By Chris Matthews


Pump Square

Ebb and flow. Drains and Bricks. Boston is man-made: how man battles with fresh and salt water for both trade and development. It all depends on the Witham and the Wash. Boston didn’t exist in 1087 but by the tax rolls of 1332 the waters were flowing and it was the fourth wealthiest provincial town in England. In the sixteenth century the river silted up and the town ebbed: Puritans emigrated and locals rioted as hired Dutchmen drained the land for private profit. But the benefit of drainage was a boom for the eighteenth century port and Boston flowed once again: its glory is that of a Midland protestant pining for Northern Europe. The Witham has been unable to keep up with the increasing size of shipping and the town has slowly ebbed. Though credited with feeding the industrial revolution the town has been lingering ever since. The puritan American forebears only begat the bloody bypass (named after the sixth president) but the Mayor of Boston Massachusetts (and father of JFK) did partly finance the repair of the church tower (aka the stump) in the 1930s. Today the town suffers from a myopic car lobby, deprivation and the odd BNP councillor here and there. There are plans to master this water’s edge once more with a new tidal barrier. Get those levels right and a twenty-first century working dock and leisure marina could be coming to town. But if this isn’t done carefully, it could mean the loss of those unforgettable tidal mud banks clawing the town back into the sea.


Facing the River Witham


Arrival or Departure?

How do I know Boston? Nottingham holidays makers pass through the town on their way to Skegness. But whereas Skeggy offers unpretentious frivolity (beer served in a chip shop), it has very little in the way of townscape unlike Boston. On arrival I could be forgiven for jumping back on the train as despite a cute porte-cochere, the immediate Station Approach is no more of an approach than a let down. To follow an aesthetic impulse is to wander the bye law GNR terraces of Station Street but that will take you round the houses until you cross the footbridge and enter the town centre. Tower Street and the west bank view of the famous stump are a highly rewarding experience, which could be improved by more generous public landscaping between the police station and river. The brave new world may have been a bit of a let down in Boston, but the footbridge by Arthur Ling (scheduled to be replaced) is a decent bit of planning connecting the town centre with the utterly banal 90s CVS building and bus station.


Stepped lintels, Emery Lane

The more literal route from the Railway Station involves navigating beside a landscape of car parks with the usual contemporary plonk: Asda, PC World etc. At least they are not out-of-town. Things certainly pick up beside the Swann building, where the Victorian Artisan Mannerism is reminiscent of Wilberforce House in Hull – this former feather pillow factory has thankfully found a new use as flats. However West Street is the main drag and for the most part appears symptomatic of Boston’s decline: closed shops, vacant plots and decaying shop fronts, which could be anywhere in the Midlands. But when you reach Municipal Hall, everything gradually begins to pick up and the pace quickens – it’s as though the tight knit creativity in each little street, back lane and plot was building up to the grand crescendo at Town Bridge.


Town Bridge


A Dutch Urbanism

“God made the world and the Dutch made Holland” so the saying goes, but didn’t they also make Boston, in the Part of Holland, Lincolnshire? Given the size of the place, it has a confident urban structure that many English cities might envy. The narrow tidal mud banks of the Witham grappling at the back of the Assembly Rooms leave an impression which is quite unforgettable, but not in a twee Stamford way. This is a place with a clear physical function: a North Sea port - though reduced in importance.


The sheer size of the market – as viewed from the Stump

The market is an impressive urban space framed by the showy fronts of the aforementioned Assembly Rooms and the Grand Hotel. The pinnacle of all this is the unique stump of St Boltolph’s Church. As one of the principal ports for the export of wool in the middle ages, the town traded with France, Flanders and the Baltic. Amidst the backdrop of the stump with its lantern you can recall Bruges and indeed that once powerful and urbane medieval Flemish city was the European port of entry for English woollens. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there is great life in the market but for the rest of the week this historic and place-making locale is a sterile car park.


Wormgate

Nevertheless from here the pedestrian is excited by a mouth watering choice of urban delights which require a frenetic flick through the old architectural glossary: Flemish bond, crow-stepped gables, ornamental brackets, swan necked pediments and stepped lintels. It is all very inventive and not at all condescending. North east from the market is Wide Bargate (the former livestock area), another similarly continental public space and home to a rather unique open air auction every Wednesday. This could lead more clearly to the grand suburbanism after Park Gate but the war memorial is lost in a lonely traffic island. The pedestrian is pushed to the sides and there is little opportunity for engagement with the grand Edwardian Post Office and the fanlights of the nineteenth century merchants’ houses. Across the sea of parking and the John Adams Way is a distant mirage of fine townscape.


Church House: Artisan Mannerism

It is in the Wormgate area and the lanes off the market where narrow lanes of Northern Europe can be recalled: Boston doffs its cap to seventeenth century Dutch commercial supremacy and the Glorious Revolution. Each street and corner arouse architectural curiosity, expectation and occasional titillation – everything is on a human and domestic scale. The Artisan Mannerism of Church House is exceptional: in inventive display of brick jam-packed into a reasonable space. Is this the architecture of the seventeenth century Dutch Entrepôt trade at Boston? Pump Square and Spain Court are similarly Dutch and Flemish in their space and design: pantiles, hipped roofs, gables, dormer windows and bizarre Bostonian doorways with shaped entablature. And while the neo-Egyptian Freemason’s Hall gives a first rate lesson in facing the street, the same can not be said for the new Pescod Shopping Mall, which turns its arse to the lanes and could be in any post-Thatcher provincial town. Amidst the restored timber framed Pescod Hall the place resembles a theme park. It is amazing how Building Design Partnership managed to ignore everything that is so unique and abundant about Boston.


Stumped for Words


Tower Street

Everyone bangs on about the stump so much that there is little else to add, but yes the tallest medieval parish church tower in England is impressive. Completed on the eve of the Reformation and in the twilight of the Perpendicular style it shows that mad late medieval mindset to be the “Sky Scraper City” of the day. Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest building in the world, Louth has the tallest parish spire, did Boston plan to put a spire on top? And so on. The stump has a powerful presence in the town and this is accentuated by the flatness of the surrounding fens. Its gapping maw gobbles the fantastic Tower Street, but by the time you get to to it you know the drill. You are not prepared however for the nave. This is a great and almost humanistic experience – it doesn’t bring you to your knees in weak sacramental subservience and indeed this may be how it was intended. The town guilds of Boston ran the local church and not the other way round. There is much of historical importance to explore here: including a Hanseatic merchant’s gravestone and a sixteenth century Dutch copy of an Erasmus text. It’s a shame that the former (and reputedly Flemish) roof of the nave is now at St Donat's Castle. While I habitually shuffled through the curious misericords – which suggest largely unknown oral traditions to Christian dogma – the organist plays Alan Haven style swirling melodies.


Hanseatic Haven


Packhouse Quay

Boston was an important trading post for the Hanseatic League – a civic association of European merchants who curbed the stringent controls of medieval feudalism, until the onset of mercantile nations. The Hansa have long gone but the association is strong in Boston. South Street, Packhouse Quay and the old pre-containerisation wharfs and lanes have a character which is quite un-English. The future could be built from this Hanseatic heritage of bricky urbanism – the architectural possibilities are almost endless. Unlike other East Coast ports, Boston was dominated by Hansards from Lubeck during the later middle ages. The merchants and industrialists of the nineteenth century must have known this well: evident in the stepped gabled warehouses of Sibsey Lane and 10 South Street. They were after all building on the eighteenth century confidence of Fydell House, Customs House and the medieval Shodfriars and Guildhall. You can see why Pevsner calls this entertaining jumble “endearing”. But the view from here has been neglected by turning Packhouse Quay into a car park. The same may be said of South Square, which is courted by towering hipped and half-hipped roofs of the elongated Hanseatic style warehouses, which have thankfully found new use as flats and the Sam Newsom Music Centre. Unfortunately for Boston, the past is a foreign country. This area has recently been designated a cultural quarter by the planning department but the closure of the Haven Gallery last year is a sad reminder of the present. Though not of a particularly high standard, at least it had a stab at contemporary pastiche modernism. The new flats overlooking Haven Bridge are similar in this respect: not gated and not out of town. But that is all that can be said for twenty-first century design.


Working Life


The Port of Boston

For the most part however, this is just a sore hangover for a town, which has a strong working identity and indeed there is almost a feeling of smug satisfaction. Boston has eight Batemans pubs, two non-league football teams, an exciting mix of Portuguese and Eastern European settlers, a huge market and the physical presence of the modern port. Batemans is a stalwart of the cask ale revival and though based up the road at Wainfleet, this is the town in which it is most dominant. Add this to the liveliness and compact form of the town and it has a palpable excitement on a hot spring afternoon. Marc Bolan & T Rex will forever haunt the Boston Gliderdrome.


Boston Utopia


Haven Bank

The long term effects of a process begun by Cornelius Vermuyden and his sixteenth century Dutch employees was a great lowering of the fens, and in some instances this was below sea level. This is a facinating landscape history which has been so thoroughly told by the great historical geographer H.C. Darby. This drainage left an undeniable problem, which in terms of environmental science is best left to nature. Yet in a social, economic and cultural sense it doesn’t make any sense to abandon ship here and after years of political wrangling the Environment Agency gave the go-ahead for a flood barrier. It’s not as big as the often mooted and ever changing Wash Tidal Barrier plan - from super city, to reservoir and wind farm. Yet this is still big news for a small town and could improve Boston as a commercial port and leisure marina. There is one question though: how much will the barrier limit tidal variation? Regeneration UK PLC doesn’t like mud but if the grappling banks are gone there would be huge loss of distinction. Given the threat of flooding it will be difficult to get this right.


Boston Myopia


John Adams Way

Meanwhile the locals think traffic is a major problem. John Adams Way undoubtedly buggered the town up. Today it is at a seeming halt and the obvious cry from our local car lobby is to build another bypass. The lack of progress in the matter has created great political tumult to the point where independent political parties have emerged over the issue and were briefly in charge of the council. The independence of the flatlands lives on but did the Boston Bypass Party see the irony in their name? Bypass Boston. Their raison d’etre was after all a little myopic. The County Council planned a new link road but it was way down the regional pecking order: Nottingham hasn’t got a dual carriageway to the M1 and big brother City of Lincoln also wants a bypass.


Subconsciously lending itself to cycling, burdened by poor rail

Yet a bypass is not really the solution: there needs to be better management of traffic and better facilities for alternatives, walking and cycling. The flat landscape and the narrow lanes lend themselves to the bicycle and indeed there are perhaps more cyclists here than many towns of a similar size but little is being done to encourage this beyond leisure. There is a similar dispiriting situation with the local railways: from nearby Grantham it is only an hour to London (or Leeds) but the short thirty-mile journey to Grantham Station adds at least another hour. While the similarly historic Hanseatic Dutch town of Deventer builds a sustainable transport infrastructure, Boston builds a Tesco. It’s enough to make you want to emigrate. Being a pilgrim looking out to sea is nothing new here.


Suburban Nonconformism


Genteel doorways are profuse

Boston doesn’t just have a strong and varied centre, but also good suburbs and generous public spaces. For this you need two wheels but these are good streets to enjoy cycling and for the most part drivers give you a wide birth. From Tower Street you can explore Haven Bank, where the split level Victorian houses are almost metropolitan. From the industrial archaeology setting of the Grand Sluice you can carry on north along the river as far as Lincoln. This is an excellent new car free leisure route called the Water Rail Way – so hats off to the local council and Sustrans. Back along Norfolk Street you meet Central Park which is packed with youth and framed by crude Victorian bay window civility. The Wrenian domes of the grand Wesleyan Methodist chapel coupled with the stump create an impressive skyline. Pevsner is disdainful about the 1909 restored façade but it is almost Louis Sullivan in its turn of the century classicism.


Wesleyan Methodist Chapel

Heading out towards the Maud Foster Drain you can explore more industrial heritage: the ubiquitous Lincolnshire Windmill, the half-hipped granary, the huge mute water tower and John Rennie’s bridge by Horncastle Road. The banks of the drain are met with nineteenth century terraces of different ages, shapes and sizes. Quite uniquely for England they face the water and are provided with half a mile of public footpath from Queens Road all the way to Windsor Bank. Regeneration UK PLC take note. Heading back into town along the hair raising boy racer Skirbeck Road it is worth seeing the post reformation Hussey Tower, if only to marvel at contemporary ignorance: it is sadly framed by a legoland cul-de-sac. The unique townscape views of the river and the half-hipped warehouses either side of Haven Bridge are ruined by the get-me-out-of-here John Adams Way. High Street down to the Black Sluice is a fascinating detour of derelict Georgian masterpieces with twentieth century dock-scape views but is treated as rat run for impatient drivers. Then just when you thought Asda marked the western end of civilisation, the Carlton Road area continues to surprise with leafy Edwardian charm and individuality.


High Street: too good for a rat run


Cosmopolitan Boston

Boston has neglected the fact that is it has constituent elements from different parts of the world. It is cosmopolitan and illustrates the varied regional and conflicting social history of England. The built environment reflects the ebb and flow of town success – it is still under-researched and in parts worryingly poor. The locals have an obsession with congestion and new developments such as Endeavour Business Park and Tesco threaten to strangle the life out of the town. Yet there is much we can learn from Boston, not just in terms of history but also as a template for good urban design: Pevsner called for a Royal Commission, Tom Dychoff called for the defibrillator but it now looks as though improvement could be on the way in the shape of major flood defences. In the meantime it should lean from its old European lowland neighbours about sustainable public transport and contemporary design.


Maud Foster Drain – note the footpath


N.B.
A swift half of Bateman’s XB was enjoyed at the Kings Arms Inn

--

References:
N. Pevsner & J. Harris, Buildings of England Lincolnshire (2002)
N. Wright, Boston: A Pictorial History (2007)
G. Morey, The North Sea (1968)
M Burkhardt, “One hundred years of commerce at a Major English Seaport”, in The dynamics of economic culture in the North Sea and Baltic Region (2007)
R.W.K. Hinton, “Dutch Entrepôt Trade at Boston, Lincs., 1600-40”, in Economic History Review, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1957)
R.W.K. Hinton, The Eastland Trade and the Common Weal (1959)
Boston Borough Council, Boston Waterways' Development Plan (2008)
Boston Borough Council, Town Centre Study (2007)

Acknowledgements:
Also thanks to @langrabbie for the Entrepôt article find

An entrance of international standing - St John's Street

Goole – a wonderfully evocative name resonant of watery isolation. Google self importantly thinks you have misspelt. The name actually derives from the Middle English word for channel and Goole certainly is a place apart shaped by water. The flat landscape of drained marshes, embanked rivers, canals and huge skies feels like a far away country but actually Goole is very well connected – just a mile from the M62. It even has quite good trains to the East Coast mainline at Doncaster, and to Sheffield and Hull. It is also the largest inland port in Britain, 50 miles from the sea.


Fifty miles inland

Goole is contained within a meander of the mighty Ouse where it meets the Aire and Calder Navigation with the parallel Dutch River which was built by the Dutch engineer Vermuyden in the C17th to divert the Don and drain Hatfield Chase. The River Aire is to the north. Rivers and canals both isolate the town from its hinterland and connect it to the wider world. The canal and the docks made Goole and make it one of the most unusual and dramatic towns in England.


Humber City


The M62 Bridge

Although unmistakeably part of Yorkshire its administrative identity is confused. A small, compact town with a population of only about 20,000 it was historically part of the West Riding. However in the 60s there were semi serious ideas of quasi Soviet hubris for a new city of a million people on the Humber to act as a counterweight to London. Reflecting these ambitious dreams of esturial development Goole became part of the new Humberside County in 1974 – a forced marriage of the Tykes on the north bank with the Yellowbellies on the south. But with no cultural and little geographic or economic rationale it was doomed to failure. When dismembered as a populist move by the Major government Goole ended up in the East Riding of Yorkshire. This was once a hub of of the Yorkshire coalfied: West meeting South before transhipment and going out to sea. In any event Goole has a very strong identity of its own.


Let us give thanks to the Aire & Calder

Whereas other important ports in the region like Hull and Boston grew in the medieval period, for Goole history starts in 1826 with the opening of the Aire and Calder Navigation and the first docks. There were ambitious plans for a new town but little was developed in the first decades. It really was a company town – the Aire and Calder Navigation Company even paid for the parish church (St John) completed in 1848 which, as Pevsner notes, is remarkably large and stately. Its position right next to the docks with containers stacked up against the church yard is remarkable and there is an extraordinary view of the spire framed by cranes from the ring road (A161)and from the dockside.


Goole for the Continent


An incomplete mini metropolis

Goole really took off with the coming of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway in 1848. If you know Manchester Victoria, that grand relic of the heyday of the L&YR, you may have been surprised at the prominence of Goole in the destinations shown on the nouveau canopy and on the glorious tiled route map in the concourse. Goole was the gateway to the Continent with steamers to destinations like Hamburg, Amsterdam and Antwerp. The L&YR had the largest fleet of any railway company and Goole was big in its plans. This is evident from the impressive Goods Offices on Stanhope St, 4 stories with grand windows in red brick and terracotta with the date 1892. Goole was also served by the North Eastern Railway which survives today. The Station buildings have been replaced but at least it retains the platform canopies.


Dreaming cranes


The unique Goole skyline

The landscape around Goole is all about huge engineering structures rising out of the flat landscape. As you approach along the motorway you see great brooding power stations and more recent distribution sheds. The M62 crosses the Ouse on a long viaduct which in this huge flat landscape ‘looks like a Scalextric’. This elegant structure could not be more different from the massive, clunky rail swing bridge going east towards Hull glorying in its manly heavy engineering. The Boothferry swing bridge of 1929 is more delicate. Within the town itself are more swing bridges across the docks at Lowther Bridge St and Bridge St. The dock cranes rise up as great sentinels and are really quite stunning abstract forms. The other great feature of Goole is its water towers – the brick late Victorian tower of 1883 and the adjoining massive concrete tower of 1926 which Pevsner says ‘represent the spirit of their respective ages convincingly’.


The skeletal supports of  the 1926 water tower

What is so extraordinary about Goole is the close relationship of the docks to the town and how accessible the docks are - there is a footpath running right through them. You really get a sense of the drama of the port. You see the massive cranes loading ships on the great expanses of choppy water. Forklift trucks reverse everywhere, containers are stacked to the horizon, huge lorries grind around the ring road. Slavic tongues are heard in the cafes and bars - Goole is twinned with Zlotow in Poland and has strong links with the Baltic and Scandinavia. This is no provincial backwater.


Edwardian swagger


Dear Aire Street, the paint job ends here.

The town centre next to the docks, largely built in the late Victorian and Edwardian era, has a scale and confidence you would not expect for a small town. Aire St was the first street to be built in the 1830s. The grand but severe Lowther Hotel is right by the dock gates and the wide street is lined with what were once handsome 3 story terraces. There are some fine commercial buildings with stone detailing and blue brick sting courses and names like ‘Transatlantic House’. Bank Chambers with proud terracotta detailing and flashy turrets is the grandest dominating Stanhope St and Church St. It looks as though it belongs in a big city. Now East Riding council offices it has been extended circa 1980 with a big brick box dressed with string courses and an elaborate corbelled cornice. Full marks for trying, but a pity about the crude new windows. The building at the corner of the street has a beautiful dark green terracotta door case with a marvellous frieze of sailing ships. Elsewhere the influence of the docks is evident in the number of grand bank buildings, now mostly pubs, and indeed the number of original pubs. On Mariners St is the powerful white faience building of the Yorkshire Electric Power Company. 100 years ago this was a town of optimism and boundless confidence in the future.


Surveillance society


A grand dame with gaudy blue make-up

The focus of Goole is the Clock Tower erected in 1926 to celebrate the centenary of the town. Unfortunately this sits in the middle of a roundabout and is virtually inaccessible. It also has a CCTV camera ignominiously planted on top. Boothferry Road the main shopping street begins at this circus. Some of the shops are quite handsome turn of the century brick buildings with elaborate gables and there are occasional stripped down 30s Deco efforts as well as too much post war dross. St John’s Building between Boothferry Road and Stanhope St is an object lesson in how to turn a difficult triangular site. North of the level crossing (which adds some drama to the street) a massive Tesco Extra lurks behind a huge car park. There is a Morrisons monster nearby, although to be fair both are quite accessible for pedestrians or cyclists if you can ford the car parks.


St John's Building: disrespected by billboards and road engineers

Goole is worried that it doesn’t have enough shops but as well as the standard offer in the precinct opposite the Station and despite the superstores it actually seems to have a wide range of friendly independents along Boothferry Road and Pasture Road. The market hall of 1896 is next to the Clock Tower although its elegant frontage actually faces a side street. Down North St fine Flemish gables mark the boarded up Arcade currently being renovated. Its viability is certainly not helped by the idiot traffic domination of the circus which cuts the area off from the pedestrianised Boothferry Road. Apologetic flower beds are not enough – the Clock Tower circus needs to be re-designed as a social focus for the town and to help revitalise the more run down areas near the docks.


Big Society already


Precision and detail - Pasture Road

Although only a small town Goole has a remarkable range of facilities. Political clubs, sports clubs, working men’s clubs, seedy clubs, pubs, a big leisure centre, institutes, churches, charities, schools and training centres are all there. Many are in fine buildings from Goole’s heyday. The Conservative Club on Carlisle St speaks of High Victorian complacency. Along Boothferry Road an attractive Edwardian school has been converted into The Courtyard, which provides a base for social enterprises. On Pasture Road is the lovely Arts and Crafts Catholic Church of 1912. The Vermuyden School is a fine Queen Anne composition of 1909. A little further out is West Park laid out in 1923 with bandstand and lake. The embankments to the Ouse are laid out as an attractive promenade and lead to Riverside Gardens, and there is lots of other green space. Above the Library by the Clock Tower is an excellent little museum. The Yorkshire Waterways Museum which expands on the remarkable history of the port is to be found between the Dutch River and the Navigation.


Big - democratic public sector - society

However perhaps the most remarkable new facility is the Junction Arts and Civic Centre found between the Market Hall and the Precinct. This is basically a 1980s shed which has been stripped down to its frame and rebuilt as a theatre and social centre by architects Buschow Henley. As well as the theatre/cinema it houses a café and Council Chamber for the Town Council. Parallels have been drawn with the community function of Alvar Alto’s seminal Säynätsalo Town Hall and actually this is not too far-fetched. The architects were attempting to evoke the familiarity of the industrial sheds that line the quays and, well they do. The recessed ground floor walkway has a startling shiny gold soffit. The spruce plywood frontage is a shock as the first impression is of a boarded up building but then you see the entrance and the activity of the café. Unusual but it seems to work. Most small communities would give their eye teeth for something like this.


Goole the Future


A visible lesson in functionalism

So Goole, so often overlooked, is a town with a strong identity. It is only a small place with a population less than half of my Nottingham suburb but it is intensely urban. It does not grow out of the landscape, itself largely man made, but imposes itself upon it. Although largely the product of a short period of frenetic expansion, it has matured into a multi-dimensional place with masses of social infrastructure – it is almost a miniature city. A place unto itself set amid endless flat, green, fertile fields, defined by its rivers and canals it is maybe not the most exciting place in Yorkshire (hence the surveillance cameras no doubt). But arguably it is a model of sustainability. And it is well connected to the global economy, so if we are going to import everything from Asia it has a great future as the planned Centreport distribution complex by the M62 portends. Goole has a lot going for it.


Subway artwork: dynamic and assured


N.B.
A lunchtime half of Old Rose was wisely declined at the friendly Macintosh Arms

References:
Geoff Shearcroft in the Architects Journal April 2010
Pevsner: West Yorkshire
www.goole-on-the-web.org.uk

Distribution Warehouses: from here to the death of the high street

Northampton is an interesting but unassuming Midlands town which has had a great deal of planned development thrust upon it. It is at the epicentre of what was the Sustainable Communities Plan announced by Prescott in 2003 only to be scrapped by Pickles in 2010. But despite the much publicised death of regional planning the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation lives on and the new Core Strategy still contains plans for big expansion – 7 ‘sustainable urban extensions’ as well as large scale inner urban development. 23,000 new homes are still planned in Northampton by 2026.


New Ways - a future from 1925

Northampton has always been compliant to central diktat, unlike stroppy Home Counties exurbia. In 1968 it was designated a New Town and the population has since increased by nearly 60% to 210,000. Then it was included in Prescott’s Milton Keynes/South Midlands Growth Zone. This was always fairly bonkers as the intention was to divert development from where it really wanted to be – the Thames Valley, Surrey or anywhere posh where the locals would thwart development – to somewhere 70 miles away up the M1 which didn’t matter so much. In fact it was an early form of Localism.


The past is a foreign country


Blessed with good parks and rolling landscape

Prescott, the Sustainable Communities Plan, regional planning, growth zones …. what a curious far away place the recent past is. No longer command and control, planners are now the Enemies of Enterprise. The future is about embracing communities (or is that big business). But Localism is really ritual theatre to reinforce the identity and belief systems of the privileged. It is not about practical things like delivering housing or jobs. This is the preserve of the Market god. However faith in the Market god is badly misplaced since his or her model of housing delivery is well and truly bust. Two thirds of people under 45 now think they will never own their home. (Must be true, it was in the Guardian.) Without first time buyers the mass housing market, which has underpinned most of our fantasies of well being in recent years, does not work. But this is a heresy not to be spoken – something so terrible that it strikes at the very being of Middle England.

Strangely planning is complicit in this. As a profession it has yet to understand the scale of the housing crisis triggered by casino banking but which is actually far more fundamental than that – the pyramid selling of housing that so many of us are complicit in. It offers no coherent alternative to the charade of Localism, partly because everyone really knows this is just window dressing – it is not meant to change anything. And the apparatus of planning is still all there; a vastly complex structure with its evidence basing-demand forecasting-sustainability appraising-environmental impact assessing-stakeholder involving-infrastructure levying-market appraising that seems to make little impact on the quality let alone the quantity of new housing in particular.


Northampton plays the game


Take me to the River Nene

So what does any of this mean for Northampton? Well despite the catastrophic failures of the housing market it’s still game on for growth planning, at least in theory. The planners to their credit are putting in place all the pieces of the Local Development Framework jigsaw. There is a Core Strategy which covers the town and sensibly the surrounding semi-rural areas as well. A Town Centre Action Plan has been produced and there are imaginative proposals for improving the ecology and accessibility of the River Nene. A ‘tariff’ for developer contributions covers everything from crèches to crematoria. The West Northamptonshire Development Corporation and the HCA are assembling land and remediating it for development – really quite amazing in Pickles world. So if new housing and jobs are not delivered in Northampton it won’t be for lack of plans.

Two things in the Core Strategy really strike you. The first is that the ‘sustainable urban extensions’ remain a blank canvas (of which more later). The second is the extent of the problems created by the New Town developments from the 70s onwards which now have to be overcome. These are a series of inward looking Radburn estates tagged on to new expressways, hugely car dependent and with little relation to the older Northampton. The new shopping centres, offices and factories are all out of town. The town centre is economically weak – overshadowed by nearby Milton Keynes.


City centre ambitions


Closed: ambitions for civic transport. Borough Transport offices.

The Core Strategy and the Action Plan include lots of sensible policies to strengthen the town centre – to try and make it a ‘city centre’. Bravely it includes a ban on any further superstores, which are already hyper dominant with just four big supermarkets taking 40% of the total retail spend. Enemies of Enterprise indeed! The strategy also includes lots of good intentions about improving sustainability with obligatory calls for ‘high quality public transport’. Poor public transport is an intractable problem for Northampton. Always off the main line its rail links were butchered by Beeching so although it has outer suburban services to Euston and the West Midlands, there is no connection to other Northants towns, or to Leicester, Nottingham, Peterborough or Bedford. No wonder its expressways are clogged. Worse are the bus services. Northampton Borough used to run its own buses and their jewel box like offices survive next to the First bus garage. Londoners enjoying the benefits of regulated (and heavily subsidised) London Transport cannot imagine what it is like to rely on the anarchy of competing bus companies and where there are virtually no buses after 7 in the evening. All the sustainable travel policies in the world will not overcome the madness of bus de-regulation.


Amenities and services are left wanting

Although the Core Strategy says all the right things, Northampton’s experience shows us how difficult it is to deliver against the pressure of government backed market forces and the crippling lack of resources and powers of local authorities. There is a strong sense that the horse has already bolted. The business parks and estates along the motorway have little at all to do with Northampton the real place but are part of the amorphous M1City which is a fairly inevitable result of their genesis as an extruded part of the London megalopolis.


The Belgium of England


Free market or real market?

When Ian Nairn stopped off in Northampton on his 1972 journey through England what he saw was the handsome County town rebuilt after the great fire of 1675 which was just then being knocked about a bit, and the Northampton of what had been the ubiquitous boot and shoe industry. It was a distinctive, distinct and quite separate place – certainly not part of the Home Counties. Nairn loved the open market which he thought was more like Belgium than anywhere in England (he thought this a compliment). Nairn rightly bemoaned the ignorant destruction of distinctive buildings around the market place, one of the finest in England, and the extreme banality of their replacements. Worse was to follow. What was the subtle skyline of the town seen from the South Bridge over the Nene is now completely dominated by the dismal 1972 Grosvenor Centre flanked by office slabs of a similar date and more recent cliffs of apartments near the Station. Even more disgraceful is the blank and unfathomable Crown and County laager beyond the Grosvenor Centre which has no relation to anything. It is shamed by the quality and confidence of the Police, Fire Station and Baths across the ring road built in 1938-41 and which Pevsner found ‘desperately uninspiring’. Well, all things are relative.


The creativity and street levels are a joy


Not all doom and gloom


Great and gaudy: Barratt’s

Whilst redevelopment in the 60s and 70s was undoubtedly a tragedy as in so many historic towns, in fact there is still much to admire about the centre of Northampton. Many of the streets radiating from the grand All Saints, rebuilt in1680 after the Great Fire, retain their character. The Town Centre Action Plan could provide the basis for a real renaissance provided the government actually supports Northampton’s apparent determination.


Remember the future? The Express Lift tower

Apart from the Market Place the ‘must see’ buildings of Northampton are somewhat eccentric. Firstly the Town Hall designed by Edward Goodwin in 1861- wonderfully over the top Gothic which caused a sensation in its time. In the 1990s it was extended in a modern interpretation of Gothic, and exceptionally well done. On Derngate is the house remodelled at the end of his career and far from home by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (now National Trust). His client the model train maker Bassett Lowke also commissioned Behrens to design a startlingly modern Expressionist house on Wellingborough Road in 1925. Other curiosities include the Carlsberg Brewery of 1971 suitably by a Danish architect and with a wonderfully jagged roof line. Even more unusual is the 127m high Express Lift Company testing tower, only built in 1982 and quickly redundant. Now listed it sits in a roundabout at the centre of a fairly bleak residential redevelopment.


Built to last: the lively streets of the boot and shoe industry

Northampton’s development as an industrial town was slow but in many ways successful. The boot and shoe industry was small scale, initially domestic workshops and later small factories closely related to terraced housing, a lot like Leicester. The grander factories like Barratt’s Foot Shape Boot Works on Barrack Road were Edwardian. The town reputedly had the best working class housing in England and the middle class suburbs around various fine parks remain very attractive.


The Sorrows of Young Womersley


The Alice Coleman critique ends here, at the precinct...

The planned expansion of the town has proved more problematical. One of the first post war developments was the King’s Heath estate, designed by the Borough Architect J.L Womersley in the early 50s – before his Sheffield apotheosis. Now very rundown it is nevertheless easy to see why this was initially highly regarded, a physical manifestation of the Welfare State ideals. Set around a generous oval green the terraces of maisonettes and houses are well laid out and show touches of detail and care in design which is so patently missing from so much recent social housing. On the entrance axis to the estate and next to the green is a broad shopping precinct which should be, and probably was, the social heart of the estate. Sadly most of the shops are now empty and the precinct looks like a wasteland. The evident problems of the estate have little to do with Alice Coleman’s critique – the layout is conventional and very legible. It seems to have a lot to do with lack of maintenance and lack of opportunities. King’s Heath is just part of the base of the English housing and class pyramid.


...and here, facing the park


Eastern District twinned with Stasi-land


Given the "current climate" can you stop taking pictures?

Womersley post Sheffield also advised on the New Town developments of Northampton. The Eastern District was the first to be built starting in the early 70s. The scale of the new district – it has a population of 45,000 - and the rapidity of its development was extraordinary. This was not an urban extension – it was a new town plonked down beside Northampton. It includes its own town centre, Weston Favell, which is certainly a period piece. The shopping centre is high up above car parking and servicing originally reached by dramatic concrete stairs. It has an unexpectedly grand barrel vaulted roof. The original has been extended by more conventional retail park tat but the most extraordinary extension is a flying Evangelical church across the highway. Commercially successful it actually has a threatening feel and is the only place on our travels where we have been stopped by the Police for taking photographs. (Actually we were also stopped in Upton on the same day. Clearly paranoia is a big theme of the new Northampton.)


We can learn from this

The Eastern District is a maze of Radburn estates and you are instantly lost. Thorplands designed by the Northampton Development Corporation was under construction when Pevsner was revised in 1972. Bridget Cherry concluded: ‘This looks very promising. The varied heights, angles and textures of the houses already begin to create the atmosphere of a village centre with an identity of its own.’ Nearly 40 years later these qualities of design and place-making can still be discerned. With its local facilities, play pitches, pine trees and broad vistas it comes close to the social democratic dream – as long as you don’t look too hard. If the houses had been built better and maintained better it might well be des res today, but actually it is shabby and run down. The manic separation of traffic from pedestrians creates a confused layout where parking always ends up dominant. Easy to criticise now – the question is are new housing layouts learning enough from this? From our chronological tour of Northampton housing developments I fear not.


Tales of the Riverbank


I will not re-use a Carlsberg marketing slogan

The River Nene running south of the town centre is a big asset to Northampton. Surprisingly broad, slow flowing, lined with willows and in places flanked by parkland it almost has the quality of The Backs. The industry along the banks has largely disappeared apart from the Carlsberg Brewery. So Northampton was well placed for the Urban Renaissance as translated from the original Rogers by volume house builders.


Spot the security camera

In Northampton riparian development inevitably involves retail parks but the Morrison store off Victoria Promenade actually deserves some credit. It is a bit more than a shed and its jolly turrets are something better than desperate. Even better you can reach the front door with its nice little garden centre outside without having to walk across a huge car park – it is on the pedestrian desire line from the town centre to a new pedestrian bridge (although cycling is discouraged with draconian fencing chicanes).

