that, for some unfathomable reason, has been absent in recent additions. It isn't as if Edinburgh doesn't have the architects fit for the task – small-scale gems like Richard Murphy's Fruitmarket Gallery, or other small-scale interventions by the likes of Murphy and Malcolm Fraser prove otherwise. Yet the new housing around Holyrood is fine as planning and disappointing as architecture, as cheap as a new stunning development in the Thames Valley. The stone-clad bank offices nearby are even worse.

On brief acquaintance, there are two large-scale structures in Edinburgh after Geddes that abandon conservative surgery and instead go for the drastic and risky operation, one high-end, one low. The latter is 'St James' Shopping', the sort of structure to bring out the antimodernist in even your correspondent *, a complex whose ability to have received planning permission even in the 1960s is truly extraordinary, straggling as it does in front of the unforgettable symmetrical vista of Waterloo Place. Its recent redevelopment compounds the injury, labouring under the twin misapprehensions that it can all be made better via wonky shapes (iconic!) and stone-cladding (contextual!). Turn from that back to Holyrood, to the other non-conservative piece of surgery – EMBT's Scottish Parliament. This is not an easily dismissed building. Spreading into fragments at the foot of the hill, its complexities defy glib analysis, although on short acquaintance the most striking aspect is how Miralles and Tagliabue specifically tried to design the ubiquitous security features of a contemporary government building. Rather than leaving it to the Council, the architects helpfully provided bristly organic high fences and sensually curved concrete blast walls.

For all the local references, it does not grow out of the site in the same way as Edinburgh's other acropolis, the former Scottish Office of St Andrew's House. Thomas Tait's very '30s design has a nod here to Constructivism and there to Italian Novecento, but it feels organic to the landscape in a corporeal, non-rhetorical way.

Its grandiose planning is continued in the other Scottish Government building in Leith, but not much else. RMJM's paranoid panorama of business park misery is an example of how the derelict port has been transformed via all manner of pepper-potting, of luxury flats, bistros and the like. Not much of it seems to have trickled down into the later tenements, miserable Presbyterian things compared with their predecessors, nor into the port town's Brutalist blocks. These are sometimes fine, heroic architecture, like the famed, sinuous 'Banana Flats', but sometimes less impressive as urbanism, with the Banana block's car park a barrier between itself and the rest of the city. Otherwise, Leith is abundant in evidence that 'conservative surgery' in and of itself is not much better if the architecture is devoid of presence, elegance, or often even competence.

Now and again in Leith you find an infill site between warehouses and tenements that has a genuinely worthwhile building lodged in, but mostly it's a matter of will-this-do, shameful in a city with an architectural legacy like this. It's no use blaming it on the context - Leith itself can nearly hold its own with the city centre, with several hard, dark classical buildings that are fittingly muscular and robust, lasting as far as the spectacular Americanist concrete atlantis of the Flour Mills.

Yet the rest of Leith Dock is, and no exaggeration here, one of the worst new developments in the UK, and that it should have come to this here is unforgivable. Reading or Southampton can boast little worse than Conran's exurban, introverted Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre, some awful regen-cliché flats, or the pitiful Mint Casino. In any city this would be a scandal, let alone one as rich as this, with architects as talented, in a capital that has not exactly been short of investment. There is no excuse for this other than philistinism, stupidity, desperation and graft. The site is now pockmarked with wasteland, and Edinburgh Council need to be publicly shamed into clawing back at least some pride by starting over with something that is at least slightly worthy of its location.

* (on second viewing, the back side by the bus stop is pretty good)

Originally published in Building Design, 25/8/11

Viddy Well

2011-09-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

Things has said some unexpectedly nice things about the photographic arm of this series/blog/book/project, so here's a few sets for your delectation that are otherwise unwritten-up. Lincoln, Leicester, Wakefield, Newport, Brecon, Cardiff, Catford, Eltham, Stratford, Edinburgh, Leith, Kew, Bournemouth. Most or some of these will be written about properly sooner or later.

Urban Trawl: The Valleys

2011-08-28T04:16:00.000-07:00

'South Wales needs a Plan!' declared a book published during the Great Depression, on one of the 'distressed areas' hit hardest during the 1930s. The cities of South Wales – Cardiff, Newport, Swansea – became boomtowns in the late nineteenth century for one reason, and one reason only – to export and process the produce of the coal seam that ran across the valleys, and the tiny industrial towns that arose to service them. Now, in 2011, it seems the place needs a Plan, again; among the places worst hit by the recession are the likes of Merthyr Tydfil, which face huge rates of unemployment. The same places hit, in the same ways, yet again. Iain Duncan Smith helpfully suggested that the people of Merthyr up sticks to Cardiff, where there are nine unemployed people for every job vacancy. The Valleys are at least topical.

Does it even make sense to include the Valleys in something called 'Urban Trawl'? They don't fit the pattern of any other rural or urban settlement in the UK. These long rows of terraces, distributed along steep, scarred and verdant hills, are obviously too dense and industrial to be 'the countryside', no matter how gorgeously they might nestle in those undulations; they're largely too small, too bounded to feel like towns as commonly understood. They could be considered one great big town, parted by billowing topography. You'd be either a fool or very poor to attempt to negotiate it without a car. Linking the Valleys together coherently could only work via expensive, dramatic solutions – an underground railway, a system of funiculars. The place does get some investment. Since the mines were crushed in the 1980s, with the steelworks gradually following suit, call centres and local government offices filled the gap; talk of remaking them into Silicon Valleys came to little. The Valleys are often so beautiful that you could imagine them one day becoming tourist centres, but snobbery checks that. High architecture, especially of the twentieth century, has touched them little, although there are remarkable finds to be had.

We begin at Aberfan, whose tightly packed terraces packed up along hillsides introduce the scene – an urban-rural landscape mirrored in the linear strip of gravestones to commemorate the children killed by a landslide of coalfield waste in 1966. An early reminder not to romanticise that industrial past. From there, we travel to Merthyr Tydfil, another place full of meanings and resonances. The red flag, as a political symbol, was born here, in the Merthyr rising of 1831. It would have been nice for this have been commemorated in the public art that is invariably scattered around a post-industrial town, but there is at least a very appropriate welded metal sculpture by Charles Sansbury marking the entrance to the town, placed on a roundabout. Brackish, severe, beautiful in its harshness, it is very Merthyr. Next to the roundabout are offices for the Welsh Assembly (a nothing building), and the town's only tower block. Nondescript as architecture, it's notable both for being one of the more urbe-in-rus towers in the UK, and for commanding one of the finest views conceivable, for what is no doubt a knock-down price. The poverty of the town fairly whacks you in the face, especially in the dense concrete shopping precinct of St Tydfil, but it looks like its residents care for their area more than is common in the south-east of England. The terraces are spick, span and colourfully painted, rising up the slopes in a manner that almost evokes Brighton. What you can't miss is the desuetude of the public buildings. The Miners Institute is without roof, overtaken by greenery. At the town's centre is a gigantic Tesco, which from a hill looks exactly like the steelworks supermarkets replace. At the town's other exit is the recently closed streamline moderne Hoover Factory. Merthyr Tydfil also has a signposted 'Café Quarter'.

The next village we stop in is Mountain Ash, in the Cynon Valley. Rows of precise, clipped council terraces lead towards one of the Valleys' several breath-stealing panoramic views, where the terraces, the hillsides and the variously derelict chapels and institutes come together in an accidental composition. The fulsome baroque town hall points out that it serves an 'urban district council', which answers the question posed in our introduction, although Mountain Ash's population is just over 7000. That said, it has bustling traffic at rush hour, presumably as it commutes back from Cardiff and Newport. A barn houses the local Citizens Advice Bureau. The landscape is magnificent, with forests of pine (apparently the result of post-war planning decisions) tightly enclosing what, for once, can aptly be called an urban village. The hills make the place glorious as spectacle, and perhaps horribly claustrophobic as a place to live.

That certainly seems the case with Brynmawr, another series of terrace strips which once abutted the famous Rubber Factory, surely for a time Wales' most famous 20th century building; a failed attempt at co-operative industry, at doing things differently, eventually demolished in 2001 in defiance of listing. By the end, it was a Semtex factory. After a few hours in the traumatic townscape of Ebbw Vale, you could easily imagine terrorist cells emerging, avenging the damage done to the town and its people. The anti-tank measures and frisking at Cardiff's Senedd suddenly make sense. Follow the sign to the DHSS, and you can find some of the saddest sights in Britain. Worn, never-changed signs to the Civic Centre lead to a decent, if undemonstrative 1960s complex, its office blocks surrounded by the churned-up paving of a car park. A distressed leisure centre has a growth on it, the bright yellow and green tentacles of swimming pool flumes, with broken glass underneath. An angular underpass from here brings you to the rest of the town, and it has the most eloquent graffiti I've ever seen. 'AMAZING VALUE £5 – A WORKING CLASS HERO'. Then there's a small recreational ground, and the start of the terraces. The street lights are on. It's three o'clock in the afternoon, in July.

There's a lot to love in Ebbw Vale; the incongruously enormous, hulking scraping spire of Christ Church, dwarfing the terraces, evidently intended to be a landmark for miles around; the compact centre, with the unexpected pleasure of a Festival of Britain interior in the Crossing Café; another sadly derelict austere-baroque Workers' Institute; even the concrete car park at its centre, a fittingly muscular design reminiscent of Gateshead's demolished Trinity Centre. This one was saved, but improved by being painted white and covered in metal wire. The public art here, sadly in contrast to Merthyr, is pro forma, a swooping metal clock surrounded by steel balls. It was commissioned the year after the steelworks closed; the site is still being cleared for impending 'regeneration'. These things always feel like a sop, but the rest of the country owes Ebbw Vale and neighbouring Tredegar a favour, to put it mildly.

On a hilltop between the two towns, commanding views of only partly re-landscaped industrial waste, surrounding works, terraces and hills that would be crammed with sightseers were they elsewhere, is a memorial to NHS founder Aneurin Bevan. It's the most striking tectonic thing in the area, although it goes back to the very foundations of architecture. It is a stone circle, in the place where he used to speak to constituents. It feels moving, mystical, an ancient monument to the belief in a viable future. We were there on the NHS' 63rd birthday.

Tredegar has one of the Valleys' nearest things to a town plan – an iron column with a clock on top, around which the centre revolves. Here is 'Spirit of Bevan', a film co-operative. The local miners' self-run health service was the NHS' original inspiration. There's a little monument also to a more modernist social architecture – Powell Alport and Partners' Tredegar Library, a striking, dynamic little piece of Brutalism, a riot of angles and geometries now accompanied by a mural of the town's radical heritage. It bears repeating that the idea of the National Health Service was born here, not in Manchester, not in Birmingham, not in London. And as in the surrounding towns, what the rest of the country has to present this place is out-of-town retail parks and call centres.

The last thirty years has fairly clearly had little to offer the Valleys. The finest piece of new architecture we see, by a long chalk, is Arup's Chartist Bridge, in Blackwood. Opened in 2005, it's a sweeping cable-stayed bridge, simple and dramatic enough to shame all our Calatrava imitations. It's encouraging that this monument's function is to bring these scattered towns closer together, irrespective of the exurban dross of the 'Sirhowy Enterprise Way' nearby. Next to it is a colossal socialist realist sculpture of a Chartist, by Sebastian Boyesen. Constructed from steel mesh, it looks ghostly, an apparition of a power that has disappeared, for the moment.

Urban Trawl: Plymouth

2011-07-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

When you arrive, it's blocked off by a car park, and shadowed by a clearly once shiny but now greying glass office block; but you find it soon enough. It starts with a series of underpasses. These aren't your common or garden subways, but wide open things, a sort of combination of underpass and grand public square. Pass under them and you're right in the middle of an axis, flanked by large, severe Portland stone buildings. The space is vast, something which subsequent planners have tried to efface via everything from funfairs to gardens to giant TV screens. Stylistically, this boulevard is not quite classical, but not quite modernist either; for that, you must walk all the way to the end, where you'll find two towers – one, the elegant and well-made Civic Centre, now almost derelict, the other, a bland and shoddy Holiday Inn, very much occupied. Then you're at a wide public park looking out over a glorious waterfront, a view of warships, rolling green hills and rocky Cornish cliffs, with a lighthouse, a lido, and an art deco war memorial for company. This is Armada Way, the main street of Plymouth city centre.

It's the axial fulcrum of a comprehensive plan, in the British city more damaged than any other by Luftwaffe attacks. Patrick Abercrombie's plan was not especially avant-garde – certainly a lot less so than his plans for London – and nor was the architecture. It's in a style which is as yet un-named, some sort of Attlee—Scando-Stalino-classicism, which anyone familiar with The Moor in Sheffield or Above Bar in Southampton will recognise, though it is superior to both. Architecturally, it lacks the futurity of near-contemporaries such as London's ultramodernist Churchill Gardens or populist Lansbury Estate, or the multilevel replanning of Coventry. Its compatriots are elsewhere – August Perret's Le Havre, or, rather more controversially, post-war East Berlin or Warsaw. A big boulevard, for the tanks to go down (this is a garrison town after all) symmetrical stone buildings, ceremonial plazas. It's not what 1950s critics considered the architecture of democracy. At this distance, however, its insistence on the traditional street seems more contemporary, as does its continental nature - a space seemingly designed for cafes to spill out onto the pavement, which they do. If, for Aldo Rossi, the Stalinallee was 'Europe's last great street', then Armada Way is certainly Britain's last.

It's also a counterfactual in stone. Abercrombie's Plymouth is what might have happened everywhere in the UK if proper, ideological CIAM modernism had never enjoyed its brief moment of planning hegemony. Its driving ideas are those of inter-war, twilight-of-empire Britain, as are its architects – Thomas Tait, William Crabtree, Louis de Soissons, Giles Gilbert Scott. The influences of Lutyens and Charles Holden are also palpable. It's curious that Gavin Stamp, for instance, has recently repeated the claim that 1940s-50s Plymouth brought little of value to replace the destroyed city, given that it represents exactly what he has been arguing for in British architecture and planning for some decades. These dignified masonry buildings, in a non-dogmatic classical tradition, are as equally far from Le Corbusier and Leon Krier. But funnily enough, central Plymouth is seemingly held in no greater public affection than the more hardline Coventry or Sheffield. Invariably, the plan is described as a 'concrete jungle' in circles non-architectural, despite the fact that the dominant materials are Portland Stone, granite and brick. It's a reminder that modernity and planning itself, not its stylistic vagaries, are what offend a certain kind of British psyche. It is not pretty. Cohesive it may be, but central Plymouth does not look like Bath, and some will never forgive it that fact.

What it does prove, however, is that this modernised classicism was tired by the late 1940s. Some individual buildings do impress – the two stepped department stores which provide the axis' main focus, by Tait and Alec French, are loomingly powerful as anything from the 1930s, and B.C Sherren's National Provincial Bank is lovely, albeit remarkably similar to the precisely contemporary Finland Station in Leningrad – but overall the cohesiveness, planting and sheer generosity of space are what is really of value here. The architecture is palpably an aesthetics in its dotage. In a very prominent place is Giles Gilbert Scott's last completed church, a sadly wan, provincial design from the architect of Battersea and Liverpool. In some ways, central Plymouth is a reminder of just how necessary modernism was. Slightly later structures like the Civic Centre and the wonderful Pannier Market reflect this, especially the whale-like concrete interior of the latter. After the 1960s, the grand civic gesture sometimes continued in a different form; Peter Moro's late 1970s Theatre Royal is central Plymouth's only Brutalist building, and an excellent one, its geometrical complexity and harsh volumes akin more to Moro's ex-Tecton partner Lasdun than his own more clipped work. Nearby, The Pavilions is a messily ambitious structure where pedways link a swimming pool to a car park, shopping and then back to the Abercrombie centre, a laudably ambitious undertaking marred by cheap and nasty '80s retail detailing.

So much for the planned centre. Plymouth is lucky enough to have both one of the UK's most complete pieces of grand city planning and one of the most interesting, albeit sanitised, areas of ad hoc inner-urban townscape. Walk round the breathtaking panorama of the Hoe past an inadvertently proto-Brutalist fortress, and you're in the Barbican, an area once slated for demolition full of snickets, strange and surprising vernacular architecture and, interestingly, very sensitive modernist infill. Plymouth evidently had one of the best post-war City Architects in HJW Stirling, and his Paton Wilson Quadrant is a lovely council estate of lush, bright stone, tile-hanging, Swedish details and easy informality, a remarkable contrast with the Hausmannian melodrama a few yards away. Sadly all this cleverness and warmth gives way further along Sutton Harbour to the luxury architecture of the 1990s and 2000s, with several more-or-less miserable blocks of flats, here particularly unimpressive and badly made. Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, Plymouth seemed to lose all its confidence, seemed to start to hate itself. It's a familiar enough story in the north of England, and deindustrialised, poor, shabby but often glorious old Plymouth has more in common with a Bradford or a Liverpool than with the seaside, spa and silicone towns of the south.

The last of the modernist buildings in Plymouth is an apartment block, Ocean Court, an elegant and faintly 70s sci-fi irregular ziggurat. It's the sort of thing you might normally find in Benidorm, and it points to one of the two ideas for contemporary Plymouth – luxury waterside living. Opposite, in Stonehouse, is Urban Splash's atypically sensitive conversion of John Rennie's King William Victualling Yard into flats; adjacent are a couple of surviving sheds putting together warships and yachts, as other dock buildings are assigned to a different social class.

In the centre, redevelopment is neither as elegant as here in Stonehouse nor as identikit as around Sutton Harbour – instead there are two structures which have a good pop at the 'iconic'. There's Chapman Taylor's notorious Drake Circus mall, which swallows a chunk of Abercrombie Portland Stone street, but is most embarrassing for the way it axially frames the bombed-out Charles Church with trespa wafers, and for the lumpen car park which faces a 'public' square; facing that is Henning Larsen's Roland Levinsky Building for the University. With its combination of gestural vernacular and angular Regen shape-making, it's of its time, though it genuinely attempts to make something of its prominent site, a decent attempt at civic presence. These two make a little effort, one with some success and one with much bathos, to create something specific to Plymouth. Much more typical are the little encroachments into the planned centre, all of an extremely low quality – prefab hotels, already dated Blairite apartment blocks, a miserable little casino. More encouragingly, its rigid zoning is being lifted – one of Tait's great towers is now student flats, inadvertently giving ubiquitous developers Unite their only architecturally notable building.

The planned post-war Plymouth is now being recognised as being of value, with publications, listings and possible conservation areas. It's about time that social democratic Britain was the subject of something more than giggling and ridicule, and there's no doubt that the incremental demolitions around the edges of the place and their replacement with dross should be stopped. Yet the notion the centre could become an object for Keep Calm and Carry On austerity tourism forgets that naval tourism already exists here, and hasn't exactly reversed the city's decline. Plymouth already has its post-industrial leisure, its riverside galleries and loft conversions, and yet remains poor. It needs new ideas. But as a place to come and think about alternatives, you could do a lot worse than this forlorn, bracing city.

