Urban Trawl: The Valleys

'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

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

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

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

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

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.