Both banks of the river are lined with similar blocks of 4 storey yellow and red brick apartments with hard block paving everywhere, all verdant with weeds. A processional pedestrian way flanked with really utilitarian looking flats leads to the heart of the development – which is of course the car parks. The Mary Ann looking ‘fronts’ facing the walkway are actually the backs ‘cos inevitably the entrances are via the car parks. And they are huge and horrid. It’s not the apartments which are the problem, although they are pretty bog standard; it is the layout and the dominance of parking and traffic engineering. West of South Bridge more similar flats are under construction and more still are planned nearby on the hugely significant site between the Nene and Delapre Park which desreves much better.


Prince Charles woz ere: Upton in Bloom

What is driving this high density, low quality stuff is the cost of assembling, decontaminating and servicing Brownfield land, the burdens of ‘planning gain’ and of course the Faustian pact with the car. It is difficult to be optimistic that this will change. Northampton waterside is most probably the future. However there has been a bold attempt to follow the real Urban Renaissance model – at Upton, 3 miles west along the Nene Valley. This is a Greenfield site brought forward by the predecessors of the HCA with help from CABE and even Prince Charles. As with much successful development historically, it is the landowner who has adopted design codes – not the planning authority.


Upton Wives


A cover band of architectural styles and motifs

From the bizarre anomie of the Swan Valley business district next to the M1 where huge distribution sheds and huge car parks are set within acres of dog eye daisies and balancing ponds you approach Upton along Tithe Barn Way. (Was that intentional irony?) Across the shallow river valley you glimpse another surreal sight – substantial 4 storey perimeter blocks of houses in white stucco rising up next to the water meadows. You quickly realise that in Upton there is a cacophony of styles but all within a consistent structure of blocks which is coherent and legible - you will never get lost. The variety of styles from neo-Georgian to Ecobuild takes a bit of getting used to and there is something of that subversive Northampton eccentricity here. But actually the standards of design and detailing are very high compared to – well almost any other big new housing estate in England.


Beware of the cars

What doesn’t work quite so well (inevitably) is the parking. There is a very clear street structure and although some parking is allowed on the street, the paving designs are often over fussy to limit this. Most parking is in gated backland courts, which are a big drawback and add to the security paranoia that is something of a feature of the place. Few people are around – it feels a bit like a Stepford Wives set. The Junior School is a sinister affair with huge pitched roofs, blank walls and security fencing. There are no shops (hardly surprising given the huge retail and leisure complex on the other side of the expressway). Upton feels quite isolated by the expressway and is very car dependent, although there is now a bus route and for intrepid cyclists and walkers, the Nene Valley Way.


Victorian Values: the school fortress

The first phases of Upton are still being built and more are planned. It is certainly brave and ambitious and could mature into a successful community. Certainly due to the enlightened approach of the public sector land owners it is about as good as we can get without some much more fundamental changes in the way we plan, design and pay for buildings and community services.


Mastermind


A clear plan facing the park (similar to King's Heath)

So what will we learn from Northampton’s experience of large scale expansion over many decades? The Core Strategy sets out policies for each of the 7 ‘sustainable urban extensions’ it has identified – numbers of dwellings, amount of employment land, school places, size of local facilities, sports facilities, highway authority requirements, generic aspirations for transport and sustainability, flood management, archaeology, SINCs – it’s all there. The last requirement is ‘development proposals must be accompanied by a masterplan’.

The big issue is who commissions and controls the masterplans. At Upton it was the public authorities but Thatcher and Son’s marginalisation of planning has meant that this is very much the exception. Masterplans for Greenfield sites are invariably the creatures of developers and volume house builders. Design, place-making and sustainability are on the back foot from the start as every agency jostles at the developer contributions trough and the existing communities seeks to insulate themselves from the future community at all costs. Public authorities are usually left to try and bring forward expensive and difficult Brownfield sites. And public authorities are left to deal with problem estates which have been starved of investment and asset stripped. How can this be in the public interest? Ironically the biggest sustainable urban extension in Northampton is next to the King’s Heath estate. I wonder how this new development will relate to and improve the quality of life in the deprived estate? How sustainable, how urban and how much an extension of the town will it be; or will it be plugged into new roads turning its back on the estate and the town. I wonder.

So yes planning does need some fundamental changes. What is required is not the mumbo jumbo of Localism but much clearer leadership on the design of places and public spaces – masterplanning for want of a better term. I don’t think this is on the Pickles agenda. Nevertheless what we see in the development of Northampton pressages the future for many of our towns and cities - for good and ill.

--

N.B.
Unfortunately the Victoria Inn was closed on our visit but it looked good from the outside.

References:
Pevsner and Cherry: Buildings of England – Northants
J. Smith: Northants – A Shell Guide
English Heritage: Built to Last (Buildings of the Northants Boot and Shoe Industry)
Garry Mills, 'The Planners and the Planned', in Alan Moore: Dodgem Logic Magazine
CABE: Upton case study
West Northants Joint Core Strategy

After Northampton, Southampton was inevitably the next stop on our tour. The place where Ian Nairn began his road trip exposing the horrors of subtopia (his word) ‘…the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton’. His book Outrage was hugely influential, although unfortunately not influential enough to prevent the cancerous sprawl of motorways, tin sheds with various uses and euphemisms and endless insular housing estates under Mrs Thatcher and her political children.


History and dynamism still discernible (but only just) 

Southampton is not a city I had visited before except for brief student adventures but it actually seems very familiar from Owen Hatherley’s acutely observed writing. His book could well also have been called ‘Outrage’ but is actually ‘Ruins’. The evocation of his home town promises a kind of savage exoticism but ends with mostly disappointed hopes. That’s something I understand only too well from my home town, Cardiff and my adopted home, Nottingham - disappointed hopes that is. It is partly thwarted chauvinism and partly the realisation that they could have been so much better as places if only … they had been properly planned. Although not a creative person I literally dream fantastical versions of places I know – really all just jumbled up experiences but always very, very urban and usually very exciting. I wake up and remember that no, it’s not actually like that.


The Vision thing


Wyndham Court - a paradise of visual grammar

Ellis Woodman in his recent very perceptive piece in Building Design identifies the fundamental failure of the planning system as its inability to propose a vision to which developers (or indeed others) can respond. He rightly calls for ‘propositional planning as opposed to our wretched culture of development control’. Too right mate, but actually local government and planning in particular is drowning in bollocks visions – part of Blair’s hugely damaging legacy of public service ‘reform’ – you had to have a vision to tick the performance assessment boxes.


Walking the walls - L. Berger's excellent vision

These corporate motherhood-and-apple-pie visions are much less realistic than my dreams and can be easily parodied. ‘By 2026 (that mythical year in planning policy) Anytown will be a great place to live – a thriving and sustainable community of happy, smiling and prosperous people living virtuous lives. Better advice and counselling will mean that sexual satisfaction will be greatly enhanced but STDs dramatically reduced’ etc, etc - ha, ha. People are paid serious money to dream up this sort of stuff – I know, I’ve been there – and it’s not bad per se but just an illusion, a Pickles-less apolitical world of available resources, ‘partnership’ and an intent of social justice and sustainability.


Plenty o' place-making off Bedford Place

The problem is that, whilst it is focussing on this generic tosh, planning is failing to provide specific spatial and design vision about real places and doing the placemaking which should be shaping the future of our towns and suburbs. Planning has become largely reactive to the overwhelming power of the development industry, now in almost complete command of the built environment – a spatial expression of the economic and political realities of the White revolution. Southampton is no different.


Waterfront city with a world wide reputation?


The inviting Southampton Water - if you can get to it

‘Southampton will be recognised as the region’s economic, social and cultural driver….. It will be a centre of learning (and) have a varied and exciting cultural landscape…..Adapting into a sustainable waterfront city (it) will have a world-wide profile….. Southampton will be known as a city that is good to grow up in and good to grow old in where people are proud to live and economic success is harnessed to social justice…..Residents will feel that they are part of strong, sustainable, healthy communities…..The city will have high-quality, accessible environments designed to protect and enhance the city’s heritage whilst providing attractive and functional settings for 21st Century life…..Public spaces should take priority over car-dominated roads. Well-designed and contemporary public and private realms will be safe, accessible and create a sense of place and a rich built environment in which communities can flourish.’

So sayeth the Core Strategy. Yeah – good – let’s hope so. But there is a huge credibility gap between this optimistic rhetoric and the reality of Southampton today. In 2009 Owen Hatherley, writing with a passion which can only be explained by his great love of the place, concluded ‘Southampton is a compendium of all that is evil and wrong in this septic isle, but it didn't and doesn't have to be like this’.


Soton for NYC


The former station: pissing it away at the Casino

Southampton was a city of promise – the home of the great Transatlantic liners, a new city for the C20th (although actually one of the oldest towns in the country); it had almost American possibilities. Whilst Britain struggled through the last Great Depression Southampton prospered, as the extravagant Civic Centre shows. But the city blazed in 1940, a massive trauma with a lasting impact. After the war there was still optimism - amazing flying boats on Southampton Water as well as the liners and the opening of the magnificent new art deco Ocean Terminal. But the post war redevelopment of the bombed city centre was timid. The jet age robbed Southampton of its status as an international gateway and its role and special identity as a great port city was emasculated. It became less of a city in its own right and more an adjunct of the prosperous South.


The Soft South


West Quay: A dead end for pedestrians

The problem for Southampton is that the South doesn’t really do cities. So much of its economic ‘capital’ is the lush countryside, comfortable ‘heritage’ towns and twee rentier villages. The explosion of the outer metropolitan economy in the last 30 years has mostly been based on smaller towns and exurbs. Southampton is an oddity – a still recognisably working class city beyond the Deep South but economically dependent on its hinterland, rather than the other way round like a real city. This is quite deep seated. Southampton never developed a mercantilist economy, unlike say Bristol or Liverpool, so was always dependent on external initiative and investment rather than generating its own resources. This passivity ends up with the disaster of West Quay, Southampton’s new, tawdry and utterly depressing anti-city centre. In the last 15 years the City of Possibilities but Unrealised Dreams (symbolised by the destruction of Ocean Terminal in 1983) became the City of Subtopia which now laps the very walls of the medieval town.


Solent City


Solent City - Mayflower Park

There are some striking similarities with Cardiff – late development, narrowly based economy and over reliance on the port, civic centre hubris, wonderful parks, nice suburbs, de-industrialisation, desperation, capitulation to the lowest common denominator of spectacularly incoherent crap new development and abject failure to create a ‘world class’ new maritime city. But although the two cities are similar and similarly sized, Cardiff can fall back on its new role as capital of a small country. Southampton by contrast struggles to assert any regional role. Of course in Pickles World there is no such thing as an English region but historically Southampton was always upstaged by Winchester anyway. The city itself has a population of about 250,000 with as many again in adjacent suburbs and satellite towns. ‘Urban South Hampshire’, which of course also includes the slightly smaller arch rival city of Pompey, has a population of over a million.

From the 1960s planners dreamt of a creating a ‘Solent City’ metropolis north of the port cities and the government commissioned a feasibility study from Colin Buchanan. This concluded that up to 750,000 more people could be accommodated in a new kind of city based on ‘directional grids’. This would not be sprawl however, rather ‘a dispersed but structured and landscaped city with a new kind of urban texture’. There would be a new regional centre near Eastleigh which would eclipse Southampton city centre, inconveniently sited for motorways on its peninsula.


M27 City - Ocean Village

‘Solent City’ was quietly abandoned but a version of this, M27 City, came to pass thanks to Nicholas Ridley’s mad libertarian visions – not as a new kind of urban texture but rather as a subtopian, amorphous and unsustainable cul-de-sac, in both the literal and metaphoric sense. Under Prescott M27 City was again designated a Growth Point but with such a fragmented planning system (10 local planning authorities plus Hampshire), visceral local rivalries, the absurd and selfish delusions of exurbia (reinforced by local MP Chris Huhne) and now Localism this is going nowhere fast.


De-coding the structure


Regency roots - Rockstone Place

Southampton, the real city, actually has lots of advantages. Its site at the head of Southampton Water with the Itchen and the Test to either side and the New Forest beyond should give it dramatic waterside possibilities. Its network of central parks and Southampton Common are superb and very well used, at least on a sunny day in July. The ruined but extensive medieval walls around the old town are stunning and comparable to York or Conwy.


Plenty of quality still visible from High Street

The structure of the real city centre is very clear with a long street (now dubbed the QE2 Mile) running from the Civic Centre to Town Quay. It is punctuated by the Bargate dating from the C12th, which Pevsner says is ‘probably the finest and certainly the most complex town gateway in Britain’. North of this the street is Above Bar and below it is High Street. The old walls enclose the High Street and parallel streets – mostly visible towards Western Esplanade. Town Quay is the only place you can actually reach the water – strange for a place that advertises itself as Sea City.


The western walls before reclamation (and West Quay subtopia)

Two things make orientation and understanding the town confusing. Firstly the western town walls have no relationship with the water whatsoever, although the road below is intriguingly called Western Esplanade. Reclamation of the tidal Test estuary began in the mid C19th and with the huge dock construction of the 1930s a massive new industrial area was created. Come industrial decline cue the ‘regeneration’ of ‘West Quay’- but actually there is no quay, no water and no relation with the town either. Secondly the fine original 1840 Terminus Station designed by Tite and ‘one of the earliest surviving pieces of railway architecture of any scale in Britain’ is not a station but a casino. You arrive at Central Station, an architectural nonentity singled out by Lord Adonis for opprobrium – dreadful facilities, not at all central and hopelessly related to the real city centre, let alone the adjacent West Quay, which of course only does cars.


Southampton Terminus


Soho Southampton

Arriving at Terminus Station would be a great introduction to Southampton as this area has some sense of being a big city. Next to it is the magnificent Manhattan-like extension of the former South Western Hotel, only 7 stories but feeling like a skyscraper with its elegant stripped down classical orders, exactly what you might expect Southampton to be. The original hotel is 1870 French Renaissance. Opposite is the small Queen’s Park flanked by Queen’s Terrace, with Oxford Street parallel, both including Regency stucco terraces with wildly exaggerated bay windows, remnants of Southampton’s previous life as a resort. If anywhere in the city centre has a slightly metropolitan, up market, feel it is here.


Spot the odd one out, Canute Road

Along Canute Road are various interesting dock related offices intermixed with some gruesome new flats which screen ‘Ocean Village’, a miniature version of Cardiff Bay around a big marina off the Itchen. Everything here is threateningly private apart from the welcoming Harbour Lights film theatre. The original brick and vaguely Po-Mo buildings are resolutely dour but later apartments in pastel stucco with ‘wave balconies’ are quite fun as is the 30s pastiche car park.


Harbour Lights

Queen’s Park is now cut off from the water and isolated by the inner ring road gyratory. You can just glimpse the ships through heavy duty security fencing. To the west is Town Quay, the only place where the water is accessible to the public and from where ferries depart. The adjacent Royal Pier is shamefully derelict although its jolly Brightonesque pavilion survives as a Thai restaurant. From the rather scrappy Mayflower Park you can watch the ferries coming and going and see the massive, and I mean MASSIVE cruise liners at the heavily fortified terminals to both the west and the east. They are quite a sight. The vast inaccessible container port recedes into the distance, lacking drama.


The Walls have it


Walk the Walls

The inner ring road severs Town Quay from the Old Town where the remnants of Watergate mark the start of High Street, now the QE2 Mile. Behind the walls to the east is Winkle Street with the originally C12th God’s House Hospital, its gardens now surrounded by good new residential development. Here with the extensive medieval survivals you could be in York or Conwy. However along High Street the new apartment blocks, some incorporating ground floor retailing, are overpowering like the standard issue for southern European inner cities, not all bad but there are some shockers. The central section of High Street retains something of the grand street before the blitz, including the fine C18th Dolphin Hotel and grand C19th and early C20th banks and commercial buildings. Towards Bargate however wartime destruction meant the street was rebuilt with mean shops and has a rather desolate feel.


A pattern worth repeating - Bugle St

The Old Town, essentially to the west of High Street, has surprisingly not been branded a Quarter although actually it is one. Within the extensive remains of the walls the old street pattern is largely intact and there are many ancient survivals including the very fine Tudor House, now a museum. Only on Bugle Street do you really get consistently good townscape but the feel and scale of the post war residential redevelopment , much of it of the Civic Trust school, is appropriate and convincing. The bare square in front of the ‘austere and impressive’ façade of St Michaels (the only intact medieval church) is memorable and quite un-English. A wonderful contrast with this small scale is the 14 storey Castle House of 1963 by Eric Lyons, providing the punctuation that the lost castle should. Southampton deserves credit for its restoration work and largely well judged residential developments over many decades. However the Old Town remains a bit forlorn and lacking vitality. It is crying out for a more creative and dynamic approach to the use of buildings and spaces – possibly something the universities could be leading.


There was such a thing as Society


City centre living social housing

The ruins of the bombed Holy Rood church on High Street were restored as a memorial to merchant seamen by the City Architect, L. Berger, in 1957. After Southampton’s timid start to reconstruction, Berger was responsible for a much more ambitious approach, as can be seen nearby in the pleasing Holy Rood estate completed in 1962, by Lyons, Israel and Ellis. The blocks of flats are well proportioned and with better maintenance this would be a really good residential environment, right next to Debenhams.


Good design: abused and neglected by the free market

The extent of public housing in the city centre is remarkable, especially towards St Mary’s which dominates the area with its massive steeple designed by Street. St Mary St looks like a mix of Lymington High Street and Brick Lane, all very run down but lively with a small street market. Up Northam Road is the Millbank Estate which Pevsner calls ‘an outstanding piece of urban development’, and he was spot on. The centre piece is the 14 storey Millbank Tower around which are 3 and 4 storey blocks ‘laid out with unusual sensitivity’ and a colonnaded shopping centre sensibly related to Northam Road. Heartbreakingly all but one of the shops are closed. The tower has been clad in some crap shiny stuff. The pathways are strewn with litter - the binmen are striking against Council cuts – the shape of things to come. The place sums up the social and architectural vandalism of our dismal age and the disappointment of the social democratic dream. But it did not have to be like this – it was not inevitable but the result of cynical political choices.


Above Bar below par


Ignorance and belligerence 

Above Bar was pretty much flattened by the Luftwaffe and by common consent the subsequent rebuilding was dismal. David Lloyd in Pevsner says it ‘has the look of a Mid Western town in the early 30s if there had been planning control and Portland stone’. Much more ambitious plans had been draw up by Adshead, one of the foremost planners of the time appointed to advise on the redevelopment. He imagined a grand new street parallel and east of Above Bar with a monumental circus, a sort of cross between St Peter’s Square in Rome and Chester’s Rows, on an axis with the Guildhall. It was to have two levels of shops and bridges at upper levels. This was scuppered by the timidity of the Council and the various Ministries. With the hindsight of more than 50 years the decision to rebuild largely on the old street pattern may be applauded.


Proportion, respect and elegance: everything West Quay is not

The post war shopping streets of Southampton are fairly dismal but in comparison with the subsequent tsunami of retail detritus in Britain, mostly post-Ridley, they no longer seem quite so naff. At least they could still do curves to follow the street line and despite the preoccupation with uniformity, so expressive of the welfare state paradigm, there are touches of individuality. There were two good new buildings on Above Bar. Marland House has excellent proportions, with 3 storey colonnaded shops and balconies above and a subtle curve to the Civic Centre. A modest tower rises 5 more stories sitting excellently into the townscape – 1963 at its best.


An old planner’s dream


Trying the new cantilevered benches out for size

However the 1958 Tyrrell and Green department store which was opposite Guildhall Square has recently been demolished. John Lewis decamped for West Quay in 2000 and plans for a new arts complex designed by CZWG, which were widely panned, have stalled. So the Council has cleared the site for a temporary landscaped events space which in a crude way fulfils Adshead’s vision for a grand Guildhall axis, and confirms it was a duff idea. After West Quay, which is essentially responsible for the disaster, this sad episode must represent the nadir of planning in Southampton.

Guildhall Square, the concession to Adshead’s grand plan, is an austere place but does provide a good view of the severely classical and rather under scaled Guildhall. Despite recent repaving, which includes cantilevered benches in the form of waves with inset text invoking memories of the site (OMG), it lacks activity and is certainly not helped by the destruction of the city’s emblematic department store leaving a gaping void opposite. On a sunny Saturday morning there was literally no one there.


Sea Civic Centre


Grandiose ambition from the Morbid Age

The Civic Centre built 1929-39 is nothing if not ambitious. A huge complex in a ‘Free Classical’ style all faced in Portland stone it incorporates the Guildhall, council offices, law courts, art gallery and library. Each of its four frontages was until recently symmetrical with a grand entrance and flanking wings. The seemingly immensely tall and tapering asymmetrically placed tower is the iconic landmark of the city. It certainly makes a statement about the city’s self-confidence at that time, now so sadly lacking. The art gallery is delightful and has an excellent collection of modern works. However it is difficult to appreciate the complex fully at present as much of it is behind hoardings. The abandoned courts and police station are being converted and extended by Wilkinson Eyre for the ‘Sea City Museum’ which will celebrate Soton’s maritime history majoring on that albatross - the Titanic (see OH’s very amusing blog).


Expansion and poise 

This seems like a very odd decision. You might have expected a maritime museum to have some relation with the sea. Despite its virtues, the Civic Centre lacks this. Surely the new museum should be the centrepiece of an ambitious strategy to re-imagine and re-invent the waterfront as attractive and accessible public spaces. These it singularly fails to provide today. Surely this would begin to realise the Core Strategy ambition for a ‘maritime city with a world wide reputation’. Next to the drama of the cruise liners and next to the medieval walled town you have a viable tourism product as well as a source of local pride. I could swallow the Titanic for that but Sea City without the sea doesn’t make any sense.


When is a Quay not a quay? When it is a shopping mall


Our aggressive and destructive consumer economy 

And so we are drawn inexorably to the West Quay shopping centre. No doubt there is meant to be some architectural reference to a moored liner here with the random outlying car parks as tugs. Actually the massive structure is lumpen, lacking the sleekness and dynamism of a liner – it is more like a bloated leech. At either end John Lewis and Marks and Spencer proudly announce their shameful tenancy. Because it is built on reclaimed land the ground level is several floors below Bargate, so the shops sit on layers of car parking which of course is where you will arrive.


Apparently this is "Western Esplanade"

But let us pretend that you approach from the real city centre. It is just a stone’s throw from Bargate, right next to the town walls but you are immediately sucked into another ersatz universe. One tentacle extends to Above Bar by decking over Portland Terrace, which has to duck right under it. The centre completely obliterates the central part of Western Esplanade, making a street which should be a key part of the town’s legibility completely incomprehensible.


Subtopia City


The City Council have recently moved into new offices

Internally there are absolutely no distinguishing features. You can however promenade around the exterior of the blank shopping mall high up above the ‘street’, from whence to better survey the deadening tat of retail parks, budget hotels, KFCs, etc which actually occupies the great bulk of this huge redeveloped area. A gargantuan IKEA dominates the horizon – the Swedes have a lot to answer for. The hotels are just the most depressing thing. The De Vere Hotel, wonderfully described in Bad British Architecture as ‘a shit-brown postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it’ comes into the ‘it’s so bad its good’ category. For the rest, they are the usual dismal chain house styles all grouped together around TGI Friday. Welcome to Southampton.


o rly?

There are people here trying to find their car parks all strung out along the ludicrously named Harbour Parade - there is no harbour and there is no parade - it is completely hostile territory for pedestrians. This is right in the heart of the city centre - unbelievable. Surreally a plaque is let into the tarmac saying: ‘Legible City - coming soon'. I don't think so.


WTF townscape 

The tragedy of Southampton is the paucity of the City’s vision in aspiring to such banality. 'The Experian retail rankings tempted me and I did eat'. But in promoting the overweening West Quay it has devalued and debased the real city centre which can now look forward to a pound shop, charity shop, empty shop, Wetherspoon’s future.  How long can the quite elegant Debenham’s survive, stranded on the wrong side of town?


Debenhams and the coherent city: under threat from previous image

The shopping mall, hotels etc are not really worse than those up and down the country (that is Britain’s tragedy) but usually they are contained or restrained within a recognisably urban structure. Here the retail parks have come to town, and so at West Quay there is no such structure.


The return of the oligarchic spa town (sort of)

Ironically the cruise liners are putting Southampton back on the map – a new terminal is being commissioned. It should be reinventing itself as a tourism destination, re-discovering its Regency roots. But what on earth can visitors think of the mess that is the city centre now, especially if you arrive at a West Quay hotel (although all the new hotels are just as bad).


Let’s make a masterplan


Following a plan: detail from the Southampton mosaic 

What can be done? Given the scale of the gratuitous damage done so recently I don’t have the answer. The City has recently appointed a consortium led by David Lock and including the excellent Gehl Architects to advise on a new masterplan. Good, with two caveats – firstly that Gehl Architects are not just there for window dressing and their approach is central to the conclusions. Secondly that the City actually acts upon the recommendations.

Three things seem obvious. Southampton must capitalise on its unique assets – the medieval walls, the water and the drama of the big boats and link the two. It must create a ‘world class’ environment around Town Quay, Mayflower Park and Queen’s Park, presently dominated by traffic and damned car parks. Secondly it must have a decent station with a proper street axis to the Civic Centre. It already has the start of the new street with wonderful 1966 Wyndham Court commissioned at a time when the City actually had some vision. And then  the City must dramatically reduce the overwhelming dominance of traffic - make Legible City a reality.


Bargate detail - the walls are an asset not a hindrance 

Southampton is a frustrating place. As my friend Nick says 'Its rich in many things but is just a fucking mess.' It does not seem to value its unique identity or its great achievements, especially its fine post war housing. Its aspirations for the built environment are 3rd Division and as we see at West Quay this lead inexorably to Subtopia. This was defined by Ian Nairn as ‘the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern’, which I think fits the bill.

The City of Disappointed Dreams.


N.B.
Fish & Chips and a Gales Seafarers Ale were enjoyed at the busy Platform Tavern

References:

N. Pevsner and D. Lloyd: Buildings of England - Hampshire
O. Hatherley: Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
O. Hatherley: http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com (too many to list!)
Jonathan Glancey on Ian Nairn: Guardian 15 May 2010
Ellis Woodman: Building Design 25 March 2011
C. Buchanan: South Hampshire Study
J. Hasegawa: Replanning the Blitzed City Centre
A. Temple Patterson: Southampton – A Biography

Eighteenth century pioneers: made in Derby

According to the European Union Brian Clough City has a metropolitan population of 1.5 million, larger than Glasgow, the second city of the Empire. It is called Brian Clough City because the only thing its two constituent cities could agree on was that Brian Clough is God. Brian Clough City is of course the Nottingham/Derby agglomeration and exists only in the minds of bureaucrats.


From here to St Pancras (cf. Rowland Ordish)

Defining cities is difficult, and nowhere more so than Nottingham which the Centre for Cities described as the most ‘under-bounded’ city in England. Less than half of the people who think they live there actually reside in the administrative city. From my house in West Bridgford I can hear the crowds baying at the City Ground and the thwack of leather on willow at Trent Bridge yet apparently I live in a rural community, according to the ONS. The data, being based on arbitrary local authority boundaries, has no geographic, social or economic integrity and so makes a mockery of the endless league tables beloved of government and lazy journos like Phil and Kirsty on Location, Location, Location. Arbitrary, or lets be honest gerrymandered, local authority boundaries also make it pretty impossible to have any sensible planning or economic development strategy for a big city.


What a Pickle


Debenhams - deserted for Westfield

But then, silly me, I was forgetting about partnerships and particularly Local Economic Partnerships, which of course must be business-led. In the Pickles imagination (if that is not a contradiction in terms) they will spearhead regeneration and development after the bonfire of quangos. Officially promoted partnerships are a bit like when your mum invited a friend for tea and you had to play with her kid even though neither of you really wanted to. The characteristics of partnerships are wariness, relentless positivism, opaqueness about objectives and conclusions, scarcely concealed vested interests and the inevitability of buggins' turn. The most fundamental characteristic of all is a lack of democratic accountability - indeed otherwise you wouldn’t need a ‘partnership’ in the first place.


In the glory days football was egalitarian

There are strong economic and commuting links between Nottingham and Derby.
However these are very definitely separate cities, separated not only by a narrow Green Belt but by deep historical, political and social prejudices. The (literal) Derby match with Forest stirs strong, even bitter, passions although you could argue that this visceral rivalry actually demonstrates the closeness of the relationship of the two cities. By contrast Forest fans are pretty indifferent to Leicester, which is much more of a real rival to Nottingham than Derby, always very much the junior partner.


This is Derby


Coming soon? Renewed interwar civic Derby

Derby City, unlike Nottingham, pretty much covers the built up area and has a population of nearly 250,000. Ian Nairn called it ‘that most Midland of Midland towns’, but for me it has the feel of a town in the foothills of the Pennines. Nottingham and Leicester are very obviously east midland cities with their long terraces of hard red brick but Derby has softer brick, more stone and stucco and looks and feels less unremittingly urban. It evokes somewhere like Worcester. The Derwent flows through the centre and the city is almost entirely surrounded by attractive rolling countryside full of NT houses, although the power stations along the Trent Valley exert a corrective to the picturesque. The Derwent below the town centre was flanked by polluting industry - now by visually polluting urban regeneration.


The distinctive and discerning Iron Gate

That Derby has a long history is evident in the streets leading up from the Market Place to All Saints, now the Cathedral, with its tall, square early C16th tower. The rest was rebuilt in the C18th in the style of St Martin-in-the-Fields and has wonderful ironwork. The town figured large in the early industrial revolution with the likes of Hargreaves, Strutt and Lombe, who set up a water-powered silk mill in 1717 just north of All Saints, now an industrial museum. In 1780 the Darley Abbey mill was built a mile upstream and both are part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage site. The early industrial revolution is wonderfully captured by local artist Joseph Wright’s paintings of fire and light on show in the Art Gallery.


Midland Junction


The Midland Railway Wyvern 

But it was the Midland Railway that made Derby. This was formed in 1844 as an amalgamation of three early railway companies whose junction was at Derby. The station was (and is) some way outside the town centre and this accurately reflects the relationship. Derby was a junction not primarily a destination. The Midland had its headquarters and works here and it was the centre of operations – so to railwaymen Derby was always far more important than the other much bigger cities that the Midland serves, and so it remains today.


British industry today (sigh)

Derby’s development post the Midland Railway was steady but its great expansion was in the first half of the C20th. Rolls Royce set up here in 1907 but the original factory is now demolished and the grand inter war Marble Hall empty. The RR Engineering Centre of 1964 is a fine example of the Modern Movement. Although cars are no longer manufactured in Derby, jet engine production is cutting edge technology and big business. Nationalisation enhanced Derby’s railway role with the establishment of the BR Technical Research Centre. However this world leading expertise was pissed away in the mad privatisation of the railways. The Thameslink order fiasco now threatens the survival of Bombardier, Britain’s last train manufacturer based in Derby. You could not make this up. Nevertheless Derby’s manufacturing remains relatively strong, at least compared to the rest of Britain, helped by the building of a massive Toyota plant on a disused aerodrome outside the city.

Derby, a pleasant and successful town, was made a city in 1977. This encouraged rivalry with that other larger and more imperial part of Brian Clough City – rivalry between cities being the more natural state of affairs than partnership. Subsequent striving to ‘punch its weight’, to go up in the city league tables has led Derby over the last 20 years to promote regeneration schemes which are mostly an unmitigated disaster.


Nothing to be proud of


Units of finance only - bollocks to the public realm

The first big project was Pride Park, Derby’s City Challenge. Note this as Heseltine thinks City Challenge was his most successful initiative and we may well expect Tory history to repeat itself soon. So we begin our tour at the statue to Brian Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor outside County’s Pride Park stadium. Of course the scene of their triumphs was the Baseball Ground now redeveloped for housing, not this new identikit stadium. At least there is a Greggs which is open on non match days – the only sign of life.


A Francis Maude consumable building

The area was an industrial wasteland east of Derby Station, cut off by the river and railway lines. The big regeneration idea was to decontaminate the site and whack in two big balls new roads. That’s it. There is no discernable plan, no pride – not of a civic nature anyway, no park, no relationship to the Derwent, zero concession to urban design, no pretence of place making. The only evidence of any design intent is the ubiquitous fussy street lamps which are no doubt meant to give the area a ‘special identity’. Pride Park is crap squared, not even aspiring to the standards of a business park. It has been built out as a series of sheds, or sometimes if you were being kind pavilions, all surrounded with car parking, overgrown landscaping and security fencing. What is completely amazing is that in this place which only exists to give primacy to cars it is virtually impossible to park. Everything is privatised, all the car parks barriered off, the streets all yellow lines to facilitate fast flowing traffic. Pride Park epitomises a society where all transactions are atomised and depend on separate car journeys.


Railway enterprise today

There are some big employers here including East Midlands Trains, successors to the MR, and Egg, the internet bank located in a huge grey battery shed, although its future is uncertain. The grandest building belongs to Rolls Royce but perversely is tucked away on a cul-de-sac. Solicitors and other professionals have decamped here from the city centre in dreary and respectable brick pavilions with steeply pitched roofs. These are often strangely juxtapositioned with uses like car repair workshops, but hey, who cares as long as there is plenty of parking. The many flashy car dealerships actually have the more interesting buildings at least compared to the fitness clubs, budget hotels and the usual array of mouth watering chain eateries – Frankie and Benny’s, Harvester et al, all cocooned in their own private spaces.


Bending over backwards for short term capitalism

That this non-place should be the outcome not just of commercial ignorance and greed but deliberate public policy, planning, regeneration and huge public subsidy no longer shocks or surprises. For Heseltine to claim this as success shows him to be a true Bourbon.


Railway Heritage


Renewed identity but heavy security

There is however one big success story – the restoration of Derby Roundhouse adjacent to Derby Station but this had nothing to do with City Challenge. This 16 sided engine shed engineered by Robert Stephenson in 1839 had been left to rot but together with an original engine shop, carriage shop, offices and impressive clock tower it has been restored for Derby College by a team lead by Maber Architects. There are some flashy new build additions with lots of orange (reference to Joseph Wright?) which probably strike the right note for the new college use. A very impressive achievement and real regeneration, but it is a pity that paranoia means the complex is all behind security fencing with a turnstile entrance like a youth offenders’ institution.


Aestheticism and laudanum  

Derby Station was bombed in the war and the remnants of the celebrated original 1839 Trijunct Station were recently destroyed for new buildings which look like a bog standard motorway service station – probably intentionally. Even more recently the futuristic post war concrete platform canopies were replaced. You can’t cross the station to the Roundhouse complex because of the ticket barriers – another outrageous privatisation of space which Sheffield has successfully stood up to.