Unison Building, Euston Road

2011-07-13T05:48:00.000-07:00

Although they don't, funnily enough, tend to be considered part of the Big Society, Trade Unions are still, by an overwhelming margin, the largest civil society organisations in the UK. The Unions are voluntary, democratic, mutual, bottom-up, and yet they're the very obverse of 'localism', philanthropy and the other current shibboleths. Membership might have declined since its late 1970s peak, and a series of amalgamations might have swallowed up many of the once-influential unions, with even the fearsome Transport & General Workers Union absorbed into the most recent of them, Unite – but Union membership still stands at seven million, which puts the much-vaunted likes of, say, London Citizens in the shade. And paradoxically, the frontal attacks on public sector unions from the coalition has revealed their unexpected strength, whether in the half a million who marched in London on March 26 or the 750,000 or so strikers who walked out last week. The largest, along with Unite, of today's amalgamated super-unions, the public sector union Unison have just begun occupying the first purpose-built trade union headquarters to have been erected in the UK for nearly thirty years. While as a piece of architecture it's quite deliberately unspectacular, Squire and Partners' building shows a face of the trade union movement that is seldom seen. The stereotypes of donkey jackets, gavel-bashing and intense masculinity are wholly absent – instead, this is quite consciously an exercise in branding and modernisation. It suggests what the 1997-2008 era's Blairite buildings might have been like if Labour had remained a socialist party. It's a fascinating, occasionally rather inspiring place. But the first thing to note about the Unison building is what it is not.

Oddly, given their once-central and still key role in British political life, trade unions have not always been major sponsors of architecture. The most famous of them is in central London, in the form of David Aberdeen's Congress House for the TUC, a very expensively detailed Corbusian palazzo, with its Jacob Epstein sculpture and craftsmanlike finishes. It is one of several in the Bloomsbury/Kings Cross area, near to the termini serving the North and the Midlands, traditionally the unions' strongholds. Even now, the NUJ, Unite and others are nearby. Also in the area is the original headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, a stripped classical building now occupied by University College. The NUM moved out of here even before their fateful defeat in the Miners Strike of 1984-5, to a purpose-built headquarters designed by Malcolm Lister – relocated to Sheffield, as a gesture of distrust to Union leadership's tendency to get cosy with the Great Wen. It was left unfinished at the end of the strike. Unison's tower is almost certainly the first of its kind since then. It even has the odd stylistic similarity, with both centring on severe columns as a slightly strained metaphor for mutual support. It's worth remembering that Dave Prentis, the head of Unison – not a leader who is exactly known as a firebrand – has said of the current wave of public sector strikes that it will be unlike the Miners strike, as 'this time, we'll win'.

The air of siege and conspiracy that all this might imply is conspicuous by its absence; no union barons or smoke-filled rooms to be seen. Michael Poots, the project architect at Squire and Partners, talks of it as a 'corporate headquarters'; Unison's site manager John Cole speaks of a 'bold high street frontage', and both talk about it as a form of branding, a statement of what trade unions are in the 21^st century. Cole contrasts it with the office block Unison previously occupied just across the road – a large, slit-windowed, Gorilla House concrete tower which he refers to as 'the East European grey concrete building'. The union had considered moving to the City of London (before deciding that 'culturally, it didn't quite fit'), but decided to stay near to other unions and to the termini for the North. But happenstance has meant that the new Unison building directly faces the old.

Originally designed for the local government union NALGO, one of those that merged into Unison, Cole says of it now that 'it was basically a concrete tower block', although this is also a fair description of the most obvious element in the new Unison building. To the Euston Road, it is a concrete-clad, steel-framed tower, with a mild case of the barcode façades and a rhythm of different window heights; but this becomes more complex at the rear and the side, where that corporate symbol, a glass atrium, links it to the listed Arts & Crafts Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, a former women's hospital, and at the back, a small cluster of housing. It's a complex more than a singular building, although this is hardly apparent from the laconic street frontage, where the most notable moment is the aforementioned branding. A large UNISON logo at the top and at the entrance, making the purpose-built nature of the project apparent, and announcing the union's public presence.

The main bulk of the complex is the office block in the tower, spilling into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, and curiously it's here that the difference between this place and any other corporate headquarters is most apparent. On one level, it's a question of rhetoric. You find the brightly coloured sloganeering that adorned some Blairite structures, but the content is very different. Instead of, say, AHMM's Westminster Academy and its Mandelsonian mantra of 'Enterprise, Global Citizenship, Communication', each room features the rather more meaty, contentious 'Solidarity, Participation, Democracy, Equality'. What would once have been called 'improving quotations' are also littered around the building, inscribed into glass doors and internal windows, with 'everything from Mahatma Gandhi to Billy Bragg'. Most memorably, given that the UK has, as Tony Blair once proudly pointed out, the most repressive labour laws in the western world, one wall comes via Michael Foot: 'most liberties have been won by those who broke the law'. All this heated (albeit soft-toned and lower-case in the graphic design) rhetoric has to have some sort of correspondence to how the building actually functions. Given that the organisation exists at least in part to fight for better working conditions, it had to be 'an exemplar working environment' And here Unison are clearest about the old NALGO building's limitations. Dark and lit by artificial light, John Cole also points out that it had 'no social spaces'. Instead, the union 'wanted large floor plates' in order to be able to create these areas. In the concrete tower block, there's a very pleasant roof garden, a cafe, a creche, a 'breakout room' and much else. In design terms, these aims are compromised a little by the rather cold, identikit corporate detailing. Cole comments that opulence was out of the question, as 'we have lots of low-paid members' (something that certainly didn't deter the designers of Congress House in the 1940s) but there's no doubt that they work. When walking around it I chance upon a small office get-together, with crisps and what is (euphemistically?) described as 'juice'. One comments that in three days there, she'd met six fellow Unison employees she'd never met before. 'It shows how a building can change things'.

Most of the workers I saw here were women, and the building seems to – perhaps inadvertently – reflect where Unions are currently strongest, in poorly-paid but traditionally 'white-collar' jobs, largely female, and highly computer-literate. In the face of accusations that unions are lumbering pre-modern dinosaurs, Cole proudly points out that Unison has the the largest intranet in Europe, and Michael Poot lists with equal pride the building's impeccable environmental credentials. Given the evident successes of the internal arrangement, the lightness and airiness of the place, it's a shame that its design language stays at such a low voltage.

That's something which becomes especially clear with the transition to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. This late 19^th century hospital was closed in 2002, with its functions transferred to nearby UCH. The complex entailed a complete restoration of its much smaller, cosier rooms, with the original tiles and fireplaces scrupulously pieced back together. Sometimes this leads to enjoyably surreal juxtapositions, as when a vaguely art nouveau fireplace sits unused in the corner of a video conference room. Irrespective of the TUC's brief foray into high modernism, the most famous visual image of trade unionism is deeply Arts and Crafts-influenced – the embroidered trade union banners that are still carried on marches, where the aesthetics of William Morris socialism, in a pre-branding era, still have a vivid emotional role. Framed with foliage, symmetrically organised and allegorical, sometimes you even find architectural modernism immortalised on them. One RMT banner I spotted on a protest a few months ago was centred on an image of Charles Holden's Arnos Grove station. This powerful language is at least partly present in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. In its main room, which is being adapted as a museum, with interactive exhibits on feminism, the health service and trade unionism, there is remade arts and crafts furniture (that you can sit on, for once!) and a small library, featuring the likes of Friedrich Engels, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sheila Rowbotham. If the rest of the building avoids the traditional notions of what trade unionism looks like, here there's a reminder, and its a quietly powerful one. Perhaps this is a project which needed rhetoric and imagery as much as clarity and spaciousness. While Squire and Partners clearly took the place very seriously, a more nonconformist firm might have reconciled the traditional and forward-looking impulses of the union in a more forthright, convincing, dialectical way. Instead, the pretty but mute faceted roof of the atrium provides the main connection.

The atrium also leads the way towards the housing that was demanded by planning – deceptively so, as there is no public access. It's a decent, unspectacular, stock brick scheme of houses and flats, 'mixed' as ever, and clearly demarcated between the private element facing one way and the 'social' side the other, with both quite aggressively gated from the street. Here, you're reminded that the context is the redevelopment of Somers Town and Kings Cross, a working class industrial area of dense council housing undergoing severe gentrification, from HOK's BioMed Centre behind the British Library, that was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing, to the new St Pancras International and King's Place. It's the sort of area where unions used to thrive, being completely transformed. The Unison building shows trade unionism transforming in turn, and in that, it's an optimistic, encouraging building, an enclave of sobriety and solidarity in amidst the regen tat. It stands its ground, quietly – but in terms of what happens inside, this might well prove to be one of the more influential recent buildings in London.

Originally published in Building Design, 6/7/11

Holiday: Hunstanton and Heacham

2011-06-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

We stayed in a road called 'The Drift', in Heacham. This is a former fishing village, now minor beach resort, on the north coast of Norfolk, looking over the Wash. In the 1790s Norfolk (soon to be supplanted by Lancashire as Britain's industrial area) was a hotbed of Jacobinism. The'Heacham Declaration' announced the formation of an early, universal trade union, swiftly suppressed under the sedition act. Today it is a small village (Victorian and earlier) bookended by, at one side a series of bungalows, and at another, towards the beach, caravan parks. Both are a kind of quotidian minimal architecture, bereft of ornament, but somehow unobtrusive in their modernity. The most impressive minimal architecture in Heacham is the Pillboxes.

They look over the North Beach, in case the Nazis attack via The Wash. What two men in bunkers could have done against the Wehrmacht is a moot point.

Three miles from Heacham is Hunstanton, a proper seaside resort, with Penny Arcades, shops called things like 'Geezer's Palace', amusements including arcade games of the mid-80s (Track and Field!), and so forth. Like all seaside towns it has gone to seed in an interesting way. At the seafront are curved concrete walls to prevent floods. Also like all seaside towns, concrete and Modernism are quietly, blithely acceptable, perhaps because the purpose is hedonism, however circumscribed, rather than English home-making.

The most famous thing about Hunstanton, although it doesn't feature on the postcards, is a much less blithe kind of Modernism: the Hunstanton Secondary Modern School. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1949, while they were (remarkably) in their early 20s, it is as far from seaside jollity and all its cheerful crapness as could possibly be imagined.

Practically anyone interested in 20th century architecture will have seen it in photographs, the water tower at the entrance and the severe geometries. 'The first New Brutalist Building', 'the most truly modern building in Britain'. This gives you absolutely no hint of just how wildly incongruous it is with the surrounding area. In amongst the bungalows and such, this sleek, ruthless object. The Smithsons spoke of the building having two lives - one as a noisy comprehensive school, 'and another life when the building is empty, a life of pure space'. Me and my sister go there on a Sunday. The gates are open, so we get the life of pure space. The 'found objects' element you always see in photos is the metal water tower, not the even stranger, even starker brick tower behind it.

Yet it's just a secondary school. Its fame worldwide seems to accord with its obscurity in Norfolk. A perfect example of Welfare State ethics in its most extraordinary form - a sublime object dropped, seemingly at random, landing in the midst of an unremarkable English everyday. Now, of course, rather than being truly comprehensive it 'specialises' in Maths and Computing, in that offensive Blairite manner - something that polymaths like the Smithsons, enthusiasts for art, pop, science, philosophy, would undoubtedly have been depressed by - but Secondary Modern will always be the phrase associated with it, with the latter of the two words stressed.

The length of the main block is almost a shock, the deliberate aestheticism and imposition. Without ever using the raw concrete that Brutalism would be known for, it creates the sense of power and force, the memorable image, that the style brought to Modernism. Even the additions, the black panels on the main block's windows (to stop the sea winds smashing them) seem to reinforce the buildings' domineering effect. All this at one storey high, with De Stijl colours and stock brick - pointedly not the local stone and ragged brickwork which features in so many buildings in the area, which itself seems a Dutch importation, has something rather continental about it.

At the back are fields which seem to go on forever. The endless Norfolk flatlands, with barely a hill all the way to the Urals.

Originally posted at SDMYABT on 06/09/08

Urban Trawl: Croydon

2011-06-27T04:41:00.000-07:00

The suburbs are back, this we know. Ever since Boris Johnson's 'Zone 5 Strategy' reminded everyone how successful a politician can be by appealing to the Free Born Englishman's age-old right to drive at 4 miles an hour rather than taking a bus, the Party of government has explicitly favoured suburban, south-east England, especially as the North becomes even more hostile to it. Croydon may be a typical slice of the London/Surrey grey area that has been a conservative bastion for over a century. Why is it, then, that the first impression a stranger might have of the centre is of a large, dense, multicultural, independent provincial city? Why does the London Borough of Croydon so much want to be a City itself? And what can we learn about what a 'suburb' really is from this place?

If it ever gets its long-stated wish of becoming officially 'urban', this quintessential commuter suburb will become a city of above average size, roughly the size of, say, Coventry, or Hull. It has its own rapid transport system and it's own rather particular pattern of urbanism, both of which are lacked by many official British cities. Many will be familiar with the strange sight that hits you when leaving East Croydon station – with the trams and high-rises, you could believe you were in a wealthy West German industrial city, until you walk around a little. What you find on investigation is that Croydon is in fact very English indeed, a result of the subjugation of planning to commerce. In short, what happened here in the 1960s is that an ambitious council offered businesses cheap office space if they would fund infrastructural improvements. Within an astonishingly short time, they transformed a burb into a minor metropolis of skyscrapers, underpasses and flyovers – the trams would come rather later. Since then the place has been the butt of numerous jokes. 'Mini-Manhattan', as if trying to be like New York was somehow less interesting than being like Surbiton. Croydon had, and has, ideas above its station, and for that, at least, it's hard not to warm to it. Yet the problem with the place quite quickly becomes apparent. Rather than this new metropolis being planned or coordinated, the dashing appearance from a distance gives way to a messy, chaotic reality, planned in the good old, ad hoc, throw everything in the air and see where it lands style so beloved of England.

In its ethos, the erstwhile Croydon Of The Future resembles the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s more than municipal planning, But in aesthetic, it's a 1960s living museum, because the place is remarkably intact; a mere couple of recladdings, only two completed post-1970s towers (neither of the slightest note, though Foster and Make schemes are planned). Much of what you can see is mosaic, concrete and glass in the English corporate modernist manner. Accordingly, it has an accidental uniqueness – things obliterated elsewhere survive. There's a fair amount of period charm, not much in terms of real quality. Seifert's fabulous NLA Tower, probably their best along with Centre Point and NatWest, is justifiably Mini-Manhattan's Empire State; but there's little else that shows any spark. The pleasure instead is seeing the past's generic, everyday architecture in an unusual state of completeness and survival.

So there's the once-chic, now-shabby tapering tower the council built as their own offices, which complements nicely their earlier, enjoyably debased Victorian halls; a couple of sub-Seifert cubist experiments; a jollily Festival of Britain Travelodge; Hilberseimer-style Zeilenbau blocks step along where a developer could get a big enough plot; and the chimneys of a power station ornament a giant IKEA. Residential towers are massively outnumbered, but there's three worth noting: the Lubetkinesque Cromwell Tower, some more Festival styling on Coombe Road, or the cute Zodiac House, which fans of the sitcom Peep Show will be familiar with. The best bit, comfortingly, is an enclave of public space, the mosaic-piloti and shell roof Arcade of St George's Walk, which emerges from behind the drab Nestle Tower.

The problem, or for the dedicated flâneur, the fun, is in how it interacts with the suburb all around. Or how it doesn't. Arrangements are totally random – a row of artisans' terraces with skyscrapers behind, would-be secluded Tudorbethan facing giant high-rises, the sound of birdsong accompanying an endless rumble of traffic. Sometimes the place seems to be mocking itself, as when churchyard meets concrete subway you find the sign 'OLD TOWN CONSERVATION AREA'. In fact, there's a lot of pre-Victorian, never mind pre-1960s remnants in among the towers, if you know where to find them. It adds up to one of London's more surreal urban experiences, taking the capital's pre-existing aptitude for the juxtaposition and amplifying it.

So Croydon is, at first, nothing like what a suburb is supposed to be. But look for the housing built at the same time as the new metropolis and you find that LA was the model much more than Hamburg or Chicago. Wates' Park Hill estate (no relation) is a case in point. This is one of the leafiest, lushest of suburbs, with either bland, tiny detached houses or vaguely Eric Lyons terraces in amongst mature trees giving way to, extraordinarily, three short terraces by Atelier 5, in a state of impeccable kemptness. However, this is exceptional; what is much more typical is the sprawl around the Borough's centre, those burbs where 'going into town' means going into Croydon, not the West End.

Thornton Heath, for instance, where the borough's only notable post-1970s building has just been completed, FAT's new Library extension. Drop the 'OMG jokes' reaction for a second (if we're lucky, the architects might sometime do the same), and it's a remarkably serious, not at all whimsical public building, warm, welcoming and on this Tuesday afternoon, very well used. It looks comfortable, which is an interestingly rare thing in new architecture. As a building, it's a great reproach to the rash of library closures. It takes a small-scale thing and makes it better. But this is a place with large-scale problems. And far more typical of the attempts to solve it are new spec blocks of flats, or Saunders Architects' generic Blairbuild Thornton Heath Leisure Centre. Maybe that'll survive long enough to acquire the centre's unexpected period charm, but it seems unlikely. This place has suffered from over a century of non-plan, and the result is chaos – dereliction next to newbuild, dramatically crammed and then almost criminally low-density. It's full of surprises for the walker, but it's a disastrous way to run a city, as the horrendous traffic, or the decidedly fractious tenor of public interaction, makes very clear.

But what does it say about South-East, suburban England, the area that lords it over the rest of the country? This place is, in theory, a major centre of our most powerful, most wealthy, most leafy area. You'd never guess, though, as it feels like another Britain entirely - a poor but multiracial, intriguing but miserable place which could really do with social planning and social housing, rather than more speculation and a BID. Croydon is not smug; unlike neighbours such as Carshalton, it won't be going all creeping Jesus Big Society anytime soon. It's a place. It could be much more so.

