Quadrangular: Oxford

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

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

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

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