The 1840s speculative railway boom - planned here

The extraordinary Roundhouse complex is matched on the west side of the station by the wonderfully severe late Georgian Midland Hotel, like the original station designed by Francis Thompson, and the delightful planned town of terraces for railway workers. These are beautifully proportioned in brownish red brick, some with paired Tuscan Doric doorcases and little gardens. They were restored in the 70s, a major conservation triumph. In between is the swaggering red brick and terracotta Midland Institute of 1894 by Trubshaw, the Midland’s architect.


Welcome to Westfield Derby


Words fail me 

This is a wonderful ensemble and a great introduction to Derby (the present station excepted). However the good impression quickly evaporates. You are no longer allowed to walk to the city centre down Station Approach as this has been turned into Pride Parkway which also seals off the Bass Park next to the Derwent. Pedestrians are directed through a wasteland of marginal uses and surface car parks – not a great approach as Derby Cityscape (the Urban Regeneration Company set up by Prescott) quickly pointed out. A new entrance to the city centre was planned here and this is clearly the right place for new offices and hotels, but the plans came to nothing –Pride Park had already nicked the market with no nonsense about masterplans, urban design or restricted car parking.


A reluctant street frontage by the global corporation

Across the ring road looms the truly appalling Westfield shopping centre. Derby, concerned about its low retail ranking, actually courted this monster – as explicit a statement of corporate contempt for the urban environment as you are likely to find. The main elevation faces the ring road and makes absolutely no concessions to scale, composition, design or civic dignity. The ring road itself makes no concessions either - you reach the shopping centre via a newly constructed pedestrian subway. Given that most cities including Nottingham and Leicester were already taking out their pedestrian subways this was a seriously retro move. There are 3,600 parking spaces - I think you would guess that from their horrible dominance. Piled on top of the retail box and cages of car parking is another great box for a multiplex. It is light grey so you won’t notice it on the skyline, I don’t think. You can see it from just about every vantage point in the city.


Westfield propaganda masking the homogeneity 

Westfield does actually do a very short stretch of real street frontage to London Road - the blandness of its random brick, stone and glass elevations diluted by other interesting buildings. However ‘The Spot’, a small public space with an art deco clock tower - something very specifically Derby - is hideously overwhelmed by Westfield crap. Internally the new malls are quite clean lined and light, but are poorly connected to the rest of the city centre, which is reached through the narrow and claustrophobic arcades of the 1970s Eagle Centre. The Eagle Market however, although lacking its original octagonal stalls, is light and airy.

The new monster shopping centre has massively unbalanced the city centre dynamics leaving swathes of empty shops but Westfield has been successful in promoting Derby in the retail rankings – now benchmarked with Bath, Cheltenham, Chester, and York, allegedly.


Retro-city


Get out of the way: people who drive cars are more important

Derby’s inner ring road begun in the 60s was as destructive to an historic town as you would expect but it is also exceptionally disorientating with its loops and swirls and the dislocation of the historic street pattern. Only the northern and eastern legs were built before ring roads became unfashionable, undesirable and unaffordable. Derby, retro-city, however did not give up and pursued completion in the new world of Prescott’s ‘New Deal for Transport’. The old plans were dusted off and rebranded ‘Connecting Derby’, all dressed up with pieties about pedestrians, cyclists, bus priorities and regeneration. And to show how shallow the DfT’s commitment to sustainable transport really was they got the money. The ring road has recently been completed from Westfield’s car parks towards Friar Gate across the grain of the streets and topography of the town, leaving a swathe of destruction and dereliction in its wake. Hausmann had a plan for the rebuilding of Paris. Derby hasn’t a clue.


Another planet


Friar Gate - haunted by the Lunar Society

Friar Gate is a beautiful street lined with some fine C17th and mostly mid C18th houses but is rather dominated by traffic. It is punctuated by a wonderfully picturesque railway bridge with a fanciful cast iron balustrade by the Derby firm, Handyside, currently hidden by anti-pigeon netting and needing refurbishment. There are restaurants, hotels and bars – a civilised, social place. Friar  Gate restores your faith in the pleasure of good building design, proportion, quality of materials and craftsmanship, townscape, society – and Derby. The continuation of Friar Gate towards the centre is Wardwick, also a fine street containing many historic buildings and the Gothic style Museum of 1876. The Art Gallery is in the parallel Strand – a very handsome Victorian improvement street with stone neo classical curving terraces.


Pennine curves - a premonition of Buxton & Newcastle

Victoria Street is also C19th (the name is a bit of a give away). It contains the very fine and very grand former Royal Hotel, the central section stucco, commissioned in 1839, as well as other Victorian commercial buildings. There is also C20th retail chain architecture. The large former department store, restrained 50s with subtle curves, is now Silly Sid’s discount store since Debenhams relocated to an extremity of the Westfield centre. St Peters Street leads south to ‘The Spot’. St Peter’s is the only surviving medieval church. Opposite this the brilliant faux Elizabethan former Boots store of 1912 is empty. The parallel Exchange Street includes a number of excellent, very literate, early C20th buildings including the 30s Co-op Department Store. Cornmarket with its satisfying mix of mostly C19th architecture and proportion leads north to the Market Place.


Civic conflicts


Assembly Rooms: Tectonic integrity

Ian Nairn loved the Market Place which he saw as the centre of the town but unfortunately it no longer is. The Guildhall, remodelled in 1842, sits on the south side, the 1864 Market Hall behind with its splendid tunnel vault roof, cast iron columns and gallery. Opposite is the L shaped Assembly Rooms of 1971 by Casson. Pevsner thought this ‘bland in colour and rather featureless… it fails to give the Market Place any visual climax’. Yes, but it has some tectonic integrity. Stirling’s entry for the design competition envisaged a Campo-like enclosure of the east end of the Market Place. He was definitely on the right lines. The problem is that the space bleeds out towards the Council House and the wide open spaces of Morledge and the visual chaos that is Westfield.


A good thing but bleeding away into the distance

The new Quad film theatre and gallery to the south west of the Guildhall unfortunately does not provide sufficient enclosure. Designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley it is an admirable building in many ways, carefully sculpted and referenced, although I don’t quite see the promised ‘transparency of silk, lace and ceramics’. But it is an ‘iconic’ object in its own right rather than an effective part of the townscape – that would have required a different brief. The difficulty is the relationship with the Council House, obviously a key building of the city which needs its own setting. It was designed in 1938 by Aslin, the Borough Architect, in C18th style which Pevsner thought ‘a poor design’ but actually it looks like a real town hall and is well liked. It was part of a larger civic design including the Courts, now derelict (how typical), the Exeter Bridge and  new roads which are just too wide. These now give a depressing vista of Westfield and other recent follies.


It’s the location, stupid


The joyful and historic Sadler Gate

Iron Gate leads from the Market Place to the ‘Cathedral Quarter’ around Sadler Gate, St Mary’s Gate and Queen Street. These are delightful streets full of good buildings with interesting shops and businesses. The finest building is the County Hall of 1660, similar in details to Bolsover and Nottingham Castle. Nearby on St Mary’s Gate is the excellent Cathedral Quarter Hotel, converted from grand Victorian offices and showing that Derby can indeed do quality. Sadly this does not apply to Jury’s Inn. Its 12 blank stories complete with a little fin loom over the Cathedral – the most conspicuous but not actually the worst of the predictably dreadful crop of new hotels.


Unloved eighteenth century bridge seeks civil society

Opening up the neglected riverside was a priority for Derby Cityscape and rightly so. The elegant C18th St Mary’s Bridge with its rare surviving C14th bridge chapel is overshadowed by the bastard inner ring road. On negotiating the subway you will find ‘Derby Riverside’ next to the Derwent and opposite the Silk Mill. It has the dreariest, most joyless blocks of red brick apartments you can imagine, with a narrow riverside walk dominated by grilles to basement car parking. A new pedestrian mast bridge links this to a  new park behind the cathedral, which could actually do with a bit more landscaping. South of this boarded up sites await ‘exciting new mixed use waterside developments’. Beyond Exeter Bridge the pleasant Riverside Gardens are flanked by the Council House (temporarily boarded off for renovation) and the back of leaden Crown Courts, yet another triumph of the PSA.


Nadir


Zaha Hadidn't

Next we come to ‘Riverlights’, an exciting mixed use regeneration scheme which is breathtakingly bad. It sports a concertina roof which looks as though the designer had flicked through a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room and noticed a Zaha Hadid. There is masses of grey or cream shiny cladding, the elevations are completely featureless and vacant looking except for a desperately matey glass stairwell leading to hotels on the upper floors. As well as hotels it contains a casino, lots of boarded up restaurant/bars and a new bus station replacing Aslin’s much loved art deco bus station– something specifically ‘Derby’ destroyed for something utterly anonymous and banal. Riverside Gardens are tenuously connected under the ring road to Bass Park and this could have been extended along the Derwent to link to the Station and Pride Park except that Pride Parkway was blasted through instead.


Where did we go wrong?


Speculative (adjective) based on conjecture with high risk of loss

How come so much regeneration ends up like this - so trite, so cynical, inept, anonymous and crap? Of course there are many intractable reasons but the whole concept of regeneration is part of the problem. Since Mrs Thatcher big business has been so totally dominant and local authorities systematically disempowered – a process that is accelerating today with the cuts and Localism. Regeneration is a sort of desperate reaction – cities begging for central government favours, grasping at footloose investment to try and secure jobs and repair their ravaged economies. And like gladiators they are pitted against each other in competitive government funding schemes. Regeneration projects are measured on short term economic outputs, not design, identity or community interests. Crucially they must be acceptable to the demands of private sector corporations and the utterly dominant financial institutions. There are parallels with the power of News International over governments and civil society.


Bring back municipal socialism

The British diseases of chronic short-termism and iron central control of both private and public finance mean that high quality, imaginative regeneration has very little chance of success. The regeneration industry, chasing fickle public funding and hard nosed commercial investment which can always go elsewhere and needing to produce quick results to justify its existence, has come to believe any development is good and big shiny things even better. And in the competition between cities they end up increasingly the same. So Nottingham’s response to Westfield Derby is a bigger Westfield Nottingham and so on.


Contrast and surprise - Derby Guildhall

Heseltine is completely wrong to extol competition between cities for limited central government funding as the best way to promote regeneration – the opposite is true as Pride Park conclusively demonstrates. Cities need to be in charge of their own destinies, to have financial independence and to work on longer timescales. Prescott, who genuinely bought into the urban renaissance, regionalism and sustainable transport agenda got it largely right but did not have enough time, resources or political support to deliver.


Nostalgic for those meretricious Victorians

If we can survive the coming dark months of Pickles and his philistine insouciance there may yet be opportunity for better regeneration in Derby. The city has co-operated with Nottingham to prevent the stealthy emergence of another north Bristol (sorry, South Gloucestershire) type edge city sprawl around motorway junctions, the airport and new Parkway station – at least for the time being. This may allow city centre developments to become more viable. The Derby Cityscape masterplan identifies a number of further regeneration sites including the old Royal Infirmary on London Road. This is a street of real townscape quality – the original Victorian hospital buildings in a Jacobean style with ogee capped towers, and a striking modernist block of 1970. The as yet unrealised redevelopment promises ‘a new gateway to the city marked by an iconic, landmark building’. Oh my God not again! This is actually a great opportunity for a development to take inspiration from the special character of the context and integrate itself into a wider, more complex urban environment without screaming ‘look at me’. We can only hope. There are some signs of a more humane approach to development, like the Ash Sukula proposal on Sadler Gate.


Motifs and materials from the Peaks 

Derby is a very distinctive city despite the recent dross. It must remain so.

N.B. Lunch was served at the Brewery Tap, but Chris had a better half (a White Feather) at the Brunswick Inn.

"Hope for me, I hope for you..."

Edinburgh in the Festival is at once magnificent, tawdry, chaotic and wonderfully enjoyable. This riotous collision of artistic creativity, street bonhomie, international yoof, the arts establishment and the Edinburgh bourgeoisie is now a great international occasion. It is played out against the mad, thrilling topography on which the Old Town sits with the Castle Rock at one end and Arthur’s Seat at the other, adjoined by the restrained elegance of the New Town. Together these make Edinburgh one of the great cities of the world. How extraordinary that Scotland, with only one tenth the population of England should, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, produce two such exceptional European cities - so different from the English cities stunted by the overwhelming dominance of London. In some sense the grandeur of Edinburgh is the physical expression of Scottish nationhood denied political expression by the Union and at the same time made possible by the prosperity of the British Empire in which Scots played such a prominent role. It is also a physical expression of the class division and inequality in Scottish society, even greater than in England.


Customs House, Leith

Edinburgh lives off its extraordinary topography, urban design, architecture and the breathtaking juxtapositions which create endlessly fascinating and exciting townscape. Of course Train Spotting highlighted the rather less picturesque aspects of life on Edinburgh’s outer estates (again a very European model). Then there is that other Edinburgh, the sprawl of business parks, shopping centres, new universities, hospitals, all strung out around the City bypass and especially towards the airport – a parallel economic universe. Edinburgh is in many ways a polycentric, dispersed city with most activity on the outside and the centre reserved for tourists (except for the execrable concentration of gargantuan new offices to corporate greed between the Usher Hall and Haymarket).

View of Arthur's Seat along Easter Road

But Edinburgh is also Sea City. The views of the Firth of Forth from central Edinburgh, with the hills of Fife and East Lothian beyond, are quite stunning and finer than those of any other maritime city contender. Terry Farrell in his recent and evidently frustrating role as design guru for Edinburgh immediately recognised the potential of the city’s neglected waterfront to be a third element – ‘Sea Town’ -alongside the Old Town and New Town. The main focus of Sea Town is the port of Leith. Ironically this largely lacks extensive views of the sea which is cut off by the docks, the object of huge waterside redevelopment proposals. Will these match the magnificence of the location? Will this be different from - better than - dockland regeneration in that other Celtic fringe capital or at Media City, Cruise Ship City and elsewhere? Early examples are far from encouraging.


Strength and restraint near the town centre 

Leith developed around the mouth of the Water of Leith whose peaty waters flow into the Forth about 2 miles north east of the kitsch bagpipers on Princes Street. Leith has always been a place apart from, but bound to, Edinburgh. It was a separate Burgh until 1920 and so as well as imposing port buildings it has its own civic buildings including 2 town halls, courts, innumerable churches, assembly rooms, institutes etc. It even had its own main line terminus but the fine train shed was inevitably destroyed for a supermarket (Tesco). The docks, begun in the early C19th, were relatively modest until the construction of massive breakwaters in the C20th. These enabled large scale land reclamation for the port and industry – at the same time cutting off the town from the Firth.


"Copenhagen you're the end, gone and made me child again"

By the 1970s Leith had fallen on very hard times. Much of the historic port area around the Shore was derelict. Interwar council estates suffered from acute problems (also known as poverty) as with so many Scottish estates. New blocks of flats built following slum clearance in the centre were reviled. Leith was a pariah for the Edinburgh establishment and when, as MSc students, we chose to do a project on its regeneration our course tutors thought we were mad. And possibly we were as the scale of the problems was so enormous.


Decent infill near the shore

That was over 30 years ago. For the next 20 years not a lot changed except, very importantly, tenements were improved not demolished. Then in the late 90s and early in the new century there was an extraordinary urban renaissance – Leith became hip. Amazingly the old warehouses along the Shore were renovated as apartments. Posh restaurants opened up and Malmaison arrived. Gap sites were redeveloped, maybe not all of the quality you might have hoped for but generally of the right scale and fitting comfortably into the urban morphology and street structure. So far so good, but as the RBS bubble expanded (and Edinburgh had quite a hand in the financial madness) the scale of development got bigger, greedier. The focus moved from the Shore to the vast expanses of the largely redundant Leith Docks.


Brilliant and austere - Easter Road

Most people arrive via Leith Walk, that amazingly wide Georgian street which links the New Town to Leith. However an even more staggering approach is Easter Road, the earlier route from the Old Town and now the wonderful new Scottish Parliament. This is lined by tenements with shops at street level, not in gracious New Town style but rawer, freer, with many exaggerated Caledonian flourishes. The tenements frame a miraculous view of Arthur’s Seat – townscape to die for. Around Leith Links there are lovely late Georgian terraces and villas, very much in the classical style but less structured and more organic than the New Town. In North Leith there are also gracious late Georgian terraces around the neo-classical parish church with Ionic portico and immensely tall steeple, designed by William Burn (1816). This area with its elegant, sombre streets looks very like Copenhagen - on the same latitude across the North Sea.


The Banana Block: Unité d'Habitation - ish

The ‘Foot of Leith Walk’ is the heart of Leith but a bit of a non event dominated by traffic like so much of Edinburgh, despite lots of excellent and high profile expert advice to the City. The Kirkgate shopping precinct of 1965 is inoffensive but fails to provide a focus whilst the18 storey Kirkgate House which terminates the view along Leith Walk is not tall enough or sculptural enough to be visually effective. Far more exciting is the 10 storey but immensely long, curved Cable Wynd House by Alison & Hutchinson & Partners, 1966. Known as the Banana Block it has a fabulous rhythm of horizontal and vertical, but I was unable to convince my daughter of its virtues – ‘would I live there?’ Yes but….only if it was much better managed and maintained. There is a Michelin starred restaurant across the road.


Constitution Street

Constitution Street is full of excellent late C18th and C19th buildings including the earlier Town Hall of 1827 and the Assembly Rooms. At the corner of Bernard Street is the domed Corn Exchange (1865) with a gorgeous frieze, now very well converted to studios and a gallery showing an exquisite small exhibition of Japanese sculpture as part of the Festival. Bernard Street, which leads to the Shore, is the grandest commercial street full of banks and forms a wonderful wide, irregular space which should really be a square. Unfortunately it is part of the northern ring road. Between Bernard Street, Constitution Street and the Shore is a maze of wynds with much good regeneration and well worth exploring. In 1984 the Buildings of Scotland lamented ‘not much townscape at the Shore – a few buildings amongst gap sites’. It is now the picture postcard bit of Leith.


Fearsomely bland and heavily fortified - the Scottish Government Office

Across the harbour on Commercial Road is the severely neo-classical Custom House and beyond a long range of bonded warehouses forming the edge of the docks. Here we encounter the far less successful regeneration of Leith Docks. The bonded warehouses have been nicely converted to restaurants (including The Kitchin), bars and studios. However across what should be a grand square or park they look out on the faceless and fearsomely bland new Scottish Government Office. The space is actually a heavily fortified car park. The Scottish Office monstrosity manages not only to destroy what could have been a superb public space but also to sterilise Victoria Dock on its seaward side.


Ocean Terminal: Junk-it townscape

However Victoria Dock did not have much of a prayer. Its northern quay is now ‘Ocean Drive’ with predictably crude and assertive apartment blocks. To the west its lifeless waters dismally survey a wasteland beyond which is Ocean Terminal. That’s the German Ocean of course. It is just a huge, horrid internalised shopping centre which blocks off the Western Harbour. The only good thing about Ocean Terminal is that the buses actually stop outside the front door and the car park entrance is through a little garden which sort of subdues the drivers, who stop for pedestrians. The Royal Yacht Britannia moored next to the shopping centre is a visitor attraction for the credulous. Bemused tourists stranded in the wasteland ask ‘is there a historic port?’


Ocean Drive and that awful song by The Lighthouse Family

The construction of the docks bankrupted the City of Edinburgh in the C19th. They remained in public ownership until 1992 and soon after that the redevelopment began, which rather suggests that Macmillan was right about not selling the family silver. As Edinburgh boomed in the Blairite bubble massive developments of the docks were dreamt of – planned is not quite the right word. Masterplans were produced for Leith Docks and for the contiguous but disconnected Western Harbour with approval in principle for 18,000 new homes and 2 million plus square metres of commercial development. Blimey, that is big!


Named after a credit card

Western Harbour is the more straightforward. This is a huge area of recently reclaimed land behind the western breakwater. There are stunning views across to Fife and up the Firth to the iconic Forth bridges. It should be pretty much a tabula rasa, except that some crass planning decisions mean its interface with Newhaven and Leith are a huge Asda, a David Lloyd shed and a service station style Premier Inn (which is worth staying in for its magnificent views of the Firth). The early apartment developments, seen like distant citadels across the wasteland, are Platinum Point and The Element. Desperately trying not to be entirely negative, it is worth noting that Platinum Point has quite attractive courtyard gardens which are accessible if not exactly public. But the scale is inhuman and the confused composition of forms and materials suggests mental breakdown. The Element on the other hand is just an expression of shocking greed, cynicism and incompetence. What is absolutely amazing is that the public esplanade along the water is so mean and minimal – 2 metres of tarmac between crude and already rusting railings and dominated by private car parks.


Calvinist street frontage in a retail park context...

Having made pretty much a hash of the first stages of the Western Harbour regeneration Edinburgh insisted on a new masterplan before further development. This was drawn up by Robert Adam and Alan Baxter, an inspired appointment. Not being an admirer of Robert Adam’s architectural philosophy I had not expected to be sympathetic to the conclusions. But where so many masterplans are promo documents long on ambition, short on credibility, skating over the problems and telling the developers and the planners what they want to hear, this plan actually starts with an honest and realistic assessment. It considers the context, the climate, the connectivity, looks at building traditions and why Scottish towns are the way they are, as well as north European examples. It provides for a layout of traditional streets around a major new park (the size of Princes Street Gardens) and gives detailed design guidance for the individual blocks.


... and a free market back and sides 

This is an excellent example of masterplanning, but obviously only as good as its translation into actual development. The first blocks to be built out following its adoption suggest a developer screaming and kicking and only a half hearted commitment from the planners. Although some of the key principles of design can be discerned – the adherence to traditional streets, front doors, small front gardens, re-interpretation of traditional terrace hierarchies and orders - much of the design is weak and lacking detail and depth of modelling. Although there are front gardens the backs are a sea of car parking with the most utilitarian elevations. Worse still the corner at the main entrance eschews orders and scale altogether for a traditional bombastic developers’ ‘wow factor’ curved penthouse block. Delivering a high quality Sea Town is clearly not going to be easy.


The car park beneath the garden

Meanwhile in 2005 the privatised Forth Ports agreed a detailed Leith Docks Development Framework with the City. The stated aim is ‘to create a sustainable, commercially successful, well designed waterfront development which will transform Edinburgh into an international waterfront city’. In 2008 outline permission for this massive scheme was agreed but the financial contributions (development tax) were not concluded. The development was predicated on and conversely justified, the ill fated Edinburgh tram, which is now not arriving in Leith anytime soon due to the bizarre procurement of public transport in this country. With the financial and property crash casting a very dark shadow a revised outline application has been submitted for a much smaller inner area of the docks – now to be known as Edinburgh Harbour.


I'm afraid it's Terminal

Urban Design Guidelines accompanying the application draw on a litany of regeneration examples from Amsterdam via Baltimore, Bilbao, Chicago – let’s stop at the Disney concert hall in LA. Everywhere the sun is shining on glistening water and smiling happy people. But here I am at ‘Edinburgh Harbour’ in August with leaden skies and a howling wind whipping across the water. Having lived in Edinburgh I know the climate is perfectly congenial, but dockland developments with their exposed position, the large bodies of water, the micro climates created by tall buildings and lack of effective street enclosure tend to make for a hostile environment. I strongly suspect that reliance on waterfront activities as the focus of a community of this scale is a mirage.


The Element - your vibrant and active waterside?

The UDG says a lot of the right things but comes across as the triumph of hope over experience. Yes - mixed uses, yes - active street frontages, civic squares, community parks, vibrant and active waterside, cycle networks etc, etc. Definitely remodel the recently constructed Ocean Terminal to be outward facing and provide a pedestrian axis to the waterfront (good luck with that one). But when it comes to specifics the masterplan fails to convince.


Just pop a few more financial units on top

Firstly the building heights supposedly based on the principles of place-making actually look more like the maximum the developer can get away with, taking into account prescribed views and the impact on older buildings. The general height of new blocks is some 8 storeys, about twice that of the traditional Scottish tenement with its well proven track record of townscape and place making. Some of the street blocks go up to 13 storeys, so God help the vibrant street life below. There are two towers on the harbour edge, one of 26 storeys, which seems a far more sensible strategy than piling up flats above the street – just go and look at The Element to see what that will be like. Secondly there is no convincing approach to parking. Overall 5,000 parking spaces are planned, including new multi storey car parks, but mostly the parking is in basements and undercrofts. The impact of this on street elevations, active uses and street life is all too predictable. And of course the problem is exacerbated by the greedy density of development and the lingering preoccupation with separation of traffic and pedestrians, itself antithetical to street life. Then the various public plazas lack real focus, activity or sufficient critical mass to be really vibrant people places even on a sunny day.


Marooned in a trail of wasteland

The development of Leith Docks is a huge project and hugely important to Edinburgh. Planning for it has been going on for over 10 years but the principal player has not been the City Council but the privatised Forth Ports whose day job is, err, operating ports. This is very different from, say, Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm where the City took the lead with a clear long term plan. Come the recession and grand regeneration plans are floundering. Edinburgh recognised that development on this scale would need to be ‘kick started’ by public funding but, just as it got approval for this, Forth Ports pulled out of the deal and put the site up for sale. Having made hundreds of millions on the sale of overpriced land Forth Ports now see the property game is over. They now plan to ‘reindustrialise’ the huge outer expanses of the docks with a new bio-mass plant and wind turbine production which actually sounds like a much more sensible strategy. Even so the residual areas for future housing around the inner docks and at Western Harbour are huge.


Might as well knock it down and build something worse eh?

In the regeneration game Scotland has the advantage of a less dogmatic, more flexible, government and a more urban tradition than England. This is exemplified by the tenement which, despite some drawbacks (I know, I’ve lived in tenements), is the best model for high density city living. But Scotland in the C20th also had a tradition of building really poor public housing environments. Close to Ocean Terminal are blocks of 70s flats boarded up and waiting for demolition – massively wasteful of public money and embodied energy. It will be a tragedy if these mistakes are repeated in the C21st. If this is to be avoided then architects, planners and urban designers need to be far more realistic about the developments they are promoting and far more careful in detailed design and layout.


"And our love is, an antique song..."

Leith illustrates the opportunities and the problems very well. We are clearly at the endgame for brownfield regeneration fantasies loosely based on the Urban Renaissance prospectus but translated by cynicism, naïve optimism and carelessness. The market has changed fundamentally but the need for housing, for regeneration of urban areas and brownfield land remains ever more pressing. Different models for development are required with an end to free market shibboleths. Translated, this must mean a lot more Council housing in humane, well considered environments - not more of the same dross we see at Leith Docks and so many other vibrant regeneration lash ups. This will require architects and planners to have confidence in taking responsibility for design outcomes and to honestly learn from past mistakes - something they have not been too good at in the recent past.

By Chris Matthews



Leicester is a red brick city and appropriately home to the last of the “red brick” universities. It is also home to De Montfort University, named after the alleged progenitor of parliamentary democracy. Not surprising the history of English universities has closely chimed with the ruling class, which was slow to embrace industry and technology. It wasn't until 1871 that Oxbridge was forced by government to grant degrees to non-conformists. The University of London from its 1821 inception realised it needed to match Scotland and Europe in pioneering new subjects such as political economy and medicine. Oxbridge was stuck in a pre-industrial age, while the new northern cities had no provision to grant degrees. This problem was met by London granting affiliated degrees to provincial institutions, and eventually these college outposts grew into the "red brick" universities we know today.


A new University


Insert joke about academic insanity here - Fielding Johnson

Leicester University sits somewhere between the "plate glass" new universities of the 60s (Sussex, UEA) and those misleadingly titled "civic" or "red brick" which began out of the idealism of private industrialists (Manchester, Birmingham). As the last in line of the civic universities, Leicester is architecturally a contrasting campus. On the one hand it is an antiquarian box of tricks: an acquisitioned Prussian-style lunatic asylum, numerous nineteenth century mansions dotted about and the dour 1940s neo-Georgian stuff by Shirley Worthington (unbelievably the Ken Edwards building mimicked this in the 90s). Neighbouring the campus this pastiche continues: a memorial and gate lodges by Luytens and a pleasant neo-classical concert hall from 1913. Yet on the other hand this campus is a graphic designer’s mood board. When Leicester made the leap from College to University in 1957 Leslie Martin was appointed to create a masterplan. This resulted in a series of buildings by the very protagonists of British modernism.


For the city and the students - Victoria Park

What can be said about the individual buildings which hasn't been said already? When I was a student here I always preferred to approach the university via Victoria Park: Lasdun and Stirling's work providing a powerful backdrop to an autumn kick about or some gossipy summer lolling. Internally the relationship between the modernist towers and the park also works well. In the floors above the mezzanine of the Charles Wilson building you get a widescreen view looking south towards the central watershed of England and the blue/green subtle bowl of Leicestershire.


We can work with this - the Science Block

The other entrance is via the tree-lined University Road. Leslie Martin's science complex is unfortunately paying lip service to Luytens memorial and this mealy mouthed statement is further exacerbated by the tacky paving. Yet there is an interesting change in levels and the buildings have some contrast and rhythm. With the right kind of landscaping maybe the recently appointed Terry Farrell can reawaken this forgotten spot. The extensions to the Medical Science complex on the other side of University Way are a dire warning of the mental health of management during the last two decades, yet somehow the Richard Attenborough Arts Centre managed to sneak in. This modest modernist sits pretty between the postmodern beasts - unfortunately enveloped by car parking.


The tart in the library

I nearly didn’t write about the Engineering Building: my sorry excuse being that I was trying to discern the rest of the campus and critical praise is already plentiful (here, here and here). The job of the historian is to find interest about things which people don’t talk about. Yet I can’t avoid it. I remember from the library it was like some sort of clever tart: frustratingly leading my eye astray as I tried to trudge through that must-read journal. As the long winter nights drew in I was seduced by the glow from the crystal geometry of the workshops. Clever tart? U wot mate? It has a paradoxical wit: coherent and dynamic, distracting without being shallow – things which many iconic buildings today are not. Surprisingly Ian Nairn wasn’t charmed and though I’ve not read the Telegraph article, he is quoted as using the terms “bizarre”, “bloody minded” and “angry”. Pevsner meanwhile was full of praise.


Movement & balance

There are other moments to enjoy here which are not always on the architectural glossary of experiences. The concrete slab porch of the Museum Studies building has movement and balance, but who originally designed it? Despite the eternal wind created by the towers at the top of Mayor's Walk, the Attenborough paternoster is a lot of fun: you float above the bricky city in an open wooden box pulled by creaky ropes and as you approach the top you can see the northern end of Leicestershire: Soar becoming Trent by a steaming power station.


The Halls of Residence


Nice roof, shame about the curly fries

New student accommodation is notoriously bad and is visibly more penal than habitable. Oddly I have come to learn how lucky I was in experiencing these 1960s halls of residence first hand. Leicester University grew rapidly in the years immediately after the Second World War and the halls positioned on the outskirts of the city reflect this expansion. They are endowed with generous landscaping, large rooms, plenty of light and a clear plan.


A muted revolution

I spent a year at Digby Hall and although the head warden named Geoff liked to impose some sort of infrequent Oxbridge pretension, the halls were very convivial for socialising and maybe invoked some sort of revolution by the time the year was out. "Geoff is a cunt", was memorably burnt into the turf. Internally the dinner hall rhomboid roof is dynamic and externally the complex of is a muted Scandinavian modernism by Sheppard, Robson & Partners.


The wealth of student life (fifty years ago)

Stamford hall on the other hand doesn't do modesty. Pevsner thinks this is Lasdun’s most assured Leicester building. The mono-pitch dining hall and tiered common room terraces are asymmetrically opposed and although I’ve not been inside, there is probably an interesting play with light. The accommodation stretches out along castellated walls in a grid of playfully placed windows and round the back the external staircases and overhead bridges rise among the evergreens. Wonderful.


A lost civilisation

But what is overwhelming about Digby and Stamford compared to today’s plethora of incarceration is the sheer acres of green space. Nearer to town, College Hall by Leslie Martin and Trevor Dannat is reminiscent of Hannes Meyer’s work and is thankfully awaiting a new use as a converted conference centre. I initially feared that this building would be for the knackers’ yard, and that like the Peter Moro designed Clare Hall would be replaced by a cul-de-sac of Wimpey legoland crap off Elms Road. The rest of the halls are pretty nondescript: apart from Opal Court (Carbuncle Cup winner 2007), the unselfconscious nineteenth century mansions and the paternalist Beaumont Halls by Shirley Worthington.


The unselfconscious Leicester mansion

The main nagging problem with most of these halls is that they are positioned miles from the main campus and city centre. It was a real ball ache to make those early morning lectures; the bus forever late, full and slow. But this problem could have been ameliorated if the University and City had Dutch plans for cycling - London Road is wide enough to take it. Door to door could have been reduced from a painful hour to a casual twenty minutes. There is also a social problem, in that it alienates the students from the city by sticking them in suburbia. By the time the year was out I was desperate to escape this closeted environment.


Clarendon Park Di Dah


Frightfully lah-di-dah (I love you very much) 

Unlike Cardigan Road in Leeds, the sheer increase in the number of students has not ruined Clarendon Park. Kids still go to school here and the high street is varied and growing: there are charity bookshops, two Delis, a number of good cafes, bars and a greengrocers. Furthermore, there are still corner shops within the leafy bye-law terraces including a butchers and a real ale emporium. Unfortunately the gloriously untidy second-hand record shop has gone. Yes it does have some pretensions but socially it’s quite mixed and from here you can have an enjoyable walk into town. Sometimes I think why on earth did I leave?


Pseudo Cape Dutch – who knew?

One bored summer night me and a housemate went for a walk and noticed that the slope of Clarendon Park was like the English class system, and the higher you climbed the closer you got to wealthy Manor Park, Stoneygate and Knighton. These places are always worth a wander as you'll often find something odd like a pseudo 1920s Cape Dutch house but generally these places are neither pretentious nor opulent. Ray Gosling rightly noted in the 1960s how Leicester's non-conformist factory owners were modest in their mansions and often you barely notice anything behind the tree-lined roads.


De Montfort Industrial Aesthetic


Municipality - Hawthorn Building

Polytechnics were always more municipal and vocational in origin. In the 1880s the local Leicester lad and hosiery industrialist AJ Mundella was often quoted in Hansard warning parliament about the advances of German education. The subsequent touring commission resulted in Act of 1889 which allowed local authorities to levy for new colleges of technical instruction. An assortment of art schools and colleges were often absorbed into one Technical School which provided instruction to those employed in the local trades and formed close connections with the town's industries. After 30 years of de-industrialisation these former vocational colleges provide instruction for which there are few jobs and graduate unemployment is currently at record levels.