Urban Trawl: Brighton and Hove

2011-05-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

It could be said, and it would be only slightly hyperbolic, that we are all Brightonians now – or at least, our governments and local councils would really rather we were. The seaside city of Brighton & Hove is a place with a radically immaterial economy of tourism, property, media and 'creativity', a city of leisure. Unlike, say, Richard Florida's other favourite British city, Manchester, it has no industrial past to uncomfortably erase; but like the cities that would desperately like to emulate it, it has a large and ignored working class population, often living in large and slightly-less-easily ignored tower blocks. Brighton and Hove were built for fashionable London on holiday, and so it remains, at least after a 'decline' when it became more proletarian. In short, there's a lot to get annoyed by. The problem, however, with maintaining a critique of the place is that it is – especially on a sunny day – so gorgeous that it's almost impossible to keep your faculties about you. In an analogous but visually very different way to Milton Keynes, Brighton is the most seductive city of the new economy.

It's also the city which has been the first to elect a Green MP, Caroline Lucas, and right by the station is something that combines the two elements of the place – harmoniously uniting right and left Brighton, if we're being extraordinarily generous. This is the grandiosely named New England Quarter, a piece of brownfield regen, fundamentally indistinguishable from any other up and down the country. Much of it is in the anonymous, render/wood/metal balconies style, with the latter amusingly skimpy, implying some very svelte occupants; the central tower, Fielden Clegg Bradley's 'One Brighton', has a marginally clearer, more convincing presence. The difference, as ever, is in the marketing. At one corner is 'Brighton Junction – an ethical property centre'. Their italics, and their protesting too much. Ethics in the development are expressed through underground carparks hidden under Sainsbury's, Subway and the 'public realm' – and some extensive gating. 4 x 4s glower their way down the surrounding roads. Then you come to one of the city's many council tower blocks, a thin, stock brick thing with, unforgivably, an expressed, concrete car park on its ground floor. Drive, by all means, but be discreet.

From there you can walk through North Laine and Sydney Street, whose bright colours and painted shops are a centre of the city's alternative culture, with some undeniably rather intriguing shops among all the sub-Carnaby Street nostalgia, which is best signified by the prominent sign 'Madcap Items £20'. North Laine's hip-bourgeois nature has recently been accompanied by something more square-bourgeois – Bennetts' Jubilee Library, and the several blocks around it. The Library itself is quite a fine building, especially for a PFI and Design & Build contract. Its elegance is almost entirely down to neat proportions and the decision to clad much of it in deep blue glazed tiles, a subtle nod to one of the city's Victorian materials, which fits the general raffishness very nicely. Somewhat less successful is the obligatory thwacking great atrium, which is visible on the façade via a blue glass expanse soiled by the city's anti-social seagulls. The blocks around, housing the usual middle class chains – Wagamama, etc – are inoffensive, if bland, so it's the offsetting that offends – the notion that a library must be justified by lots of surrounding retail. As ever, the entrance to Pizza Express is far more visible than that of the Library itself.

Fashionable Brighton is not nearly as interesting as it thinks it is. In fact, the element of the city that really convinces, that saves it from completely irredeemable smugness, is the tourists' seafront promenade. One route takes you past irksome retail old (the Lanes, where it is acceptable to call a shop 'Pretty Eccentric') and new (CZWG's Black Lion Street, actually a rather imaginative bit of infill which nonetheless houses a Jamie Oliver restaurant). Then you get to this thing, somewhere between a Regency utopia and a Brutalist Miami, defined most magnificently by a feeling of space and air without parallel in the UK, with a wide, wide boulevard, spacious streets and lawns, and the Channel spread out before you. It's glorious, and that glory is given particular pathos by the ruins of the West Pier, a haunting reminder of the city's persistent hint of the sinister.

Giant towers are planned and seemingly shelved at each end – a monster hotel by Wilkinson Eyre to the east, an observation tower by Marks Barfield to the east. Frank Gehry's plans for Hove, meanwhile, seem not so much shelved as permanently cancelled, although that's no great tragedy, as they bore about as much relation to his best work as Gropius' Park Lane Playboy Club did to the Dessau Bauhaus. As it is, modernism is represented by some still controversial structures. One scheme which is surely due some critical rehabilitation is the Brighton Centre and the accompanying Odeon designed by Russell Diplock Associates. Both sit at the point where Brutalism and futurist kitsch meet, and are all the better for it, with the Odeon's expressionistic roofline a particular thrill. Even more hated by custodians of Brighton are the several Seifert schemes that crowd behind Waterhouse's aggressively red, late Victorian Hotel Metropole and the fussy, part-bombed Grand. There is one unforgivable element to them, where Seifert saws off Waterhouse's skyline, replacing it in the clumsiest, lamest manner possible – but the irregular grids of the Seifert towers are very smart, both up close and from a distance, adding a metropolitan skyline drama which, along with the council high-rises, stops the townscape from becoming a mildly more seedy seaside version of Bath.

The other major modernist scheme creates a demarcation between Brighton and Hove, both in terms of scale and style, but it's of far from local significance. Wells Coates' 1936 Embassy Court, recently and thoroughly restored, follows on the ideas of his experimental Isokon housing in London, employing its ideas on a massive scale. It might have been built as serviced flats for light entertainers, but it's clear here how much Coates was indebted to Constructivism, especially Moisei Ginzburg's Narkomfin building. The seaside front is clean and classic, but lurk round the corner and the building's circulation is on spectacular display, with strongly, bulgingly modelled access decks and staircases, so lush and physical that you feel you could eat them – it supports Manfredo Tafuri's one-time description of Coates as a 'proto-brutalist'. It's one of the most remarkable blocks of flats in the country, but there's several of its era in Hove.

But first you pass through Brunswick Town, which is as complete an expression of Regency luxury aesthetics as Embassy Court is of the '30s (or is it the other way round?), with its often breathtaking Crescents and squares. Looking at the way the bow-windowed terraces sweep down the hills to the sea, you sense that here there was a real seriousness about high-design, high-density living combining with hierarchy, profit-making and speculation. It's the Urban Renaissance of it's day, except immeasurably more confident and proud in architectonic execution. Go up the hill a bit from here, and you find much more. If Bethnal Green is a museum of working class housing, Hove is a museum of the luxury flat. Every permutation is on show. The clipped, Jeeves & Wooster neo-Georgian of Wick Hall, now a Buddhist Centre ('Meditate in Brighton', it suggests - a new, more pious approach to self-help); the Crittall Windows and wave motifs of Furze Court, with additional Bupa centre; Eric Lyons' typically elegant Span Development at Park Gate; or St Anne's Court and Beresford Court, outré combinations of traditionalism and 30s' metropolitan display. The former has a blue plaque informing us that Lord Alfred Douglas once lived here. As well he might.

Interestingly, and sadly, the newer blocks of flats do exactly the same thing, on exactly the same low-to-mid-rise scale, for exactly the same kind of clientèle – Hove's sleepy and/or elderly, and ex-Londoners – but are so dramatically clumsy and poorly made by comparison. There's Landsdowne Court, with blocky red terracotta cladding and strikingly lumpen, cheap-looking balconies – it could be in any number of less favoured, less wealthy towns. The blocks next to Beresford Court are especially alarming – here, perhaps as some consequence of the winds coming in off the sea, the wood panelling has deteriorated so rapidly that it looks burnt. Or in fact, it looks like the boarding councils use to deter squatting. It's all indicative of one of the stranger things for which the last 30 years can be indicted – that often, even the luxury housing was poor. It seems to sum up a few truths about this attractive but impressively hypocritical city. But at least from here, you can walk down to the seafront, take in those winds and that space, and pretend that everything's going to be alright.

Urban Trawl: Bristol

2011-04-19T05:15:00.000-07:00

Bristol is perhaps the one southern city which really feels independent of London. For whatever reason – its diversity, its distance, or the internal emigration patterns of wealthy Londoners in the 1970s, some might suggest darkly – it largely lacks the lamentable parochial mentality and substandard architecture so common in the Lutons, Portsmouths, Readings, Southamptons, Guildfords and Swindons. It's clearly a very long time (200 years to be precise) since it was the UK's Second City, and the port is now six miles away from the centre, but it doesn't feel all that bothered by either fact. Bristol doesn't feel all that bothered by anything, which is its virtue but also its curse – it takes itself both too seriously (as centre of alternative culture, street art and suchlike) and not seriously enough (as modern, industrial city and sponsor of architecture). Stereotype it may be, but the place is seriously lackadaisical, and it succeeds and fails on this. Often, architecturally, this big, dynamic and multi-racial city feels like it's been asleep since 1910; the awakenings, when they happen, can be like nightmares.

As an example of the wastes that Bristol's general air of torpor can so easily create, there is little better than the area around Temple Meads station, one of the worst introductions to the city in the UK (and here, happily, a deceptive one). Inside, a Brunel shed and then immediately outside, cutely silly Jacobethan – but then, in front of that, a wasteland, made up of some startlingly grim 1960s buildings (to paraphrase Ian Nairn, if you want to like modern architecture, don't come to Bristol) wide and pedestrian-hostile arterial roads, and in the middle of it all, looking forlorn, the moderne Grosvenor Hotel, as featured in Chris Petit's classic film Radio On. In that film, the Hotel was passed by a spindly steel flyover; that went in the 1990s, but though less modern and hence apparently less 'alienating', the road is surely even more obnoxious and impassable without it. Then opposite that, we have one of the finest, most original Gothic buildings in the UK, in the craggy, lurid form of St Mary Redcliffe, all monsters, tendons and grottoes. It has no foil, is not placed into a viable public space. It just sits there surrounded by traffic.

Go past this towards the river and the centre, and things pick up very quickly; past the tiresome radical chic ('Che's Bar') is the frankly staggering 1869 Granary, a monumental example of the misnamed 'Bristol Byzantine' style, all Venetian detail and hulking robustness - this is real port architecture, worthy of a Glasgow or a Hamburg, and you can smell the sea. Bristol architecture could have developed from this style, or from its unique Gothic heritage, into some form of Amsterdam School Expressionism. Yet the Georgian tradition is equally present here, so in the 20th century neo-Georgian, like the bloodless Council House that insults the Cathedral, was a safer bet. Topograpically, the Granary gives way to the huge showpiece of Queen Square, where elegance, pastiche and muddle are made coherent by the simple 18th century plan. Amazingly, in the 1930s a road was built bisecting the square, and the 1990s removal of that, at least, was probably mourned by few.

Anyone looking just for good buildings can easily find an enormous amount to admire in Bristol – late Medieval, Regency and early industrial architecture is especially rich here, though there's little Victorian or modern work of comparable note. As townscape, the city is all over the place. The dramatic topography and tight, winding streets seem to encourage this, so the city's most interesting places are all a matter of hills, snickets and unexpected, panoramic vistas. Often, however, you'll step out of the bustle into a void. Conventional wisdom may bunch them together, but Bristol's post-Blitz rebuilding was more Sotonian fudge than Coventrian triumph. There are exceptions – near the University there is a tiny, clipped Barclays Bank that is quite exquisite – but the stumps of several clearly uncompleted schemes lie scattered all over the place, from the Stafford Cripps Beaux Arts of Broadmead to the roundabout expanse of St James Barton. The former's architecture as bland as the latter's planning is inept.

Perhaps the most successful of these measures is, aptly enough, a shopping mall – Chapman Taylor's partly open-air Cabot Circus, which, tastelessness aside, is a spatially imaginative thing, all flying walkways and quasi-parametric roofs. Like Liverpool One, the clone-town tenants somewhat defeat the object of designing a Mall as a real piece of city. While there I'm told that Cabot Circus is in effect a long-delayed element of the 1940s City Plan. In a city where the Gothic Revival lasted until the 1920s (in the form of the enjoyable pastiche of the Willis building), it somehow makes sense. But it's not all slumber; Charles Holden's earliest buildings are here, a Library and (mutilated) Hospital of striking civic confidence and originality, albeit with few successors here.

The other redeveloped area is the city docks, which closed to industry as late as 1991. Mostly, Bristol can be criticised for not hiring architects of any talent or significance; here that doesn't apply, and yet the results are just as unimpressive. Fielden Clegg Bradley's housing is identikit city-centre-living well below their usual standard, Hopkins' '@Bristol' entertainment centre is muddled and drab, and Cullinan's housing scheme in particular is distressingly poor, with no trace of their usual originality and drama, indistinguishable from the work of the usual regen grunts. And that, 80s neoclassicism and the obligatory 'iconic' bridge aside, is basically that for new architecture. If you must, then further back into the centre there's the tacky post-war reclad of the Radisson Hotel, and sundry CABEist blocks scattered around around at random. Most are furnished with the usual phoenix-from-the-ruins public art.

That might not be the essence of Bristol's urban identity anyway – who needs architecture when you've got street art? Here I should declare my prejudice in advance – I don't find Banksy funny, nor particularly 'subversive'. Yet his redecorations of Bristol façades at least have a point to make of some description, however obvious. Mostly, areas like Stokes Croft are daubed in day-glo inanities of various sorts, as relentlessly bright and jolly as a bumptious barcode façade, though with more countercultural pretensions. Meanwhile, above Stokes Croft are the impressive interlinked towers of Dove Steet Flats; regardless of the planning hashes, Bristol's City Architects evidently had at least some talent. As a resident walks in, we mutter of these hilltop beauties 'the views must be amazing'. 'They are', he replies. 'But they're so bloody cold that I'm actually warmer out here than in there. I'd die to get out of 'em'.

Bristol makes a better use of its topography than any English town outside Yorkshire, and identical towers were proposed for another hilltop site near the University; they were replaced with High Kingsdown, a low-rise scheme which shuns the site's loftiness – but, happily, here the reaction against monolithic planning led to an imaginative, complex arrangement of houses rather than mere pastiche. Its Swedish politesse fits the sleepy city very well, as does its labyrinthine arrangement. Plenty of mock-Victoriana would follow, of course, in the subsequent reaction against even this tamed modernism. One Thatcher-era villa nearby features a Victorian-style roundel showing its builders as bewhiskered nineteenth century notables.

From the University's elevated point, the beauty of Bristol is inescapable – the details at ground level may often be poor, but up above it doesn't seem to matter. There's one last moment here, though, a piece of half dirigiste, half accidental 'planning' so exquisite that it could be a whole model for how to stitch together the contemporary city.

Bristolians may be alarmed to find that I am referring to Lewins Mead, a 60s-70s redevelopment of a medieval area with walkways and towers. It is, the two estates above excepted, the most interesting part of modern Bristol. That's not for the elevations – most of these office blocks are of little note. It's because, if you have a good enough guide, it's the city's most rewarding promenade architecturale. Start on the walkways, pass through towers, survey the views of the city's innards, then proceed along alleyways, past fragments of the old city walls, slip through doorways, and spot on the way art nouveau printworks, expressionist adornments on contemporary nightclubs. Here, just for once, this perpetually unfinished city makes a virtue out of its heterogeneity, with the walkways and alleys providing surprising and thrilling pieces of townscape. Somehow it has all bled together into one, a delicious melange of faïence, concrete and Bath stone. It's a great improvisation, and it exists outside of all our familiar divides – masterplanning vs localism, Ville Radieuse vs Rue Corridor, it doesn't matter. Given how much of the UK is this diverse, this messy, there's a lesson here or several. For Bristol to take advantage of this chaotic dynamism, it might have to take its architecture seriously.

Originally published in Building Design, 17th March 2011

Pimlico Parade

2011-04-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

(this essay is a reflection on/explanation of a walk as part of Critical Practice's 'Parade' event at the parade ground of the former barracks opposite Tate Britain, on an extraordinarily hot day in summer 2010 - it entailed a long walk around the area, so what was at first a decent crowd ended up as me, Pyzik and two exceptionally loyal walkers. It was of course written before the events at Millbank Tower last year, although some of these photographs were taken afterwards)

There was never really any question about where to parade in Pimlico, and that was out of the former Parade Ground, not to mention out of the sweltering heat that the crate-construction could never quite provide shade from; so our stall advertised a walk, first one hour after the start of the Parade, then two hours, as we attempted to convince at least some visitors to come along. The idea was a Tour Around Socialist Pimlico, where we would try to find the hidden socialist potential of these deeply overdetermined streets. The area around here, where Pimlico adjoins the back end of Westminster, is one of the last great London secrets, a haven of experimental and socialistic housing in the seemingly deeply unsympathetic shadow of the Houses of Parliament's tortured crockets, or under the glass contours of the Millbank Tower used alternately as campaign offices by New Labour and Cameron's New Tories.

The phrase which always comes to mind here is 'hiding in plain sight'. Though we're the shortest of walks from some of the biggest tourist traps in the world, it's quiet, mixed, strange, at times poor, though never the kind of traumatic poverty you can find elsewhere in London. This sort of contrast is supposed to be what London is 'all about', but elsewhere it has become increasingly grotesque, as council estates give over their open space for the construction of 'aspirational' towers for incomers, as the most painful poverty and the grossest wealth live next door to each other. There are huge contrasts of wealth here too, but never on the same horrifying scale as a Clapham or a Hackney.

So, where are we exactly? The City of Westminster is not habitually considered a residential area, but for most of the 18th and 19th century it was a fearful slum, and at the sort of proximity to Parliament that would make it the ideal assembly point for an insurrection. The 'Improvement' began in the late 19th century through the Peabody Trust, the charitable body which built tenements for the 'deserving poor' all over London, and still does. Some of their cliffs of yellow stock-brick flats still stand here, still partly social housing next to some of the world's most expensive property. From here until the 1970s, the area would become the centre for some London's strangest and most overlooked council estates. It would briefly return to prominence in the 1980s, when Westminster City Council was under the control of an enthusiastically Thatcherite group around the Tesco heiress Dame Shirley Porter.

Although it had always been a Conservative council, Westminster was a marginal, at the constant risk of falling to Labour. Porter decided the easiest way to keep control was to expel the Labour voters, which she did, by forcibly moving tenants from safe and well-maintained properties in Pimlico and the centre of Westminster, to asbestos-ridden blocks in Paddington, sometimes out of the borough altogether to encampments in Barking, and sometimes onto the streets. Soon after this gerrymandering was discovered, Porter left the country, and is still essentially a fugitive from justice, yet her approach would be extremely influential on later Conservative and New Labour policy, where wholesale transfers of council tenants from inner to outer boroughs would accompany the selling off of council housing. Porter called her gerrymandering Building Stable Communities; Labour called it Building Sustainable Communities. And it worked – Westminster is now a safe Tory seat. Yet perhaps her most amusing, and perhaps Pyrrhic, defeat was at the hands of the Duke of Westminster, owner of the Grosvenor Estate, which his ancestors had given over to 'the housing of the working classes' in perpetuity. He took Porter to court, and her defence was to claim that the working classes no longer existed. She lost, with the peculiar side-effect that the existence of the English proletariat was proven in court by the Duke of Westminster, Britain's richest man.

Walking around the place now, Porter can be seen to have won an only partial victory. There is some deeply horrible infill, in the bumptious, shoulder-padded style of the 1980s, but there are still many corner shops, greasy spoon cafeterias, community centres – often the places lacking from the gentrified but apparently more 'edgy' streets of Hackney.