Art & industry - Portland Building

The origins of the technical school and its association with Leicester industry is brought to life by the Portland and Hawthorn buildings at De Montfort University. Built in stages between 1896 and 1937, you can see how Leicester developed a traditional Jacobean style and then merged it into a sort of classical deco. There are examples nearby of this aesthetic in the former hosiery works: Bryan (Great Central St), Harrison & Hayes (Gateway St) and the Deacon Knitting Co (Grange Lane). W.G. Hoskins often bemoaned the prosaic industrial buildings of Leicester, but on closer inspection there is a definite Leicester aesthetic.


Light industry & art - Harrison & Hayes works

One of the main reasons I eventually returned to Nottingham was because it had better connections to the art school. To put it another way, ‘there was more going on down town’. This was probably because Leicester had a definite barrier: the awful ring road which had severed the city from the art school since the 60s. Hopefully the recent traffic taming by the Magazine will have an improvement both on the retention of students and the freedom to walk.


From the medieval to the future zone - Queens Building

The stand out piece at De Montfort is the Queen’s Building by Short & Associates. A High Tech PoMo Jacobean tour-de-wotsit reflecting Goddard and the nearby hosiery warehouses: height, detail and lots of motifs. It's all very Leicester and hard not to enjoy the complexity. Unlike Short & Associates’ similar Lanchester library at Coventry it’s not a disappointment inside but rather a Crystal Maze of stairs and overhead walkways. I might be alone in liking the tower of the Fletcher building, a standard public sector in-house job by Thomas Locke, yet internally it is coherent and the modernist features have been treated with respect unlike its twin at Loughborough College.


The poverty of student life - Grange Lane

De Montfort is not well planned and although the new Students Union attempts to create some sort of public space it’s all pretty bog standard stuff. None of the University of Leicester accommodation could be as bad as those provided privately at De Montfort. Mean windows, tiny rooms, naff all proportion, no sense of place and there are bloody loads of ‘em. Sadly, some of these jerry built developments have replaced perfectly good industrial buildings but hopefully the recession has seen the last of it. Just round the corner is a proto modernist factory on Henshaw Street from 1893, with a Leicester light industry aesthetic which Pevsner rightly thinks Stirling's masterpiece is evoking. Thankfully it’s listed.


Sod the county, this is Leicester

Further down Mill Lane and overlooking the Soar is another wonderful Jacobean deco hosiery works which has been converted into student housing. It has a series of piercing concrete buttresses and a sky scraper style wall of glazing. Together with the river and the 1890s iron bridge this place adds to the itinerary of impressive and distinctive Leicester townscape. The new student flats further down road are quite the opposite: unbelievably humans are expected to enjoy views out towards a ten storey darkened crevice in Newarke Point.


Narborough Road


Cycling on water (sort of)

A contemporary theme with regional cities and their Universities is retention of students: most bugger off to London, and it's only those that are left behind who actually get to know what “the brain drain” feels like. Thankfully the Narborough Road area is to De Montfort what Clarendon Park is to Leicester - only poorer. Like Clarendon Park it is easily accessible by foot and although the Bede Island complex is pretty dull, on a hot August afternoon the park has a lively commuter rush. The Council is also currently attempting something similar at the end of Soar Lane with Rally Park being redeveloped and made more legible.


Jacobean deco - Bryan works

What De Montfort students have that Leicester University doesn't is an attractive post-industrial canal-side location. I doubt if anything will be built which takes full advantage (apart from this idea by Ash Sakula) but as a sustainable commuter and leisure route the River Soar will take some beating. Although certainly not dramatic, it is accessible, sheltered and full of historic interest. The series of bridges, weirs, and locks are very exciting and there are two occasions which give the effect of cycling on water. Perhaps one day De Montfort students will be able to cycle to the Space Centre but at the moment the path is still a risky ball jangler past Abbey Park. The main area set for development is around the Great Central Railway station, which is strewn with industrial archeology, including a Jacobean deco hosiery warehouse and Friars Mill. Sky Scraper City fans often ignore the street and public realm, which is a shame as Leicester City Council may be an example to others: the whole area is slowly becoming more cycle and pedestrian friendly.


Proto-modernism c.1893 (by Stott & Sons)


References:

B. Burch, The University of Leicester: A History 1921 - 1996 (1996)
N. Pevsner & E. Williamson, Leicestershire & Rutland (1984)
J. Simmons, New University (1957)
N. Pye, Leicester & its region (1972)
M. Argles, The Royal Commission on Technical Instruction 1881-4, in ‘The Vocational Aspect of Education’, (1959)
A. Jones, Urban Impressions: Leicester City, in Jones the Planner (2011)
R. Gosling, Two Town Mad (BBC, 1963)

The power of the grid - St Vincent Street

I find geology hard to grasp – those incomprehensible time scales all in three dimensions. But I have just about got the concept of continental drift, which tells us that Scotland used to be part of North America. If you go to Glasgow this looks obvious. It has the feel of an American city – the grid, the scale, the dynamism, the self reliance. Visiting in August Brad Pitt was also there filming with Glasgow as a stand in for Philadelphia. Glasgow architecture and design up to the mid C20th ran on a quite different, more progressive, tangent to that of London and England.


Dear Zaha, this city doesn't need you - Botanic Gardens

Glasgow, the second city of the Empire, was once the fourth largest city in Europe and is still, inevitably after London, the most exciting city in Britain. Ian Nairn wrote ' Glasgow was a shock to me' and probably having just read that I persuaded my older brother who had no interest in architecture but had just passed his test to drive up there. After a fairly hair raising journey without a map we found ourselves at night in a townscape of wide streets and soot blackened tenements. We were in the Gorbals just before the wrecking ball. I had never seen anything like it. However crowded and mean the housing, these tenements had magnificent presence as streetscape. But that was a Glasgow in the 60s, more than half a century after its heyday and then determined to be part of the brave new post war world. This exceptional city with its unique style has for decades sought to restore prosperity and status by becoming more and more like every other big international city. So obviously it needs iconic new museums, hence the specific purpose of our visit. We went to see Zaha Hadid’s recently opened Riverside Museum, otherwise known as the Glasgow Transport Museum.


Fancy a picnic?

There is not much further that can be said about the building after that fantastic blog by Douglas Murphy well before the museum opened or the incisive review by Steve Parnell in BD. The AJ took a rather more star struck line. Clearly the museum is very popular. When we were there it was rammed, evidently mostly local people, often families with children and grandparents. Were they there because of the iconic building? I rather think not. Few people seemed to be looking at the architecture and no one else was taking photographs. The punters were totally absorbed in the exhibits which are a celebration of Glasgow, Glasgow engineering, Glaswegian skills and Glasgow of a bygone age. There is an awful lot here to be proud of and Glaswegians are rightly proud of it.


Cardiff Bay again

But what can you make of the building and more importantly its brief and its location?
Well one thing is certain - the location is crap, about as bleak and inaccessible as you could possibly imagine. Don’t think South Bank promenade - think Clyde Expressway. Its location at the confluence of the Clyde and the Kelvin famously or fatuously inspired the twisted architectural concept of the building. To either side are vast areas of dereliction with some apartment blocks in the distance, presumably the first phase of yet another vibrant waterside chimera which promises to provide a Clydeside walkway and a new bridge across the Kelvin to the museum. Back towards the city centre, if you could reach it, is that other icon – the Scottish Exhibition Convention Centre Armadillo by Norman Foster. This too is stranded on the wrong side of the Clyde Expressway and surrounded by car parks. The Riverside Museum stares at Govan on the opposite bank across a surprisingly narrow Clyde. (How on earth did they launch those huge ships? I think the answer is sideways.) Govan is of course home to Rab C. Nesbitt. His views on his new view are not yet known but can be imagined from his hilarious take on Glasgow’s stint as European City of Culture in 1990.


The ominous pedestrian approach beneath the expressway

Partick is the nearest station – about 10 minutes walk away, served by suburban trains and the famous 'Clockwork Orange' Subway, a circular line which makes the London tube seem generously proportioned. (It manages to miss the main line Central station and is a very bumpy ride but frequent, cheap and fun.) However signage from the station is so discreet we were lucky to find a very helpful Big Issue seller to direct us – across the expressway, alongside the expressway and then across the dereliction to the car park. It was a gloomy day, but the approach is really dismal. The museum looks lost and insignificant set in this wasteland. The arrival square is as bleak and utilitarian as it is possible to imagine, animated only by burger vans. The building looks blank – black glass entrance and acres of zinc panels. A ‘fuck off’ building if I have ever seen one. However it does look much better from the riverside where the drama of the crumpled roof is helped by viewing it from closer quarters whilst the tall sailing ship moored alongside reflects in the black glass. But basically this is a shed and, despite the interest of the squiggle, a pretty hostile one.


A parametric paradigma of the wheelie bins. 

Internally the overwhelming impression is of clutter and crowds, making it difficult to enjoy the space. The drama of the roof is best seen from the narrow gallery leading to the Tall Ship entrance and from the mezzanine bridge. The choice of near universal pistachio for the walls is daring but I thought effective although Chris said it made him visually sick. Overall the impression is of a pretty basic building with little evidence of the architects’ care and commitment such as you find in, say, Benson and Forsyth’s wonderful Museum of Scotland or Adam Caruso’s Nottingham Contemporary or indeed Barry Gasson’s 1983 Burrell Collection in nearby Pollock Park. There are a few nice touches like the seats on the deep window reveals, some of which frame good views along the river, and the art deco-like stairs. But overall you get the feeling that the starchitect, having had the iconic idea, moved on to some more lucrative project and didn’t really bother with the detail. Hence the wheelie bins for litter outside the main entrance, ruining my shot.


Cramming it all in

There is no doubt that the building does what is asked of it – which is to attract attention. But in the long term how suitable is it as a transport museum? Well the squiggly shape does at least inject some element of movement which is fairly important for a transport museum and is conspicuously lacking in the displays themselves. The main problem is that this expensive shed is just not big enough for the exhibits. Some of these things are huge – like the railway engines and the tramcars – but they are all crowded in on top of each other. The star attraction, the South African locomotive, particularly needs some space but is not given any. It is jam packed next to a Glasgow double-decker tram which itself is worthy of a bit more dignity. Vintage cars are perched on shelves up a wall. The bikes are displayed as an aerial sculpture, which is good as art but might you not want to look at the bikes themselves?


Ego before social history

There is a huge issue with the brief for the museum - Stephen Greenberg explains why in BD and it is fairly chilling. A deliberate decision to go for the iconic building which hobbles the exhibits rather than re-using an original ship building shed which would have provided the space and opportunity to explore Glasgow’s transport, engineering and social history expansively.


Ever wondered what a still skateboarder looked like?

Apart from the lack of space and the confines imposed by Zaha’s building there is a real problem with the unimaginative approach to displays. Actually the excellent artefacts were much beter displayed in the old, unassuming, transport museum where you could get a decent look at them. There is a real lack of the kinetic – everything is static apart from the brilliant models of all those ships launched on the Clyde which pass on a conveyor bringing up just the right amount of information as they pass. You could watch all day. But nothing else moves. There is even a tableau of skate boarding for God’s sake – have they never thought of video?


Nuff said

The thing is there are just so many good here which is not properly explored. For example Glasgow’s public transport never really recovered from the abandonment of the tram network – the largest outside London and the last to be scrapped in the 60s. There is a fascinating film by Kevin Brownlow about the last days of the ‘caurs’. Apparently the women tram drivers lost their jobs – they could drive trams but not buses, a fact which suggests there has been some progress in the last 50 years. I nearly missed a breathtaking Stanley Spencer panel on shipbuilding (or shipbuilders) commissioned as part of the war effort. It is there but has not space or prominence, nor does it lead us to those amazingly potent narratives behind the paintings.


Transport policy outside City Chambers

There is a sense that this project exemplifies a City that has lost its way and especially lost its way in how it deals with its transport, connectivity and the public realm. It is a city, even more than most others in Britain, in love with the car. Ironically Glasgow is still a compact, dense city but its structure is mutilated by motorways and its fine streets largely given over to the dominance of cars. The building of the M8 across the city centre in the 60s was self harm on a massive scale, and in some ways the destruction south of the river (near Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School) is even worse. But Glasgow is still doing this today with the M74 only just completed through the south east of the city – ‘a violently imposed fissure on the urban grain’ as Ellis Woodman beautifully describes it. Why would you do this in a city with one of the lowest car ownerships in the country and the largest suburban rail network outside London? It is psychopathic self harm to one of the greatest cities of Europe.


Move aside Manchester - Bank of Scotland

And that is the point. Glasgow is undoubtedly the finest city in Britain other than London, even surpassing Edinburgh. There is no doubt that it is a hard city, and one that has seen hard times as well as greatness. No Mean City indeed. The wind whistles down the grid iron streets. But actually Glasgow has reinvented itself around its exceptional artistic and cultural heritage as well as its commercial and engineering achievements. This new economy also needs to find expression in the public realm as a more relaxed place less dominated by traffic where pedestrians and cyclists can relax too, as they already do in the Merchant City. It shouldn’t be such a hassle to cross the street.


More life than the riverside - Necropolis 

Glaswegians are right to be proud of their achievements and what’s in the Riverside Museum but the building is not up to the exhibits. Certainly the idea that iconic architecture like this will kick start regeneration along a Clydeside dominated by motorways is quixotic. Glasgow has a magnificent urban structure still to work with and more than enough iconic architecture already. The priority is to make sure it keeps its character and distinctiveness. And I’m talking of the Egyptian Halls for starters.


Tenement design - more progressive than Victorian London/England

By Adrian Jones & Chris Matthews


Lincoln contemporary - The Terrace

Lincolnshire, the second largest historic county, is the English equivalent of a fly-over state. Agricultural, sparsely populated and often dismissed as flat and boring it is off the motorway network and not on the metropolitan radar. It is true that much of Lincolnshire is flat although with big, dramatic skies and its own austere beauty. But it also contains the limestone uplands which are a continuation of the Cotswolds and with similar picture postcard villages and towns like Stamford, whilst the Lincolnshire Wolds with their wonderfully bare contours, long views and far-away feel are one of the great joys of the English countryside. But life in the working countryside was and is far from idyllic. My uncle, a GP in rural Lincs, told harrowing tales of farm workers who could not afford medical treatment in the days before Aneurin Bevan set up the NHS which has done so much to improve the quality of peoples’ lives. Now few are directly employed in agriculture and as Rem Koolhaas rightly analyses the countryside is changing more radically than our cities.


The Arboretum - one of the great Victorian public parks c.1872

The largest town in Lincolnshire is actually Grimsby, well on the way to Iceland, but at the centre of the county is the city of Lincoln. What is striking about Lincoln is that it is a really vibrant, busy place –maybe rather old fashioned in some ways but in other respects self confident and cutting edge. What is the secret of its success? Well, there are lots of reasons but some good planning is one of them, which is not to say there aren’t some shockers too. Nevertheless many towns could learn from its example. What has been particularly successful is the implementation of the Linking Lincoln masterplan, steadily pursuing an agenda of people-friendly places and design excellence.


Contrast #1: The gap - Brayford Pool

Lincoln is very definitely a town of two halves and two characters, quite a violent collision between South and North, Barchester and Doncaster, the Lincoln Edge and the Witham Gap, Above Bar and Below Bar. It is not a large town – even with its suburbs beyond the city boundary the population is only about 120,000 – but it is the busy centre of a very large hinterland. Most people’s image of the place will be a Beautiful Britain photograph of Lincoln Cathedral rising above Steep Hill – an unforgettable silhouette. Pevsner begins thus: ‘Apart from Durham there is no English Cathedral so spectacularly placed’. It is certainly one of the very grandest and finest of English cathedrals and there are magnificent views of it from the surrounding countryside. In some directions the cathedral’s dominance is challenged by the distant power stations along the Trent Valley. My uncle, who as well as being an avid supporter of the NHS, was also a keen antiquarian and paradoxically a modernist used to declare ‘that cathedral spoils the view of the power station’, which as an impressionable young boy I took as an amazing insight, although in retrospect I think he was joking.


Contrast #2: The edge - Greestone Place

The Cathedral with its Close, the Castle and the attractive Bailgate area sits high up on the Lincoln Edge, surveying the town in the Witham valley below. You can see why the Romans and then the Normans chose this commanding location. Lincoln was a hub of Roman communications at the junction of Ermine Street and the Fosse Way and they also built a canal, the Fossdyke, connecting the Trent to the Witham at Brayford Pool, one of the important features of modern Lincoln and focus of the new university. The town was also a major railway centre with big yards and sheds south of Brayford Pool reinforcing the north – south divide in the town. Along the railways and waterways big engineering and agricultural machinery works were built. The first tanks were made in Lincoln, rather reversing the biblical adage about swords and ploughshares. This duality between the cathedral city and the manufacturing town is not unique to Lincoln but is particularly pronounced because of the topography – the two halves see each other but are disconnected and vertically segregated. The duality is also expressed in the suburban form – orderly and compact in north Lincoln, loose and straggling south of the Fossdyke.


Independent retail-o-rama (or how to make Nottingham jealous) 

Lincoln is a bustling market town and pleasingly not completely dominated by supermarkets and chain retailers. There are lots of independent shops – it is quite a foodie place especially for meat eaters with all those rustic sausages, pork pies and local specialties like chine. There are lots of interesting restaurants and cafes too, although the bar scene is fairly dominated by studenty chains. In the Bailgate area and around the market you will find the sort of quirky shops that are squeezed out of most city centres.


William Watkins fin de siècle  

The High Street is immensely long and straight but divided into three sections - by a somewhat surreal and very inconvenient level crossing next to the Station and also by the medieval Stonebow. This is the boundary between the working town (Below Bar) and the ecclesiastical town (Above Bar). The High Street also features a black and white timbered ‘inhabited bridge’ at High Bridge over the Witham, a unique survival although much was restored at the turn of the 20th century. North of the railway High Street is pedestrianised and remarkably coherent with some fine fin de siècle commercial buildings by William Watkins. There are few bad buildings.


The Jacobean Lincoln Market

The grand Victorian market hall opens off Cornhill and beyond this is a new square next to the Witham – a nice space but rather let down by the quality of the new buildings around it. The massive public artwork is presumably as homage to former engineering glory. On the north bank is the Waterside shopping centre which could be described as post modern contextual. Betjeman would have quite enjoyed its whimsy and pot pourri of references. The good thing is that it both fits into the street scene quite well and is in the right size and the right location to strengthen the traditional shopping area unlike say Derby or Doncaster with their destructive edge of centre shopping monsters. The proposed Lindongate shopping centre behind Sincil Street, which would replace the squalid bus station, is plausible in concept but the application is in outline only. Everything depends on the details.


Norman sprawl - High Street

The railway and parallel inner ring road rather cut off the long but interesting southwards straggle of High Street. This was a medieval suburb and you get a sense of the old Roman route approaching a town which grew considerably during the economic boom years of the wool trade preceding the Black Death. It still contains interesting survivals like St Mary’s Guildhall and the adjoining church. The more recent buildings are a friendly jostle of styles with many pubs and chapels competing for custom. Despite the fracture from the main centre the street is surprisingly busy, in part helped by the St Marks shopping centre, a strange but in some ways quite creditable construct – a neo classical retail park. The inspiration is the elegant, severely classical 1840s former St Marks station, the front range of which is preserved but emasculated as a Lakeland store and altogether too hemmed in by cruder imitations. However there is a real attempt at urbanity here with even a small garden square.


Wake up Paxo, this is a Lord Wolfson landscape

Compare and contrast with the massive sprawl of excremental, parasitic retail parks along the adjacent relief road’, which needless to say is clogged by traffic from their endless car parks. Of course this degraded scene, which could be anywhere and is everywhere, is the product of a planning system for which ‘NO’ is allegedly the default answer. IF ONLY. Yet Lord Wolfson of Next interviewed on Newsnight smirkingly claims that the planning system needs to be reformed (scrapped) because it is stopping him building enough out of town stores to bring us out of the recession. And Paxo let him get away with it.


Lo and behold: a new in-house designed, city centre university.

I don’t know how well Lincoln did on Paxo’s University Challenge but the new university is certainly a big thing for the city. Initially set up in 1996 as a branch of Humberside University, it expanded hugely in 2002 when the main Hull operation was transferred to Lincoln. There are now 10,000 students. The campus on the old railway yards south of the Brayford Pool is well chosen, close to the city centre and with inspiring views of the cathedral, but not without challenges, perhaps the least of which is that the southern edge is formed by the moronic retail parks referred to above. A bigger problem is that the campus is bisected by the railway and a road viaduct spanning the railway and the Fossdyke.


Connecting the Foss Dyke with Holland

The initial university campus was between the Brayford Pool and the railway. West of the viaduct and next to the Fossdyke are very pleasing student residences, responding to their Dutch-like environment with restraint and simple clarity of design. Later phases are more fussy. The expansion of the campus to the other side of the railway tracks was masterplanned by Rick Mather. He also designed the Architecture School which is pure white cubes as you would expect - the yellow and orange chairs in the foyer look like a shocking affront. Allies and Morrison have produced a further masterplan to expand the campus onto the sea of surrounding car parks. They also designed the Engineering Building which has satisfying windows onto great big machine workshops.


Cheap and cheerful - pastiche modern

The most impressive buildings are actually conversions of old railway structures. The Engine Shed is almost completely swathed in glassy additions to provide a new Students’ Union whilst the Great Central Warehouse has been very attractively converted to the University Library, clearly displaying its structure but with new pods added, echoing railway lucams. These are either side of a wide new pedestrian bridge over the Witham that forms part of a new quad for the university. Beyond is the shiny Lincoln Performing Arts building. All were designed by STEM Architects, as was the sparky but slightly disturbing Alsopesque construct ‘Enterprise@Lincoln’ next to the library. This is one of an impressive number of innovative workspaces commissioned by the university and the city, which also includes Marks Barfield’s iridescent Think Tank.


Yeah, I must get round to doing the landscaping - Architecture Building

The university has had a hugely positive effect on Lincoln – 3,000 jobs for a start - and its lively impact is very noticeable in the town centre. Compare this to Norwich, in some ways a bigger version of Lincoln, where UEA is very definitely a place apart. The scale of its expansion is impressive but the campus does at times seem hurried, cheap and cheerful – the IKEA of academia. This is particularly the case with the mean landscaping and paving although the new masterplan promises to rectify this. It is also disappointing that after an impressive start with student residences the usual barrack blocks now dominate. The Pavilions ‘student village’ has the cheek to weakly reference the engineering shed typology of its near neighbours.


'A new Odeon will really kick start Lincoln". Bygone desperation.

It is also unfortunate that the quality of development across the Brayford Pool from the university is so crass. Brayford Wharf North is a hotchpotch of chain bars and restaurants with an overpowering Odeon box dominating the view. However you will find the interesting former car showrooms now converted to restaurants by local, late, architect Sam Scorer, most famed for his parabolic roofed Little Chef on the A1. On Brayford Wharf East Pevsner noted fine C18th and C19th warehouses which were destroyed for the inner ring road and replaced with utter banality, an act of terrible vandalism from an era when this was the norm. Imaginative proposals to redevelop this as a proper framework of streets and buildings have been put forward by Linking Lincoln - let us pray that they can be achieved. This would make a huge difference to the coherence of Lincoln.


Times New Roman - the strength and subtlety of the paving (Bailgate)

Despite Linking Lincoln the highway authority is schizophrenic in its approach. On the one hand there are excellent paving schemes creating really pleasant and attractive public spaces. The most extensive is around the Cathedral Close, where Pevsner complained about the incessant traffic, and the adjacent Bailgate area. This includes a very pleasant new square just north of the Castle which features a Roman well. It leads to the wonderfully massive stone water tower designed by Blomfield in 1911. The southern High Street is also being calmed with a very effective, simple paving scheme, whilst Flaxengate which leads to the Collection (see below) is a model of how to provide desire line pedestrian crossings and unfussy quality paving.


The quiet revolution: paving, traffic calming and desire line crossing

On the other hand, traffic is very dominant in much of the city centre. The County have grand plans for a new eastern bypass and then for a southern bypass which will allegedly solve this problem whilst opening up large areas for housing development. This is the usual story but in reality the additional bypass will only make Lincoln yet more car dependant and spawn new car centric housing developments impossible to serve by efficient public transport. The usual plethora of subtopia cul-de-sac Lego land going up inside the existing ring road shows us what to expect. Nowhere is safe. Certainly public transport is not the best thing about Lincoln – that there are no buses after 7pm gives you a measure of how poor it is. So when the County claim that the new bypass is really needed to enable public transport priorities I think we can safely conclude they are having a laugh.


A builders arse - new flats marring the famous view

Rail services are also poor. The impact of the railways for Lincoln is profound and perverse. The city is off the main line so you arrive by slow train (the only kind and not as delightful as Betjeman would have you believe) at the picturesque but rather inadequate Tudor style Central Station, surprisingly designed by Cubitt. The inconvenient level crossing of High Street is one of the big planning problems of Lincoln. Network Rail plan to divert more freight trains through the city in order to free up capacity on the East Coast main line, so the level crossing will be almost permanently closed. At the same time the rail industry has reneged on the promise of new direct trains from London, absurdly terminating them at Newark which already had an excellent service. Lincoln used to have a freight line bypass but this was foolishly closed. If St Marks station had been retained and expanded rather than Central then a far better university site would have been possible but this opportunity was lost, so Lincoln is stuck with a very disruptive railway line and yet a branch line service.


Northern Europe is this way - Waterside South

Pelham Bridge, a long curving viaduct from 1958, provides a fine view of the Cathedral, the whole of the south front with the medieval buildings hanging on the hillside. There is also a good view from the elegant concrete pedestrian bridge over the dual carriageway leading to Waterside although somewhat marred by an appalling new block of flats in strident bands of yellow and red brick. On Waterside is the magnificent Flemish style grey brick mill of 1863. Beyond is a large Siemens complex where encouragingly substantial building improvements are in progress.


City living with civic sense - Museum Court

Back across the dual carriageway we find Blomfield’s 1906 domed public library on Free School Lane with the fun Jacobean Co-operative opposite and streetscape pierced by St Swithin’s spire. Next to it is the Drill Hall, an excellent refurbishment of 2004 which has created a welcoming multi function events space. This is one of a number of initiatives which have really raised the cultural profile of Lincoln. The cultural provision and urbanism north off Flaxengate restores your faith in C21st civilisation. The Terrace by Bauman Lyons is contemporary and contextual; limestone, street pattern, light, subtlety, and precision. Publicly funded, it successfully houses a café with around fifty studio spaces for the creative sector. Neighbouring this is Museum Court by Jonathan Hendry architects, which shows a confidence in the proportions of a Georgian terrace and the considered decisions of a minimalist. It is billed in the twatish Thatcherite language of estate agents as ‘executive accommodation’ and yet it is actually trying to instil some sort of civic sense. You can but try.


The Collection: playing with restriction (and not making parametric crap up) 

The Collection by Panter Hudspith Architects is the star at the centre of all this and easily one of the best recent buildings in the country. Whereas the Terrace and Museum Court pay lip service to the context, The Collection plays with the rules of its circumstances – a limestone declivio with DeWint views - without degenerating into a Zaha ego trip of pointless angles. On the other side of Danesgate, the older Usher Gallery shows Blomfield’s consistent classical stubbornness for 1927, but who really cares about the Zeitgeist with neighbours like these? The cumbersome extension has been removed, a new entrance has been built to face the street and the park opened up so now the gallery clearly sits below the hill in the hollow of a delightful garden. This is all thanks to local authority town planning, and not the chaos of the free market, dear Messrs Pickles and Shapps. The art collection here is outstanding for a city the size of Lincoln including the likes of Ben Nicholson, John Piper and Hockney.


This is town planning (but shame about the security camera)

During a recent 20th Century Society tour, Bobby Drake talked about the decline in committed and informed people (especially those with money) who are active in the arts and local affairs. With this is mind, the Sam Scorer gallery and his house off Gilbralter Hill are relics from a bygone age but staring at a painting of this architect by Tony Bartle in the Usher Gallery I realise this may be the centre of an admirable revival.


Chocolate box stuff but where are the sweet toothed tourists?

Whichever of the several picturesque ways you choose it is a steep climb up the hill to the Cathedral. This is an overwhelming building even for a godless person like me, staggering in its certainties and technical precocity. Was the young Scorer staring at the hyperparabolic forms of the vaulting all those years ago? What can I add to Pevsner and others - nothing. Just don’t forget the Wren Library and the 1959 Duncan Grant mural in the St Blaise chapel with its muscular young men considered so outré by the church authorities that for decades the chapel was closed to the public.


Nosey parker - overlooking the arboretum 

The Cathedral is wonderful, magnificent, transcending …. but in some respects the real glory of Lincoln is its housing. Few places can boast such consistently pleasant residential areas. This is of course a huge generalisation but the Cathedral Close must be as about as des res as you can get. Houses from the C18th to the present on the steep winding alleys below the Cathedral and the Castle command staggering views. Much of the Victorian and Edwardian town looks really, really pleasant. To the east of the Cathedral off Monks Road is the Arboretum, a fine Victorian park designed by Edward Milner, an apprentice of Joseph Paxton. To the north are the mansions where the masters of the engineering works lived. To the south are the tight terraces for the workers but far, far better than the equivalent housing in cities like Nottingham. It still feels like a good area with lots of local facilities, like the Co-op supermarket in a converted chapel. In the changing levels of the west end ‘muesli belt’ you can look out towards West Common and pretend that interwar subtopia never happened. South of the town Swanpool Garden Suburb is a small piece of Hampstead Garden Suburb or Welwyn Garden City.


Pinch yourself - the past thirty years never happened 

Perhaps the most uplifting, miraculous place of all is the Ermine Estate, built mainly between 1952 and 1958, and you might say much like any other low rise council estate of that era with its mix of terraces, low rise flats and bungalows. Except that Ermine still works – no signs of vandalism or anti social behaviour, no graffiti, no Alice Coleman interventions and, can you believe it, no security cameras. Open plan lawns and communal areas are well kept. There is a shopping parade including a butcher’s, green grocer’s, Co-op and Post Office, a community centre, library and several churches including Sam Scorer’s St John the Baptist (1963). This extraordinary building is conceived as a tent rather than a temple, and has a complex hexagonal geometry with the congregation on three sides around the sanctuary. Light floods in through the glorious east window – a very intimate and inclusive space and a genuine heart of the community.


Social democracy is alive and well and living in Ermine

Ermine is social housing as it was meant to be and it has survived for 50 years – not pristine but clearly a place that really works. Compare and contrast this with so many other estates – King’s Heath, Northampton for example which was planned so carefully but still ended up a problem estate. Lincoln clearly did something right at Ermine – like manage and maintain it.


A must see: The east window by Keith New (St John the Baptist)

Actually Lincoln has done a lot of things right. It has shown vision, ambition, tenacity and application, good strategic planning and attention to detail. Obviously there have been mistakes and lost opportunities but a small city that can commission buildings of the quality of the Terrace and the Collection has got a lot to be proud of.

References:



N. Pevsner & J. Harris, Lincolnshire

A. Walker (ed.), Survey of Lincoln Series

A. Rodgers, Lincolnshire
K. Szynalska, Sam Scorer
H. Thorold, Lincolnshire Shell Guide

by Chris Matthews



Burton on Trent is synonymous with beer. By the late C19th the scale of the brewing industry was global and the industry’s unique historical fabric still shapes the character of the place today. But it is also shaped by the decline of the breweries – the town has been battered by the winds of Thatcherite and Blairite developments. Everything you can think of thrown arbitrarily at it – gigantic, scattered HGV distribution sheds, identikit business parks, boring low grade shopping centres, legoland cul-de-sacs and endless car parking, all in an incoherent vehicle dominated jumble leaving a wilting historic High Street. The problems created are so pervasive it becomes a real challenge to know how to plan our way out of this mess. Where do you start?


St Pancras


Relic of a destroyed infrastructure - Midland Railway warehouse

I started at the railway. I choose Burton because I knew the St Pancras Station story, which was so thoroughly researched by Jack Simmons during those years when its very survival was in question. According to the engineer responsible, Sir Henry Barlow, the Midland Railway Company wanted a station with a lower floor devoted to Burton Beer traffic, and this "formed a ready-made tie sufficient for an arched roof crossing the station in one span". Burton beer and the Midland Railway: the function behind the form.


National Brewery Centre, Guild St

Due to the unique quality of the water and its excellent canal connections, Burton was already a nationally important brewing centre before the age of steam but when the Derby to Birmingham line cut through the town in 1839 the industry really took off. The subsequent facts and figures became staggering. With more than double the production of London, Burton became the world's premier brewing centre. By the late nineteenth century it had grown to over 30 breweries with a total output which had increased to 3 million barrels per annum. The scale of production was so incredible that Burton had a complex web of private railways linking the breweries to the main line. In 1880 Bass, the then biggest brewery in the world, had 11 locomotives and 17 miles of full-gauge track. Although there are moments where this former glory is still visible, it's one of those historical moments where you really need a time machine.


The Beer Mile


A slightly out-of-town Town Hall

Arriving at the station you notice it has immensely wide, long, platforms reflecting its former importance but its original buildings have been replaced by BR CLASP affairs – a metaphor for the decline of the town really. The most distinctive structure is the solemn piers of the unloved cavernous undercroft beneath Station Street Bridge. That sense of railway history increases beside the listed Midland Railway Grain Warehouses c.1890 and the weigh bridge which survives as a friendly sandwich shop. But before continuing east down Station Street it is worth heading in the opposite direction towards Edward Place – the late nineteenth century civic area.


Suburban Sobriety - off St Paul's Square 

Oddly, the Burton dignitaries planned the civic centre away from the original High Street – probably to escape the older breweries. The result of which lessens the possibility of walkable urbanism. Nevertheless, the Gothic Town Hall, St Paul’s square, the Church and the neighbouring Almshouses off Wellington Street form a pleasing coherence. A grumpy Pevsner called Thomas Jenkins’s 1939 extension “depressing”, when really the neo-classical/deco entrance adds city centre ambition to the ensemble. At the middle is a statue of one of the Bass family head honchos Michael Thomas, who funded the civic centre - a reminder of the late Victorian paternalist / collectivist approach to sweeping up the free market chaos. Coors and the other major brewers today don't do this sort of thing, and if anything as we shall see, they do the opposite.


The gargantuan Allsop Brewery – Station Street

After witnessing the days of yore civic responsibility you have to go back on yourself - walking east down Station Street - to take in the full length and breadth of the Beer Mile. I chose to while away my time in Burton because I spent many formative years hanging around a Victorian brewery in Kimberley, five miles north of Nottingham. Before Greene King it was a genuine functioning red brick industrial townscape straight out of the hop smelling nineteenth century. So a visit to Burton was a vain attempt to discover that urban past.

For the most part Station Street lives up to that expectation. Immediately after the station the former Allsop Brewery is a gargantuan neo classical slab of 1859, with a great cast iron forecourt. It supposedly had a greater capacity than any other brewery at the time and is now being converted as apartments and office units.



Beeropolis - Station Street

Station St becomes a Beeropolis with the Ind Coope Brewery classical remains and the Northern Renaissance facade of B Grant Importers. Independent shops with Edwardian windows are currently being renovated which suggests a town finally aware of its character and potential. The effect is marred by a couple of Legoland cul-de-sacs (Grants Yard, Wyllie Mews) and the arse end of a Sainsburys, both of which pay little respect to the fabric of Burton. But thankfully the nineteenth century Bass Brewery buildings dominate Beer Mile, with adjacent foreman's houses - all very much a hotchpotch but of a gritty consistency. This was certainly the epitome of Beeropolis, but you might say that other lesser brewery towns had more attractive buildings.


Ghost of a former self - Methodist Church, George St

The best part of Beer Mile however is the soot stained Victorian red brick social area - around George Street. This features a huge deco cinema which turns its back to an industrial corner where the 1860s Methodist Church stands adjacent to the fin de siècle French renaissance style liberal club and school designed by Dunwood, Brown and Gordon of London. Some of these buildings are sadly abandoned, disused or rarely used. The excellent Methodist chapel was once home to 5 of the first 17 mayors of the borough, yet it has been vacated this year because, "all the business and monied people have gone by the board”. Around the corner is the Catholic Church which again has a ruddy Beeropolis integrity.

Looking out towards Sainsburys is a former municipal Art Gallery & Museum begun at the outbreak of WWI. This was abandoned by the Council in 1980 and the collection given to Derby and the National Brewery Centre. This was sold off by Coors a few years ago and now charges a hefty £7.50entrance. Michael Thomas Bass funded most of George Street for the social and educational good of the town. Compare and contrast with today.


High Street Origins


High St nucleus

The High Street is the nucleus of the town, where it all began and where it should remain. It runs parallel with the Trent and bends alongside the meadows and river. It's best to begin at the impressive Bridge Street, the site of a notorious medieval crossing. This was re-built belatedly in 1864 by the Midland Railway as Burton communications were clearly very important to the company. Yet to try and appreciate this and the Georgian confidence of Bridge St - the original entrance to the town - is to risk death with a terrifying gyratory. Further up Horninglow St there are further 18th Century gems and a 1910 Magistrates Court by Henry Beck which Pevsner rightly likens to a variety theatre. All this should have some sort of civic grace adjacent to the National Brewery Centre but the pedestrian experience is too stressful to ponder. Respite can be enjoyed at the Burton Bridge Inn - a pioneer brewery and pub of the Real Ale revival. What's Brewing columnist Roger Protz is a regular visitor to Burton and campaigned to prevent Coors from closing the museum for good. The town is evidently still at the centre of all things beer.


This is what shopping local looks like - Market Place

A stiff drink is needed for tackling the High Street as a quarter of it is deserted due to the economic effect of the neighbouring shopping centres and retail parks. Near the abandoned bowling alley a poster of celebrity capitalist Ruth Butcher encourages people to shop local and yet the footfall must be very poor. However, High Street is more interesting than any of the shopping centres with their token links to history; it has a genuine jumble of Victorian and Georgian buildings, probably sited on medieval plots, and it is a reminder of how the brewing industry grew from these domestic origins. Towards the centre of High St, Coors still use Bass's original nineteenth century Jacobean offices but apart from the bizarre lone tower, the original brewery buildings have long been cleared.


Constitutional Club

Post-war East Staffs council rightly planned their leisure centre, library and college between the High Street and the Meadows. It shows what happens when the public sector is given sufficient power and funds to make decisions rather than just ameliorate private developments with bureaucracy. Neither of the buildings are Building Design Page 3 models but they have a calming meadow-side appearance. Perhaps more importantly they draw life to the walkable town centre: Shane Meadows and Paddy Consadine studied here and you can almost see why - the students are jovial, creative and very social. The net result of all this activity is that the excellent market hall, Edwardian shop fronts and constitutional club are all in good nick - unlike so much else of historic Burton. More use could be made of the interesting Abbey, which today is actually an eighteenth century church very similar in design to Derby Cathedral.


Meadowside Surrealism


Unique - Stapenhill Viaduct leading to Ferry Bridge

The best thing about the Meadows apart from the acres of public green space is the surreal nineteenth century pedestrian bridge, which connects the Victorian middle class suburb of Stapenhill to the town centre. This half a mile iron bridge is for the most part like a landlocked sea-side pier. During rush hour it is jam packed with people, and is a great Trent-side experience. We are reminded of the geography of the river which slips on beds of sand and gravel snaking through a malleable clay flood plain. The river heads north after Burton and the town was quoted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV at the point where England is carved up - Hotspur evidently peeved he was given the poorer northern third. Meanwhile the traffic generated by all those town centre car parks queues up on St Peters Bridge, built in 1984 for this blinkered car age. It tragically tears through the memorial park - the northern side of which now feels like a sawn off limb - and mars the visual and sonic expanse of the gaping Trent valley.


Car Park-on-Trent


33 acres of woe

Within the half mile between the Station and High Street at least 33 acres are devoted to the car park, which must be a record. This includes separate car parks for three shopping centres, two retail parks, three supermarkets, and even a Blockbuster Video. This is a prime example of a complete lack of forethought and integration. Everywhere the pedestrian is bullied and the townscape is gapped toothed. A case in point is the masterpiece turn of the century façade on New Street which casts a critical shadow over its saturated retail park style Comet neighbour. The architectural critic Jonathan Meades had an uncle who was Town Clerk and responsible for the rubber stamping of many of these changes - Meades acutely summarises the point here.


Centrum 100


To Let – 302,693 sq ft

To journey along Shobnall Road from Car Park-on-Trent to Centrum is to experience a town being pulled apart by the same anti-planning ‘plonk it anywhere’ ethos. Colossal 300,000 sq feet empty warehouses are popping up all over the place like giant weeds. The Marmite factory is guarded by CCTV and immigrant workers are banned from speaking their own language. Meanwhile Burton Civic Society has just commended Punch Taverns’ new Sunrise House, which however polite is really a continuation of suburban sprawl. In a separate car park celebrity capitalist Duncan Bannatyne has a design and build tin box vanity gym. Bannatyne signed a recent letter to the Times in favour of the proposed NPPF reforms. Centrum is an NPPF vision of the future.



To Let – 213,240 sq ft

The future here is an oligarchic quick buck where the idiocy of the speculative economy is writ large: Legoland cul-de-sacs are positioned adjacent to HGV warehouses, new car dependant amenities are strung out towards the bypass, while Coors and the empty new warehouses create an expressway barrier between Centrum and Burton. To attempt a circular walk round Centrum is to fill your lungs with car exhaust and experience a 50 mph HGV fist in your face for a disorientating hour and a half. This sprawl is visually ugly, utterly homogenous, and economically inefficient; a two finger salute to density and design, it is a drain on fuel, public transport and infrastructure.



When local authorities had authority - Burton Day Services

It's enough to make you lose the plot but thankfully Burton Day Services provide facilities only 200 yards from the Centrum entrance. This is another post-war public sector building, this time a pre-fab Lyons Scando-Modern. Were East Staffs council enlightened modernists? Or is this a case of the things-are-so-bad-that-this-is-now-good complex? We may never know. In the gardens patients were planting pink plastic flowers, having a cheeky fag and cribbing about the loss of the breweries. Nearby, there is (or was) some hope by the old Trent & Mersey canal, yet even access to this pleasant and sustainable walkway is blocked off by the business boxes off Callister Way. Overlooking the canalside area is the Victorian paternalist Marston’s brewery, complete with a friendly social club and sports pitches - a reminder of Burton's impressive football history.


The Maltings


Meakin & Co Maltings

Vast Maltings, breweries and former ancillary works are scatted all over the place outside central Burton, the appreciation of which entails a dance of death with the motorist. After the mid Victorian boom, the industry stalled with the "creeping collectivist" approach to legislating out of the saloon bar era of prostitution, drunkenness and disorderly behavior. The 1869 Licensing Act marked this watershed as breweries began to scramble for retailers. During the twentieth century other breweries replicated Burton water and the town's industry consolidated and declined with a dizzying array of amalgamations and takeovers. Today there are only a few large breweries left and only a small portion of the once unimaginably vast Maltings remains.



The former Everards Tiger Brewery

The most visually impressive of these is the Meakin & Co Maltings off Anglesey Road, where hundreds of East Anglian workers were seasonally drafted in. There are no English Heritage plaques telling you this of course, and although this building is now used as small industrial units it is in a poor state of repair. Few buildings outside of the Burton core (Station St, Bridge St, High St) are listed. The interesting octagonal brewery on Clarence Street is in a similar state of decay and there is no sign of any present use. There are a few examples of refurbishment: Everards brewery is trapped in a half gated Legoland cul-de-sac and the Wetmore Road maltings have recently been converted into offices.


What's the plan?


This is not a distinctive town centre - Middleway Retail Park

What’s the plan? There clearly isn't one. Burton is still very much at the centre of communications, the A38 connecting the subtopias of the East and West Midlands with the motorway network. C.C. Owen was right when he wrote his history of Burton: the development of the town can be seen according to the change of its communications; Trent water, Midland rail and now expressways and car-park-mageddon. It's an example of Asa Briggs's neat summary: the train gave us our industrial towns and the car scattered them. Simmons may have helped to save St Pancras but the scandalous destruction of the Victorian railway infrastructure was a far greater loss and precipitated the repetitive road building and subtopia which ensued. Yet this is a town which still has an identity and an industrial purpose. Surely this should be reason for better buildings and not an excuse for worse? There has to be some sort of walkable civic integration with all of Burton's unique assets, while the car, the HGV and big business have to be tamed. But the scale of the problem is vast.


Walkable integration - let's start at the meadows

References:

C. C. Owen, The Development of Industry in Burton upon Trent
N. J. Tringham, A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 9: Burton-upon-Trent
J. Meades, Incest and Morris Dancing
J. Simmons, St Pancras Station
A. Briggs, Victorian Cities
N. Pevsner, Staffordshire 

Queensgate Market - one of the great sights of Modernist Britain

A generation ago Ian Nairn refereed an architectural and townscape match between Huddersfield Town and close rivals Halifax. His final score was 5-2 to Halifax. Huddersfield’s goals were for its magnificent station and the extraordinary but now threatened 1970 Queensgate market hall. Halifax scored with the Piece Hall (obviously), its Victorian market hall and the spaceship-like Halifax Building Society HQ which had then only just landed. But Nairn awarded two extra goals to Halifax for the ‘way it still expresses itself’. Yer wot ref, are you blind? Huddersfield too expresses a strong character, maybe rather more understated than Halifax and it too has a fine refurbished Victorian market hall. So the result should be a score draw. But wait – Nairn was actually talking about planning. Does Huddersfield express its true character in what it is planning today? Well, not really.


Pennine townscape - Fitzwilliam Street

Huddersfield’s situation is spectacular, nestling in the heart of the Pennines along the Colne and Holme valleys. From everywhere you look there are views of the surrounding moors, which is very exhilarating. The approaches across the moors are dramatic, even from the M62 which has inevitably somewhat tamed the Pennine wilderness. Pevsner talks of ‘the view of the smoking mills from the hills… impressive if bleak’. The chimneys are no longer smoking and most have fallen victim to Fred Dibnah, rather diminishing the modern prospect although the Victorian folly on Castle Hill adds piquancy.


Scottish baronial Yorkshire - towards Station Street

Huddersfield is blessed by its magnificent setting and by two other factors. The easy availability of good quality sandstone means that, as well as the fine commercial and public buildings, most of the pre1914 housing is of handsome, warm looking stone. The other fortune was the foresight of the Ramsden Estate in laying out the ‘New Town’ between the Station and the parish church and maintaining such high standards in its development. The enlightened and informed developer is now rare indeed, although not completely extinct. Planning once aspired to take this role but was given a good kicking for its presumption by the political pals of ‘the free market’.


Huddersfield - Berlin

Huddersfield was a small straggly township until the end of the C18th. Its expansion to a great woollen manufacturing town superimposed a grid of much grander streets. But this is an irregular grid and the railway slashes across it. Post war planning inevitably required a tight inner ring road; an oval that radically disrupts the grid and as always is a huge obstacle to legibility and pedestrian movement. In 1968 it was billed as a vital redevelopment to ensure that "the car becomes the servant and not the master". Forty years later and the car is certainly the master of Huddersfield. The overall impact is that the town centre is sometimes quite disorientating for the visitor.


Huddersfield - Rome

It is also disconcerting that the metropolitan district of Huddersfield, a town of some 150,000 people, is called Kirklees - a confusing amalgam of quite distinct boroughs mackled together in 1974. Kirklees should be called Huddersfield but this would piss off Dewsbury.


Lessons in townscape - towards Huddersfield Station

The Station is magnificent – says it all about the confidence of Huddersfield at the time (1847). It is by Pritchett, responsible for a number of buildings in Victorian Huddersfield and his work adds to the town’s classical consistency. Nairn describes it as ‘more of a palace than a station …. a stately home with trains in’. Pure Georgian, it has a massive six column portico with pediment and outer wings as Corinthian colonnades. From the platforms your first impression might actually be of the massive and atypically brick St George’s warehouse north of the station. It is only when you emerge into St George’s Square that you can fully appreciate this is one of the very best stations in the country. Needless to say BR wanted to get rid of it but Huddersfield purchased the station in order to save it. That is civic leadership.


Bring me sunshine 

Around the Square are some very grand buildings. The George Hotel is late Classical and opposite is the ornate Italianate Britannia Buildings with 1920s shop fronts including exotic Egyptian and Aztec motifs. The Lion Building surmounted with its Coade stone lion is emblematic of Huddersfield. The Square itself, large and irregular, provides a fine view of the Station but is otherwise a bit unsure of its purpose. It has recently been splendidly repaved to designs by Whitelaw Turkington and includes fun fountains but is not really a place you would want to linger. In the centre is a very jolly statue of local lad Harold Wilson looking as if he might be Morecombe or Wise, sculpted by Ian Walters and unveiled by the Rev Blair.


2 for1 - quality covered markets in Huddersfield

The surrounding streets of the New Town were laid out after 1850 with Tite in overall charge of design. The results are exceptional. It reminds you of Grainger and Dobson – the streets are that good. The early buildings are Classical but along Station Street the Ramsden Estate Office is fairly wild Gothic Revival, designed by Crossland (of Rochdale Town Hall) in 1880. The dignified John William Street, which could be in Buxton, has fine views to the hills. Down Brook Street is the cast iron and glass former wholesale market splendidly restored as an open market. This is well positioned next to Tesco but the supermarket itself has no shame and doesn’t bother to pretend to any architecture. Its servicing backside looks like an abandoned Soviet arms dump – and it does matter because it faces onto Viaduct Street and the immensely long 1840s stone viaduct which is one of the glories of Huddersfield.


Just waiting for fashion to catch up with it - YMCA

Northumberland Street leads east towards the pompous Post Office of 1914. The 1960s extension to the rear is much sparkier. Opposite this is a really interesting early post war brick building, St Peters House, now vacant but formerly the YMCA. This has very clever and satisfying massing relating well to three street frontages and with an exciting tower rising in the middle. The fenestration and brick detailing are very accomplished. The elevation to Northumberland Street is stunning with its powerful blank brick between narrow slit windows above the shop front and below the cornice. Fortunately the recession has saved this building from planned demolition as part of the ‘Huddersfield Renaissance’ regeneration plan.


The City of Huddersfield? Kirkgate Buildings, Byram St

Opposite the handsome Mechanics Institute has been cleverly converted to provide a Media Centre. The recent extension by Ash Sakula, a 5 storey double skinned glassy block retaining parts of the former buildings, looks very effective on the otherwise bleak inner ring road. Back along Byram Street is the parish church of St Peter’s, rebuilt cheaply in the 1830s and not much to write home about. However the churchyard is an attractive open space with the Kirkgate Buildings by Crossland in a mixture of Renaissance styles facing onto it.


Westgate joy and experimentation 

Kirkgate and Westgate are the east-west axis of the town and are rather a mixed bag of noble buildings and dross. Particularly interesting is the Byram Arcade of 1880, in a vaguely Hanseatic style with excellent wrought ironwork in the arcade. Opposite is Westgate House, the frontage rebuilt in 1923 with steel frame, bronze cladding and lots of glass in a quasi-Modernist composition.


Muscular modernism - Police HQ

To the south is the post war civic centre girdled by the gross inner ring road. It includes the bus station with quite sculptural car park decks above, although no Preston. Bus stations tell us a lot about the class system in England – compare and contrast the abysmal small plaza in front of the working class bus station with the fine paving at the railway station. The 60s civic buildings are a disappointment except for the very handsome and carefully considered Magistrates’ Court, which begs the question: what if Mies van der Rohe had been a Yorkshireman? A security guard politely asked me why I was taking pictures, and seemed interested if surprised at my admiration of the building. Next door the West Yorkshire Police HQ is appropriately muscular.


Brilliant and empty - Co-op, New Street
The ring road brutally severs the town centre from its hinterland and its disastrous consequences are nowhere better seen than at the bottom of New Street, the main shopping street. Across the chasm of traffic you can glimpse the lovely Edwardian white faience facade of the Grand Picture Theatre, now no more than a disguise for a Lidl. On New Street the Co-op department store is empty, its fine 1936 Modernist extension echoing Mendelsohn is vacant. The retention of its façade is promised in a new shopping centre which also threatens the Queensgate market (see below).


The rise of northern Victorian Municipality

Huddersfield was clearly still a pretty gutsy place in the 60s and there was a surprising amount of redevelopment. Much of it fits well into the grid/block structure although little regarded today. Between New Street and the civic centre there is a very literate group with a powerful rhythm of concrete facades, a cross arcade with interesting reliefs and Buxton House which is a decent Eric Lyons / Basil Spence style tower block by Bernard Engle & Partners. Nearby is the majestic Victorian Town Hall whose composure and scale is a reminder of the stubborn civic independence of nineteenth century West Yorkshire, its grand concert hall ‘vibrating to the Huddersfield Choral Society’s Messiah’ (Nairn).


"Commerce", by Fritz Steller - Queensgate Market interior

Across Peel Street, although not immediately apparent, is the most spectacular of Huddersfield’s new buildings - the Queensgate market designed by the Seymour Harris Partnership and completed in 1970. It occupies a difficult sloping site facing the ring road to which it presents the most amazingly unexpected elevation with a dramatic roof of hyberbolic paraboloid shells of varying heights. The façade is adorned with the most extraordinary sculpted panels designed by Fritz Steller, possibly African in inspiration – anyway a hell of a shock. Nairn calls it ‘a bit of glam’ but it is more than that. Inside he says ‘the architect really went to town and did Huddersfield proud. The concrete mushroom columns are not a gimmick but are used to define spaces, to relate them and bring light from the top so you are at one with the building. It is a marvellous human space –the opposite of most shopping centres.’ Thirty years later it was listed to save it from just such a crass shopping centre (see below), thanks to the C20th Society and Huddersfield Civic Society.


Art integrating with architecture - Queensgate Market

The shopping centre scheme is called ‘Queensgate Revival’ and its objectives are basically sensible. It aims to provide a better choice of shops for the town centre threatened by competition both from the White Rose and Meadowhall motorway based shopping malls and more local retail parks. It would provide a better balance of shops within the town centre and could create some townscape coherence in the very ragged area behind the old Co-op store and the ring road. That said the actual proposals compromise the integrity and quality of the really important buildings, the market and the Co-op, and are basically very dull, standard stuff. In other words they do not express Huddersfield’s character. Fortunately the listing of the market and the recession has given Huddersfield at least a temporary reprieve.



The extremely severe stripped classical 1940 Library and Art Gallery across Ramsden Street from the Town Hall was also to be demolished as part of Queensgate Revival. However it was listed as a ‘well-executed and well preserved example of early C20th civic architecture’. To either side of the entrance are figures by James Woodford‘representing the youthful spirits of Literature and Art’. The Council think the building is ‘not fit for purpose’ and a new library and gallery are planned in the Queensgate Revival. This is clearly one for Piloti as the real problem is chronic lack of  maintenance. The grumpy caretaker and tatty website don't help either. The current civic leaders clearly haven’t been to the art history section recently.


A Yorkshire Coventry - Ramdsen House

The idiosyncratic modernist Colne Valley fables in the library show that this wasn’t always so; Reginald Napier taught at the local art college and clearly knew his subject with West Yorkshire folklore depicted as a Stanley Spencer / William Roberts / Pieter Bruegel jolly knees up. The gallery is noted for a largely twentieth century collection, including works by Max Bill, Josef Albers and Paul Feiler. With colourful murals and abstract reliefs dotted around the town centre Huddersfield is partly a Yorkshire Coventry, or more precisely an example of “art integrating with architecture”. The Fritz Steller works are a master class of this lost modernist ideal but there are others worthy of note; the book illustrator Harold Blackburn’s local historical murals on Ramsden House, and Richard Fletcher’s abstract “systematic sequence in light and shade” in a court off New Street. It would be a backward step not to make use of this.


Systematic sequence of light and shade - Buxton House

The main shopping streets like New Street and King Street are unremarkable but contain some good buildings like the Boot and Shoe Hotel, sadly defaced by the worst of some really crude fascias – in this case advertising that old bastard Col. Sanders. The paving is poor and the clutter and signs are worse, but you can do something about that and those ignorant fascias. Up Cloth Hall Street the Halifax BS offices are a sort of miniature homage to their great HQ building. The Kingsgate Centre hides behind older buildings on Cross Church Street but has the usual banal drum announcing its entrance. Internally it is completely standard. It expresses its bulk and car parking backside very prominently to the ring road faced in ‘appropriate’ sandstone - so that’s all right then.


Students often forget where they are

From the entrance to the Kingsgate Centre the vista down the very handsome Queen Street is terminated by the dramatic spire of St Paul’s Church. The accomplished Classical style Queen Street Chapel (1819) is now a theatre and St Paul’s, designed by local architect John Oates in 1829, has been converted to a concert hall. It provides an elegant threshold to the University campus which is across the inner ring road from the market hall. The campus is dominated by the bulk of a 70s building designed by Wilson and Womersley and clad in buff brick to fit in with the sandstone tradition, allegedly. It looks like as if it could be a tax office and feels the need for huge signs proclaiming ‘University’ in case you are uncertain. However it does have quite striking geometry especially from the canalside view. There is some clarity to the layout of the campus from St Paul’s down to the canal but the various recent buildings look like a random off the shelf selection. The Technology Building clad in planks is particularly poor and weathering badly.


Slow down motorists and admire this town

The University is cut off from the town centre by the inner ring road here called Queensgate, although this could be an attractive space. There are many good buildings including St Paul’s, the Gothic style former Technical School, the market hall elevation, Queen Street and the unusual Zetland Hotel. But it is not considered as a street at all, just a race track. The retrogressive solution of Queensgate Revival is a pedestrian bridge. Thanks but no thanks.


This could be great

The Kingsgate Centre blanks off the main entrance to the town from Wakefield Road but remnants of the old street network survive at the junction of the ring road with Kirkgate, leading to the parish church and the New Town. This is a key ‘threshold’ between the town centre and Aspley Basin on the Huddersfield Canal with the riverside beyond. This zone of de-industrialisation stretching to Huddersfield Town's Gulpharm Stadium is the focus of regeneration dreams thankfully yet to materialise. It is a ramshackle mess and badly needs sorting out, but the promoted solution – you guessed it, a vibrant mixed use waterside regeneration fantasy - is yesterday’s mashed potatoes, wrong headed and lacking in credibility. Saved by the recession, Huddersfield deserves and is capable off much better than this.


The car economy - a vast obstacle to pedestrian movement 

The starting point must be re-imagining the inner ring road (here called Southgate) as a true street. This is perfectly feasible given vision and determination and would re-establish the relationship between Aspley Basin and the historic town. The principles of the development of the C19th New Town – legibility, connectivity, focus on the streets and spaces and managing the quality of the buildings provide an excellent template for the creation of a New Town for the C21st on the waterside site.


A soft spot for those sandstone suburbs (pre 1914 anyway)

The ring road continues its destructive way north of the town centre, here masquerading as a motorway with grade separation, corkscrews and slip roads eviscerating the attractive townscape. If you can find your way across this engineering acid trip you will find the extraordinarily attractive C19th suburbs along New North Road with stone villas, houses, terraces and sylvan parks – you would love to live here. There are some Art Nouveauish houses by Manchester’s remarkable architect Edgar Wood, a founder of the Northern Art Workers Guild in 1896. He also designed the clock tower in Lindley, a folly with a pagoda roof and ‘so wilful that connections with Mackintosh and Glasgow must be considered’, says Pevsner. Scottish connections must also be considered with the Infirmary (1831 by Oates) with its imposing Greek Doric portico, now part of Huddersfield College. The nearby original college building of 1840 is in rather weak Tudor Gothic. In Huddersfield Classicism ruled OK.


The inscription reads: "for the benefit of the inhabitants"

So then – a surprising and an impressive place, well worth the trip. The New Town is really outstanding, the 1936 Co-op department store is a neglected gem and much of the 60s stuff is very impressive, most especially the market hall. Huddersfield is at heart a self confident, self reliant place, unusual for Yorkshire in being quite reticent. What it needs in planning for its future is to keep calm in the face of the economic storm and show a vision which expresses the real character of an exceptional place. Come on you Terriers – express yourselves!

References:

N. Pevsner: Yorkshire West Riding
I. Nairn: Football Towns (Listener 1975)
D. Lindstrum : West Yorkshire Architects and Architecture
D. Wyles: The Buildings of Huddersfield
Queensgate Revivial: Design and Access Statement
Huddersfield Gem website
L. F. Pearson, Public Art Since 1950
L. F. Pearson, Postwar Murals Database
J. Abse, The Art Galleries of Britain and Ireland
K. Gibson and A. Booth, The Buildings of Huddersfield Research Notes

You can stick your Englishman's castle - Camphill Avenue

With Scottish secession a distinct possibility we face the horrifying prospect of a permanent Tory Westminster. Even worse, the ex-industrial Midlands and North (and Cornwall) will be the only remnants of Empire left to the incompetence and condescension of the Establishment. Emigration to Scotland seems a very attractive option especially with the dividend of global warming (I may be wrong about that). Scotland with its wonderfully urban cities and towns, boundless countryside and wilderness, magical coast and islands – who would not want to live there? Well of course there are some deep seated social and economic problems too, and these are especially pronounced in Glasgow and Strathclyde. There is a real danger that the new Scotland will reflect the English north/south split in a Caledonian west/east divide with the capital city of Edinburgh, like most European capitals, dominating political, financial and creative life to the detriment of its larger neighbour.


A city where this is ordinary

I love Glasgow – I just get such a buzz from being there. The only place I know which can compete is Chicago, a city which shares many similarities although not the skyscrapers. Glasgow is so American in feel, but also so European, actually so British as opposed to Scottish or English. It is so much its own place. The sadness is that with most new development it is becoming less distinctive, more second rate. Glasgow must be sick of all this advice. Fifty years ago Gomme and Walker’s tome captured the city in all its splendour but just when it was losing so much of it. Ian Nairn pronounced ‘unless the city wakes up to a sense of its greatness Glasgow is heading for disaster’. Thirty years ago local historian Francis Worsdall published ‘The City that Disappeared’ (a bit of an exaggeration).Twenty years ago the Buildings of Scotland catalogued Glasgow’s outstanding architectural legacy. Gavin Stamp spent years raging against the iniquities of the City Council and its neglect of Greek Thompson and the rest of its extraordinary heritage and many, probably most, Glaswegians supported him. Most recently Owen Hatherley told the city it was looking for the future in all the wrong places – but I don’t think the Glasgow authorities are listening.


Pioneers of the Modern... well actually it's 1927 but still

Certainly the decline of manufacturing and especially of shipbuilding meant Glasgow was in a difficult position. The very fact that it had been such an enterprising and innovative city meant that the decline was steep when world conditions changed. Glasgow had to reinvent itself and this helps explain, even if it does not justify, its often philistine approach to new development. However, despite the needless self harm to its fabric, Glasgow remains largely a very coherent city – far more so than other big British cities and especially its nearest rival, Liverpool. It is far grander and culturally richer than Manchester, Birmingham or especially Leeds. And Glasgow is a proud place, proud of its achievements and its special identity, which makes it all the more puzzling that it is not as passionate about its architecture.


New tenements and per cent for art near Caledonia Road

Of course there have been big achievements. Perhaps the most important has been the reinvention of the tenement block after decades of clearance. Tenements, despite their often negative connotations, are the glory of Glasgow - the real WOW factor. Across great swathes of the city they create rich, diverse and intensely urban townscapes, reinforcing the street as a public, legible and social place. The West End provides one of the most attractive, congenial and consistently urbane urban environments in Europe. The extent and quality of tenements is quite staggering, in middle class suburbs like Hyndland and south of the river at Queen’s Park as examples, but also in working class districts like Govan as we shall see. Since the 1980s new tenement buildings are again achieving this quality of urban coherence, albeit with somewhat less quality of design and materials than the pre 1914 originals.


Welcome to Glasgow, twinned with Chicago 

The city centre is also successful - notably lively and the biggest shopping destination outside London. The decline of Sauchiehall Street is sad – once an upmarket destination, now the shabby former Willow Tea Rooms face a closed Pound-Mart. The Buchanan Galleries are boring but the splendour of Buchanan Street makes up for this and whilst the destruction of St Enoch’s station was unforgivable the St Enoch’s Centre, a huge 1980s steel and glass tent, is arresting although internally bland and confusing.


Boring Broomielaw

The striking thing about the city centre is not just how grand the buildings are but how so many of its buildings are so technically and stylistically adventurous. On Jamaica Street there were fine early iron framed buildings, some shamefully demolished quite recently. On Argyle Street you see this amazing Chicago like confidence with proto skyscrapers rising amid more modest scale, built with the expectation that everything was going to be like that, but WW1 intervened. On St Vincent’s St you find the fin de siècle inventiveness of buildings like the Hat Rack designed by James Salmon with Beardsleyesque and Gaudiesque features. Between the wars commercial confidence was asserted in the grandest neo-classicism. Post war commercial architecture was also confident if often insensitive, but so much recent development is just dim and dreary. The Clyde end of Jamaica Street is now a disgrace – Jury’s Inn one of the main culprits as usual. It actually manages to be worse than its Nottingham namesake. Fronting the river at Broomielaw, new offices could be anywhere. They are not absolutely awful, just so bloody boring and lacking in life. Interestingly plans to build new restaurants on the wide quayside opposite have sparked a big local protest, suggesting this space is valued although in December it is maybe not seen at its liveliest.


Jury's Inn: the canny ability to downgrade any townscape

Across the river from Broomielaw there is an immediate Chicago-like transition from the dynamic city centre grid to an urban wasteland with a few buildings rising out of the debris. The new M74 thunders through. On Eglinton Street a Greek Thompson terrace was needlessly demolished as late as the1980s. Carlton Place fronting the Clyde opposite the Suspension Bridge is a fine Georgian enclave providing an elegant screen, but there is urban chaos behind. This is of course the Gorbals, in the post war years a byword for appalling slum housing. The demolition of the fine tenement terraces of the Gorbals was meant to exorcise the injustices of the past and even the name of the area was temporarily expunged. Now most of this urban renewal scheme has itself been cleared, including the highly sculptural Basil Spence flats, although some monumental tower blocks remain. In places a third Gorbals has risen from the ashes seeking to learn from the past and at least in part succeeding.


Great stuff: the Gorbals facing the Clyde

Down Gorbals Street, past the massive Norfolk Street flats and the Citizens’ Theatre, on through a wasteland and beyond the railway bridges you will see the magnificent ruin of Greek Thompson’s Caledonia Road church. The neglect of this masterpiece, gutted by fire in 1965, epitomises the Glasgow problem of not realising its own greatness. But even as a ruin and in the middle of a traffic gyratory it is absolutely compelling and fundamental to creating a sense of place and identity in the adjacent third Gorbals development. This is broadly based on the tenement tradition with four or five story blocks flanking broad, legible streets and crescents. Car parking is largely in the streets, at times in right angle parking, so there is not the usual fussy and confusing domination of layout and design by cars. The tenements themselves, although of the right scale and massing, are a bit fussy, trying too hard at variety within order and not always succeeding. The artworks – I think flying angels – are certainly OTT. However there is certainly a sense of place and the numerous views of Greek Thompson’s church create very satisfying compositions. The biggest problem is the ridiculous barriers against Laurieston Road which make it virtually impossible to get to the bus stop. The concept of the multi functional street is obviously not fully re-embraced in Glasgie.


Black Hole Sun

Two miles downstream from the city centre, past Foster’s Armadillo and its hinterland of car parks, is Zaha Hadid’s new Riverside Museum, the focus of our Glasgow blog last summer. Great exhibits, shame about the location and the unsuitability of the building for them. However in its first six months the museum has attracted a million visitors which is one hell of an achievement – so well done. But visiting again in December my reservations were reinforced; indeed the greyness and bleakness of it was overpowering in a howling gale and driving rain. This is the problem with the global warming thing. Extreme weather seems to be here already, which is why an exposed riverside location is not such a good idea for regeneration, especially in Scotland.


This is Govan 

The best view of the zinc icon is actually across the Clyde from Govan, although few visitors will see this. Govan – that redoubt of anarchic working class resistance to global capitalism as embodied in Rab C. Nesbitt (although in the latest series he seems to have become a pillar of the community rather than the scourge of it). The place is not quite as I had imagined. It is almost a town in its own right - and was until 1912 - with its own monumental Beaux Arts town hall in red sandstone, built around 1900, the time of greatest prosperity based on the shipyards. There are other fine buildings of this period, like the Pearce Institute, a working people’s club disguised as a C17th Scottish town house whilst churches, schools, libraries and grand banks all attest to Govan’s heyday.


Govan - side streets and shipyards

Despite these dignified buildings however, on arrival by Subway (apparently not to be called the Clockwork Orange) Ian Pattison’s inspiration is immediately apparent. The irregular space of Govan Cross is the visual centre. The Govan Centre opposite sums up the poverty not just of its architecture but also of many of the shoppers. Appropriately it was built in the early years of Thatcher and illustrates her visionfor Scotland  – I don’t think Meryl Streep quite catches that. But turn west along Govan Road towards the Fairfield shipyard and you cannot fail to be impressed. This is a fine street lined with four storey tenements, interestingly showing the transition from the earlier light sandstone and square bay to the red sandstone and bow window model which is so quintessentially Glasgow at its zenith. Majestic side streets of similar red sandstone tenements lead down towards the river with the cranes of the old shipyards still in view – thrilling townscape.