This was especially obvious on our walk, as part of the small group were two locals, an elderly couple, one in a wheelchair. We started at the London County Council's Millbank Estate, exactly at the back of the Parade Ground. Designed in the 1890s, this was the second council estate in London, after the very similar Boundary Estate in Shoreditch. While the charity-driven Peabody blocks near Parliament are social housing on sufferance, deliberately grim and imposing, sanitary but unfriendly, the blocks built by local government were, with equal deliberateness, humane, lined by trees, and finely architecturally detailed in a muscular style, with a park at the centre. The contrast is an object lesson in the idiocies of the 'Big Society', with its fetish for charity and its denigration of 'the state'. Aptly, as the LCC estate shows the explicit influence of the Socialist idealism of the Arts & Crafts movement at its best - William Morris' News from Nowhere partially built round the corner from the Parliament he re-imagined as a stables. Aptly, in the hinterland of the Tate Gallery, the blocks are named after painters, and this being Victoriana, the remembered – Millais, Ruskin – are mixed with kitchmeisters like Lord Leighton.

A convoluted walk from there takes through more of Peabody's tenements and terraces, and past the Hide Tower, a tall, clipped and minimal concrete tower block that strangely remains unobtrusive, hence, presumably, the name. Our destination is the Grosvenor Estate, another, later London County Council development, this time of the late 20s. The designer was Edwin Lutyens, the neoclassical architect of New Delhi and much of interwar London – this was a very rare use of outside architects by the LCC. The prosaic description does it no justice – this is a space right out of Kafka, or rather Lewis Carroll – a series of square blocks of flats with checkerboard patterns on the outside and long, white access balconies on the inside, with the rendered concrete resembling some kind of icing, the patterns like Battenburg Cake. From Regency Street or Page Street they create one of the strangest urban landscapes in London, an outright English Surrealism that was one of that decade's few real equivalents to (but not imitations of) continental Modernism. The blocks enclose communal gardens, and smaller neo-Georgian pavilions, which house hairdressers, a corner shop, a 'Multi-Cultural Centre'. There's particular justice in the aristocrat's victory over the Tesco Council leader here, in that an area like this would be gold dust to the property speculators, if they ever got hold of it, but here it appears to be entirely functional council housing. I'd read in a book on Porter that these flats were originally built without inside toilets, but am firmly corrected by the two locals. 'My grandparents lived here, and they definitely had loos'. From here, we walk to the red-brick Edwardian Regency Estate on the other end of Page Street – similar in scale to the LCC Millbank Estate, but with the original arts & crafts touches replaced with a more familiar Tudorbethan. We stop here, to look at the archways that enclose the communal gardens, noting the typically stern sign warning against 'hawkers', and they decide to leave the walk, wheeling into their flats. Were it open, we would at this point have made a stop in the Regency Cafe, a moderne, black vitrolite palace of tea, but it closes early on Saturdays.

From here, we cross Vauxhall Bridge Road, noting a hoarding promising 'Homes for Key People', to Lillington Gardens, a 1960s council estate designed by Darbourne & Darke. Some of the blocks are named after theatrical and literary figures, inadvertently making this one of London's camper estates – Noel Coward House, indeed. For enthusiasts of the era of social democratic planning, Lillington Gardens is as much a peak of architectural and social achievement as the Millbank Estate round the corner, both of them lushly detailed in red brick. Here, the architects took their inspiration from the Church of St James the Less, a cranky polychrome brick monster, and the brickwork is some of the most gorgeous in London. The flats are on multiple levels, here sprouting walkways and there traversing service roads, but mostly enclosing winding pedestrian paths, lined with overgrown vegetation (the cars are there, but hidden underneath). They provide a whole self-enclosed world, a dramatic but never dominating townscape, unafraid of the sublime but not aggressively so. There's not much housing as good as this anywhere, which makes it particularly satisfying that, for a time, until the introduction of the Right to Buy council housing, it was impossible to actually purchase a flat here. It was a right, but not a property right. This is one of the few estates that few have a bad word for, yet the funny thing is that the architects designed an almost identical complex in Islington. It was stigmatised as a 'sink' and mutilated, although this may or may not be connected with the intensity of gentrification there.

The rest of Pimlico is full of the stucco'd early 19th century terraced housing designed for the Empire's more lowly clerks, which time, sentimentality and gentrification has elevated into a model for all housing to follow. Along some of these squares and rows, to Pimlico Comprehensive School, designed by the LCC's successor, the Greater London Council, the entity which was abolished by the Conservative Party as a threat to central government. It's a little concrete battleship inside a stucco square, in the same angular, dramatic style as the GLC's Hayward Gallery over the river. The School was almost completely destroyed in the late 2000s, to make way for one of the new Aspirational City Academies, in order to inculcate neoliberal ideology in Pimlico youth. But we're here for another contrast nearby.

Dolphin Square is the only place on the walk that was built as private housing – and luxury private housing at that, a monumental late 1930s complex whose current inhabitants include Prince William. We sneak in through the private archway, and notice that a bit of a party is in progress – the ruling class evidently has something to celebrate. Creeping to the other side, we arrive in Churchill Gardens. This, the largest of Pimlico's estates, was once a model for the whole country, embodying the brief socialist hope of Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government. Although it was commissioned by a strange alliance of Conservative and Communist councillors, it was built contemporaneously with the 'three-dimensional socialist propaganda' of the LCC's Festival of Britain. It's all wide open spaces and huge, confident slabs, on an utterly heroic scale. Voices bounce and echo off the glass stairwells. At the centre is the steel tower which once housed the estate's heating system, which ran off waste from Battersea Power Station, just over the river. It sits derelict now, the baton passed between developers every couple of years - the biggest property scam in London. It's where the Conservative Party launched their 2010 election campaign, and an apt place to finish, as they intend to slash housing benefit, ensuring that inner London is only a place for those who can afford it. The estates of Pimlico, however, are still marching distance from Parliament.

An edited version of this appears in Parade: Modes of Assembly and Forms of Address.

This Way

2011-04-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

Lots and lots up on Flickr: Southampton, Coventry, Leeds, Oxford, Barking, New Ash Green, Sheffield, and more of Manchester.

Quadrangular: Oxford

2011-04-01T16:40:00.000-07:00

This is a post vaguely inspired by Pevsner's unfinished, recently reassembled Visual Planning and the Picturesque, where the great man wanders round Oxford, Lincoln's Inn and Roehampton's Alton Estate, seeing all of them as exemplars of an irregular, organic approach to planning based on juxtaposition and flow rather than orders and axes. It's an interesting way of planning a city, no doubt, but it has certain differences with how most of the cities I like work.

For instance, the approach from the railway station. Like Cambridge, it's based on making sure industrial modernity doesn't stray to far into the heart of the city, so your first sight of it is a car park and some Barratt/Bovis/Wimpey/whoever dreck. The cities that look exciting from the train - Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, even Newport - throw you straight into the city, all bridges, office blocks and spires. Here, the most interesting thing is this bit of rationalismo by Dixon Jones, which is weirdly more like an Aldo Rossi painting than any actual Aldo Rossi buildings I've seen.

The last time - the first time - I was in Oxford was with IT a few months ago. Naturally, as a lecturer in an ex-poly she can barely look at the place without fury. As a way of building a city, it's certainly spectacularly exclusive - around half of the spaces are basically private quadrangles open only at the colleges' discretion. This also has interesting consequences for the modern architecture of the city - as there's loads of it, it's all post-war, it's all very good, but it's nearly all hidden away where the tourists won't look. So though you might enter something like this, above...

After a little while you will come to something like this. These, the Beehives, are the first Modernist buildings in Oxford, designed in the '50s by the Architects Co-Partnership, at a time when most of the new buildings were neo-Georgian. My guide has a short text on the subjectwhich explains their appeal better than I could.

Much as the Harold Wilson-era Labour intent seemed to be the making a more mixed-class establishment by opening up education to gifted working class youth, rather than getting rid of the establishment altogether, modernism, when it belatedly arrived in Oxford, followed the rules of an inherently exclusive and undemocratic city, only attempting to give it a new and more democratic sense of space and style. So as they're fundamentally unchallenged by it, the colleges treat it very well - no spalling concrete here, in the courtyards.

The process continues after Modernism, in an even more self-conscious fashion, as Arup's prickly brutalist quadrangles give way to the early '90s postmodernism of MacCormac Jamieson Pritchard. As if to reinforce the Lewis Carroll feel, there's the giant chessboard above...

As a fairly irreconcilable pomo hater, I can just about deal with somewhere like this, not for stylistic reasons, but because it still manages to continue modernism's insights into space - there's movement here above and below, multiple levels, passageways and trapdoors, all of which would never be allowed somewhere that was to be Secured by Design. It's welcoming, surprising and flowing space, if you're allowed in.

But all this is emphatically not public. You reach it through an electronic touch-card applied to a tiny, spiked door like the above.

In fact, in subscribing to its essentials while subverting its stylistic assumptions, Modernism and Pomo might just have been following in the footsteps of the various deliberately crass and aggressive Ruskinians of the 19th century - like Butterfield at Keble, a fireworks display beamed down from Cottonopolis or Brum, which is perhaps more of an attack on Oxonian assumptions than anything in concrete.

...which leads to one of the most extraordinary examples of the city's stealth modernism, Ahrends Burton and Koralek's snaking high-tech extension, a bit of which got snipped off by the prolifically boring Rick Mather.

Outside of the density, privacy, architectural enclosure and excitement of the quadrangular system, Oxford feels more like Cambridge, which gets a chapter in New Ruins - straggling, suburban, dotted with landmarks. One of them is this gigantic Brutalist laboratory by Leslie Martin. Perhaps because everyone can see it, it's in a far more parlous state than any other bit of Oxford Modern.

The concrete is in need of a clean, unlike with Arup's insular effort; it's as if the owners are ashamed of its presumptuousness in being both modern and actually visible to the civilian. This can be seen especially in the tragically cheap PFI extensions round the back....

Next is a Leslie Martin building in better nick, the Libraries. This is in the first book about architecture I ever bought, a '60s Pelican History of English Architecture, where they describe it as 'dynastic' - which sounds about right. Somewhere between Hilversum and Assyria, though Alex suggests Odessa.

From there, along gaping voids of playing fields, to St Catherine's College, Arne Jacobsen's Grade 1 listed High Modernist opus. The entrance to it is by Stephen Hodder, marginally less dull than Rick Mather but in a similarly timid, business park-like psuedomodernist vein. Pevsner would have regarded this attempt to fit in as a big mistake, a misreading of the picturesque qualities of Oxford planning...

St Catherine's, being designed by an internationally famous Dane and all, is often considered offensively un-English. Which is funny, as the first thing it makes me think of, in its ruthless rectilinear sweep set amongst greenery, is the Smithsons' Hunstanton School, which as a Secondary Modern catered for a very different post-war educational clientele - and both have something very Alexander Pope about them - measured, unnatural, Augustan.

I despise the term High Modernism, considering it pernicious and often meaningless, but if it means anything in architecture it means this, as sure as it means Woolf in literature. It proclaims itself as a Work Of Art, and emphatically not a popular one, while Modernism on the whole is, whatever some may try to prove, usually in a constant, if tortured, dialogue with the popular. Being 'High', St Catherine's eschews montage and juxtaposition, standing on its own. Yet if it does have much to do with Oxford, it's the Through the Looking Glass element, the miniature mazes of topiary that define it.

As a Stadtkrone, an attempt to set up a dreaming spire, there's a concrete tower which evokes something Italian Rationalist, like Dixon with Rossi - here it is Terragni's de-secularisation of Sant'Elia, albeit significantly more trim and chic. It's a fascinating series of objects, and I could look at this place for hours, but - and here I conform appallingly to English stereotype - I could never love it. Pevsner adored it.

Out from there, and we hit some pomo of a much more typical kind than the thoughtful spatial manipulations of McCormac. This could be anywhere in the south of England, but hardly anywhere else.

Then there's the centre. There's another Oxford that I'd like to explore - the car factories, places like Blackbird Leys, which I'm sure native informant Will Wiles would have something to say about - but this is about the place which, as we're out of season, is full of people snapping away just as avidly as me.

OK, so I love this, I won't deny it. But I'm glad I didn't go to university in it. It's so funny how Modern architects fitted into this place, how they didn't want to disrupt it. What is now Holywells, below, was designed by Macmillan and Metzstein of Gillespie Kidd & Coia, architects capable of great Brutalist aggression - but here, they've slotted something into it that even Charles Windsor couldn't possibly object to.

I imagine a hypothetical reader of Visual Planning and the Picturesque would find it difficult to see the picturesque, the visual drama and humanism, in the Alton Estate because of its form - because it's a series of mere council blocks and maisonettes. Similarly, I should love the below, where a series of contrasting rooflines along a narrow street lead to a bristling spire - but the cultural signifiers rub me up the wrong way, grate at my inverted snobbery.

This is a fabulously silly thing, though - a skyway! It was opened in 1914, but the fantasy is here, at least, entirely convincing. Pevs proclaims 'a bridge across a street is always the greatest temptation to explore beyond'. We don't, though.

It's interesting to see how the three biggest egos in 1960s British architecture - James Stirling and Alison & Peter Smithson - inserted their ideas into all this.

We don't see the interior courtyard of Stirling's Florey Building - the reasons why are explained in the image at the top of this post - but I see enough to, once again, notice how much more massive Stirling buildings look in photographs than in reality, and to note what a poor bit of planning it is - surrounded by a car park and straggly indeterminate space, taking the Oxonian fixation with hiding away to outrageous extremes.

The internal space looks wonderful through the grate, of course.

All that said, it's an extremely impressive building, and as a piece of stand-alone architecture I like it more than perhaps anything else here. It has more in common with Butterfield at Keble than anything else - full of tensions and angles - but it's a shame that it got plonked in this corner, when it could have been placed somewhere where its postures could have been aimed at something rather than a private matter. Maybe it does do this from above. It loses Pevsner points for good reason, not so much visually - Pevs clearly couldn't stand the sort of architectures I'd consider Militant Modernisms - brutalism, expressionism and constructivism, all of which are drawn on by Stirling here - but for its lack of interest in the spirit of the place.

Funny that the Smithsons - who were, in the architectural press of the '50s, the scourge of Townscape and picturesque planning - did something so mild and contextual, even trying to encourage creepers up their Halls at St Hilda's.

Outside of that, a bit of residential planning. Not having been to Bath, I don't expect terraces in the south of England to look this ordered and elegant, and grope around for northern comparisons to make sense of them. Halifax, maybe, a town I prefer to Oxford which is around the same size, which has some of these. What it doesn't have, I suppose, is this:

I'm not sure who is responsible for this - ABK again? Powell & Moya? - but it's a marvellous, fearless juxtaposition, not a mindless plonking but an alignment of differing elements. But even here, notice the wall enclosing it, Victorian paranoia crassened further recently with barbs. It's one of the only Modernist incursions into the actual streetline, one of only a couple which the tourists can see. They can see this, mind you - John Outram for halfwits.

This is another - more spindly, Gothic Brutalism from Arup. It's striking, but it's an exception. Oxford keeps its modernity closely guarded, as secretive and exclusive as you'd expect for a place which is still the main source of power - in media, in politics, in the City, wherever - in the UK, even after nearly 900 years. Beautiful as it may be, it's sad nobody ever really tried to threaten it - architects or politicians.

Originally published at SDMYABT on 7/8/10

Suburban Sketch: Bluewater

2011-04-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

Today I went back to Bluewater. I had two appointments at the M25's delightful Darent Valley Hospital, one in the early morning, one late afternoon, and I decided that it might be a more interesting means of spending an extended lunchbreak than sitting in the hospital branch of Upper Crust and reading Eric Hobsbawm. The first time I went there, with I.T, who combined pics with quotes from Ballard's underrated last novel, I was a little underwhelmed - having spent much of my childhood and youth in Malls (like 90% or so of those born since the 1970s) it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed - the only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit, perfect for dealing with us when we start to get off our fucking knees. This time I explored it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.

I hadn't realised, given the hospital's hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater in my twice-a-month-at-least appointments. I was walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes most modernist housing projects look like models of extreme libertarianism. As the crow flies, or in a post-apocalyptic, car-free scenario, I could walk about 5 minutes from the outpatients to the back-end of Bluewater, counting in some tricksy negotiation of the chalk cliffs. Pedestrians are necessarily bus-riders, as there is literally NO WAY of just turning up and walking into Bluewater, something which I'm sure Americans are rather used to, but for us is still relatively shocking. Eric Kuhne, the architect whose firm CivicArts designed Bluewater, opines in a rather fascinating interview that Bluewater is a city rather than a retail destination. In terms of its size and population, this is true (plus you could count its appendage, Ebbsfleet new town, which I have yet to visit), so we need to evaluate exactly what sort of a city this is - a city with one ceremonial entrance, which can only be entered in a vehicle, where nothing is produced but where many things are consumed. The only sort of regime that could set up such a controlled, channelled city is a dictatorship or oligarchy. Neatly enough, Kuhne explicitly praises 'benevolent despotism' and critiques the very notion of democratic city planning in the above interview, with admirable frankness. Yet following Patrick Keiller's account of finding 'a small, intense man reading Walter Benjamin' in Brent Cross ('Robinson embraced the man and they talked for hours...yet the number he gave him was that of a telephone box in Cricklewood'), it's clear that Bluewater is one of the many possible termini of the 19th century Arcades that bore through the solidity of the baroque city, their iron and glass construction the 'unconscious' of architecture, an oneiric, ethereal harbinger of the future amidst the ostentatiously solid architecture of imperialism - the place where the 'dreaming collective' spend their time. As the bus winds through a series of roundabouts on its way from the hospital to the mall that is yards away, you see the elevations that are the (basically irrelevant) 'face' of the building - a series of spiked glass domes, over a long, bulbous metal roof, which shimmers in the exurban autumn sunshine.