No artifical colours?

The long monumental offices of the Fairfield Shipyard (later Glasgow Shipbuilders) built in 1890 of red sandstone in an Italian Renaissance style utterly dominate Govan Road. Although empty they are apparently being converted into offices and community space funded by Europe and the Scottish government. There are other heartening signs of renewal nearby with new flats nearly completed – not exactly new interpretations of the tenements but of the right scale and reinforcing the life and urbanity of this part of Govan. The block on Golspie Street feels the need for a Smartie assortment of coloured bays, which actually look ok. Back towards Govan Cross another nice touch is the palimpsest image of the original 1937 Lyceum Cinema on the curved façade of the husk of the old building which bingo could not save.


Intimacy - the back of Govan Road

Behind Govan Old Church is the ferry to the Riverside Museum, if you are lucky, but anyway you get the good view. There is a bleak Clydeside promenade, part of a featureless low rise 1970s redevelopment. The east side of Govan is really very depressing. The urban fabric has been blown apart by demolition without any apparent thought, leaving an utter wasteland. The saddest thing is the recent destruction of Napier House designed in 1899 by the little known W.J. Anderson. At once precocious in its steel frame and concrete floor construction and wilful in its eccentric version of art nouveau, it still exists on Google street view but all I found was a hole in the ground, which is what Govan needs like a hole in the head. The only encouraging development nearby is Collective Architecture’s scheme for the Govan Housing Association. The curved façade of the 6 storey block to Govan Road is unpromisingly defensive but has the good sense to embrace the fine sandstone bank building at the corner of Orkney Street. Here a crescent of linked 2 storey houses, brick with gold panels, creates an attractive, intimate environment. Opposite, small scale industrial buildings have been nicely converted into an Enterprise Centre.


New Govan Tenements

I had intended to walk back to the city centre through the Clydeside redevelopments but despair set in as I trudged through the ugliness, anomie and sheer misery of the alleged regeneration of the old Govan Docks. I got as far as the titanium clad spheres of the Glasgow Science Centre at Pacific Quay, designed by BDP and interesting in an ascetic way. Opposite is the RIBA award winning new BBC Scotland HQ by man of the moment David Chipperfield. Although a serious, carefully considered, scrupulous and elegant building, the bleakness of the site and the heavy security serve to alienate if you are in the cold outside its magnificent atrium. Why the BBC has chosen quite such hostile locations for its various new studios God only knows. I bottled out and took a cab from the luvvies’ taxi rank.


The city centre doesn't care what the weather man says...

The ride back to the city centre is through identikit acres of regeneration, no different, no better, no worse than much of London’s Docklands, Salford Quays – you name it. Maybe it is unfair to review the Clydeside version in the wind, rain and snow of December, but really that is the point. How does it work as a place? Well it just doesn’t. Despite the involvement of Foster, Chipperfield and Zaha Hadid there is no coherence, no hierarchy, no enclosure, no diversity, no street life, no shelter. These are all fundamental to successful place making. Glasgow city centre is thronged in the downpours. I walked round Hillhead and Langside in the snow and they are really civilised places with cafes, shops, libraries, parks. They are designed for the reality of the climate.


Woulda coulda shoulda been

I still love Glasgow, but maybe I’m in love with the image of Glasgow as it could have been – should have been; the finest, most adventurous, most ambitious, most exciting of British cities. I wish it were so today.

Vulliamy's sturgeon - the origin of municipal design in London

The annoying thing about exploring London these days is that in virtually all long views the Shard will pop up. It is like an irritating splinter in your finger that you are always aware of and can’t get rid of - it really pisses you off. But at least you now know where Southwark is – that seems to be the idea. Well actually I knew where Southwark was before and wonder why the Borough has lumbered itself with this boorish icon which would be far more at home in Docklands or Brum.



Southwark is more subtle than that - an extraordinarily complex urban landscape shaped by the river, marshy ground, bridges, viaducts and multifarious activities deemed unsuitable for the City. Its rich mix of buildings and townscape is highly eclectic, often eccentric, usually humane and if sometimes monumental  rarely pompous. Beyond the South Bank crocodile walk it is the smaller scale lively street scenes that dominate your memory of the place. The reinvention of Bankside over the last few decades has been an extraordinary success story but then if you could not make urban regeneration work here you could not make it work anywhere. The catastrophic decline of local industries induced by right wing dogma opened up mouth watering development opportunities just as Mrs Thatcher also pulled the pin out of the hand grenade of deregulation in the adjacent City. But it is not quite as straightforward as that. For a start, glitzy regeneration does not extend far inland and few of the jobs in the new regenerated Bankside seem to go to Southwark residents. It remains one of the most deprived places in the country.


That Halifax advert has much to answer for -  Shad Thames

It would be churlish not to celebrate Bankside which has added a new dimension to London as a global city. Much of this riverside went largely unnoticed until relatively recently and it was Lord Foster’s beautiful if initially wobbly bridge that really changed perceptions and accessibility. Most of London’s bridges are quite difficult and hostile for pedestrians, unlike Paris, but the Millennium Bridge is intimate and very convenient. Not only that but it creates a clear axis between two of the great emblematic temples of London – St Paul's and Tate Modern. The perverse but brilliant decision to establish Tate Modern in the former Giles Gilbert Scott power station built only 40 years before was a real game changer. This grim structure with its fabulous brickwork was converted by Hertzog and de Meuron and opened in 2000. Its success was immediate and overwhelming but I have always felt it is somewhat disappointing. The huge turbine hall is, yes, huge but nothing much happens there. The actual galleries are cramped and the circulation spaces confused and crowded. I’m not sure the extraordinary new extension - big enough dwarf the original power station - will change this.


Elevating pedestrians 

The entrance plaza from the Millennium Bridge is poor and scrappy but this does not actually matter, partly because the building  itself is so overwhelming but also because the success of Bankside does not rely on self conscious ‘public space’ – quite the reverse. The riverside walk is so successful because the public space is actually limited and very subsidiary. The experience is all about people in motion – not just tourists but joggers, cyclists, people going to work. It is not a place you want to or need to linger. The river views are also exciting and, compared to Westminster for example, the Thames has a harder estuarial character with dangerous tides and currents very evident. The buildings flanking the riverside walk are mostly interesting with lots of conversions and remnants of old London to leaven the boring and bland. The Globe is bizarre but actually rather likable and there are real archaeological finds, like Winchester Palace. The walk is anything but boring – the street is the point not the paving, although I notice major new paving is currently underway.


Borough High Street hiding from the Shard

After diving under bridges and behind buildings you end up at Southwark Cathedral and Borough Market and their thrilling juxtaposition with the railway viaducts. Nairn said that the unsentimental throwing together of the cathedral, railway and warehouses is the essence of place which should never be sacrificed and it hasn’t been. If anything the new Thameslink viaduct has heightened the drama, flying over old buildings in a cavalier but very exciting way. Borough Market remains a fabulous place but in danger of losing its soul to too much gentrification.


Neo balls up

The other way to Borough from Blackfriars is along Southwark Street, a wide Hausmann-like improvement which always somewhat lacked empathy. It is now overwhelmed by the looming Shard and dominated by massive and rather faceless new buildings, the latest being Rogers Stirk Harbour’s Neo-Bankside. This has an extraordinary juxtaposition of cold glass and steel against the C18th Hopton almshouses, very reminiscent of the relationships you find between the medieval remnants of Coventry and the post blitz city. Like the adjacent Allies and Morrison’s Blue Fin building, Neo-Bankside is not without elegance, subtlety and precision but ultimately inhuman. We must be grateful for the wit and interest of Piers Gough’s nearby Bankside Lofts. Also Allies and Morrison show how it should be done with their own offices on Southwark Street.


Introducing the council style - off Long Lane

It does not help that Neo-Bankside is offering bargain apartments (inevitably with stunning views) at £1.5 million to £5 million in a borough where most residents are poor and there is a desperate need for social housing. Away from the hum of tourism and creative media much of Borough and Bermondsey is social housing as can be seen on the first part of the train journey from London Bridge to Brighton . This is an enthralling ride not because of the Shard but for the impressive mass of varied and well built council housing. Some general changes in the aesthetics of local authority housing can be discerned: Jacobean-arts and crafts, neo-Georgian blending into a Viennese brave new world, Scando-modernist, a full blooded GLC brutalism and finally a low rise quasi vernacular reaction. The mistakes at Aylesbury and Heygate have been a gift for reactionary polemicists yet for the vast majority of cases in north Southwark council housing clearly worked. 'erbert Morrison and Co. really did create a better future.


Peabody flats - when bankers were at least civil

Any tour of Southwark’s social housing is inevitably partial and arbitrary. The earliest example is probably the 1864 model industrial dwellings with cast iron balconies on Redcross Way which are fairly grim. However Octavia Hill’s 1887 Redcross Cottages and gardens nearby are delightful. Our perambulation starts on Blackfriars Road near the Palestra Building. Designed by Will Alsop, the Ken Russell of the architectural world, this is a really successful building - large but subtle, fun without being frivolous (unlike so much else of his work).It is a true local landmark and puts us in a good mood for a tour on a bright but freezing day, starting off walking southwards on Blackfriars Road. Palestra rises above but does not dominate Nelson Square. A fragment of the late Georgian original survives but the rest is post war redevelopment with 8-9 storey council flats. Pevsner says they are dull, but actually they seem quite desirable to me with their effective rhythm of balconies overlooking the retained square, its public greenery and play space. Many of the housing schemes we are to see evoke the traditional London square, often quite successfully. On Surrey Row archetypal LCC 30s deck access flats are unsurely poised between neo Georgian and streamlined moderne.


London municipality - 1899 housing off Lancaster St

Peabody Square of 1870 looks almost Parisian. It is quite grand; less crowded and institutional than most Peabody estates with well proportioned blocks around pleasant courts which look well cared for. Peabody, as a plaque explains, was a London banker. Don’t hold your breath for such philanthropy from the present sharks. Behind on Webber Row 1970s Peabody houses and flats have a robust design and clever plan. Tall turn of the (20th) century LCC blocks are nicely detailed and the composition of bicycles chained to balconies adds a further level of visual interest. Facing Waterloo Road the flats sensibly incorporate shops. This is the era which signifies London's comparatively late rise to municipality, when progressives the like of Sidney Webb oversaw the planning of County Hall, tramway electrification, school meals, housing estates and slum clearance. The earliest housing is on Lancaster Street (1889) and compared to Webber Row illustrates the change from Jacobean to Arts and Crafts.


GLC brutalism hoves into view - Jurston St

Towards Westminster Bridge Road the scale gets bigger with uncompromising 1970s hard red brick blocks, surprisingly sporting tall chimneys and small gardens, and impressive 8 storey pre-war angled deck access apartments. The confident house building stride of the LCC was disrupted by the introduction of the GLC and the financial effects of the oil crisis. Nevertheless the flats off Jurston Street (and the nearby Kipling Estate) show that the GLC had a bold stab at bricky brutalism. Now with the demolition of the Heygate Estate Southwark are building a number of small scale new housing schemes for its residents, like the interesting and precise housing and open space at Library Street off Borough Road. These are designed by Metaphorm Architects and Sarah Wigglesworth.


Density, intimacy & noddy - the Scovell Estate

The earlier reaction to often badly executed mega deck access developments has frequently resulted in disappointing and inappropriate sub-suburban housing schemes in inner cities (like Surrey Quays). But there were also examples like the Scovell Estate, designed by Southwark architects department in the 1970s, which aims at a low rise villagey effect. The houses are grouped off vehicle free lanes and yards – the cars in an undercroft and the level change created is used to good effect. The atmosphere is remarkably quiet and intimate with nice juxtapositions but there are a lot of blank gables with little of the informal surveillance you would find in a real village and rather too much hard paving.


Social ceramics - Lawson Estate


A jolly rhythm - Lawson Estate, by Burnet, Tait & Partners


Scando town - Lawson Estate

Down Trinity Street and past the early Victorian Trinity Church Square, which Nairn pronounced one of the best squares in London, is the Lawson Estate of 1953. The great man also singled this out for praise, comparing it to housing in Copenhagen: ‘the similarity is unnerving: the same angular polygonal blocks, the same beautifully cut bricks and the same feeling of people first and architectural expression second.’ He was less enamoured of the tall standard LCC concrete slabs added later. Across Great Dover Street is an estate designed by Lubetkin in 1965, not particularly remarkable and somewhat run down but quite a pleasing ensemble of medium and low rise flats around gardens.


The template worked - Tabard Gardens

Far more characteristic of the area is the neo Georgian of the blocks behind Tabard Gardens (there is a lot of Chaucer around here). The Tories ruled the LCC from 1907 to 1934 and there is a shift toward paternalist aesthetics: an imperial neo-Georgian with barrack like symmetry. Yet the architects actually subvert this with quite functionalist interpretation. The blocks employ a standard template but are set amongst generous greenery in a tranquil environment. The standard template clearly worked, and still works today.


Materials and typography from LCC's neo-Georgian years

North of here on Weston Street is an archetypal 60s redevelopment of tower blocks with lower scale courtyard flats; altogether a harder and more challenging proposition but elegant in its composition. It is opposite the fine Leather Market of 1878 now well converted into offices. Most ex-industrial buildings nearby are converted to trendy apartments as we are on the edge of the ‘creative industries’ bit of Bermondsey.


'Good old 'erb' - Meakin Estate

The huge 1902 Hartley Jam Factory complex off Tower Bridge Road has been converted to flats, studios, offices and with its live-work ethos is an exemplar for ‘new’ Bermondsey regeneration chic. Opposite is the 30s Meakin Estate with its wonderfully dramatic mirrored horse shoe arched entrances. This represents an earlier and more substantial vision for Bermondsey. The design owes something to the Fuchsenfeldhof in Vienna or possibly Copenhagen and is very convincing and moving. There are many other blocks of flats nearby with similar inspiration and motifs. They speak volumes of the pride and aspiration of an earlier London and its political leaders such as 'erbert 'Labour gets things done' Morrison. He set out to create 'the most powerful local political organization ever to exist in this country' and he did. By the end of the 1930s the LCC was building around 4,000 flats every year - four times as many as the previous administration. Morrison stood up to Imperial Whitehall and his social policies had powerful implications for the post war era.


Post-war social confidence - off Grange Walk

On Grange Walk blocks of 6 storey maisonettes with expressive open stairwells are set in expansive greenery and have been provided with local amenities like shops. The estate underscores the confidence in society, planning and the future which was such a characteristic of post war Britain. In the post-war era LCC architects like Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin gradually cast aside the old templates as they developed a Scando-Modernist aesthetic of their own. The twenty years leading up to 1981 saw the percentage of local authority housing in inner London increased from a fifth to nearly half – no wonder Mrs Thatcher abolished the GLC. The resurgence of the right re-imposed old orthodoxies which justify and sustain the sort of inequalities that are particularly evident in Southwark, as is so eloquently explored in Owen Jones’s brilliant ‘Chavs’.


Cardiff Bay-on-Thames - Empire Square

In the era of neo-con ascendancy Southwark has made some brave attempts to emulate the housing achievements of its illustrious predecessors but has been obliged to use Thatcherite methods which massively limit its ability to deliver. Bermondsey Spa is a good example. Here a new community of 2,000 homes with schools, health facilities etc is emerging based on a Llewellyn Davis masterplan and employing architectural competition as a tool. The estate agents with typical hyperbole advertise it as ‘London’s best new place to live’. Certainly there is a feel of urbanity in places but the actual buildings are fairly standard with oh so much of that jolly spectrum of cladding. This is nothing however to Empire Square off Long Lane, which is rightly castigated by the excellent local blog as the worst new development in north Southwark by a long shot. What is so crass about this scheme is the whole nonsense about creating a new public square. Yeah right, but a square surrounded by overbearing and faceless crap is of no public value.


The future of social housing? Bermondsey Island

Bermondsey Square is not crap but it is disappointing. It has lots of advantages - terminating wonderful Bermondsey Street, archaeological heritage and the weekly antiques market - but it does not really come alive as a space. You might have expected lots of interesting uses capturing the vitality of the streets around with their mixture of chic and eel and pie shops. (Apparently eels are currently in short supply.) What you actually get is fairly ordinary café-bars, an overpriced deli, a Sainsbury Local and a cinema (although this is not very obvious). The buildings defining the space are a bit like Muji storage – minimal, functional and ubiquitous. Being boxes they have difficulty in effectively defining the awkward geometry of the surrounding streets and creating an inviting inner space. The final phase, Bermondsey Island is much more engaging – a carefully sculpted and articulated janus of a building by Urban Salon which provides good social housing on a difficult site.


The charming village idiot

Bermondsey Street is the sort of place which makes London irresistible with its wonderful jumble of buildings, fashionable uses and interesting punters. It is a conservation exemplar: former leather factories and their hoists jostle for space – at times you could be in Antwerp. The ancient rhythm of the street is punctured by the brilliantly eccentric dumpy Strawberry Hill Gothick of St Mary Magdalene. Bermondsey Street is one of those 'London villages' of the middle class return-to-town movement, which has actually been ongoing since at least the 1960s – remember Mick Jagger’s Notting Hill pad in Performance? These began with left of centre media and arts types and the estate agents followed later. Also known as gentrification, the village ideal has helped to preserve an historic fabric and successfully lobby against excessive road building schemes, yet the other side of the coin is that it can be socially divisive. While skilled workers left the estates as work moved westward the poorest remained, which created two Londons - 'inner city' and 'village'. The myth that council estate equals sink estate stems from a misinterpretation of recent history.


Another bourgeois barrow boy's curio stall - The White Cube

But although inner city and village are different worlds, they arguably co-exist more easily in north Southwark than in much of London. This is partly because of the smaller scale and diversity of much of the social housing which has been developed very largely within the old street network. Also new developments were, until recently, of more modest scale and with a stronger emphasis on quality and good design. Despite the tensions you do not sense a void between separate planets as in Docklands where social housing is overpowered by yuppie bling in its face. But it is fairly absurdist to find the latest White Cube gallery half way down Bermondsey Street. Described as ‘uber-frigid’ by the very amusing Tom Dyckhoff in his recent ‘Let’s move to Bermondsey’ it is certainly very white. The attendants wear black and stop you taking photographs. Currently there is an interesting exhibition of work by Anselm Kiefer with massive works on what I took to be industrial decline and dereliction (hugely relevant). Chris was resolutely unimpressed by the experience.


Dubai-on-Thames

Around every corner looms the Shard. Its presence becomes overwhelming when you reach St Thomas Street but here it has to compete with the 30 storey tower of Guy’s Hospital. This has been reviled as a concrete eyesore for decades and is shortly and sadly to suffer the indignity of cladding. This is a pity because it has clarity, integrity and purpose. It makes a very effective ensemble with the tranquil entrance courtyard to Guy’s but now the Shard is muscling in. You can escape it by ducking into the C18th Guy’s Hospital Chapel, singled out for praise by Nairn most especially for John Bacon’s monument to the compassion of Thomas Guy. But there is no escape for St Thomas Street, with its former church of 1702 (where the attic became an early operating theatre and is now a museum). Keats used to live opposite. Now the severely elegant late Georgian terraces are totally overwhelmed by bad neighbour development. Whilst we will inevitably get used to the Shard in the long views, the impact on St Thomas Street is criminal.


Please, no More London

There is only one vantage point I found from which the Shard looks good and that is More London. Lord Foster’s huge development is ‘sleek, efficient, scrupulously detailed and built to a well tried formula’ as Ken Powell says in his analysis of architecture and regeneration in Southwark 'City Reborn'. More London captures the ambition of Southwark to be central London, not an inner London borough. It is now the home of the Mayor himself in the slightly disturbing asymmetrical City Hall. Within this context the courting of the Shard by mayors and other politicos looks more understandable. No doubt the contribution the developer is making to the revamped London Bridge Station helped too. This is badly needed but the external images of Grimshaw's scheme look pretty disappointing. The Tooley Street elevation has been compared to a Waitrose and the wavy canopies too look apologetic - hardly his Waterloo International or the peer of say Calatrava's thrilling Oriente station in Lisbon. The station is subservient to the bombast of the Shard. But whatever the architectural virtues of the Shard, and I am far from convinced it will live up to the expectations of its supporters, the political statement that it makes couldn't be more relevant to the current political debate on inequality and the overwheening power of finance. It is 'sod you'.


Public vs Private - Guy's Tower & the Shard

Southwark has got a lot to be proud of in its regeneration, as examined in ‘City Reborn’. More so than most authorities it has taken advantage of its opportunities and has promoted good architecture (if we forget Strata). But the rationale for the massive scale of development has been to provide housing and jobs for local people and this is proving increasingly difficult to deliver. Despite the efforts of the planning authority, developers are not fulfilling their part of the bargain, especially affordable housing that is actually affordable or jobs for local people. Poorer residents risk being increasingly marginalised by the continuing colonisation of the 'City' and the 'village'. In theory Localism will empower them, but actually this is just a cruel charade to mask the increasing power of business.


The white cliffs - Great Dover St

The record of previous generations in delivering successful municipal housing has been largely obscured by Thatcherite rewriting of history. But it is the failures of her model of the housing market that are now all too apparent. London's municipal housing record looks increasingly impressive and needs to be much better understood and celebrated. Much excellent research and analysis has already been done by Elain Harwood, Matthew Whitfield and others. Hopefully this will be expanded into a comprehensive reinterpretation of its achievements of municipal housing which is badly needed. And what London badly needs is a new 'erbert Morrison, not another four years of Boris buffoonery.


SE1 is a museum of social housing - Redcross Cottages

--

References:

Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner & Bridget Cherry, London 2: South
Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century 
Stephen Inwood, A History of London
Kenneth Powell, City Reborn
Elain Harwood & Alan Powers, Housing the Twentieth Century
Ian Nairn, Nairn's London
Owen Jones, Chavs  

Tackling oligarchy: wider pavements

London is the richest city in the country and its wealth is conspicuously, often obscenely, displayed. At the same time public spending per capita is higher in London than anywhere else in the country as a patronising Paxo was forced to concede in his bruising encounter with Plaid Cymru. Public investment in public transport and the public realm is massive and that is a good thing – would be nice if the rest of the country got a look in too but London is a world city and a different world from the provinces. There is a big question however about how wisely this public largesse is being spent. London is also the most unequal city in Europe and that too is horrifyingly obvious, yet so much public investment is directed to vanity projects, mostly Boris inspired. However there are also some good examples of relatively low cost enhancements of public spaces which really improve the quality of city life.


Pedestrian friendly crossing to the new King's Cross

It is a commonplace to say that London is a city of contrasts but nowhere is this more so than Euston Road where the great stations disgorge provincial hopefuls into the maelstrom. Euston of course, now a byword for philistinism and public squalor, is to be redeveloped as the mother of all Grimshaw stations due to the tenacity of the HS2 train spotter tendency. The implications of this for the rest of the rail system and indeed for the onward journey of HS2 passengers have not been thought through, following in a great British tradition of non-joined up planning. Expect chaos.


How the elite arrive in London

St Pancras, now basking in the sunshine of its magnificent re-invention, must be about the most exhilarating station to arrive at in the world. And I say that despite the fact that my Midland trains have been pushed out into a utilitarian annexe. However, I do baulk at the privatisation of what was the station’s magnificent booking hall much as I applaud the painstaking restoration of the hotel. What seems a particular wasted opportunity is the elevated forecourt above the clamour of Euston Road which has been beautifully paved but is mostly used as a car park for the 5* hotel. Although not exactly private, the signals of uniformed flunkeys and privileged access for cars certainly doesn’t encourage public use.


How everyone else arrives

Across the way McAslan’s new concourse to King’s Cross is just opening and looks sufficiently exciting and robust against the magnificent power of Cubitt’s station. As with St Pancras the cleaning and reglazing of the train sheds is creating an extraordinary transformation. But the biggest benefit should be the clearance of the tat in front of the station’s monumental façade and the creation of a new public square – except this won’t be the entrance to the station and the square will give onto the snarling bedlam of Euston Road. The new square has been designed by Stanton Williams who got it spectacularly right with their minimalist conversion and extensions of the King’s Cross goods sheds for Central St Martins. However I fear their stark approach to the new square is wrong headed. The station façade is certainly very dominating and the design of the square must not compete with this. But its other perimeter is Euston Road. How or why a civilised city would tolerate this idiotic and selfish traffic is beyond me, and it is worst at the King’s Cross gyratory. There is only one solution – to massively reduce the number of private vehicles and put pedestrians, cyclists and buses first. But the Mayor has bottled this. King’s Cross Square surely needs some enclosure, some attempt at tranquillity and to be somewhere that people can meet and enjoy, not just an external concourse.


FFS - Tavistock Place

Along Euston Road the British Library has very successfully created just such a place. The spacious courtyard with subtle enclosure and changes of level is screened from the road and provides a very tranquil and reflective environment which is a prelude to the library itself. This is one of the most important public buildings of the late C20th - thoughtful, practical and beautifully detailed and executed. The tremendous interior spaces flow from the courtyard and have great quality of materials and design so that the building reveals its pleasures slowly. St John Wilson managed to achieve this despite the parsimony of government, delays and controversy which HRH famously fanned - testament to the values and public service ethos of his generation of architects.


Byng Place is shared space

Opposite the library is Camden Town Hall – not a particularly remarkable building in itself but home to some excellent thinking about streets and urban design, the pole opposite of Boris bling. Camden includes Bloomsbury, perhaps the most simpatico part of central London although 50 years ago Nairn pronounced it was dead. Cycling on the Euston Road is terrifying and foolhardy but there are relatively quiet alternative routes through Bloomsbury. These include an extremely popular segregated two way track along Tavistock Place. However this is very narrow and at times really congested - the balance between traffic, cycles and pedestrians is just not right. However the continuation of the cycle route westward at Byng Place has recently been redesigned as part of a shared space repaving scheme which I think is extraordinarily successful. It is all very simple and designed as an entity with uniform setts. There is a kerb between the carriageway and the paved area where cyclists mingle happily with pedestrians. What was pretty much a non place with endless taxis rattling through has now become a very pleasant new square. The traffic is still there but is slower, less dominating and the feeling is relaxed, tranquil, civilised. The adjacent farmers’ market makes it a lively people-place and an excellent spot for lunch even in March.


Widening pavements and reducing signage 

Malet Street which leads south towards Covent Garden has also been utterly transformed from what was a somewhat dour street of university institutions and parking to a text book model of sensible use of space. The street is now one way for cars and there is even some parking, principally for electric cars and car clubs. The pavements have been widened to allow for pleasant passegiata but, perhaps most importantly, the carriageway can now provide a very comfortable two way cycle route on the street with no need for fussy layout and signing. It is simple, very elegant and very functional. The same principles are applied to Montague Place outside the north entrance to the British Museum, although I’m not sure about Delia’s Kitchen Afrika van which seems to have taken up squatters’ rights here – perhaps I am being too anal.


Squaring the corners and defeating the racetrack - Russell Square
The massive improvements to this main bike route would not have been possible without the recent remodelling of Russell Square. London did not invent squares but London squares are one of its most distinctive features and biggest assets. In the 1960s many fell victim to the traffic engineers and one way systems of roaring traffic which so damaged street life, pedestrian convenience and cyclists’ safety. These traffic schemes were a stealthy sequestration of the wide roads which had not been designed primarily for traffic and parking but for proportion, outlook, light and public health. The street space had been multi functional – now pedestrians were penned into narrow pavements with awkward multi stage crossings and the geometry of the squares encouraged high traffic speeds. Russell Square, laid out in 1800, is one of the largest London squares but its fine public park was the centre of a race track. The new road layout has utterly transformed its setting. The streets are now two way and the junctions are a simple T, allowing straight desire line pedestrian crossings. Pavements are widened and some parking bays provided but visually these are part of the repaving. It all works brilliantly and is now a really comfortable place for pedestrians and cyclists. Although traffic is still heavy on the main Southampton Row to Woburn Place route at least you can now cross the street easily. The one thing in short supply is bike stands although Barclay bike stations are everywhere in evidence. Russell Square shows what can be achieved with political will, simple good design…and reasonable public funding.


The revolution will be repaved - Bedford Square

At the other end of Montague Place is Bedford Square, completed in 1786, and as Pevsner says ‘the most handsome of London squares, preserved completely on all sides’. The gardens in a central oval remain private but there is extensive ‘public highway’ outside the railings. This has now largely been reclaimed from taxis and parking in a very simple and effective solution and the new public space ‘borrows’ the private gardens in a very democratic way. It is somewhat galling that this new public space is being abused by American style anti-abortion campaigners seeking to intimidate women attending a clinic here.


Turning a traffic jam into a public space - Great Queen St

Bloomsbury’s public realm improvements are often very simple, like just widening pavements, improving crossings and civilising anarchic parking but they are characterised by good uncluttered design and quality paving. Other areas have similarly been improved, like Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden. There is a problem however in linking these up because of the horrendous traffic around Holborn which makes it a no go area for all but the most testosterone fuelled cyclists. Like Euston Road a far more radical approach to this conflict is required.


We don't need your private gardens - Fitzroy Square

Across the chasm of Tottenham Court Road, Camden and Westminster are currently consulting on an Action Plan for the fascinating Fitzrovia area based on a study by Urban Initiatives. This shows how public space and green space can be reclaimed even within a very tight and busy mixed use environment. It is bizarre that the restaurants of Charlotte Street do not spill out into the street which is dominated by parking. However Fitzroy Square provides an object lesson in sensible urban improvement. Two sides of the square are by Robert Adam but like Bedford Square the circular gardens remain private. What was the highway outside the railings is now pedestrian space with plenty of seating and views into and across the gardens - all delightful except for the litter which is everywhere.


Look, no guard rails and foot friendly kerbs !

Kensington High Street is one of the best known examples of rethinking highway design, although this was as much to do with libertarianism as aesthetics with politics overruling professionalism. And it works. The street is pretty much dominated by traffic but pedestrians have much more freedom and it looks crisp and uncluttered. Idiot rails have been removed, except I notice outside the Underground station. Pavement thresholds continue across side streets and there is a central reservation you can walk along – brilliant idea – as are the bike stands here, some of which are improvised. This really is a very practical model for high streets.


Exhibition Rd - making a bad exhibition of shared space.


The speedy car is still priority - Inequality Space

You could not say the same about the recently completed showpiece shared space on Exhibition Road. The concept is good – to make a grand visual and pedestrian axis between South Kensington, the V&A, Natural History and Science Museums and Kensington Gardens, the Albert Memorial and Royal Albert Hall. Despite its grand buildings and the crowds of museum visitors Exhibition Road lacked interest and was certainly not geared for the pedestrian. The new scheme designed by Dixon Jones is definitely better – but with a price tag of £29m is just not value for money. This is not the fault of the architects but rather of the brief.


The London elite don't really get sharing.

The shared space concept is controversial and will be more so after Exhibition Road. It is based on the Dutch inspired principles that all road users need to take responsibility to ‘negotiate’ rights of way and this is safer than segregated and directed flows. This certainly seems sensible. My wife once had a research job investigating accidents, the conclusion of which was, broadly, that when roads look safe they are dangerous and vice-versa. (It also made her the worst car passenger in the world.) However to make shared space work it is not enough to remove physical barriers, signs and other paraphernalia – you also need to change the psychology of ‘ownership’ of the space. The problem with Exhibition Road is that this has only partially been achieved


Behind the parking, pedestrians stick to the old pavement lines - big wow.

The political deal is that the road space has basically been divided into three. The westernmost section alongside the Natural History Museum is meant to be a broad sidewalk. The eastern section adjacent to the V&A is a two way street. Amazingly and absurdly the central section is reserved for residents’ parking bays. The Dixon Jones design attempts to provide a false unity to this division in an overall wall-to-wall diamond pattern of white on black Chinese granite setts. This is elegant and not as assertive as I was expecting - although the central light columns on kerbed islands are – big time. Otherwise the detailing is all very nice but actually tends to reinforce the timidity of the central concept. For example the elegant cast iron drainage channels provide a visual kerb which eats into the pedestrian space, as do the residents’ parking spaces with their discreet studs. So the pedestrians don’t gain a lot in space. They would certainly be foolhardy to try and share the road space because the traffic comes in fast moving pulses whenever the lights change (the pace set by taxis of course). This is still effectively a segregated street and the reason for this is the visual and physical division caused by the very expensively paved residents’ car parking bays. This is a telling expression of Kensington priorities but really speaks of political timidity.


£29,000,000 spent on residents' parking for the super rich

Further evidence of political timidity is the failure to tackle the dominance of Cromwell Road, which slashes across the granite with tarmac and roaring traffic (although to be fair the pedestrian crossings are much improved). Then there is an abject failure to make meaningful visual or pedestrian connection across Kensington Gore to the park or the Royal Albert Hall. Indeed the upper section of Exhibition Road reverts to a traditional street layout complete with a very gross roundabout at the Prince Consort Road junction to speed traffic. All this is rather strange as Exhibition Road is the baby of Daniel Moylan, responsible for the groundbreaking Kensington High Street and now Boris’s deputy chairman of TfL. Exhibition Road is not a bad scheme but a compromised one which comes with a big price tag. Lots of lessons should be learnt for the future but it is telling that there has been little interest in the planning press or in the transport press, except for the excellent John Dales. That the architectural press take this important scheme seriously tells us a lot about relative professional values.


Flat Iron Square - Southwark

As well as big ticket items like Exhibition Road there are lots of interesting small scale, low cost improvements to be found in London, often the result of the enterprise and dedication of Council planners. A nice one spotted on our recent sortie to Southwark is at the junction of Southwark Bridge Road and Union Street. What was little more than a traffic island but with a characterful island café, some plane trees and the drama of the railway viaduct on its north side has been reimagined as a pleasant and interesting paved space including cycle priorities. As much aimed at regeneration of a run down quarter as at urban design, it deserves to be successful.


Playing frogger with your life - Bow Interchange

Way out east within sight of the absurd Anish Kapoor Olympic Tower, which will surely be Boris’s epitaph, we found a pedestrian and cycle scheme which really restores your faith in the value of good design. If Euston Road is unpleasant Bow Interchange is insane with a neo motorway in underpasses and a flyover speeding traffic between Bow Road (which is actually quite civilised) and Stratford High Street which needs to be civilised if Stratford is to achieve any of its potential as a recognisable part of central London post the Olympics. The roundabout between is notorious and two cyclists have been killed recently, movingly remembered by ghost bikes.