Inside, the first impression - this is half-term, after all - is of everything happening at once. The city of Bluewater soon reveals itself to be docile, unsurprisingly considering the draconian code of conduct, and there's only the slightest hint of menace - but the entrance is chaos. First you go past the standard-issue Blair-era retail architecture of a Marks and Spencers, and then you hit something odd - four glass prisms, seemingly at random, part of the glazed part of the building that ushers you in. This might just be ineptitude, but presumably the designers know what they're doing here, given the (as we shall see) heavily didactic elements of the interior, but exactly what is unclear. They're 'toys', these, as Charles Jencks used to write about postmodernist architecture's little devices, they're purist solids straight out of L'Espirit Nouveau, they're the building's 'logo' - but if so, a remarkably asymmetrical and unmemorable one. Then, you come up to a series of tall pillars, and two overhead walkways crossing each other, a suspended ceiling imprinted with a seemingly endless leaf motif, with the glare of the glazed entrance intensifying the effect - the shopping mall sublime, exacerbated by the thousands of people browsing/watching/buying/eating/expelling their waste (this is a city where these are the only acts that are permitted to occur), and it's thrilling in its way, although the pale stone-ish substance with which almost everything is clad always softens the effect, stops it from ever becoming really jarring and strange - that way lies the Tricorn and a bankrupt Alec Coleman. Walking around inside, you find a large quantity of public art, and a surprisingly large amount of seating - is this, then, a version of the Urban Task Force, with its mixed use and its encouragement of sociality? Kuhne talks of 'special meeting places' that 'dignify the heroic routine of everyday life that drives you to produce a better world for yourself and your kids'. It could be Richard Rogers, this stuff, except that unlike the Plazas of the Urban Task Forces, people are actually using it, and in droves - apart from one closed noodle bar, you'd have to look damn hard here to find even the slightest hint that we're in the middle of the longest recession in British economic history (though the sorting depot nearby tells a different story). Unnervingly, it supports the idea of the financial crash as a kind of Phony War, which will intensify only later, but will be truly horrendous when it does.

I'm trying to look at Bluewater with equanimity, but I don't like this place. I feel ill at ease here. As with so much else, it's a place in which I would have felt completely at home when I was 12 years old, but education, relocation and (ahem) ambition have led me to the point where I go to a place like this and think (and I'm not proud of this) 'there but for the grace of God go I'. I know full well that poncing around here dressed like Lord Alfred Douglas, with my bourgeoisified vowels and cotton wool stuck over the place where the cannula was 10 minutes ago, I'm committing an offence against the dreaming collective, by attempting to be different from it (or at least outside of the acceptable frame of twentysomething male difference: sporty/straight/indie kid/hipster/emo/chav/hiphop). Yet nobody is bothered. This might be the burbs, but in a place like this in Southampton I'd be getting dirty looks and be at risk of worse. This, presumably, is a result of the city being administered as a police state, and maybe the thugs are all at Lakeside. I think sometimes I might like to be comfortable here, but it's not the same as actually being comfortable. I'll persist with second-hand bookshops and charity shops, although will try not to delude myself they're morally superior. Regardless, everyone else has something better to do, and activity is constant. This is ironic enough, as the interior decorating of Bluewater has some interesting things to say about activity.

For something which is supposedly The Authentic Expression Of Our Real Uncomplicated Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 50s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It's trying to make various points to its clientele, something which very few seem to have noticed, whether critics or shoppers. So there are little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges, all of them on the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures - well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanised sort, although the M25 is the more obvious land usage. It's there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass - no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised Arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, borrowed from Soane, according to Hugh Pearman, combined with the obligatory reference to long-dead local industry - in this case, the pointy tops of oatings - has a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalise all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list is practically endless, all these people who used to make stuff, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial, administrative and such. It's a quasi-religious thing, this - an attempt at appeasing the Gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer Gods of consumption (both equally implacable and brutal deities, which only seem opposed via a complicated geopolitical subterfuge). What makes Bluewater's didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibre-glass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorialising it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater's sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.

Originally posted on SDMYABT on 29/10/09

Trip to an Exurban Hospital

2011-04-01T16:19:00.000-07:00

Darent Valley Hospital, Dartford

Because I have to see a specific consultant, I don't go to the local hospitals. This is merciful in a sense, as my occasional experience of them - Woolwich and Lewisham respectively - is mildly terrifying, with the phlebotomy department in the latter particularly Romeroesque. So where I do go, every three weeks or so for check-ups and currently every six months for major surgery, is Darent Valley Hospital, on the outskirts of Dartford. Like most of North Kent, this hospital and its site is deeply strange, particularly through its seeming mundanity. This is Daily Mail-land, where South-East Londoners go when they retire or when they find the SE insufficiently racially homogeneous. So it certainly thinks of itself as normal. But when I take the train from Westcombe Park to Dartford the landscape gets progressively weirder with every successive station, travelling as it does through the Clockwork Orange set (literally - it goes through the 1960s sectors of Thamesmead), past the marshlands, sidings and vast Edwardian concrete silos of Erith, and finally arriving in what at first seems like an identifiable small town, with a shopping mall, a high street and a branch of Wimpy preserved in aspic.

Darent Valley was Britain's first PFI hospital, and accordingly it couldn't possibly be in the town centre. For reasons probably connected to land values on the part of the private companies that lease the hospitals to the NHS (leaving them tied into decades of debt), PFI hospitals are always on the outer reaches, in the 'no there, there' places, quarantined away; and this is given particular acuity by the fact that Darent Valley is on the same bus route as Bluewater, the ultimate out-of-town, out-of-this-world mall, bunkered down inside a chalk pit and impossible to reach on foot. So the bus takes you past the M25, through what is probably legally the 'green belt' - that is, a landscape of 1930s spec housing, miniscule farms where forlorn horses look upon power stations and business parks, eventually dropping you off at the top of a hill, from which you can survey this extraordinary non-place. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, its ungainly, steep curve reaching to the hangars and containers of Thurrock, an endless strip of sheds and cranes stretching out as far as the North Sea.

The hospital itself, designed by Paulley Architects, is in the PFI manner which is by now familiar from a thousand New Labour non-projects: a bit of stock brick, a plasticky wavy roof, some green glass, plus a few dashes of jolly colour in the carpets (something which becomes slightly Suprematist in the X-Ray department). Inside is a branch of Upper Crust, a WH Smith and a shop which sells a huge range of cuddly toys, amongst other concessions. The first time I went here I was rather alarmed that this '21st century hospital' was still using manual scales, but certainly one can purchase a wide variety of pastries. Screens show - always grainy - footage of local appeals, health recommendations and, in the waiting rooms, the bafflingly invariably badly tuned daytime TV. I'm always well-treated there, bearing in mind the hours of waiting around, as I do what I'm told, placing all reasonable and unreasonable trust in the physicians. Not everyone has the same trust. A massive, tattooed bloke in the bed opposite refuses to have his op because he's scared of general anaesthetic - 'but what if I don't wake up?' The elderly make up seemingly 90% of the patients. In the bed next to me in the ward was an 88-year old man. His muffled cries of 'give over!' and 'I'm a human being!' would always end with some attempt at fisticuffs, only to be told 'you can't punch the nurses, sweetheart - that's naughty'. Everyone else keeps themselves to themselves, as well they should, something aided in my case by large quantities of painkillers.

In the main Outpatients waiting room is a wall display on 'heritage'. Everything in Britain, especially in the home counties, must involve heritage somewhere. Obviously there isn't much to be found in a hospital which has only existed for 8 years, but conveniently, it turns out that there was once an 'asylum for imbeciles' nearby in the 19th century. Sepia-toned pictures of this take up the space on the heritage wall.

Originally published at SDMYABT on 25/1/09

Genius Loci: Barking

2011-04-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

Barking is potentially going to become the first place in Britain to elect a Fascist MP. Although electing Fascists is considered normal in much of oh-so-civic continental Europe (a cheap shot, I know, but the point remains) in the UK it is often still, rightly, considered alarming that such a thing could potentially occur. There are some excellent, sharp analyses of this, as well as some stupid and knee-jerk ones (here is the best I've read so far), but I won't pretend this post is anything other than a light skimming of the (architectural) surface, based on a walk withsomeone whose natural territory this is. We walked there from Canning Town, not for sexy urban degradation frisson, but because she's currently working there, and thought I would find it interesting. Which I did.

The area we saw was Barking Central (in regenerator's order), rather than, say, Becontree, a huge 1920-30s estate which by some accounts is where lots of the BNP support is concentrated. This is a shame, as from what I know about it - council cottages in very close vicinity to a giant Ford works - it sounds a lot like one of the places where I grew up, but time was short. The area has been subject to a very ambitious regeneration scheme, which local MP, unctuous Blairite and spectacularly philistine 'culture minister' Margaret Hodge has described as 'her kind of architecture'. This is hardly a recommendation, but the comprehensiveness of the whole thing is at least impressive - there's a typically detailed and scrupulous analysis by Ellis Woodman here. Barking feels like a different territory very quickly. As soon as you pass under the flyover, the difference between the terraced density of east Ham and Barking's sprawling suburbia is noticeable, with a straggling collection of dodgy pomo, Victorian factories, '30s semis, tower blocks and wasteland announcing it, which then fades into a quite pleasant town centre, marked by medieval remains, pedestrianised shops and town-centre office blocks, all on roughly the same scale as, say, Dartford - though significantly more multiracial than the latter. This is one ofthe tiny handful of BNP strongholds that actually has a high level of immigration. Customarily, this is presented as being about housing - no new council housing has been built for decades, and right-to-buy has warped the perception of what exists - although to suggest that racism has nothing to do with it would be foolish. As Laura points out, the Fascist sympathisers in places like Bethnal Green didn't disappear in the 1990s - they went somewhere.

The edges of the town centre are where the tensions lie. One side features a large, derelict shopping parade, which has flats at the back, curving around a car park and some lumps that might or might not have been public art of some description, or mere traffic-controlling blobs; whether its been a recipient of Regeneration or not, it's surely undeniable that leaving a load of housing derelict in the middle of a housing crisis is rather grotesque, especially in a place this charged. It's hard to decide which side is the more depressing, the flats - which, I suspect, are probably of decent Parker-Morris proportions - or the shops, which were in the following case no doubt even more depressing when they were open. The race to the bottom, not even jollied up or glorified.

The eye is drawn, though, to two pieces of very jolly architecture. First, the Town Hall, proof that there are simply no uninteresting town halls in London, a Dudok-Georgian mashup with a wonderfully unscholarly silliness. The belltower appears to be full of suspicious-looking telecommunications equipment, and Bobbies On The Beat walk back and forth in front of it at a more regular rate than I'm used to seeing, presumably to make sure the place doesn't explode, although the centre seems calm enough on a superficial level. Then there's AHMM's Barking Central development. AHMM are some sort of exemplar of Blairite architecture at its most thoroughly developed, a glossy, brightly-coloured neomodernism that feels like CGI even when you touch it, Bruno Taut relocated to DOSAC in The Thick of It - their tendency to the rictus grin occasionally conceals talent, but if there's a better exemplar of New Labour architecture than the atrium of Westminster Academy, I don't know what it is. In the article linked above, Woodman is scathing about the contrast between the Fun of the facades and the grimness of the small, single-aspect flats - leading to 'the sense that the architect has allowed itself to be cast as a variety of Butlins Redcoat, ladling on the jollity in an attempt — both tyrannical and hopeless — to keep the poverty of the underlying conditions from mind.' I can't add much more to that.

Some of it is 'affordable housing', that all-purpose get-out-clause, and it bears constant repeating that affordable housing is not council housing, is usually shared-ownership or slightly cheaper to-buy, and so makes virtually no difference to the problems that are purportedly stirring up the BNP vote. Let's imagine for a moment, irrespective of the crappy space standards, what a gesture it would have been if a development this large, this shiny and optimistic, were let to council tenants - how many political arguments would then be won at a stroke. As it is, the place is not altogether hideous, for all its fiddling-while-rome-burns nature, and part of that is due to extraneous things, extras on the architecture which are surprisingly clever, and suggest how much more could have been done here - the colonnades (which may be by Muf rather than AHMM, though I'm unsure) are great, the size of the site letting the architects do something they couldn't have squeezed into a tight plot of inner-city CABEism - it's an actually quite pleasant and successful public space. The main occupants of the space appear to be the pigeons.

Across from this is - honesty here, at least, in the choice of name - the Folly, designed by Muf. It's rather asking to be judged as a description for the entire project, an act of expensive futility - but the sheer aggression of it marks it out as something perhaps more interesting, one of the few built instantiations of the recent ruin-mania of any consequence (cf). It's a compellingly weird urban object, from the headless creatures lined up and inset into it, to the gates leading nowhere -and there is after all a ruined abbey nearby - but the suggestion that it might be some comment or satire on the surrounding scheme, or on AHMM's refusal to imagine the possibility of ageing or weathering in their buildings, seems a bit much, although placing a sheep atop the whole thing has at least some tongue-poking symbolism. It derives from a much more interesting kind of architectural thought than the rest, but I can't help wishing Matthew Darbyshire had got the jobinstead. If he hadn't already.

Two other things in the middle of Barking that caught our eye....

One is Barking Station, one of Ian Nairn's favourite modern buildings, given typically forthright praise in Nairn's London, an angular roof in concrete so richly, darkly shuttered that it's hard to remind yourself it isn't wood, a bespoke station which suggests Barking could be somewhere quite special, a local centre far from Zone 1 which nonetheless has a sharp, defined identity for itself, which isn't reducible to being just another notch in the commuter belt. The other is a shopping mall, a glass and fibreglass atrium that resembles the iron-and-glass canopies of Leeds City Markets relocated to Thorpe Park, picked out in pink, with a false top-floor and an interesting selection of shops. Here, we found two images which fit certain Barking stereotypes...one of them doesn't need much comment.

The other exemplifies the pandering that, as the NS article above makes clear, runs through Barking politics. You could see it in the notorious edition of Question Time, where the other politicians asserted how tough they would be on immigration, in a spectacularly misbegotten attempt to lessen Fascist support by telling them their policies were justified - but while they say it because they're racists, we say it because it's true (well done all). So everything is advertised as being for The Locals. At least they don't use the term 'indigenous'. Aside from the tacit racism, it doth protest too much - the implication is that there's something to prove here, that when they aren't loudly pointing it out, housing and jobs might not be going to 'locals'. But looking at the way a huge swathe of Barking has been redeveloped neither in the interests of council tenants or the poorer incomers, and how large-scale and blaring a development that is, you have to wonder who is fooling who here.

Posted on SDMYABT on 21/4/10

'I Wasn't Sure What to Expect, but I was Pleasently Surprised'

2011-04-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

A winter afternoon in New Ash Green

Span Developments Ltd was the other side of post-war mass housing to the one I normally write about. Founded by Eric Lyons, an occasional architect to Southampton and Hackney councils but mostly a private practitioner, it was both a profit-making business and an attempt to design spaces which were, at least implicitly, Social Democratic - this BBC article quotes their approach as 'community as the goal; shared landscape as the means; modern, controlled design as the expression'. Impeccably Butskellite, then, only with the emphasis on Mr But rather than Mr Skell.

I've written a bit about their estates in Blackheath before, and was recently amused by a comment from a moderately successful youngish architect that 'Span is interesting because it works'. I fail to see how what Span were doing - car-free, pedestrianised public spaces, low-rise, plenty of landscaping, a Scandinavian softening of Modernism - was any different in design terms from what Sheffield City Council did at Gleadless Valley, which 'doesn't work'. Span works for one main reason - it was designed, and designed very well, for (often upper-)middle class clients, so the spaces are looked after, the designs are scrupulously cohesive, and the inhabitants have invariably chosen to live there. It's not mysterious, and it's nothing to do with design.

Anyway - they are very lovely things. As an experiment, to see the bit of Span that might not work so well as those that are in Ham Common, Cambridge and Blackheath, and as an attempt to convert me fully to Social Democracy, Matthew Tempest convinced me to go out to New Ash Green, for which I am thankful. This place is not so much a New Town as a New Village which Span had designed in north Kent, so ambitious that it basically bankrupted the company, and the last few pieces of the scheme were entrusted to the somewhat less socially idealistic Bovis, who were chaired by Keith Joseph, who as government minister had tried to stop the place being built in the first place. Apparently Bovis still has its head office in the Village, which might explain some of the place's continued affluence.

It's properly rural, this is, although I say this with the proviso that I don't understand or know anything whatsoever about the countryside, generally considering it an ideological phantom wielded as a weapon against towns and cities, inducing them to surrender any true civic life to dreams of homes-as-castles-and-investments, as opposed to a real place, which I suppose it must be, for some. You can reach it only via car, or a tortuous public transport route - the nearest largish town, Dartford, is reached via a bus which seems to be either hourly or two-hourly depending on how bad a mood the bus driver is in. New Ash Green stops abruptly at one point, where rolling fields start.

Yet although it's essentially one of the Milton Keynes grids with all its surrounding infrastructure taken away, it's far more urban in design terms than most of what has been built for the last thirty years, albeit if the urb in question is in the outer reaches of the Stockholm Metro system. The houses, for all their wood and brick, are still deeply Modernist, almost futuristic at times, an impression reinforced by the signage, which seems to have escaped fully-formed from the head of Julian House - pseudo-rustic names spelled out in science-fiction letters.

Even the streetlamps have something decidedly Dr Who about them, furnishings that could beam you somewhere else entirely.

The landscape - nature under strict control - is the truly impressive thing here, something which even the drabber Bovis parts of the estate manage to retain - a sense that everything is public, and everything is permeable, except of course for the houses themselves - Span seem to have assumed that a largeish, well-designed house with big windows and a garden was all anyone needed for private space, with CCTV and driveways strikingly absent. Lyons and Span had evidently not read Defensible Space or the Essex Design Guide, and New Ash Green breaks every one of their nasty little rules, by placing what now seems like enormous trust in the place's inhabitants. If, as Alice Coleman and her ilk suggested, certain urban forms invite crime, then the following snickets should be a constant fest of knifings and rapes. By all accounts they are not.

Bad things do happen here, though, and when they do, it seems that it has the eventually sinister nature of all villages (he writes, in a similar knee-jerk manner to someone in a village assuming the same about a story about a death where he lives in south-east London).

There are nooks of mild criminality, however, in the form of the graffiti that is scribbled on the walkways, much of which is so cute and indie that it seems like the local youth are all living in a Belle & Sebastian song. Or at least in Gregory's Girl, a place that comes to mind often here, in its modernity and unrelieved niceness. Not in a suffocating, austerity nostalgia way, though, and the place lacks the Keep Calm and Carry On posters and general Farrow&Ballisation you can find in the Span parts of Blackheath.

Nonetheless, by the standards of 98% of Britain this is hard-line stuff - the hedges impeccable, the original features mostly in place, the spaces extremely trim. You could have a wonderful life here and you could also go completely bonkers in a week. Although not nearly as bonkers as aSecured by Design officer would become looking at the below.

Span probably knew from early on that this one would be a hard sell. The RIBA's recent Eric Lyons and Span book about their ex-president (and think of the relative fate of the buildings designed by their only other talented recent president, Owen Luder) has loads of pictures of the flagrantly sexist ads used to convince people to move to the back of beyond (or the back of beyond less than an hour's drive from London). Architect's Wives, 'vital statistics (no not those ones!)', some fairly blatant suggestions of possible wife swapping and the general sexual intrigue that goes with being terribly modern.