...and take a right turn, into the church

A masterplan for the area has already resulted in the renovation of the quirky Bow Church in the middle of Bow Road but the traffic is hugely dominant and dangerous. Plans for a cycle and pedestrian route across the flyover don’t seem like the answer to me. Leicester is getting rid of its Belgrave flyover. Surely TfL could do the same, but don’t hold your breath.


Sod the Olympics, lets have more of this 

The Bow Riverside project is beneath the notorious Interchange and links what were discontinuous footpaths/cycleways on either side of the River Lea Navigation leading northwards to the Olympic Park and southwards to Limehouse. Previously you had to traverse the deadly roundabout. The new link is basically a long Z walkway and bridge supported by robust stanchions set in the waterway. These are protected by fenders and create a habitat-rich water environment off the working navigation. Fencing in vertical hardwood timber batons ties the project together and creates a wonderfully satisfying and tranquil rhythm echoing the reed beds developing in the water below. What is great about this project is that it is so subtle and understated. It is not imposing itself on the riparian character, just complementing it. The cleverest thing is the way the cantilevered section of walkway beneath the roundabout is handled. This has very low headroom and is quite lengthy. Often such pedestrian/cycle routes can be really intimidating and unpleasant but here it is handled so well with low level lighting on the railings twinkling in the water below. Designed by Adams and Sutherland it is a real winner. It should be the start of a broader greening of Bow Interchange. There are lots of fairly marginal activities on land adjacent to the roundabout which could be made a much greener environment. Bow Interchange may never be a London square but it could and should be a hell of a lot better than it is now.


Guard rails - go faster stripes and pedestrian imprisonment

As London continues to boom, perversely benefitting from the financial instability in the rest of the world which it kind of had quite a lot to do with, it is going to have to make some difficult choices. The DfT forecast traffic growth of 43% by 2035 which is of course bollocks but is a useful fallacy as it can help London to confront reality. There is no way that the capital can accommodate such traffic growth and remain a liveable and competitive city. Bur Boris is eating his fine libertarian words of a few years ago about pedestrians in cattle pens etc. and is now promising more investment in roads, more guard rails and pedestrian bridges. Boris, you are pathetic  - stop appeasing the car minority and support the good work being done in the Boroughs to civilise London spaces.


Behind enemy lines - Kensington

Distinctive Southampton #1 Medieval & Georgian

Last year we blogged about Southampton, the soon to be Premier City of the South and pointed out the yawning gap between the grand rhetoric of the Council’s corporate aspiration for the city centre and the desperate poverty of what is actually being delivered. You read the Core Strategy and it is apparently written in some arcane ceremonial language that is not meant to be taken seriously. The incantations of sustainability, high quality design etc absolve both the developers and the City from actually doing these things. In this Southampton is only too typical but the scale of the damage to its city centre in the last 10-20 years is truly shocking. It has been denounced by native son Owen Hatherley as ‘a compendium of everything that is evil and wrong in this septic isle’.


Distinctive Southampton #2 Regency 

Owen added ‘it didn’t and doesn’t have to be like this’ and that is the point. It is not inevitable that Southampton should showcase the lowest common denominator of architecture and the built environment. There are lots of good things about the city –Southampton Water, the Old Town, the medieval walls, the parks, a legacy of post war rebuilding and especially of social housing that needs to be much better appreciated. Southampton has lots of qualities and better economic prospects than most but its recent new buildings eloquently express its loss of confidence and civic pride.


Distinctive Southampton #3 Victoriana 

The announcement last year that a new masterplan for the city centre was being commissioned gave some cause for optimism, suggesting the prospect of a new approach to planning and urban design. But on reading the recently published public consultation report abandon any such hopes. It says all the standard laudable things but could be written for Southampton, Northampton, Nottingham, Newcastle, Reykjavik. Richard Rogers said it all a lot better in 1998. But we know the reality is that these Urban Renaissance mantras have been translated crudely, crassly and utterly cynically by the market. Planning has been timid and supine, lacking leadership and at best hopelessly naïve in seeing development per se as a solution. The result is the New Ruins of Great Britain. Surely we know by now that general design principles, good though they might be, are not enough – there needs to be a clear and honest assessment of the quality of the environment that will be created in specific places and the actual experience of the new public realm; the fine words in the Core Strategy and the masterplan actually need to mean something. Consultants are past masters of skating over all this with their sketches of smiling, happy people sipping cappuccinos. This is just dishonest – the exact parallel of what has been happening in the financial markets.


Distinctive Southampton #4 post-war modernism  

The new Southampton masterplan is plausible but anodyne – it dares you to disagree with its generalities. But the fundamental problem is that it does not start with an honest assessment of Southampton city centre as a place and so has no real insight into its potential. This is because it is intended to ‘guide investment’ and to ‘act as vehicle to raise the profile of the city centre’. It is a cheerleader for promoting new development and this is the focus throughout. Fairly typically of the genre, it assumes development is synonymous with making the city centre a better place for citizens and visitors, solving environmental problems and making the place greener and more sustainable. But it is really short-changing Southampton by imagining the future largely on the developers’ terms. The result is a vision for Anyplace – any place in England anyway.



This is not to say that there are no good ideas in the masterplan. There are lots of them but none are convincingly thought through. For example, plans for a new market hall are good in principle and could make amends for the wanton destruction of the covered market at St Marys. But the proposed location makes little sense for shoppers or market traders and the loss of the St Marys open market would further impoverish that local high street for which there appear to be no ideas for regeneration - not very Mary Portas. Most of the time the masterplan is just going through the motions – themes, quarters, big balls projects. You get no sense that the fundamental issues of the city centre are being tackled.


The horror: global capitalism

 In our ‘Southampton Dreams’ blog we said:
Three things seem obvious. Southampton must capitalise on its unique assets – the medieval walls, the water and the drama of the big boats and link the two. It must create a ‘world class’ environment around Town Quay, Mayflower Park and Queen’s Park, presently dominated by traffic and damned car parks. Secondly it must have a decent station with a proper street axis to the Civic Centre. It already has the start of the new street with wonderful 1966 Wyndham Court commissioned at a time when the City actually had some vision. And then the City must dramatically reduce the overwhelming dominance of traffic - make Legible City a reality.

Town centre shopping - destroyed by previous image 

The masterplan also identifies these themes amongst others but obviously the authors have not read Owen Hatherley's extensive analysis of the place or indeed our blog.. The ‘Royal Pier Waterfront’ is a VIP (meaning a very important project) and is seen as a major opportunity for leisure based development. In fact the landowners already have a development plan in progress. Far from reconnecting the Old Town and its fabulous walls with the sea at Town Quay, what the future apparently holds is a massive new development blocking the QE2 Mile from the water. The ferries which animate the place are shifted out and the Royal Pier is literally swallowed into new development, so not exactly a pier any more.

Interesting! Demolished.

However in masterplan world ‘Royal Pier is the international face of the city and requires outstanding international quality design. The proposals should include innovative, dynamic and striking designs which contribute to a strong new image for the city’. Naturally ‘a tall point feature is appropriate as a flagship marker.’ Mixed use, active frontages etc, etc – makes you want to weep. Is it inconceivable that this – the only place where citizens have access to Southampton Water – should be shaped around public uses and that the existing character be given a chance to flourish? Why build on Mayflower Park which is part of real Southampton and replace it with an anywhere scheme – could be Baltimore. Just to illustrate the indifference the City has to its special character the interesting shelter at Mayflower Park pictured in our blog last summer has subsequently been demolished. Not iconic enough.


Fancy a walk to the sea... er nope

The masterplan says it is all about connectivity – the frontispiece proclaims ‘the key to the centre’s legibility is the attractiveness of connected routes and a sense that each leads to a clearly recognisable destination and holds the promise of rich and rewarding experiences.’ This is good and provides the central threme of the masterplan but of course this is not easy in practice. One of the biggest problem any city centre faces is how to deal with the severance caused by traffic. Like most cities Southampton has approached this by largely pedestrianising the historic core (around the QE2 Mile) pushing traffic to an inner ring road which itself then becomes a major obstacle to regeneration of more peripheral areas. In Soton’s case it has positively invited cars to its new retail honeypots at West Quay, creating an urban desert and fundamentally unbalancing the retail structure. The masterplan does at least analyse the extent of the problem of too much car parking in the city centre which is a start, but it does not have any convincing solutions.


Opportunity knocks
It is simply not good enough to wish away reality by re-designating the inner ring road as green ‘City Streets’ which in the consultant imagination will be attractive tree lined boulevards. Of course it is possible to make dramatic improvements to traffic dominated city streets – I know, I’ve won awards for it – but it is a long game, depends on an ambitious integrated transport strategy, hard political decisions, large scale funding and most importantly the resolution of practical details. The masterplan rightly identifies Town Quay as a ‘main gateway’ and crossing of the inner ring road. The relationship between Town Quay and the Old Town is so important to the special character of Southampton that a radical re-imagination of this space is required. A few blobs on a plan do not do this. For such a fundamental and far reaching improvement I would expect a detailed proposal as a demonstration of the wider ‘City Street’ concept. When you have Gehl Architects on board, who definitely know how to do it, why on earth not?


Ocean Village is a sea of cars (cue sarcastic laughter)

Because there is no real understanding of Southampton, the place, the importance of the strong working class communities in the city centre is not reflected in the masterplan. It implies disappointment, for example, that the Holy Rood estate is popular with residents, so only longer term possibilities of redevelopment can be held out. The same goes for industry. Obviously it should be cleansed from the city centre to make room for more vibrant mixed use …. insert your own marketing hyperbole. But hang on – even if there were a market for all this homogenous developer dross, and of that there no realistic prospect, why is it desirable? Aren’t we supposed to be nurturing our manufacturing capacity? Surely it might be a good idea to retain skills in local industries like boatbuilding on the riverside rather than plan yet more Ocean Villages which people can no longer afford anyway. This report seems to have no recognition of post 2007 realities. It is wishful thinking but wishing for the wrong thing.


Social housing masterpiece beside the station. Ignored.

The most radical thing in the masterplan is the proposals for a new Station Quarter. The wrongly named Central Station desperately needs connecting with the city centre and the plan is for a grand new south entrance facing onto a new city square which would be the focus of a new office quarter. This is a big idea and a big intervention, requiring shifting a dual carriageway and redeveloping some of the wilderness of retail sheds and budget hotels that blight the area. It is exactly the sort of plan which should have guided the recent development of the whole West Quay area which instead exhibits the unrestrained anarchy and ugliness of consumerism and corporate greed, red in tooth and claw.


Here's a plan: get rid of this.

It is bizarre that the opening section on ‘major issues within the city centre today’ does not even mention the execrable West Quay retail parks which are such a disgrace to the city centre. Only recently constructed, they raise two fingers to every tenet of the Urban Renaissance. The urban design and sustainability impacts of the retail parks are considered in later sections and the masterplan concludes they are incompatible with its vision but any solutions are pushed way back into the sometime, never category. This may be realism but it is hardly vision or leadership. Creating some coherent urban framework between a new Station Square and the West Quay shopping centre would provide the opportunity for Southampton to radically rethink itself as a city of quality and ambition. Foolishly (in my view) the masterplan comes up with a alternative diversion – the Western Gateway. This would extend the imagined new office quarter from the new City Square to the iconic Waterfront knocking out port-side industries and encircling retail park land. Not very real and not very sensible. Why not focus on the big issue?


Work with what makes you unique, don't abuse it! Jeez.

The masterplan is a guide for developers and boy, there is a lot of development planned. As well as an extension of the gargantuan West Quay shopping centre and the redevelopment of the Bargate and East Street shopping centres, the key diagram appears to show that both sides of Above Bar will be completely redeveloped. This is extraordinary - a new blitz; bonkers really if you read retail trends in the financial pages. What sort of amnesia makes such a plan possible? Well, Southampton is treated as just Anytown, a commodity with no character, no memory and no choice. The masterplan actually says that Soton has no distinctive architectural style, unlike Manchester, Bristol or (strangely) Northampton. This of course is nonsense. Look at the Old Town, the quite extensive Regency survivals, the outstanding legacy of the City Architect, Berger, in the 50s and 60s. The early post war rebuilding of Above Bar may have been a disappointment but compares pretty favourably with West Quay. It would have been a lot better if the Tyrell and Green store had not been gratuitously knocked down. Now Marland House, an excellent example of 60s townscape featured in our last blog, is due for the wreckers’ ball. Meanwhile illustrations of Cardiff Bay are held up as models for the new Southampton. You can not be serious.

University bus station & kiosk (more of this please)

The recent winner of Masterchef created ‘sunshine on a plate’ according to the judges. This masterplan seeks to create an illusion of a sunshine future in 178 pages but it is tired, predictable and unsustaining fare. Can anyone really believe in this future? Sadly, the regeneration industry still peddles it and planners still buy it.

References:
Southampton City Centre: A Master Plan for Renaissance

South East London is another country, off the Frank Pick mind map. South East Trains like to keep it that way with their obtuse and lethargic rail services. But in the last few years the DLR has tunnelled under the river to reach Woolwich and by 2018 Crossrail will whizz you to the Arsenal in minutes (just don’t ask about the price tag). Inevitably this means big change and development for which a new masterplan has been produced by Allies and Morrison. We went to check it out.


Smells like a bag of glacier mints - Tate & Lyle 

The DLR is like a clockwork train set but is fun and you get great views although not always uplifting ones. The train rattles through an extraordinary (actually very ordinary) jungle of vastly over-scaled new flats with no semblance of urban structure or street life. The only sign of human spirit is the bikes on the myriad tiny balconies. You can see that fine Brutalist icon, Robin Hood Gardens, apparently condemned to destruction and to be replaced by new housing seven times denser than the Smithson scheme so hated by the authorities. (Can this be true or am I on a bad trip?) To the right are the sinister towers of Canary Wharf displaying the names of our real and spectacularly incompetent rulers like J.P. Morgan. Beyond the River Lea you enter a more fragmented world where shiny new development sits alongside vast dereliction and the remains of industrial Thameside, like the massive Tate and Lyle works which certainly makes its presence felt, or smelt. Planes make terrifying looking landings at City Airport. Silvertown survives amidst all this with that amazing Teulon church towering over it. The DLR dives into a tunnel and you alight at its elegantly understated Arsenal station.



The arsenal, docks and barracks were an amazing phenomenon indeed. Despite its relative isolation today, Woolwich has long been at the centre of world affairs and represents a different expression of Britain’s maritime prowess than nearby Greenwich.  Some of this is writ large in the sixteenth century naval paintings at Queen's House at Greenwich, and if ever foul art represented an equally foul age, then Philip and Mary by Hans Eworth is a must see. That aside, from the Tudors to the C20th Woolwich owed its importance to the demands of British naval belligerence, and the sheer number of employees gave the place the scale of a provincial town.


Taking aim at waterside regeneration (again)

The late Georgian period of jingoism and social repression was particularly prolific for Woolwich; the dry docks, superintendent’s office, barracks and Vanbrughian arsenal are all both brilliant and horrific reminders. Yet it was not to last: the shipbuilding docks were shipped to the North East - a response to organised labour and the comparative price of coal. The Royal Arsenal lasted another hundred years or so (75,000 were employed here during WWI) and was a major centre for engineering, often attracted migrants from the industrial provinces. The legend goes that it was two Nottingham engineers who used their old Garibaldi kit to form Woolwich Arsenal FC, which decamped to north London in 1913.


Gormless street life at the Royal Arsenal

The Woolwich Arsenal redevelopment is part of that immense but hazy Heseltine/Prescott concept – the Thames Gateway. Despite vast public investment (no fewer than 6 cross river railways built or under construction) little has been achieved besides ubiquitous yuppiedromes, many more of which are planned around the Royals and indeed at Arsenal. Meanwhile sensible schemes like Barking Riverside which would provide desperately needed affordable housing for families are stymied by lack of funding for schools and modest transport links – not sexy enough for Boris.


Dry dock entrance overlooked by our incompetent rulers

The Thames certainly draws you but at Woolwich it has an alienated and melancholy feel. You have great views of what went wrong in the built environment when politicians handed control of the country to financial empires. From a distance Canary Wharf looks like some banal cartoon imagination of what a city should look like. The Shard is nicely framed between Mammon’s ordinary towers. Complexes of gated flats mournfully survey their riverside ‘stunning views’. But the interest of the river itself makes up for the bleakness of development along its banks. The occasional river traffic of freighters and barges adds excitement and best of all is that wonderful institution, the free Woolwich ferry, the vessel brilliantly named Ernest Bevin. Boris wants to move this vehicle ferry which makes Woolwich feel like a mini channel port, but it is really important to the character of the place. There is also an Edwardian foot tunnel, currently being renovated.


70s Council housing at the former dockyards

The Thames is the life force of Woolwich and the town grew up between the Arsenal and the Naval Dockyard. There is little left of the old High Street and the Dockyard was closed in 1869. The Borough redeveloped part of it as housing in the 70s, retaining the dock wall but turning the small docks into a sort of giant’s garden pond, in the middle of which sits a rather fine streamlined clubhouse, now derelict. There is however a lot of community provision within the estate including a community centre in the handsome late C18th Dutch style dock offices. We continued towards the Thames Barrier through an extensive industrial zone containing many buildings with intriguing possibilities for new Hackneyesque uses, except this is Zone 4.


Saving London - The Thames Barrier

The Thames Barrier is beautiful and very satisfying. Here we have an icon which actually has a purpose. Since it was completed in 1982 the barrier has been closed to protect against storm surges with increasing frequency. The feelings the structure engenders are of huge power but also tranquillity. The covered concrete pedestrian walkway under the barrier is like a cloister and the boat shaped stainless steel caps of the massive piers in the river glisten in the sun and on the water. Across the river is the superb Barrier Park designed by Patel Taylor, unfortunately not directly accessible from the Woolwich bank but unmissable. It is in a frankly unpromising location - the quite elegant moderne apartments to the west refuse to engage with it and those to the east are truly horrendous - but the park manages to create a strong sense of place, interest and visual order. It is very well used by people who don’t look like yuppies – the best thing about Docklands for me.


John Nash meets Sam Scorer

Although the river is important to Woolwich the more obvious topographical feature of the place is the hills – lots of them, steep and sudden. Up the hill out of the town centre and facing Woolwich Common you find the late C18th Woolwich Barracks, which are positively amazing. As Ian Nairn said ‘no need to go to Leningrad; come to Woolwich instead and see the yellow brick march out for a quarter of a mile or more. It won’t stand up to a close look but the first astounding view enfilade….is worth all the subsequent disappointment’. You won’t get a close look anyway because the barracks have, surprisingly, not been sold for stunning apartments but refurbished as – barracks. The Lend Lease sign confirms some bonkers funding deal. This is no longer the home of the Royal Artillery but because of historic associations a temporary Olympic shooting venue is nearing completion opposite, looking like a vast tent. It is unlikely that this utilitarian colossus was inspired by Nash’s eccentric tent structure nearby which was moved here in 1819. It was given a lead roof and an inner skin with the original sailcloth left between. Despite ferocious razor wire perimeter fences you can walk around outside it but can’t get inside.


Cue The Imperial March - the Barracks

In the C19th Woolwich grew towards the Barracks, very much as a town in its own right rather than a suburb of the Great Wen. Ian Nairn perceptibly saw it as a provincial centre that has got embedded in London by mistake. He talks of its ‘thumping self-centred vitality; complete freedom from the morning train to town’. Well yes, 40 years on you can still see that, although Luton is the comparator that comes to mind. But Woolwich was also part of the LCC, so actually inner London and is now merged into the Royal Borough of Greenwich.


There's a butterfly circling the estate - St Mary's

Most of the jumble of terraces that clothed the hillsides was swept away in large scale post war redevelopment but what survives shows the very distinct character of the place. Woolwich with characteristic independence undertook London’s first post war Comprehensive Redevelopment Area at St Mary’s. Although the layout of maisonettes and 14 storey blocks does not make the most of the site, the towers with their butterfly plan are still impressive and the estate as a whole looks well cared for. Nearby at Parish Wharf there is an attractive small estate of self-build houses to Walter Segal’s model, which looks a rather better bet for Grant Shapps’s self build bonanza than Almere.


The system works...


...in a social democracy

The Morris Walk Estate was the LCC’s first example of system building begun in 1963. It employed the Larsen-Nielsen heavy concrete panel system which had been built successfully in the Netherlands for 10 years but when applied in London it was down-specified to save money; balconies were omitted and heating and insulation were poor, leading to serious problems. Nevertheless the Larsen-Nielsen system was used extensively elsewhere in London and Pevsner calls the blocks drearily familiar. Set in extensive landscaping the initial impression of the estate is favourable but the inner courts are fairly grim. The blocks with names like Elsinore House, in homage to their Danish origins, are apparently scheduled for demolition rather than renovation, although this cannot be economic or sustainable. At about the time the estate was completed Antonioni shot his 1967 Mod masterpiece ‘Blow Up’ in the adjacent Maryon Park. The tennis court is still there but as we know the body isn’t.


A definite change in topography

There are lots of parks on the hills behind the town centre and the late Victorian and Edwardian suburbs are pleasant enough like any provincial town. The most interesting find is a short terrace of houses by Lubetkin (1935) with beautiful curved concrete balconies and delightful garden walls – no gates. Next to Woolwich Common is the extensive Nightingale Place council estate on a dramatic sloping site and exhibiting changing housing ideals from the 60s to the 70s. The most successful are the stepped-back terraces facing the Common.


A bit of respect for the pedestrian - Arsenal Gate


Taming the dual carriage-way

The epicentre of Woolwich is Beresford Square in front of the Arsenal Gate. Here is a lively street market which lives up to Nairn’s enthusiastic billing but with the traffic now removed. The recent repaving by Gustafson Porter doesn’t really need to do much, and doesn’t. The Arsenal Gate, once the main entry to the armaments complex, is now cut off from it by a dual carriageway which acts as a physical, psychological and symbolic barrier between the town centre and the regeneration zone. This severance has recently been addressed in a largely successfully public realm enhancement designed by Witherford Watson Mann. The key component is a broad pedestrian crossing zone where the traffic is held back so that at least temporarily the pedestrian actually ‘owns’ the space. What was a broad no man’s land between the dual carriageway and the shops on the old road line has been repaved. This is a simple but effective scheme with nicely detailed granite subtly showing the line of the demolished Arsenal walls and it has well considered tree planting. It now provides a civilised arrival point for bus passengers and a much better context for the very run down covered market with its highly eclectic stalls. If the main pedestrian route to the crossing had actually been through the Arsenal Gate it would have been better, but as with the Magazine Gate in Leicester this seems to have been a conceptual step too far.


Deco corner


Woolwich Polytechnic, twinned with Leicester

Powis Street, the main shopping parade, leads off Beresford Square. Nairn observed it as ‘a commercial gold mine (which) has come down from the Midland cities and in the process lost its Midland drabness and taken on alertness and savoir faire’. It is certainly like the high street of a small provincial city and bearing many of the signs of decline you find in most. Although still lively it seems to have lost its saviour faire and shows the wounds of last summer’s riots. Its claim to social history and gastronomic fame is that here the first McDonald’s in Britain was opened in 1974 – before that we only had Wimpy Bars. Stranded at the end of the street are fine relics of former glory. Two Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society department stores face each other across the street, both empty – the 1903 effort in what Pevsner calls ‘the approved Harrod’s style’ and the 1938 Modernistic building with a striking tower. Tellingly the art nouveau building is being converted to a hotel whilst modernism decays. The adjacent former Granada cinema is in a modest brick Dudok style but with an exhilarating tower. The former Odeon framing the end of the street is a grand cream faience concoction, reborn as the New Wine Church.


Municipality

When Nairn remarks of Woolwich ‘it is always being rebuilt as it must be – that is its nature’ I doubt he would have envisaged what is happening to the place today. Whilst Powis Street languishes, the largest Tesco in Europe is under construction off Woolwich New Road. Designed by Sheppard Robson this is a new generation ‘Tesco Town’ incorporating other shops and 920 apartments some of which will be ‘affordable’. It will be the companion to the ‘New Woolwich Centre’ or town hall on Wellington Street designed by HLM and cited in last year’s Carbuncle Cup as ‘spectacularly awful’. It is certainly a missed opportunity – big, bland and faceless. The glass entrance relies for interest on reflections of the Edwardian Baroque town hall opposite. The architect’s illustration tellingly majors on views by night. But it is public and accessible and incorporates a large new library. Civic pride and ambition is now so circumscribed and apologetic that buildings like this are what you get, so no wonder we are nostalgic for the Edwardian affair opposite with its spectacular showy entrance hall, at least still open to the public. And what a pity that in this Depression we can’t achieve the style, confidence, elegance and pleasure of Greenwich Town Hall built in the 30s, its use usurped by the HLM effort.


Not quite Old Market Square

Illustrations of Tesco Town certainly put it in the running for a future Carbuncle award. It looms over General Gordon Square facing the erstwhile Woolwich Equitable HQ, Baroque Moderne of 1932 and described by Pevsner as solid and stodgy – well just what you expect of a Mutual. Now the Woolwich is part of the Barclay’s empire so obviously the building is not spivvy enough and sits there empty, probably disapproving of the new square by Gustafson Porter. This is attempting to make something of what had been a neglected but important place, with the petite Arsenal rail station at its corner. The result is nothing like as good as their brilliant Old Market Square in Nottingham, although here I am plainly biased. The problem seems to be that the square is unsure of its purpose. It is not really a comfortable people-watching space like Sheffield’s Peace Gardens because it lacks intimacy, enclosure and comfortable seating. The layout is formalised and inflexible, not designed for events. It has a nervous feel and just does not seem like a place that welcomes people. There is a strong sense of Haussmann-like sight lines for CCTV whilst a massive screen plays TV news to itself in the background, just like at your Nan’s house. The skim of water for paddling is a lot of fun though.


What if this was council housing? Arsenal regeneration

Taken together the public realm improvements in the town centre certainly have a positive impact and help to bridge the divide between the town centre and the parallel world of the Royal Arsenal. Woolwich is one of the most deprived places in the country and the unemployment rate in the Riverside ward is the second highest in London. You might think that the regeneration of the Arsenal site could have been focused on employment opportunities for local people but in Blair-world the orthodoxy of trickle down was absolute. Despite its manifest failures, so it is today.


Trickling upwards - No1 Street Royal Arsenal

As waterside regeneration schemes go the Arsenal has more coherence than most. It retains a lot of significant buildings, some attributed to Vanbrugh, laid out on a formal axis from Beresford Square to the river. These dignified, sombre, usually simple classical structures provide a fairly clear framework for new buildings and a restraint on excess, although ignorant aping of Vanbrughian style is less successful than more simply expressed modern blocks. The character of this part of the Arsenal is weird, a bit like scenes from The Prisoner where everything is carefully manipulated and depersonalised. Pevsner said the abandoned Arsenal was eerie and desolate and it remains that despite the redevelopment. It contains public uses like a Heritage Centre and ‘Firepower’, a museum of the Royal Artillery; there is an esplanade and you could find a few pubs but it is lacking life and spontaneity. The neo-Gormley figures on the waterfront can’t help being alienating and for me it certainly does not help to have a tank outside the military museum training its sights down the axial avenue. The new formula Arsenal is a quintessential yuppiedrome, a place deliberately apart from Woolwich. But since Woolwich is one of the cheapest housing areas in London (not a bad thing) it is a cut price yuppiedrome. This is even more apparent in the earlier Barratt phases to the east where bog standard flats rear up on the riverfront with standard Noddy house suburbia behind.


Coming soon - an English Heritage book on the Co-operative

This is Woolwich today– what does the future hold? The Town Centre Masterplan vision can be summed up as ‘back to the future’. It apparently does not recognise the failures of grand regeneration projects to benefit local communities. There is no sense of the profound failures of the housing markets and of trickle down economics. Localism, which could in theory point to a quite different future where the development of the town centre focused on the needs and wishes of local people, is not on the horizon. So we are apparently condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. Some of the proposals are sensible, if not very specific, like strengthening retailing on Powis Street and re-use of the Modernistic Co-op. It actually suggests the Dudok Granada becomes a cinema again. But what does ‘fine grain intensification area’ actually mean for the area around the covered market and the market itself? On another plan it is a ‘future development area’.


The Royal Arsenal: level 4 of Sim Yuppie

Really the focus is on large scale apartment building on the back of Crossrail. Berkeley Homes are paying for the new Crossrail station and so will develop 4,500 new housing units around it. The new ‘planning gain’ station is presented by the government as a fantastic deal at no cost to the taxpayer but this rather overlooks the £15.9 billion cost of Crossrail itself. This public largesse will massively increase the value of the new Arsenal developments but this is unlikely to be reflected in the quality of design and place. The masterplan model is certainly not encouraging, suggesting yet more of the bombastic perimeter block and attempted vistas but without the context of the historic buildings, so pretty bland.


Sport for all - the Waterfront Leisure Centre

One of the masterplan proposals nicely sums up the implications of the application of urban design in the service of developers. The Waterfront Leisure Centre, built in that ubiquitous Thatcherite brick and mirror glass in blue frames style, sits next to the ferry terminal on what is now considered as prime real estate. It also blocks off the axis from Hare Street to the riverside esplanade and the entrance to the foot tunnel. The masterplan wants to sweep it away and open up a grand new vista flanked by yet more vibrant mixed use development. A new leisure centre would be built on a ‘more central’ site yet unspecified. Well yes, I see the urban design point and the Leisure Centre is not a lovely thing (although the sight of the flume brought back happy memories). But is this being done in the interests of local people who use the Leisure Centre and can’t afford private health clubs or are they being marginalised in yet another expression of the shocking divide between rich and poor in this country and is this equitable? It is worth asking the question.

Thanks to Douglas Murphy, Agata Pyzik and Owen Hatherley for their insights and company on our tour.

References:

Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner - London 2: South
Ian Nairn – Nairn’s London
Ellis Woodman in Building Design
Allies and Morrison – Woolwich Town Centre Masterplan
English Heritage – Survey of London Volume 48 Woolwich

The late night Great Northern trains lull me to sleep in my Finsbury Park pied a terre. As I eat my breakfast I watch the packed commuter trains from places like Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield and Stevenage New Town. This was not quite how it was meant to be. The idea was that the garden cities would be largely self sufficient model communities; they ostentatiously turned their backs on dirty, overcrowded and chaotic London positing an alternative idyll – the ordered and rationally planned town, the antithesis of a dormitory suburb.

Grant Shapps, the almost likeable Minister for Housing and Local Government (well at least he has personally shown compassion for the homeless but WTF is he playing at with his social housing policies?) is also MP for Welwyn and Hatfield. He likes Welwyn Garden City so much he is championing the idea of a new generation of garden cities with the limp endorsement of posh boy Cameron, although of course that means little. Garden Cities have never been short of supporters since Ebenezer Howard published his strange utopian vision in 1898. The Town and Country Planning Association has been banging on about them ever since (although I note their address is Carlton House Terrace). Currently the TCPA is promoting the redevelopment of Heathrow as garden cities, but this presupposes and effectively endorses Foster's mad Boris Island plan - thanks but definitely no thanks. After the war new towns like Stevenage became a main plank of the state's housing policy with a second wave of larger new and expanded towns in the 70s. Then came the era of non-plan which has done so much to despoil our countryside over the last 30 years (just look at an old Ordnance Survey map) and yet managed to stoke up the current housing crisis.


Symmetry and order  - Welwyn Garden City

The reasons for the housing crisis are very clear and it is very clear what needs to be done – see Charles Holland's Fantastic Journal for the definitive account. What is also clear is that this will not happen because there is that very large problem of unthinking right wing dogma. Of course Tory planning ideology is hugely conflicted between what might be called the Ridley tendency and the interests of local constituents, but a 'niet' from the local golf club will always win, at least with Tory ministers. So Shappsy as Minister for Housing is caught in the trap of his own party's denial, his constituents' self interests, the incompetence of the banks and the failure of the volume builders to deliver acceptable and affordable new housing.

In this context promoting a new generation of garden cities makes political sense. Conjure up a comfortable image of middle class domesticity; everyone will think of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Ersatz Arts and Crafts and pastiche neo-Georgian are not going to frighten the horses at Highgrove are they? So at least you get over the first conceptual hurdle, although this will not take you very far. Indeed Simon Jenkins will already be poisoning his pen to vilify the idea because we have conveniently forgotten the Green Belt, which in populist planning world trumps all other considerations. So, ok, put new homes on brownfield land like old air fields or military bases, abandoned mineral workings or mental hospitals; somewhere out of sight and not very pretty – that seems to be the idea.


Eccentric and homely - Letchworth Garden City

Does this all sound very familiar? Close your eyes and think of Ecotowns. But this was a Labour idea and therefore very bad. I seem to remember new settlements were very unpopular with the Tory leadership a few years ago and even more so with Tory councils – actually I know 'cos I was involved in planning one of 'em. Now Grant Shapps needs to repackage the Ecotown idea without the implied threat of wind turbines and with compulsory chintz.

I have to be honest and say that I am not drawn to the garden city idyll. It all seems too tame, as Tom Dyckhoff quipped 'like a town laid out by your mum'. I actually like cities – where else can you go for fun? Well the countryside, yes, but what's good about the countryside is that it is just that. Ebenezer Howard's hybrid concept of garden cities providing 'the advantages of the most energetic and active town life with the beauty and delight of the country' seems entirely unconvincing.

Letchworth Garden City


This is public provision - Howard Park, Letchworth.

Letchworth was the very first garden city, begun in 1903. As you approach it at first it seems quite unremarkable, just like the suburbs of any town. But that is because Letchworth was so very influential in shaping the suburban future of England. Its cottagey, vaguely Arts and Crafts, rough cast (because the bricks were poor) and prominent gables style launched garden suburb imitations throughout the land and a thousand inter-war Council estates. But Letchworth is a garden city, not a garden suburb although calling it a city is absurd; the town centre is entirely subservient to the suburbs, the inverse of a real city. However given the size of the town (33,000 inhabitants) the extent of public provision is remarkable. There is a lot of civic realm which it is very well maintained with no obvious issues of privatised space or officious security. The town centre is very quiet – no city bustle even though quite a lot of people are about. People drive sensible cars and the drivers are polite; traffic does not dominate. Socially it seems quite mixed, very different from say Surrey or Thames Valley towns; bling is nowhere in evidence. You could say it is quite old fashioned, like the image of a decent England before we realised it had been asset stripped and re-feudalised. So Letchworth looks back to an earlier England, not just in its romantic Arts and Crafts style but in the way it still manages to function as a quite civilised place, at least superficially.


Could have fooled me - Broadway Hotel

Public land ownership taming the supermarket giant. 