The place may well soon become both modern and terrible, as Broadway Malyan are slated to redesign it. To get an architect of similar talent and prominence to Lyons, they should really be asking Richard Rogers - and his recent spec houses in Oxley Woods are a precise modern equivalent - but I don't suppose he comes as cheap. The shopping centre is slightly knackered, but compared to, say, Thamesmead, is thoroughly self-sufficient - banks, health food cafe, branch of Oxfam, co-op, newsagent, various other bits and bobs. I've seen places in Zone 2 with less amenities. Up on the roof there is some slight sign of ruffness - though having 'HENCH' as your tag is a bit sad. Like writing 'I'M A BIG MAN, ME!' everywhere. It doth protest too much.

We hadn't expected it to be as neat as it was. Matthew had been through before in a car and briefly stopped in the Village Pub, and came back with the impression that here, Span had gone Yokel, and the air of chic and wealth-expressed-through-minimalism you could find in their main estates had gone in favour of the same menace you find elsewhere in north Kent. Actually though, there are only two places here where New Ash Green seems anything other than idyllic - the back end of the shopping centre you can see above, a car-parking area that for some reason has gone derelict before everywhere else. The pub is not exactly welcoming, full of regulars who look at us like we're from Mars - which is rich, as they live on it - but I've been in far worse.

The door of the pub advertises the Sunday Carvery, but rather than showing a farmhouse, the advert shows the outline of a thoroughly modern house.

First posted on SDMYABT on 3/2/10

Urban Trawl: West Midlands Metropolitan Area

2011-03-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Last month, Chinese authorities designated the Pearl River Delta, a cluster of cities with a population of 43 million, as a single city. Amidst the apocalyptic pronouncements on this, few noticed that this basically entails trying to create decent public provision for something the market had thrown up carelessly long before. Such unplanned agglomerations were pioneered here in the 19th century, and London aside, the Metropolitan County of the West Midlands is the largest – though not being a city by itself, it has nary a fraction of London's infrastructure. At its centre is Britain's indisputable Second City in terms of population, economic importance and size, although it's hard to credit it.

The Metropolitan West Midlands, and Birmingham in particular, is so consummately English that authorities might as well take a leaf out of Speer's book and rename it Anglia. Here there is a small but massively overdeveloped commercial centre, ringed with wasteland and empty luxury flats, surrounded by seemingly faceless sprawl – Victorian, 30s, 60s – indistinguishable to the observer, highly differentiated to the local. The car rules, with mid-century engineers' frankly manly interventions still utterly dominating; by comparison, public transport is pathetic, especially the poky tram with the temerity to call itself a 'Metro'.

Here, red brick and terracotta is more furiously red, council high-rises are duller, semis are bleaker, roads are beefier than anywhere else – but it's hard to define anything about this being specifically Brummie or Black Country, in the way that certain architectures are instantly recognisable as Mancunian, Scouse, Glaswegian, Geordie. What marks it out is its quintessence of Englishness; anything in the UK outside the West Midlands can be found in here, somewhere. Given the place's size and complexity, what follows is an attempt, highly tentative, to work out what might actually make it distinctive.

Knowing that the Second City tag has never sit well, successive administrations have tried to beef up this place, though they've never succeeded in treating it as the coherent metropolis that it would be in a less capricious nation. From Herbert Manzoni's plans of the 1950s to the current 'Big City Plan', it constantly tries to remake itself into something worthy of its status. It isn't, but there's still a hell of a lot here to look at and walk through. The walkways and underpasses ploughed through the town, the subordination of aesthetics to circulation, established a multilevel principle that endures, for good and ill. Some buildings which have frankly embarrassing façades – Associated Architects' stodgy Mailbox, Make's typically fussy Cube – are, as (semi)-public space, much better than they are as urban scenery, with internal and external walkways threading along the robustly, if slightly cloyingly, landscaped canal paths. Associated's less fancy version is superior, with real urban drama inside, while Make's is a ghost mall with fiddly geometries and creepy public art - figures with hearts for heads, of all things. Both are designed by locals. To see where premier league architects place Birmingham in the pecking order, walk round the corner to Foster's shocking SeaLife Centre, surely his worst ever building.

The West Midlands is, along with Teesside, the area of the country worst hit by the slump, and in the wastes of Digbeth you can tell. Here, an unbuilt park creates a swathe of wasteland, framing bland flats and Grimshaw's exurban Millennium Point, with surviving light industry further in frustrating the desire to impose the new immaterial economy on the place. It's a far cry from the rampant overdevelopment within the ring road. Building for the past decade has been intense, with buildings practically piled on top of each other; a 1990s attempt at reasonably careful New Urbanist planning at Brindleyplace didn't provide much of a model for the speculative scuffle of the new skyline. Brindleyplace itself is built around Porphyrios' eerie, flat, redbrick Stalinist centrepiece and some gravel squares, and though nothing special, it compares favourably with the new Bull Ring, a series of tinny things by Benoy, with Future Systems' Selfridges bolted on at the corner as a concession to architectural value. Whatever its disputable merits as ego-driven architecture, as an object on the skyline it's enduringly surreal, fitting the overdriven chaos. New towers are a rum bunch. Worst is the Orion Building, designed with the input of couturier John Roche, a bizarre contrast with the compacted Vorticism of the New Street signal box; adjacent there's Ian Simpson's equally jolly and aggressive Beetham Tower, an overbearing uncle of a building, and by far the inferior of the namesake in Simpson's home city. The skyline is best as an abstract, seen from a distance, where their illegibility becomes a virtue.

Post-war Brum is, like the contemporary city, a mash-up of speculative tat and some fearless originals; the latter represented best by the local firm of John Madin, whose doomed NatWest tower has such presence on Chamberlain Square. Just nearby is Madin's Brutalist Central Library. It has always impressed in photographs, but to really experience it you have to walk around the square, to feel just how well it fits into the 19th century ensemble, aligning perfectly with everything from the Corinthian Town Hall to the arch of the Victorian baroque council house, completing the public space with great elegance, without patronising 'references'. The Library too is doomed, condemned through sitting on a site of outstanding commercial potential, which is surely what led successive architecture ministers to dismiss English Heritage's attempts at listing. It has nothing to do with the quality of the building.

Mecanoo's replacement, under construction already, will potentially be a decent enough building, but it will also be an off-the-peg product of a firm who aren't terribly bothered about Birmingham. A unique solution, rooted deeply in place, by architects who lived in and knew their city, will be supplanted with an international firm's signature. With that, a little portion of the Big City Plan will be completed.

For a place that can seem so identikit to the uninitiated, the question of context is a live one – there is equal case for rejection and embrace of the surrounding area. Caruso St John's Walsall New Art Gallery is a gorgeous example of the latter, with the kind of achingly precise detailing you seldom get in British architecture; it's somewhere between living room and car park, in the best possible sense. The fact it contains a local collection is not coincidental to its specificity, and though it might be surrounded alternately by wasteland slated for Urban Splashing and decades of shabbiness, it doesn't appear loftily disconnected from the area. From the top you can see Walsall's one great feature, the way the high street ends at markets and a hilltop church, to which the Gallery forms a corresponding high point.

Its antipode is close by in West Bromwich, in the form of Alsop's famously expensive folly, The Public. The surroundings here are even less promising – arterial roads, sheds, general straggle - so Alsop took the Cedric Price approach of designing a contextless big shed that could be reconfigured by its users as theatre, gallery, interactive exhibit and suchlike. This would have been low-budget and probably successful. But as an architect-artist – he paints, you know – Alsop also filled it with strange bespoke objects, all tied into the building, making it permanent, making the mooted adaptability and cheapness merely rhetorical. The Public is where Price's ideas end up when mixed up with the cult of the starchitect – in a profligate kerfuffle.

From here, we head to Coventry, the second largest city in the Metropolitan West Midlands, scarcely ten minutes journey from Birmingham but not officially part of its conurbation, from which it is divided by a slender green belt. Here we found things that Birmingham and the Black Country's built environment seems mostly to lack – planning, and emotion. The Cathedral is still painfully moving, as much for the ruin as for the Basil Spence replacement; corten steel panels indicating where bombed shops and houses used to be are a fine recent addition. Along with Pringle's new wing to the Herbert Gallery, it's the only post-70s object in the centre that doesn't feel like a desecration.

Walking through the squares, precincts and arcades of the reconstructed city, it sinks in that this place was taken more seriously than any other bombed-out town centre, more carefully planned, more thought about, with its views and vistas a model of townscape. It's as affecting in its own way as the cathedral. A recently re-erected Gordon Cullen mural confirms it nicely – yet the buildings it depicts are alternately crumbling or subject to the most depressingly lumpen additions. In the most central precinct, tacky pitched roofs and galumphing escalators stamp all over the 1950s buildings. The uncomprehending ignorance evokes a child scribbling over a Mondrian. Once Coventry had serious city building ambitions, made real attempts at combining modernity, history and urbanity. Birmingham's model of speculation, demolition and bluff profit-making was always more influential, however – and so it remains.

Originally published in Building Design, 21/2/11

Views

2011-03-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

More photo-sets: Manchester, Nottingham, Glasgow. These are old, so even less elegant than usual.

Look

2011-03-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

Photos of the Trawls round Preston and Barrow.

Urban Trawl: Barrow-in-Furness

2011-03-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Urban Trawl often hears the question 'but why on earth would you want to go there?!' I don't think I ever heard that so often as with Barrow-in-Furness.

So, why Barrow? Well, apart from the short answer – because people live there – for two main reasons, for two things that make it most unlike any other comparable town. First of all, the urbanism. Not only is it a rare planned town, but remarkably, for a place so small, much of its Victorian centre is made up of hard, big city architecture; specifically, the kind of speculative tenement flats found more often in Scotland or Germany and practically nowhere else in England. Second interesting thing - the fact that unlike practically any other northern industrial town, Barrow still makes stuff, and it makes stuff right in the centre of town, right in your face; especially extraordinary given what unpleasant stuff this is. And Barrow's sheer remoteness has a certain intrigue – it's probably the most geographically obscure large town in the UK, its 60,000 people squeezed into a peninsula and two tiny islands in a protrusion (a 'cul de sac' or an 'armpit' depending who you ask) at the edge of Cumbria, although in both history and accent Barrow is indisputably part of Lancashire.

Barrow is also one of the towns in Britain least architecturally affected by the 20th century, and the 21st has made only the slightest inroads, once inoffensively and once atrociously. The prospect from the station centres on a red brick and glass swoopy-roofed office block and some predictable Blairboxes, both fairly uninteresting - but there's far worse in other, larger towns. That's about as far as the Urban Renaissance model reached in this most dense of industrial towns, though a dockside scheme, 'The Waterfront', promised to roll out the more depressing form of marina dromeage, only to be indefinitely shelved a year ago, with little more than some paths completed. There's a possible reason for this failure. While most of these dockside schemes have little more than some ornamental cranes and a grain silo or two for company, this one would have been in the shadow of what is indisputably the most impressive industrial monument of post-1960s Britain, though competition may not be fierce.

This is BAE Systems' Devonshire Dock Hall, better known here as the Trident Shed, or alternately 'Maggie's Farm', due to her role in getting it built in the mid-1980s, perhaps the only major example where her politics led to the opening rather than closing of a factory. We're in the territory described in Robert Wyatt's heartbreaking song 'Shipbuilding' – what would otherwise be a stone dead industrial town is kept on life support by perpetual warfare; and no doubt 'someone got filled in for saying that people get killed in the results of the shipbuilding'. As here is where the submarines that carry the British 'nuclear deterrent' are built; one submarine will be rolling out of 'DDH' the week that this goes to press. Architecturally – if that's the word – the Devonshire Dock Hall is genuinely astonishing, a Death Star clad in corrugated metal, visible from as far away as Blackpool, the size of several Unites d'Habitation stacked end-to-end. Its white cladding is filthy with grime, and would already stick out in what is otherwise a redbrick and red sandstone town, even if it wasn't so colossal. Adjacent is the relatively Lilliputian 1994 Dock Museum, bland on the outside but with a multi-level interior that rewards some exploration.

The only area where 'defending jobs' was ever really invoked by the governments of the last twenty years was in Defence, so the preponderance of actual working – if minimally staffed – industry shouldn't be that surprising, but it comes as a shock nonetheless. Mostly, industry today is hidden in the exurbs, or obliterated, or, if possible, made into luxury flats. Here, we're so far away from where media might be looking or the middle classes might think of moving, that the suburbanisation of industry never happened. The centre of Barrow industry is on Barrow Island, reached by a high level bridge from the centre. Residentially, this is an extreme landscape. The first reference for its tall, symmetrical sandstone tenements might be Glasgow, but venture round the back of Michaelson Street or Schooner Street and the feeling is more Hanseatic than Scottish, and the rubble stone and peaked roofs are Baltic in feel.

Drop someone blindfolded here and they'd never believe they were in so small a town. These blocks are approximately as unforgiving as they are impressive – in terms of public space, playgrounds, or any alleviation of the general hardness, the crappiest system-built estate of the 1960s is superior, but the tenements' power and urbanity are still bracing. It might have been company housing for abominably treated workers, but it at least assumes its tenants are adults. Yet they're a fragment, a bizarre relic of a time when observers could call this place 'the English Chicago' without smirking. On one side, the tall flats subside into two-up-two-downs and then end at the bay, disappearing into a mess of works, boats and World War Two Pillboxes strewn around at random. On the other side, the impossibly strange rendered concrete of Seeley & Paget's St John's Church, a Norse-Arabic mirage.

At the entrance to Barrow Island is a handsome sandstone office block, the terminus of the immensely long sandstone shed built in the 1890s for Vickers, the engineering corporation who were responsible for much of Barrow's late Victorian development from steeltown into shipbuilding port. The sandstone bases of earlier factories form the ground floors to BAE Systems' immense new sheds. Just opposite the tenements, you're flanked by jagged-roofed yellow and grey sheds and cannot fail to notice a building that proudly tells you it produces 'Global Combat Systems Weapons'. I'm amazed when I come out the other end of the BAE works that nobody has tried to impound my camera. Men in high-vis jackets look unconcerned. Nothing could better sum up the place's ease with its function as producer of instruments to kill and maim.

This is of course what it always was, and the town has always thrived on profiting from war - although once that at least went alongside an intent to build a town of some distinction out of the whole sordid business. Railway entrepreneur James Ramsden, Barrow's de facto founder, produced a town plan in the 1860s centred around grand squares (now entropic roundabouts) and sponsored a Town Hall competition whose result, designed by William Henry Lynn, is first-rate, its turrets and towers in a red sandstone northern Gothic that is perfect for the place's atmosphere, light and topography.

On Walney Island, reached via the spindly Jubilee Bridge from the Trident Shed, is Vickerstown, a Garden City by the water built under the influence of Bourneville; half-timbered arts and crafts houses, some not much bigger than back-to-backs, lead towards more standard, eerily spacious 30s and 60s low-rise housing which contrasts outrageously with Barrow Island's ultra-urbanity, a sharp retreat from the idea that this could ever be a 'Chicago'. Finally there's a beach, the Irish Sea, an epiphanic view of the Lake District, and the Round House, a council-built midcentury modern flight of fancy now housing a Chinese restaurant. At Barrow's northern edge, the head of Vickers got Lutyens to design his house, a stark dry run for Castle Drogo. Can the era of BAE Systems boast of a similar architectural legacy?

Well - Barrow might not be Chicago, but on the site of the Hindpool steelworks is 'Hollywood Park', one of the most dispiriting retail developments in the British Isles. The wipeclean Pizza Huts and PC Worlds are not so much an affront to the redbrick context as blissfully unaware of it, and the vast car parks break into what is otherwise a refreshingly compact town. And that's about it. BAE make enormous profits in Barrow – the town's airport basically exists for their use - but as an indicator of Barrow's future, in the centre a training agency advertisement declares to the young, 'EMA stops soon. Sign up now!'

There is nowhere in England quite like Barrow-in-Furness, and that surely counts for something; in an alarmingly short space and time you can walk through some of the most unusual architectural terrain in the country, and find the unique persistence of city centre industry. That said, the boarded-up shops, the derelict pubs, the empty streets, all tell their own story. It's probably more comfortable to be poor here in 2010 than in 1910 – but should that excuse the brain death in anodised aluminium that is Hollywood Park, or the complete failure to plough at least some of the money extracted from this town into it? Architecturally, Barrow today is nowhere. Yet once, this minuscule town was compared with megacities like Glasgow and Chicago, and that ambition can still be dimly detected.

Originally published in Building Design, 13/1/11

Trying to Say Nice Things About Leeds

2011-03-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

A Walk around Holbeck

The centre of Leeds initially induced a kind of horror in me – a Manchester without the civic pride or the pop and radical history, an oversized Reading with a chip on its shoulder, a 'bosses city' of lawyers and stockbrokers, a city where hep property developers couldn't even invoke pop precedent for their Brazilifications of council estates (having lamentably ignored my slogan suggestion – 'Saxton – at Home You'll Feel Like A Tourist!'). There's little doubt that there's more to it than that, obviously. There's a lot here to like, if you can duck down into the ring road away from the regen and the 'Leeds look' – the Arcades, several rudely Ruskinian warehouses, Cuthbert Brodrick's astonishing town hall, Chamberlin Powell and Bon's University buildings; and it's also the last major city in the UK to have had a City Architect, John Thorp, who retired last year. He was not, however, replaced.

I must admit I was initially hard pressed to see how a city which had made so many enormous architectural blunders as Leeds, with its numerous wobbly roofed, terracotta-clad towers, could have passed through the inquiring eye of a Civic watchdog of some sort, except on the most superficial level – the use of red brick, terracotta and trespa to keep it 'in keeping'. However! The recently completed Granary Wharf scheme in Holbeck won a few architectural awards, and was widely recognised as some sort of valediction for Thorp on the eve of his retirement, so on a recent visit to the city the first thing I wanted to do was have a look.

Holbeck is at the back of the train station, reached by a labyrinthine route down steps, across canals and under arches. On the way, you see the work of Leeds' major 20th and 21st century architects, and it is not especially flattering. Here's John Poulson, whose one decent building, the Leeds International Pool, was recently flattened.

Lots of what at first seem to be the worst recent Leeds buildings turn out to be reclads and extensions of its worst 1960s towers. If there's a lesson in this aside from 'you can't polish a turd', it's that no convincing aesthetic of retrofitting has yet emerged, aside from cladding either in 'local materials' or brightly coloured plastic, and most heinous of all, adding on top the jolly regen wavy roof that Joel Anderson christened the 'Blair hat'. Surely this tower awaits both, although nobody will lament it when it occurs.

Then there's Carey Jones, who have stamped their, hmm, 'identity' on the city, and much of the rest of the North, in a mostly lamentable fashion, especially through the unforgivable Sky Plaza for Unite – though this car park is very far from their worst, being as aggressive and inhuman as the function necessitates. It's also a better bit of townscape than the yawning surface car park next to it. Leeds – 'Motorway City of the 70s' (!) is almost as much a motorcity as Birmingham, and its that hostility to pedestrians (outside the ring road) that helps make it so obnoxious. The best thing about the car park is this frankly unexpected Bugsy Malone ground floor. Marvellous.

And finally Aedas, a firm that began in Huddersfield before eventually becoming an Anglo-Chinese behemoth. Aside from the terracotta, it's hard to work out what makes their work specifically Northern – and maybe a Modernist argument could be made for this. It's an International Style, so why shouldn't Leeds look like a lower-rise, lower-density Hong Kong? Because it's boring, mainly. Bridgewater Place – 'the Dalek', as it is known – is inescapable here. It does have a bit of a futurist dash as a tower, a silvery tube of steel and glass – it'll be the kitsch of the 2020s or 2030s, and I suspect when its time comes, as it will, we'll all be trying to save it - but around the back the way it extends itself grimly along the street is particularly dispiriting.

There's nothing in principle wrong with Leeds' encouragement of towers, nothing at all – when cities impose height limits it merely results in lumpen, squished office blocks, and the more enlightened contextualist will note that Leeds has a tower tradition, from the Town Hall to the Tower Works. The latter, a series of three Italianate chimneys for a steel pin factory, is exactly equidistant from Bridgewater Place and Granary Wharf. It's a nice example of the Victorian need to accompany the terrifyingly new with the familiar and antiquarian, a 'future shock absorber', in Kodwo Eshun's invaluable phrase – although the sheer surrealism of these games of make-believe are part of what make them enjoyable.

Top Loiner Alan Bennett once suggested that, had Leeds conserved rather than demolished so much of its Victorian heritage, it might have become a tourist destination, like the Italian Renaissance towns which its architects used as a copybook. That's a little improbable – partly, because what is so much fun about the likes of Tower Works is the sheer coarseness, the references to elegant precedent necessarily being executed in rough red brick, and detailed by proletarians, not craftsmen, like these 'Brickwork' boys below. And if you want a Northern Industrial Renaissance city mostly undamaged by planners, it's only ten minutes on the train to Bradford. Not many tourists there.

The first interesting thing about Granary Wharf is that it has somehow managed to avoid certain contemporary clichés despite being designed by the very architects responsible for perpetrating them elsewhere. The bridge that leads to it, for instance, is not a white-painted Calatravan skeleton or a Wilkinsonian arch, but a Corten steel construction of sombre elegance. There's more of that to come.

The main architects of Granary Wharf are Carey Jones themselves, but everyone I spoke to in Leeds put its success down to John Thorp's direct involvement and an unusually enlightened developer. Certainly you can see the strictures of the Civic Architect here – a palette of brown Corten steel balconies and dark brick infill (into the usual concrete frame, obviously), and a form apparently dictated by an industrial building formerly on the site; but it's the absence of the Blair Hats and the bloody terracotta which are especially welcome.

The tower is very impressive – the irregular windows don't make a fuss of themselves, the cylinder is eye-catching, even -yech- 'iconic', if we must – without being egotistically Fosterian or cheaply Aedasish. So here, given that we have exactly the same architects – Messrs Carey Jones – and the same clients, in principle – these are luxury City Centre Apartments, in a city with plenty of empty new flats - the main question is: what went right? This is not a facetious question. Up the road is Carey Jones ' horrendously shoddy and drab Clarence Dock, which has bits falling off it already. But here, even the detailing is good, for God's sake. You could almost be in a country which took its architecture seriously.

The conclusion is partly depressing and partly encouraging. In the latter case, well – the City Architect triumphs, hurrah! - imposing coherence, urban order and proper design upon some usually pretty shoddy persons and places. This is especially pleasing. Recently Nick Johnson of Urban Splash answered a question at a RIBA event about whether or not Municipal Architects should return, thusly: 'I would no more trust a council architect to design me a house than a council hairdresser to cut my hair'. Leaving aside the chutzpah of saying this when you've bought up and sold as luxury apartments no less than four council estates, one of them in Leeds, this scheme is a fine rejoinder. And maybe, just maybe, the new City Architects could be designing the council housing that the 5 million people on the waiting list are waiting for. The other conclusion, which it would seem is a more popular one among architects, is that architecture is only as good as its developers, and hence we should be wishing for more enlightened property speculators to save us all.

After Granary Wharf, this bit of Holbeck need not detain us further, as it's mostly full of the 'Leeds Look'. This, an 80s movement to use local materials, pitched roofs and classical tripartite divisions in (mostly) spec office blocks, is in fact a great example of how design control can't stop godawful design by itself. Here, it means lots of business park buildings and lots of car parks. Hence, the problem with the area – which markets itself, take note, as 'Holbeck Urban Village' – is much more apparent. There's some good individual buildings, sure, but as planning the place is awful. The pedestrian faces innumerable nasty subtopian obstacles, like this delightful bit of counterintuitive barbed wire.

The real problem is twofold. Partly there's the sheer obstructiveness to pedestrians, with what are already baffling even by English standards lines of movement made worse by plenty of impassable surface car parks – three times I had to clamber over fences just to get from A to B, and I'm really not an athletic sort. Also, this is Leeds' industrial heartland, and the recent past, pre-City Centre Living, clearly still zoned it as industrial. There's nothing wrong with that, if we take – and why not? - the line, common to both Ian Nairn and Jane Jacobs, that the zoning out of industry has a deleterious effect on cities. But industry in the late 20th century meant the car, and more than that, it meant the lorry; and that means virtually no chance for density or urban coherence. So there's a lot of typically exurban 80s-90s industry/post-industry around, from light factory units to strip malls and car showrooms, which sit strangely with derelict mills here and mills-as-apartments-or-offices there.

So the light industrial units above are immediately facing...this.

OK, I'll concede - so here Leeds has something that neither Manchester nor Sheffield nor Bradford can match – the truly unbelievable Temple Works, a flax mill designed as an Egyptian Temple. In lesser hands this could be merely showy fluff, as those familiar with the Tobacco Factory, Mornington Crescent will know. Temple Works is an epoch away from that sort of Hollywood Egyptian. Here, at an earlier stage of the industrial revolution, Walter Benjamin's claim that the future carries with it the archaic can be seen at its most uncanny, and most physically arresting. It is all done with total conviction; the grey stone, the strong, aggressive detail, the sense of looming, compacted power. The birth of civilisation as the aesthetic for the birth of industrial civilisation, and both hungry for sacrifice. As a place to work in it must have been terrifying.

This overwhelming impression is from only part of the building – the roof recently collapsed, and it's currently undergoing emergency repairs. There's parts of it missing anyway - Temple Works originally had a obelisk chimney and a grass roof on which sheep were encouraged to graze: neither, sadly is there any more. There are plenty of other factories, though, with grass growing out of them, if you venture just a little bit further from the waterside regen part of the 'Urban Village'. Smashed windows and rot awaiting the next property boom. This area was the city's red light district for years, and just round the back of the City Centre Apartments is one of Leeds' poorest areas.

There's plenty of remains from the last boom along the Aire. BREAM 'Very Good'! Save 30% of Your Occupational Costs! There's a real desperation about the signs along here, with the trespa-as-stone delight of No 1 Leeds being especially keen...

Then you end up at a gigantic, alarmingly dense and domineering Carey Jones thing, then the centre. This one is in the real 21st Century Leeds vernacular, with the full vocabulary of bulk ineptly offset by metal balconies and terracotta cladding, which in this case apparently is a reclad of the local Post Office HQ. After making my way past it, I turn round to see what it looks like from the 'front'. I've been here before, and the wasteland from two years ago remains unfilled.

Urban Trawl: Preston

2011-03-18T07:06:00.001-07:00

Preston, Lancashire, is the newest city in the UK. This might sound puzzling, given its age, but it acquired city status only in 2002. According to 1920s Home Office directives, the 'grant of the title is only recommended in the case of towns of the first rank in population, size and importance, and having a distinctive character and identity of their own.' Does Preston fit any of these categories?

One of the promises of the erstwhile urban renaissance was that it could not only restore dignity and urbanity to cities whose greatness should not be in dispute – London, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow – but also strengthen the urban qualities of smaller cities that might otherwise be straggling, vague, indistinct – the Wakefields and Readings of the UK. Preston sits between those two poles, in that it made major attempts to create some sort of coherent cityness, in the late 19th and mid-20th century. The decade in which it became a city made no such effort.

Preston might have ancient roots, but it's essentially a town of the industrial revolution; in fact, one of the towns of the industrial revolution, with its appalling environment and its frighteningly revolutionary workers spurring Charles Dickens to write Hard Times, whose utilitarian villain Gradgrind, famously unable to see anything other than monetary value, clearly still has some presence here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was also a pioneer in post-war roadbuilding, with the first stretch of motorway encircling it, and an inner-ring road further inside. It had a last, rather than first in 1969, when it became the centre of Central Lancashire New Town, the final New Town to be designated – before the unofficial New Town of Poundbury, at least. And Preston was pioneering in its radicalism too, one of the crucibles of the labour movement – and there are still independent leftwing councillors in the inner city area of Deepdale.

This combination of austere Victorian and post-war utopian values is reflected, for better or worse, in Building Design Partnership, the socialist collective founded here in the early 60s by local boy George Grenfell-Baines - now of course most familiar as one of the country's faceless architectural leviathans, and the only thing to have left Preston of national architectural significance. With another major exception, that is – the Harris Museum and Library.

At the centre of Preston is one of the greatest of sombre Northern civic complexes, made up of various administrative buildings, a stark Giles Gilbert Scott war memorial, a wide, imposing public square, and 'the Harris' – a piece of late Greek revival, with striking, almost Schinkel-like clarity and power, with nothing extraneous, no hint of Victorian fol-de-rol, a literal temple of working-class self-education, emblazoned with the words 'On Earth there is nothing great but Man – In Man there is nothing great but Mind'. It's a magnificent asset for any city, but here, where much of the townscape is shabby and stunted, it stands out as a beacon of what was once thought possible.

So, too, does the complex just behind it, but in a much tricksier way. Here there is one of those classically 1960s attempts to redevelop a town through the remaking of its circulation into walkways, underpasses and towers, with people separated from cars. It contains a couple of decent towers by BDP, under their most famous partner, the Brutalist Keith Ingham, both of which create a distinctive, vigorous skyline, but are a little loveless; something which could certainly not be said about the building beneath – Preston Bus Station. This, like Birmingham Central Library or Robin Hood Gardens, is one of those structures that a headline writer might call 'Brutalism's Euston Arch' – buildings trenchantly fought for by those who love them, destined to be removed for short-term profit. Yet unlike those two, it's held in undisputed public esteem – it recently won a local newspaper poll for best building in Preston. There's no surprise why – its glorious sweep is so simple, so confident, so right, that only a churlish antimodernist could not be seduced by it. Inside, matters are a little different – original signage battles with recent tat, and a clean is direly in order. It connects with a fussier, but also interesting Guildhall by RMJM, an oddly prescient building which straddles Stirling's red period and pomo; BDP's rival post-war megafirm also helped design the Central Market nearby, drab on the outside but a bustling Coronation Street Constructivist delight inside.

Stirling and BDP also led a partially successful attempt to build modernist housing to complement this modernist centre. I say partially, because the two had very different fates, in surprising ways. Stirling and Gowan's low-rise, brick housing was needlessly demolished, but BDP's two concrete tower blocks, an elegant, faceted design by its future chairman Keith Scott, still stand. A predictable answer as to why - they were sold to developers. It's sad that buildings like Stirling and Gowan's went when so much dross survived (or was built after), but Preston boasts some great little moments of accidental townscape nonetheless. One involves taking a passageway from a crumbling, cobbled Victorian snicket, past concrete car parks where cotton mills used to stand, via BDP's housing and its apologetic Housing Association successors, past typical milltown terraces emerging, suddenly and abruptly, into semis and bungalows – and an entrance down a magical series of winding stairs and alongside thick, autumnal undergrowth, to Avenham Park, the third (of three) genuinely special things about Preston.

There's a lot to love here – this is no flat piece of 'public realm', no concession to get planning gain. It's an undulating, complicated, vivid landscape, and one where you can see the city end right in front of you, just a short walk from the centre. It's the Victorian park as Victorian novel, a whole world in itself that you could spend weeks immersing yourself in, and happily it contains the city's one decent 21st century building, a jagged little cafe by McChesney Architects.

So why is it, given that Preston has these three first-class urban moments – the Harris, the Bus Station, the park – that it feels so un-city like, so pinched and unthought-about? The blame can partly be put on the 60s. The inner ring-road is truly horrible, pulling in its train a dross-scape of retail sheds and business parks – one of which houses the offices of BAE systems, the arms manufacturers who are one of the few surviving remnants of industrial Britain, and who build their weapons in the Central Lancs exurbs. It makes the city feel incoherent and drab, something aided by the fact that, after the Bus Station/Guildhall walkway systems fell out of favour, the pedestrian has to stand and wait, giving lots of time to survey just how miserable the townscape is.

The other reason is that Preston hasn't managed to erect more than one decent building in around forty years. Towns like this seldom have the clout or the confidence to challenge developers, and the results have been poor indeed. The whole panoply of outer-suburban blandness is here, in the centre of town – pitched-roofed 90s offices, concrete-framed and shoddily clad 00s Blairboxes, all without the hint of architecture that might have been demanded in a larger town. The feeling that nobody – or nobody in power, at least – seems to care what the city looks like is inescapable. In the most recently developed corner off the ring-road, a new hotel and recent buildings for Central Lancashire University are especially dispiriting. And while there has been one large attempt to plan something large-scale, it seems to compound the city's sadness rather than relieve it.

One of those New Retail Quarters that were planned all over the place in the wake of Liverpool One is mooted for the site of Preston Bus Station. Nearby an advertisement proclaims its putative virtues, and it's a melancholy sight. Next to the CGI of dead-eyed shoppers are the desperate words 'it's a nice place' and 'a bit of development is always good'. Yet the firm who have planned this development are BDP – who thus propose to erase what is perhaps their finest building.

Residentially, Preston's heart is Deepdale, where symmetrical stone terraces give way to quintessential red brick. It's the home of Preston North End FC, and until recently of OMI Architects' National Football Museum, a pretty kitsch but enjoyably tasteless decon mishmash, resembling what Capita might produce if given a book on Melnikov. The Museum was closed recently and moved southwards to Manchester, specifically to Urbis, to replace that museum's former focus on 'the city'. It's a reminder that we don't seem to know or care what makes a city. Nor do we care to try and help somewhere that lies inbetween, that hasn't quite achieved a true city's sense of possibility, drama and distinctive presence; instead, anything it does create is hived off to a bigger city, to a place that doesn't need the favour.

Originally published in Building Design, 2/12/10

Tees

2011-03-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

A Flickr Set of Teesside, further to its Urban Trawl.

Urban Trawl: Teesside

2011-03-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

Throughout 2009, this series' aim was to discover what happened to towns after 12 years of New Labour, to test the idea of the 'urban renaissance' against the recession's reality. Now, with the recession barely over and growth hardly registering, the question is different – what happens after New Labour, after the Regional Development Agencies, after the 'bonfire of the quangos', quite possibly after CABE? Does the 'big society' mean anything in these places, or is it just an ideological bromide for classic Thatcherism? Will architecture change? Will the half-finished grand projects lie indefinitely abandoned?

So we begin is Middlesbrough. According to a report by credit-rating pests Experian, the Teesside conurbation is the 'least resilient' place in the UK, with the highest level in public sector employment. According to the patronising Coalition phraseology, the industrial boomtown called an 'infant Hercules' by Gladstone is still an infant 150 years later, now needing to be 'weaned off the state'. Yet it's inescapable that what actually occurred here under Blair and Brown was the use of the public sector to try and spur into life a moribund private sector. That's especially clear in Middlehaven, the site of one of Will Alsop's many plans for post-industrial towns – just north of the central station, by the old docks and the magnificent, still-functioning Transporter Bridge.

Posters and fences enclose the wasteland, although not much effort has been expended in keeping them up, revealing an absolutely huge, poisoned-looking grass expanse, broken up by two buildings and a public sculpture. The wager was that 'Boro might become a tourist destination, if Alsop and invited architects like FAT were to be given their head; the renders in front of the wastes show a Super Mario World which bitterly contrasts with what is in front of your nose. The public sector levelled the area for, so far, an optimistic temporary suite designed as an aptly upturned lime green box, and the new Middlesbrough College by Hickton Madely at Archial. This is a huge building, and aside from the Bridge it dominates Middlehaven, its curving mass covered in a silver and yellow cladding, with small windows punched into it at random. Round the back, it's a huge white shed, as if we wouldn't be looking. Far away is the other building – the Docks' Clock Tower, attributed to Philip Webb – tall, gaunt and profoundly haunting in this dreamlike, spacious and sinister context. Between the dereliction is red and black landscaping, carrying at least some of the renders' cartoonish promise, connecting the area to the football stadium, or to another publicly funded project – Anish Kapoor's Temenos.

This steel sculpture, engineered by Cecil Balmond, begins Kapoor and Balmond's unexpected career as monumental sculptors to late British neoliberalism, but is less embarrassing than the hot pink 'Arcelor-Mittal Orbit'. A stretched tendon, it is both industrial and biomorphic, with the tautness between its opposed sides evidently a 'reference' to the Transporter Bridge. But looking at the Tees' surviving industry – the Bridge, the shipbuilding cranes, the curvaceous maw of the distant cooling towers, the intertwined tentacles of the nearby refineries - who can say that Kapoor and Balmond are better artists than these anonymous engineers?

But with all this (private sector) industry falling into disuse, what else to revive the area than the property market, the country's biggest money-spinner? Middlehaven, unlike the Pathfinder schemes we'll come to (but with the same end in sight), tries to kick off property speculation by appealing to art, heritage and tourism. If it won't work as a money-making scheme – and the area's desuetude rather suggests it won't – it's not down to political noncomformism. Middlehaven is eerie, but it is not frightening. That honour is reserved for the truly alarming redevelopment of St Hilda's, further along the river on the other side of the Transporter Bridge. Similarly, a large area is being cleared, but here the process of erasure is even more partial, the landscape even more scarred. There are scattered industrial sheds, stumps of low-rise council housing (mostly boarded up), and the lonely 1840s Old Town Hall, amongst huge, yawning open scrubland, looking out to the cooling towers of Billingham. Short of doubling for a post-apocalyptic film set, it's hard to see what exactly the use of this is. Then you find out, in the form of a sign that says 'BOHO ZONE', which you then find as the name of a new, neo-modernist building that the place has a purpose – as the veritable front line of urban cool. One suspects that Middlesbrough Council hoped for a small army of Hackney hipsters crowding the wasteland, to bring in that all-important 'creative class'. They've evidently been reading their Richard Florida.

If you forget about this horrifying post-industrial wasteland and the destruction of council housing for a minute, there's something laudable about that ambition. Middlesbrough now has large sculptures by Anish Kapoor and Claes Oldenburg, and a Museum of Modern Art. The promise was that the creative industries could replace heavy industries, and they've had a damn good shot at it. Unfortunately, the execution and the will are divergent, and the most permanent legacy, Erick van Egeraat's Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, is a curate's egg – an atrium in a box dressed pretentiously with jagged ornament, barely masking a distribution shed's backside, housing rather ineptly some excellent exhibitions. It bears repeating that these kinds of art galleries can be lifelines in towns like this, irrespective of their architectural shortcomings – and at least there's a good viewing platform at the top, from where you can survey Middlesbrough's gridiron plan, and some of its often fine buildings – the glorious sombre melodrama of the second Town Hall, and the surprisingly elegant Miesian contextualism of the brown glass Corporation House (now 'Centre North East') that neighbours it.

You can also see some truly horrible reclads – two student towers with pitifully small windows and the similarly bleak grey-clad Thistle Hotel. The adverts emblazoned on the former use the word 'luxury'. Beyond that is the curious mix of early high-tech, Gothic and PFI of Teesside University, which advertises itself as 'University of the Year'; and the planned grid of terraces, which have a certain architectural variety, and several whole streets suffer the tinning-up that signifies the presence of the barbarous Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders.

Publicly funded as all this may be, and in perhaps the UK's biggest planned town to boot, there's a striking lack of coherence to all this, bar the optimistic chasing of 'creativity'. To find something that is coherent, go to the private sector new town of Billingham, the town ICI built, a chemicopolis whose planned 60s centre, by local architects Elder, Lester & Partners, is striking. It's the space-age coated in pigeon shit, with some fabulous buildings, such as the Lubetkinesque towers of Kennedy Gardens (whose patterning is the barcode façade avant la lettre). From the elevated part you can survey the surviving ICI skyline; from the ground floor a functioning, if elderly civic modernism. One part, the Forum, is Grade II listed, but a redevelopment has given it the tackiest of blue and yellow re-claddings, raising once again, after Park Hill, the question of whether there's even any point listing 1960s buildings.

In the centre, meanwhile, is Peter Freeman's 'Spectra-Txt', a public art tower whose twinkling lights are supposed to be reminiscent of local boy Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which was inspired by the night-lit refinery tendrils of ICI's Wilton site. And if you're really looking for some truly astonishing structures – if not 'architecture' as such – you're spoilt for choice in the long strip of industry that still stretches between Middlesbrough and Redcar. The fluted concrete silos of the Dorman Long works, the breathtaking (for more reasons than one) former ICI Refinery, with an excellent, Redbrick Modernist BDP office block as part of the site, a volcanic eruption of a Power Station, the monumental cranes of Teesport, and finally the Corus Steelworks, recently closed. Those who claim that Boro has no architecture may like to reflect on the enormous stylistic debt Modernist architects owe these places.

In Redcar itself, the near-derelict seaside town hides its holes via 'Virtual Shop Fronts' and the promise of 'creative industries hubs'. The view of container ships from the beautiful sandy beach implies that someone is still making money out of this place. As it is, Teesside awaits the butchers. Take the train to Redcar East, and you can walk to a place where the private sector has had totally free rein, in a development of seemingly endless, looping cul-de-sacs, BUPA Health Centres and Retirement Homes. In one of these cul-de-sacs is a Sound Mirror, a stark concrete structure designed as an Early Warning System in WW1. It's exactly the same size as the bungalow next door, and feels part of the streetline - an irruption of the industrial past into the spec builders' zone of dead time.

Originally published in Building Design, 11/11/10

The East London Line Extension

2011-03-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

Burying bad news is commonplace enough, but it's more perverse to bury good news. This is however what Boris Johnson did amidst the protracted post-election negotiations, when he renationalised the London Underground with the minimum of furore, achieving one of erstwhile mayor Ken Livingstone's key policies. The lack of crowing was understandable given that the elaborate Private-Public Partnership scheme had always been supported by the Conservatives. And now, the East London Line extension, a major expansion, the biggest since the Jubilee Line of the late 90s, opens without much fanfare – as well it would be, as another of Livingstone's projects.

Over the last three decades there have been two major expansion projects for London Transport, and their differing ambitions are telling. The first, the part-private Docklands Light Railway, has varied wildly in architectural quality since its mid-80s inception, now comprising an incoherent collection of shoulder-padded pomo grandeur (Canary Wharf), embarrassing neo-Georgian (Cutty Sark) and more recently, sleek futurism (West Silvertown), with the main constant being a general cheapness; the second, the entirely publicly-funded Jubilee Line extension, had a similar aim - reconnecting the post-industrial east and south-east with the centre - but in design terms it was a massive leap forward, a gesamtkunstwerk that London hadn't seen since the stations of Charles Holden in the 1930s, a series of breathtaking cathedrals of lustrous grey concrete and steel. The various big names hired by the director Roland Paoletti were captured at their best, perhaps inspired by the limits and difficulties of the programme - the stations by Richard McCormac, Norman Foster and Michael Hopkins are by some considerable measure their finest buildings in London. Gordon Brown's tube PFI was devised soon after completion in 1999, as if his Presbyterian instincts were offended by the scheme's sheer abundance and generosity.

The East London Line extension is, sadly, much more in line with the DLR than the Jubilee Line extension, though it's not without interest for that. First of all, in simple functional terms, it's incredibly useful. For those – like the present writer – who live in South-East London, it makes it possible to get to Hackney in 20 minutes rather than 2 hours; and moreover, it finally pulls the SE London suburbs into the tube, with Brockley, Forest Hill, Sydenham dragged out of their sleepiness, while Croydon's fascinating high-rise Alphaville no longer hides in plain sight. The extension is a fine example of adaptive re-use, recharging disused lines closed by Beeching, joining up with existing commuter lines and building in new infrastructure – the approach is a viable, potential model for patching together and extending our appalling national rail network. There should be many more of these, in Manchester, in West Yorkshire, in the countryside, and hopefully London's example can be followed by the rest of the country. And for London itself, as a new public transport scheme it certainly beats the sentimental whimsy of designing new Routemaster buses.

But anyone excited by Tim O'Toole (head of Transport for London until recently) talking of returning to the days of Charles Holden, Frank Pick and an architecture 'as distinctive as churches' will be roundly disappointed. The East London Line extension, for all Livingstone's protestations, was still a PFI project, funded and mostly managed by the public TfL, but with the familiar PFI labyrinth of competing contractors and mean-spirited, cost-cutting architecture fully in place; it now forms part of London Overground, a network reconnecting various suburban lines, fronted by TfL but owned and managed by LOROL, a private company owned by Deutsche Bahn and the Hong Kong Metro. Early reports that Wilkinson Eyre and John McAslan would design the four new stations on the network proved to be inaccurate; instead, those ultimately responsible - PFI specialists Carillion and Balfour Beatty, not the benevolent bureaucrats at TfL - gave the contracts to Weston Williamson, Acanthus Architects, and JSA Opus, most of whom have experience working on the DLR. It might have been conceived and largely built during the boom, but the East London Line is austerity architecture, fit for a recession.

Weston Williamson are the main architects of the scheme. Their orange livery and signage has a certain pop-design perkiness, and the new railway bridges traversing Hackney and New Cross are handsome, if unspectacular. Most of the old tube stations pulled into the new line have been given new orange & silver frontages – Wapping, Shadwell, Surrey Quays all look a damn sight better than they did – but the suburban rail stations which make up the bulk of the line are mostly unaltered, leaving them as shabby as ever. The new network's accidental masterpiece, the enormous 1850s Crystal Palace Station, was supposed to be restored and redesigned as part of the extension, but nothing has happened there yet. The line has two tiers, at least for now – one which stretches from Dalston to Surrey Quays, all swish and shiny; and another from New Cross to Croydon, which is significantly less sparkling. The difference is glaring. Meanwhile, the trains, compared with the Jubilee Line's hurtling pace, are barely quicker than the commuter trains they partly replace.

But what of the new stations themselves? Here, the dead hand of neoliberalism is upon them, as property development and the need to sell air rights and generally exploit the TfL estate affects the architecture severely. At Weston Williamson's Dalston Junction you enter a grim, low canopy akin to those inserted in the 80s' under the office blocks of Charing Cross or Liverpool St. It's a shock to find that there's nothing necessitating the gloom – Barratt flats atop and partially funding the station obtained planning permission years ago, but are currently credit-crunched; nonetheless, they were a part of the scheme from early on, necessitating demolition of much-loved landmarks like the Four Aces nightclub, to much local disgust.

Shoreditch High Street, the largest new station in the scheme, is subject to similarly depressing imperatives. It's a huge concrete warship smashing into the old Bishopsgate Goods Yard, and again it's grimly low and utilitarian at platform level. The megastructure is necessitated by the need to protect the line from any debris caused by any nearby regeneration; the intended new constructions haven't arrived yet, and the station is surrounded by rather picturesque wasteland. The result is by far the most striking thing on the line. The concrete panels were shaded orange or reflective in some early renders, but now the beton is wholly brut; angular little viewing platforms add dash to the monolith. Architecturally, JSA's building hits smug Shoreditch with thrilling if no doubt unintended violence, but it's curious this drastic solution was due to the belief that the property boom would go on forever.

Two smaller stations are equally intriguing, if not always for purely architectural reasons. The press bumph for Acanthus' Haggerston Station appeals to the sainted memory of Charles Holden, but if there's any resemblance, it's to his pinched 40s austerity station at Wanstead, rather than the no-expense-spared glories of Southgate or Cockfosters; inside, pretty mosaic cladding and a bizarre retro-futurist space mural at least rise a little to the occasion. Weston Williamson's Hoxton, meanwhile, inserts concrete, steel, orange plastic and a lift tower into the Victorian arches overlooking the Gefrrye Museum. It's a welcome reminder of the adaptive, ad hoc nature of the scheme – it's not exactly the Neues Museum, but the meeting of 19th and 21st century is achieved with an admirable lack of heritage kitsch, while the platforms reveal a strange and beautiful mess of skyline.

There's another set of new buildings crammed into the space behind New Cross Gate station: the service spaces of the new line, designed again by Acanthus. There's the Operational Buildings Complex, which is designed around a triangular atrium in order to create a common space between the private and public operators, clad on the outside with bright yellow panels. Then there's the jagged, decon-esque double-shed for Wheel Lathe & Heavy Cleaning, which is enjoyably strange from any passing train and desperately cheap inside, with the bathos of utilitarians trying to be a bit arty; but the triumph is the much simpler Maintenance Depot. This is a large, airy, top-lit silver and orange shed, where trains at multiple levels are surrounded by their industrial apparatus. Funnily enough, where half of the other stations are deliberately low in order to raise extra cash, it's this almost-hidden shed that actually justifies some of TfL's talk of cathedrals and churches.

It's horribly apt that the space here which truly communicates the occasional thrill and romance of the railways is not open to the public. And as a preview of what might happen at Crossrail – a similarly ambitious scheme stitching together parts of our smashed public transport system, similarly hobbled by PFI and its attendant penny-pinching meanness – it isn't encouraging. The East London Line, and the London Overground of which it's a part, tentatively suggests what might pull us out of our current mess - but it's still depressingly beholden to thinking that dumped us in it.

Originally published in BD, 11 June 2010.

Within Walls

2011-03-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

More ports. There's a second post on Hamburg which has fallen down the back of the sofa because I started it weeks ago - here it is. There will be some more, ah, exotic posts on here soonish, but for the moment my inclinations are pulling me somewhere more familiar. 'What do you think of the walled Old Town?' asked Matt Poacher a little while ago about one of my Southampton writings. See, Southampton has the largest stretch of medieval walls in the UK, outside of York. The truth be told, apart from post-wedding boozing and visits to Eric Lyons' Castle House, I don't spend much time there, and as with Southampton University, more fool me, as it's actually a very smart (if perhaps unintentional) bit of townscape in the Gordon Cullen/Pevsnerian sense, but architecture is fairly little to do with what makes it good. The relevance of this with reference to the demise of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment will be an additional subject. This post, even more than with Oxford, is indebted to Pevsner's half-finished Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

It starts, as it should, with an overhead walkway, joining up two broken parts of the walls, alongside a derelict 60s building with 2001 windows; the view is terminated in typical townscape style with a tower, which here is Lyons' council slab block, the area's best building. You have to ignore WestQuay for this walk to be enjoyable, but after that, pickings here are rich - what is interesting about this place is the various attempts to build within and around ruination and fragmentation, some of them quite successful.

Firstly, there's some of your actual architecture here, courtesy of non-Smithsons-employing Brutalists Lyons Israel Ellis - simple, robust blocks placed in amongst the bombed-out fragments of Georgian and Victorian housing - but they pick up the rhythm and unpretentious vigour of the surrounding buildings. Crucially, they don't pretend to be suburban or small-town.

This is exactly what all the subsequent architecture does, and to enjoy it this fact has to be accepted. Most of it is 1980s housing association design, deeply provincial, anti-urban and occasionally rather twee - but what it does, and does well, is set up interestingly reciprocal spaces, create some sort of intrigue in the movement uphill, and framing some unusually (for the south of England) generous public spaces. Here, for instance, the 80s blocks are genuinely quite pretty in their interaction with the sloping site and the existing remnants.

The walls themselves were restored by Leon Berger during his heroic 50s-60s tenure as head of the City Architects Department, and they're pieced together in an unassuming and frankly Brutalist manner, the roughness of the concrete linking bridges fitting the functionalist harshness of the 13th century encampment very nicely.

What is even better is the way that they really encourage exploration - there's an invitation to try to find out how to get under and around these bridges, and when I was little this was exciting stuff - a playground in the truest sense, because it didn't patronise, because it felt like a discovery.

The places where Wall meets building are always slightly disappointing - the architectural form, after the 1960s, is always a little too close to the Holiday Village genre for my taste, and the architects clearly haven't noticed that there's little pretty about a ruined fortress if you actuallylook at it, rather than have the instant ooh-look-heritage reaction. Again, what saves this is something non-architectural...

...the passage under the blocks, which leads to the main street. This is a classic Townscape approach, a refreshingly unpatrolled and unpoliced way of walking, and designing via contrasts rather than being In Keeping.

It ends at the (passenger, not container) port, and with a medieval storehouse which is now used as the Maritime Museum; there are two salient things in here, an exhibit on the Titanic (obviously) and a scale model of the port in the 1930s, a strikingly beautiful but all-but-unphotographable thing. It also has the most capricious opening hours of any museum in the UK.

But perhaps what makes this a mini-masterpiece of Townscape is the contrast with what comes after, or what goes alongside - a large area of land reclaimed in the 1930s, which is now the dispersed, low-density drosscape of the Pirelli site and its hinterland, which regular readers will be aware is a personal bete noire that need not be discussed further here.

The walls do at least provide a vantage point that would be perfect for snipers. This was, obviously, the place's original function - to aim arrows at the French marauders. Now the same could be productively perpetrated against those coming in on business from the New Forest.

Southampton is pockmarked with places where you can mourn the future - one of them is just behind the De Vere hotel. When this was constructed, the building below was demolished.

(image via Flickr user Robert R&N)

The walled city has a forgotten feeling which makes it by far the most pleasant place to walk in the city centre, the total lack of chain pubs, chain stores and marauding students and/or locals making it so pleasant you could even forget you were in Southampton. This has been a little disrupted by something called 'The French Quarter'.

I dismissed these blocks, so arrogantly bland in such a unique area, so unwilling to embrace the manifold possibilities of the fragmented and ruined context, as 'rote yuppiedromes' in BD a while ago, and a partner at John Thompson wrote in defence:

Our scheme in Southampton’s French Quarter, mentioned in your feature last week, offers truly mixed uses, mixed tenure and tenure-blind accommodation. It also supports commercial office and retail, sheltered and affordable rented accommodation, shared ownership and outright sale homes — the sale units have all sold faster than other similar developments. Rather like dropping in a missing piece of the jigsaw, it has also repaired a historic piece of Southampton’s Old Town, knitting the development back into the community — including removing a chunk of 1960s “highway engineer’s dream”, a six-lane carriageway, and replacing it with a piece of responsive urbanism. It isn’t about “starchitecture”, nor about great Corbusian-friendly slabs of flats that Cabe can get overexcited about — and which would probably be demolished in 20 years. It may not be by the Smithsons or one of the tax-dodging fancy ones, but it is architecture that works, that people want to live in, and that hopefully will still be working in 50-100 years.

You see, to me this appeared to be a straightforward, shoddy, stack-em-up cheap bit of pseudo-vernacular, with no council housing included, that was unworthy of a once-at-least-almost-great city, a design which would have been exactly the same anywhere in the UK, but apparently not. The 'partial removal' of the carriageway that they seem so proud of pales rather in comparison with the fact that, as you can see from these pictures, the area replaces the urbanism of the 60s and the 80s, both of which were sensitive here, in their very different ways, both defined by permeable spaces and civic virtues, with bland blocks hugging the street line, with the only spaces inbetween the vast surface car parks. Yet, strangely, they seem so much more pleased with themselves than were the anonymous architects of the councils and the housing associations. Funny, that.

There is one fairly interesting new thing happening here, and that's a bit of city-branding - usually something I would disdain, but here at least it reminds the place that it is somewhere -which it is prone to forget. Part of this has been through typography and road signs, which may be signs to gigantic malls and midwestern Leisure Worlds, but it's a start. And to see Priestley here is appropriate...

You can still take a ship here - this is the new QE2, complete with retro-modernist red funnel. It won't take you to New York or anywhere useful, but on a vague cruise round nowhere in particular, for an extremely large sum of money. As ever, its huge scale and confidence are deeply incongruous in this stragglescape...

The photo above is taken in the vicinity of the first high-rise to be built here for a generation, which sits at the end of the old walled town, and which you can see below. Like the old town, it's an example of good ideas badly implemented (albeit here far worse). Of course it's right and just that the port-side should have some sort of monumental presence, something that announces urbanity and arrival - and you can imagine this was enough to sway CABE, because CABE didn't have the power to just tell the developers to hire a decent architect. As a silhouette, it's fine. The fact that it's a tacky, clichéd, forgettable Blairite craphouse of a tower was outside their remit - a tower was a good idea, wasn't it? Well, yes. The response to this sort of failure should have been to have given CABE some teeth (and to have sacked around half of its leadership) but instead it goes, in the 'bonfire of the quangos'. Here are some of the things that stayed.

Originally published on 2/11/10, at SDMYABT.