By train you arrive at the dinky neo-Jacobean station, sadly defaced by lurid signs threatening dire consequences if you do not buy the right ticket, or park your car for more than 2 minutes. The town centre plan is based on the rather leaden civic axis of Broadway. This is a wide street with a central promenade such as you might find in continental cities and it does work as quite a pleasant pedestrian space. Initially the street is lined with neo-Georgian commercial buildings of quirky interest, most amazingly the Broadway Hotel, only built in 1962 but very convincing. A Morrison's supermarket has been forced into this neo-Georgian habit and, altho' not very convincing, I'm sure it is a lot better than your local supermarket. At least it relates to the street and there is even quite a pleasant little square with a bust of Ebenezer Howard (who else). However on the other side of Broadway the enclosure is not maintained.


Broadway civic axis


Architects are not always good planners - Letchworth Town Hall
Broadway's central promenade widens out into a huge green square around which are grouped various public buildings: town hall, schools, churches, library, new offices etc, none of which manage to make any impact or provide any visual coherence. Pevsner said 'the visual failure of Letchworth is that very square'. The quietly impressive neo–Georgian hipped roof town hall of 1935 suffers particularly from its precariously exposed situation between the huge green square to the south and a more urban square to the north, which is actually used as a car park. It reminded me of the vast and ill defined public squares of Aalto's Finnish new towns like Seinäjoki, which made me realise that, although a great architect, he was a poor town planner. It is depressing that Parker and Unwin's plodding formal town centre layout is clearly the inspiration, if that is the correct word, of all those endless masterplans for 'Sustainable Urban Extensions' that you see at design reviews. They seem to learn little from experience but evidently tick the planning boxes.


Leys Avenue - city quality paving

Leys Avenue, the main shopping street, was built mostly between the wars in a mixture of neo-vernacular and neo-Georgian but with some commercial Deco as well. This variety, taken with the curve of the street, the extremely good street paving scheme (which includes public parking) and the range of independent shops makes this an attractive social heart of the town. A spacious 20s arcade leads to Station Street. Eastcheap, parallel to Broadway, is a more prosaic but lively shopping street including some 50s 'new town' architecture and with a modest 70s shopping centre behind. The most interesting building is the Deco Broadway cinema of 1935, still in use and maybe surprisingly by the same architects, Bennett and Bidwell, and in the same year as the town hall opposite,


The mannerisms of Arts and Crafts - Letchworth housing

Letchworth's founders were - let us say - eccentric. Jonathan Meades is the ideal person to explore this. But like other pioneer zealots (the Mormons for example) you have to admire their tenacity. Howard set up a company and attracted private philanthropic investors – you can see why Shappsy likes him. However the town was slow to develop and Parker and Unwin actually had little control over house designs. Arts and Crafts proved too expensive so had to be dumbed down for mass production so what we see, as Jonathan Meades says, is merely the mannerisms of Arts and Crafts. Nevertheless the early residential developments are undeniably attractive and clearly touched the English psyche. The houses built for the 'Cheap Cottages Exhibition' of 1905 are particularly interesting. Over 100 survive, most hiding their constructional innovation behind conventional detailing. Many can be found in the streets immediately north of the station, identified with plaques.


Jacobean modernism?

Industry was also slow to arrive but in 1912 work began on the Spirella corset factory, completed in 1920. This is an extraordinarily grand model factory with very Germanic looking heavy pavilions and proto-modernist glazed elements between, all set in parkland. It included unheard of facilities for the workers, including a ballroom. In 1995 the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation restored it as a business complex. As in much else in Letchworth, this illustrates the importance of a central principle of garden cities - the public control of assets - which is not much in line with current neo-liberal orthodoxy. The original company set up by Howard became dysfunctional and in the 60s was replaced by a public Corporation. Fortunately this became the Heritage Foundation in 1995 before it could be flogged off to the private sector. In many respects it is far more important to the future of Letchworth than the planning authority.


See, God likes concrete - St George at Norton

Of course the quasi religious ethic of the garden city company had its downsides. Although big on churches – the Free Church designed in 1923 by Parker in the form of a Greek cross being rather fine – there was not much room for fun. Until 1959 there was only one 'pub', the Settlement, which did not serve alcohol. Even today the 'leisure offer' is singularly limited. However a really good church has been added - St George at Norton, by Peter Bosanquet 1961, with a tall concrete spire formed of two sides of a triangle which penetrates the roof to provide the backdrop for the altar and a fine crucifixion above which are both flooded with light. Although Pevsner says the sweeping roof continues the vernacular tradition, for me the building with its strong influences of Corbusier is a welcome relief from Letchworth's rather stultifying version of Merrie England.


Ok, lets  admit it, we like Letchworth.

Although we had not expected to like Letchworth, actually we rather did. But it does not stand up to rigorous analysis. What started as a social experiment has become a quintessentially conservative place and indeed the garden city concept was always inherently backward looking to a pre-industrial arcadia. Both the founding visionaries and so many suburban residents today share fallacies about history, society and its expression in architecture which Jonathan Meades brilliantly characterises as 'False Memory Lane'. Nevertheless Letchworth is a comfortable place in an increasingly uncomfortable country and that is why people like it.

Welwyn Garden City


So boring it hurts - Welwyn

Welwyn Garden City is clearly a comfortable place too, but has a very different feel after Letchworth. Many people will have sped through Welwyn on the East Coast line and admired the stupendous viaduct over the broad Mimram valley, designed by Cubitt. The other great sight from the train is the stunning modernist Shredded Wheat factory near the station, with its expressive silos - totemic of a new age of optimism, rationality and healthy living. But actually this is a false impression of Welwyn Garden City. Far from representing modernity or the bucolic longings of Letchworth, its oppressively ubiquitous neo Georgian style conveys both social conformity and architectural complacency.



John Lewis and the dour portico


My imagination just died

Welwyn Garden City was founded in 1920 as a private company under the guidance of Howard. The architects, Louis de Soissons and Kenyon, were more purposeful and less cranky than Parker and Unwin and the town developed more quickly. The layout and style of the town centre feels distinctly authoritarian, like a company town; there is no room for stylistic dissent. Welwyn, as Letchworth, is planned around a wide formal axis, Parkway, which provides a fine vista of parkland. But as in Letchworth this actually serves as a barrier rather than a unifying element of the town centre. Howardsgate is a second wide axis linking the Station to Parkway. The endless repetition of minimally expressed neo-Georgian for the quite large scale commercial buildings is relentless. This is especially so for the massive Company department store designed by de Soissons in 1938, a leviathan that haughtily displays the thinnest approximation of a portico you have ever seen. This faces the meek 1935 Council buildings opposite - quite a nice exposition of relative power. The Company store is now inevitably John Lewis and apparently the best thing about WGC is their coffee shop scones, according to 'Let's move to' in Guardian  Weekend. Says it all really.


Welcome to Welwyn Station? Not really.

Unlike quirky Letchworth, the shopping offer in WGC is very standard. The insultingly named Howard Centre, built in the 80s, is typically awful but especially hateful as it has subsumed the Station; what should be a key civic piece of the town is now lost on the upper shopping level and good luck finding it. In its smaller way this is as bad as Birmingham New Street. The most adventurous development we found was the Sainsburys, which sports a green wall (not doing too well) although even this gives in to dull as ditchwater neo-Georgian on the (dead) Parkway elevation. Across the very pleasant Parkway gardens is St Francis church. Wow! this is Georgian Gothic, not neo-Georgian. We get quite excited by the expressive brickwork but it is sadly disappointing inside. The architect – you guessed – is Louis de Soissons.


A memorial to a planner - in England. There's something in that.

 
At last, something different - Oaklands College

The vista along Parkway ends with The Crescent – a formal semi circular park isolated by a swirling one way system. Around this are concentrated the various public buildings of Welwyn but like Letchworth they entirely fail to create a civic ensemble or to terminate the view along Parkway. Next to the overwhelmed Council offices is Oaklands College with its pleasant unassuming Scando-modern original campus buildings. The opposite quadrant is occupied by Campus West, an angular hard red brick complex from 1973 by Sheppard Robson. It includes a library, theatre, cinema, art galleries and 'Roller City'. The original rather impressive entrance now serves only the library, currently closed for refurbishment. You enter the other venues from the car park, which is a pity as the new entrance totally lacks presence and as a cultural hub Campus West lacks buzz. However at least it has some sculptural interest and the self confidence to stand out in a conformist town.


Like it or not, this is confident suburbia


Templewood School - honorary member of the Friends of CLASP society

The thing about the commercial neo-Georgian of WGC town centre is that it is so bloodless, so lacking in conviction, so loveless in inspiration. This is not true of the suburbs where neo-Georgian finds more natural and individual expression. The early houses along Guessens Road for example, including de Soissons's own residence, are extremely well conceived and detailed – very des res indeed. The leafy residential roads quickly shake off the rigid axial plan and meander pleasantly, apparently laid out this way so as to preserve the original trees. Less grand cottagey houses are often grouped informally around leafy greens and quite convincingly evoke their rural inspirations. The area towards Sherrardspark Wood was built in the 50s and the plan is very well handled. The houses still have muted Georgian allusions although a few are toying with modernism. Here you will find Templewood School, according to Pevsner one of the best of Hertfordshire's renowned programme of post war school building.


Welwyn Mega City - the Shredded Wheat factory

What is difficult to understand about Welwyn Garden City is why the town centre is so prim and tentative and yet the industrial area across the tracks so excitingly of its time. The huge Shredded Wheat factory, like something in Metropolis, was (amazingly) designed by Louis de Soissons. The Roche factory of 1938, white and unadorned, is the purest Modernism designed by the Swiss Otto Salvisberg. Pevsner certainly approved: 'the factories at WGC show how from the 20s the best industrial architecture, inspired by continental example, was developing a new confidence and originality.' Both are listed and sadly both redundant. Tesco's plans for a redevelopment of the Shredded Wheat factory, which to be fair would have retained the listed original factory and those amazing silos, has recently been refused planning permission. The redundant site now awaits its fate ominously guarded by CPUK, following the posting of some great pictures of the empty structure by urban explorers.


Suddenly we were in Weimar Republic - the Roche factory

The original Roche factory, also listed, sits empty waiting for a new use whilst all around it Taylor Wimpy build what are actually not bad new houses and flats. They clearly pay some regard to the inspiration of the Roche building and in a sense to the stripped neo-Georgian tradition of the town; we have seen a lot worse. A chirpy chap from Taylor Wimpy said if I liked the Roche building so much I could have it for £1million. Bargain – but why has this not been sorted out as part of the planning permission?

Exurbia


A popular vision of England - Leys Avenue

It is easy to see why Welwyn and Letchworth are so popular. They are clearly good places to live; plenty of facilities, nice house and surrounded by countryside. You can live a life of quiet domestic content here, insulated from the troubles of the big city. But their success relies little on the founding utopian visions and rather more on them anticipating the low density suburb and the economy of decentralisation. Far from being self sufficient neo-rural communities they are part of the polycentric metropolis of Hertfordshire with 10 or more very substantial towns, as diverse as St Albans and Stevenage as well as Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City. This metropolis is set in very attractive and jealously guarded countryside but it is an urban phenomenon, not a rural society, with a population of over 1 million people. All the towns are real places not just dormitory suburbs but at the same time they depend on the connection with the capital and are very much part of London's economy.



The planning profession has a strong emotional attachment to the garden city movement but I would argue this is misplaced. The objectives of social harmony, working class improvement and self sufficiency which Howard sought to achieve are not going to be realised by promoting more low density suburbs on ex military or industrial kit, which will in reality be isolated exurbs – let us call things by their real name. In fact this will exacerbate the problems of social segregation and deflect from action to tackle the multifaceted problems of cities.


Neighbourly - Letchworth housing

The Ecotown concept was an honest, if flawed, attempt to explore new ways of providing housing and pushing forward the sustainability agenda.This government is turning its back on sustainability and urban problems. More socially regressive even than Thatcher, it is cynically promoting garden cities because it hopes an Arts and Crafts or neo-Georgian makeover will mean bog standard exurban housing is easier for developers to push through against the wishes of existing communities, which Localism has actually further empowered. Dream on Shappsy.


Progress?

Our next blog will look at the new towns of Hertfordshire and in particular examine the dilemmas of planned expansion in Pickles world.

A town based on a technological future... now there's a plan

We all know the script – garden cities are good, new towns are bad. Garden cities look backwards to the security of nostalgia; new towns looked forward to a vision of a Britain remade. For a short time this was imagined as a New Elizabethan Age. New towns were planned, and therefore damned, because anyone who wanted to change society after the horrors of the last Great Depression and the war, or indeed today after New Labour and Osborne, is bound to be bad, or mad, or both. This is the thesis of the ‘secret history’ of our falsely remembered streets as recently brought to our TV screens by the Open University. ‘The planners’ demolished the little palaces of Family and Kinship in East London and dumped the unwilling inhabitants in new houses with bathrooms but without community and thus created the New Town Blues. So, as with virtually everything else in this country, it is a class thing. New towns were essentially working class and therefore on the wrong side of the Thatcherite misinterpretation of history which underpins housing policy, or rather dogma, today.


A university founded on creating that future...

As David Kynaston shows in his brilliant history ‘Austerity Britain’ (that’s the late 40s by the way, not today) public opinion was far from happy with renting squalid, dilapidated and overcrowded ‘little palaces’ from slum landlords. It demanded political action. The building of the new towns was partly a response to the enormous housing crisis of the post war years but they were also meant to be emblematic of the achievement of the new welfare state. New towns were conceived on similar principles to Howard and were intended to be economically self contained and socially balanced communities. Although larger and more urban in character than garden cities there was a strong emphasis on fostering a sense of community with 'neighbourhood units’ being a key part of this. However the Attlee government were keen centralisers and imposed undemocratic Development Corporations to deliver the new towns, rather than the self governing community vision of Howard and his followers.



Stevenage New Town


Mr Silkin meets Mr Mondrian at Stevenage Town Square

Stevenage was the first new town to be designated under the 1946 Act. The plan was hugely unpopular just as it would be today. Minister of Housing Lewis Silkin was heckled by a crowd of thousands when he sought to explain how the town was to be expanded tenfold. ‘I want to carry out in Stevenage a daring exercise in town planning …. It is no good your jeering, it’s going to be done’ he said as he left to cries of ‘Gestapo’. He found the tyres of his car deflated, with sand in the petrol tank, but unlike more recent ministers responsible for housing he had a clear programme and a plan, and he stuck to it. Building the new town commenced in 1949. It was dubbed Silkingrad by the right wing press. Now there is a nice bronze relief of him in the Town Square.


Light and rhythm - Southgate House

Located on the A1 between Welwyn and Letchworth garden cities, Stevenage with a population of 80,000 actually feels like a city. It certainly has scale and some style. As you drive along the A1 motorway the view is dominated by the confident big scale GSK campus. Your approach to the town centre is not through straggling suburbs but along dual carriageways lined with factories and offices which speak of some vitality and commercial confidence. Retail park dross is pleasingly absent from immediate view. The entrance to the town centre proper is signalled by a tall, slim, handsome looking Miesian office block – nothing special really but displaying style, poise, awareness of context and effective place making. Later we notice the offices are largely empty, illustrating one of the problems of Stevenage - employment is quite dispersed and the town centre lacks a critical mass of office uses.


Wonderful mural and bloody bunting - the social Town Square

Stevenage is justly famous for its shopping centre completed in 1957/8. One of the first large scale pedestrian precincts in Europe it was widely admired and copied. Pevsner says ‘with its completion Stevenage acquired its truly urban character’. The focus is the Town Square which is excellently proportioned, being small enough for 3 storey buildings to give a real sense of enclosure and provide the right, intimate, scale for social activity. There are fountains, trees and an iconic modern clock tower which includes a charming pictorial map of the town showing activities and relief. Primark displays a mural depicting the history of the town. The raised platform to the west includes an original sculpture 'Joyride' by Franta Belsky. It has been significantly altered and although creating enclosure and interesting levels does isolate the open area area beyond which is crying out for an open market to animate the space.



A legible town centre with useful balconies

The pedestrian streets leading from the square are simply executed and confidently expressed. They include canopies which Pevsner strongly approved of: ‘they make it a pleasure to walk around even in bad weather but one never loses sight of the outside world’. Subtle changes in building lines add interest and vistas are terminated by tower blocks and by the striking St George’s church. There is no doubt that Stevenage town centre is a masterpiece of its time. It is very reminiscent of Coventry’s precinct although it lacks the much broader context of that city. It also exhibits the same problems with the precinct model – the relationship with the area around it. The backlands of car parks and service yards often frame your approach to the centre. As in Coventry the market is plonked on a backland site, although here it is just the bottom floor of a multi storey car park, not a star building in its own right. Another similarity with Coventry is that the original restrained elegance of the plan and the architecture is constantly eroded by gimmicky tat that tries to jazz it up but ends up degrading it. Bog standard and tacked on additions – the Forum and Westgate Centre jostle for attention. Stevenage town centre is still stylish, but could be much more so with a bit of care and respect.


Ok architecture geeks, what style is this? Come on...


Pevsner was a mardy sod - St George's tower

Perhaps the fundamental problem for new towns is that the ‘neighbourhood units’ come first and the town centre was added later, so it is really difficult to knit the two together. This happens organically in traditional towns and even if mad highway building has resulted in much the same severance in many places there is usually some basis for stitching it back together. In Stevenage the town centre is entombed by dual carriageways, ironically not carrying that much traffic. This makes it very difficult for the town centre to develop functionally and to grow in complexity and interest. For example St George's church (1956), which includes the town’s museum in its undercroft, is part of the visual ensemble of the centre but being on the wrong side of the dual carriageway is completely isolated functionally. Pevsner unkindly says’ it succeeds in being a contrast with the commercial architecture but a depressingly ugly one’ We really liked it but its exciting concrete campanile is now completely eclipsed by the hulking Holiday Inn next door, if you were looking for ugly.


A popular pedway ascends 

Stevenage’s grid of dual carriageways is determinedly not city streets, but there is another reason why the town centre feels somewhat stunted in its development. Although it contains lots of public buildings and facilities, these have little presence or impact. In a Swedish or Finnish new town you would find a magnificent library, theatre and town hall which would be the centrepiece of the place. In Stevenage they are all here but nondescript and apologetic. The town hall is a self effacing buff brick extension to a modest 60s curtain wall effort, ironically facing the Town Square where it should be the civic focus of the town. The utilitarian library building is drearily tucked away behind ‘The Plaza’ entertainment centre. Worst of all is the Arts and Sports Centre of 1975 which is just amazingly awful - a huge box clad in shiny white panels with a blue and a gold stripe around its top. It sits blankly facing the dual carriageway opposite the Station and you actually reach the Station via an elevated walkway which runs through this complex in a claustrophobic corridor. (Actually the external walkway is the most interesting thing as it has lovely ribbed concrete stanchions.) As well as the town’s theatre the complex includes an art gallery, although we could not find it, and a sports centre. It is extraordinary that an important civic project like this could have been conceived and executed without any interest in context, townscape, external expression, dignity or concept of beauty. It is crap inside too.


The art centre with no art

Continue along the walkway across the dual carriageway and you reach Stevenage Station built in 1973. It is difficult not to despair. Basically it is just a low ceilinged overbridge with a few retail kiosks, ticket machines and barrier. The only gesture to architecture is the big brick lift towers down to the platforms. Across the tracks is the Stevenage Leisure Park with cinema and franchised eateries around an agoraphobic car park.


A sign of the times - pastiche PFI modernism

So, welcome to Stevenage. It showed early promise but instead of developing a coherent vision for expansion as a proper city centre it completely lost its way in the 1970s. Reimagine the axis from the train to Town Square as a proper street with intelligently commissioned public buildings – a station like Coventry’s for example, a town hall to be proud of, a library as a centre of the community, buzzing theatre, art gallery with some presence and excitement. The 2002 Stevenage Regeneration Strategy sort of recognises the need for this but focuses on trying to improve the town's retail rankings by expanding its shopping centres.

Planning permission was  recently granted for a big BDP designed scheme for new shopping plus restaurants, hotel, offices, a few apartments etc. This would basically have restructured the ragged area west and north of Town Square with more urban coherence providing a new open pedestrian street of a sensible scale parallel to Queensway, together with new public spaces. Town Square would remain the focus and be refurbished with the original concept of the Joyride on a 'floating' platform reinstated. By the standards of present day Britain this is a well thought out plan for expansion which would not totally dominate the original precinct, although EH were not entirely happy with the impact on Town Square. But it included little in the way of new civic or public buildings. Stevenage is not alone in this emphasis of course; that is really the story of civic Britain in the last 30 years. A nice example is the new North Herts College, actually quite a reasonable PFI type effort with an interesting Harry Weedonesque curve, but moved behind a new ASDA which now occupies the prominent site of the original college next to the town centre.

In any event the town centre developers, ING and Stanhope, having spent 5 years securing planning permission, have now pulled out of the redevelopment scheme. Bastards. Should be done for wasting planning time.


Stevenage burbs - not as innovative as Hatfield


26 miles of underused cycle super highway 

Compared with the town centre the housing estates are generally of less interest. Although well laid out they are not adventurous, being predominantly low rise and often of informally grouped terraces. There are six ‘neighbourhood units’ which are compact and with local centres. A network of green walkways and cycleways is segregated from the highly over engineered main road network and Stevenage is definitely the place for the Underpass Appreciation Society. In fact the 26 miles of cycleways are one of the glories of Stevenage, broad and continuous. You can imagine that initially they were well used and may be so again but at present the volume of cyclists doesn’t really justify the fearful, nannyish safety features at every pedestrian crossing.


Planning...

... and the picturesque (Town Park)

Across St George’s Way from the town centre is Town Park. This epitomises the vision and the quality of the new town’s inspiration, a beautiful modernist idyll with lake, bridges and harmonious landscaping with distant views of tower blocks. You could be in Stockholm. It has recently been restored and with its unfussy paving and clean lines is a real joy. This is the quality and standard Stevenage should be looking for as it develops in the future.



Hatfield and de Havilland


Vertical Forms (1951, Barbara Hepworth) at University of Herts

Hatfield is a less well known Hertfordshire new town, which owes as much to de Havilland as the Development Corporation. Famous as Hatfield and The NORTH it is a Great North Road town but this can be a bit confusing. The old road is now the A1001 and the Bypass with the De Havilland factory the A1000 whilst the A1 motorway dives into a tunnel under the Galleria shopping centre so you miss the Hatfield experience.


The Comet public house

The modernist aircraft factory on the bypass was built in 1934 next to an earlier airstrip. At the nearby roundabout is the Comet public house, actually a misleading name as it was built in 1933, as Pevsner says approvingly ‘one of the earliest inns in England to be built in the style of the C20th’. The town expanded in a haphazard way and was compared unfavourably with its immediate neighbour, Welwyn Garden City which itself was made a new town in 1948 along with Hatfield.


Tidying the car without losing street activity

The plan for the new town of 25,000 was drawn up by the architect/planner Lionel Brett. The 7 ‘neighbourhood units’ were smaller and less self contained than in Stevenage, but in some ways more distinctive. This is especially the case in South Hatfield where the buildings in the local centre, Hilltop, are well related and the hill is ringed by undulating terraces with monopitch roofs which are quite striking and visually coherent. Nearby is the extraordinary St John’s church by Peter Bosanquet (cf St George at Letchworth), although we could not see inside.


Hatfield Market - promise unfulfilled

Compared with this confident example of post war planning, Hatfield town centre is extremely disappointing. The plan by Maxwell Fry amounts to little but a two sided square of quite elegant two level shops with a pub opposite, which advertises ‘Food served all day’ but actually has none. In fact Hatfield is a desert for food – we were grateful eventually to find a Subway, although there is an extensive open air market some days, which we missed. Remnants of the earlier town just about survive – we were urged to photograph a 30s cinema/bingo hall which apparently is to be demolished to ‘regenerate’ the centre. But there were some decent examples of public housing nearby reached by elegant bridges of the (hugely unnecessary) segregated pedestrian network.



That the town centre is unsuccessful is scarcely surprising as the Council has promoted a huge shopping mall not far away. The Galleria, opened in 1991, is in some ways quite ambitious – a pretend hi tech construct. The developers of the hateful Howard Centre in nearby WGC, adding insult to injury, got huge damages from the Council for promoting this scheme. It could certainly show the Howard Centre something about ambition, but it is not a success. Competition from bigger out of town complexes such as Lakeside and Westfield has relegated it to the Outlet league –where you go to buy out of season fashion, which is a non sequitor surely. New extensions house a lugubrious array of chain eateries. They may be more fun after a few beers but looked pretty miserable on a Thursday lunch time.


Understated and enjoyable - the 1950s Herts Uni buildings

Two cultures

Who eats there? I suspect the 25,000 plus students of what was Hatfield Polytechnic, now the University of Hertfordshire. Where else can you go? The nearby campus was donated by de Havilland. The original buildings of 1951-3 are modest, brick and tile, pitched roof, 2/3 stories laid out around quite an attractive quad with some interesting contemporary art works. Later phases seem to have had little interest in the arts, this being a science and engineering powerhouse, although one building is named after ‘two cultures’ CP Snow, the man responsible for me having to sit science GCEs. There is no discernable plan to the layout of buildings from the 60s onwards, or any apparent interest in architecture. Like most isolated campus universities parking is the main preoccupation with staff jealously guarding their spaces. The University has enterprisingly set up its own bus network, Unobus, which goes some way to overcome the market failure of the privatised, deregulated bus companies and links the campus to the outside world.


The sky is no longer the limit - Hatfield David Lloyd

A second campus has been built on the old airfield on the other side of the bypass, past The Comet PH. The pioneering Comet jet airliner which temporarily put Britain at the forefront of the commercial airline industry is widely celebrated around here, as is the de Havilland Mosquito fighter of the last war, but aircraft production finally ceased in 1992. The 30s factory on the bypass is now the Police HQ. The stunning gatehouse has been restored as a KFC with admirably discreet signage. Behind this on Mosquito Way the massive hangar and the control tower dating from the 50s have been retained and converted to a David Lloyd club and other leisure uses, which is admirable, but it looks a bit stranded in a sea of abject regeneration.


Inherit the national debt or this - Herts uni campus 


Housing off Mosquito Way: Aspiration? See previous image.

There is little to say about the new university campus and business park because they are just so standard: shiny and belligerently assertive but actually faceless and completely unmemorable. What is memorable is the truly awful student housing which stretches along Albatross Way (no kidding – it was a de Havilland trans-Atlantic plane). The student flats really do look like a modern version of an internment camp complete with perimeter fencing The rest of the old airfield has been redeveloped with quite high density new housing of the dumbed down Urban Renaissance school. There is a grand(ish) pedestrian axis which bisects a weakly classical crescent at the intersection with Mosquito Way. Some attempt has been made to reflect a 50s version of modernism in the composition, possibly a homage to the fine, retained, control tower and hanger opposite although I might be giving too much credit here. The adjacent, mostly terraced, housing is certainly attempting modernist clothing and reasonably successfully. What is appalling however is the quality of the finishes and the lack of care and maintenance - unfinished paving, litter everywhere. There is little sign of the Big Society here and certainly not something for local MP and Minister for Housing Grant Shapps to be proud of.


1950s austerity pastiche (but without the welfare state stuff)

Beyond the formal crescent the estate changes character to what I might suspect the volume house builders think of as the garden city option. There is a ‘village green’, some attempt to vary the scale and composition of housing with B&Q range cottagey detailing around eaves, doors, bay windows etc. However even this seems to be on a ‘minimum we can get away with’ basis as the estate quickly gives way to over scaled and standardised blocks to achieve density and cost parameters. Compared with Upton, for example, the attempt at design is very grudging – not even half hearted and shows us just how difficult it is going to be to achieve anything like the quality of the garden cities and new towns in future developments, even in affluent Hertfordshire. One particularly nasty feature of the Airfield New Town is that, if not a gated community, it is a privatised estate. The roads are evidently not adopted. There are no yellow lines but if you are lucky you will notice threatening signs on lampposts from the wheel clamping merchants. Just an example of how squalid and unpleasant the New Britannia of Pickles World is.



Pickles World

A way out?

If local boy Grant Shapps and his planning oppo Greg Clark come across as sincere (if very misguided), their boss Eric Pickles clearly revels in his reputation as a political thug and know-nothing. His appointment as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government was a clearly calculated shock tactic, just like the late and unlamented Ridley in Thatcher’s government. It is quite possible that Pickles will do even more damage to the England his party claim to love than did Ridley – and that is really saying something.

As a starter Pickles announced the abolition of regional plans on the absurd assertion that they were getting in the way of communities approving housing development. Even before the election the Tories had told ‘their’ local planning authorities they would be able to tear up housing targets, the methodology for forcing suburban and small town authorities to accept their responsibilities in providing for an expanding population and the desperate need for more housing.


A bit of fab pre-fab - Stevenage Clinic

Hertfordshire was covered by the East of England plan, an area of particular housing need. The plan included a policy making Stevenage a ‘key centre for Development and Change’ which is Orwellian planning speak for another 16,000 homes. But the problem was that Stevenage has very tight boundaries and little room for expansion. It is already compact and lacks significant brownfield sites. So the regional plan decreed that the adjoining authority must co-operate to enable this expansion and nearly 10,000 of the new homes should be built adjacent to the new town but in North Hertfordshire District. The main settlement of this authority is actually the alleged city of Letchworth, but it likes to think of itself as rural. Nevertheless NHDC co-operated on plans for an expansion of Stevenage across the boundary to the west of the motorway and north of the town. That is until Pickles came along and idiotically abolished regional plans. NHDC immediately and unilaterally scrapped the expansion plans claiming defence of the sacred green belt, the unfairness of the housing target, localism and the right of freeborn Englishmen. (A bit like the Made in Chelsea guy claiming discrimination against posh people –so beautifully skewered by Owen Jones on a Sunday morning chat show recently.)


Leonard Vincent's plan, akin to Otl Aicher

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; the same reaction that Silkin faced in 1946. He was not daunted but of course politics and society is now geared up to protect the vested interests of the haves and at best ignore the needs of the have-nots. Which may well be our own children – certainly future generations. Plucky Stevenage tried to press on with the plan within its own boundaries but the Catch 22 of  planning bureaucracy prevented it; 'the council cannot show that cross boundary issues have been resolved so that the strategy has a reasonable chance of being delivered'. The whole local planning process is now in limbo. Result for Localism!

by Chris Matthews


Even the dead have better welfare – Skogskyrkogården

A social democratic get-away-from-it-all. Stockholm and Copenhagen were on the itinerary but Malmö was the happy accident. The circumstances of Scandinavian success are without the enormous political baggage of empire and laissez faire economy; in Britain Labour sometimes win a political majority, whereas in Sweden the SDP for decades had a sociological majority - a successful compromise of private business and public welfare. The results have been enormously beneficial for planning - profit has not always been the priority - and so like the ghost of Anthony Crosland I'll be pointing to my holiday snaps and saying 'this is how it can be done'. Despite this their problems are all too familiar, namely suburban sprawl and the car economy but for the most part they are tackling these issues with comparative aplomb.


Stockholm Style


The romance of nationalism – Stockholm Town Hall
At Stockholm the political shifts are like the aesthetic - without rupture, intelligent, confident if at times slightly dull. There few tired tourist clichés in the way London is being bled dry of its ‘sights’, and the word icon is seldom called for save for when a place or building that captures the true sense of the word. Stockholm Town Hall is a case in point, it is a symbol of the National Romantic - however historically bogus if diplomatically functional it may be. The stucco hotels of Skeppsholmen pierced by the copper spires of Gamla Stan are another, and are best viewed from atop the muscle of rock along Katarinavägen. The cruise liner tourists squashed by the expressway below are missing all the fun.


Copper spires and stucco


Boberg's Rosenbad

When it came to plan and style there’s a comparison with Glasgow. Lindhagen's vision is similar to ‘the grid’ and both cities had turn of century architectural confidence and associations with Chicago. To prove this theory the somewhat grim Metropolis-style towers of Kungstornen are an obvious place to start. Yet it is the numerous devilish details throughout the gridded streets that are most convincing. Once you've applied the doorway details of Boberg's Rosenbad to photographic memory you can see time and again the Louis Sullivan-esque florid details encased in geometry. The Venetian Gothic Artists Association building (Konstnärshuset) continues in this decorative idiom. It was built within a few years of Mackintosh’s famous art school, and is just as contemporary if not nearly as innovative. That said the art scene must have been quite progressive: Torsten Jovinge was 30 years ahead of David Hockney’s pool side sojourn. Finally, the sandstone of Skånebanken is supposed to represent the region of Skåne but to me it again recalls this thumping vision of the Glasgow Athenaeum.


Sullivan-esk streets amid the Lindhagen plan
Ralph Erskine – brutalist stairway meets timber canopy  

It's in the interwar period where this comparison ends: whereas Glasgow withdrew into itself as London clawed away its talent and relative economic power, Stockholm skipped lightly from one idiom to another; neo-classical, modernism and post modern; Gunnar Asplund as the genius and Ralph Erskine as practical master. The City Library and the Skogskyrkogården cemetery are both breath taking experiences and perhaps say more than words can about Swedish welfare. Asplund is well known as acting as an intelligent bridge between the neo-classical and the modernist, but when you compare the drum lighting at Hedvig Eleonora Kyrka (begun in the 17th Century) to his city library you can see that he had an intelligent inheritance from which to draw. Erskine's innovative campus buildings at first recall the timber porches of North America but as you walk round the university you notice they ape the neighboring Swedish vernacular. The adjacent interwar neo-classical Museum of Natural History by Alex Anderberg is so thrillingly ugly that it is a relief from the city’s good taste.


Stadsbiblioteket by Erik Gunnar Asplund 


A heritage of classical drum lighting – Hedvig Eleonora Kyrka


Hammarby Sjöstad - send me a postcard when Britain does this

There has also been a successful transition to the contemporary period of regeneration. Hammarby Sjöstad is on nearly every British masterplan precedent board but is seldom (never) realised. The scheme is now over a decade old, so how is it holding up? The short answer is that it is very successful and clearly well supported by strong public services such as a tram and free ferry. The architecture may not always be thrilling but it fits a very public spirited plan, were the fun pontoons and natural landscaping really lift the place. This comes as no surprise as the city is an exemplar at this. The London Olympic Park may be getting plaudits for its meadows and landscaping but Skogskyrkogården began doing this nearly 100 years ago. One of the first things you notice when you arrive at Stockholm Central Station are the generous public benches - you don’t have to buy anything in order to simply sit down. Beat that St Pancras.


Georges Seurat is alive and well and living at Långholmen


The generous pontoon cycle lane beside Söder Mälarstrand

Not everything is perfect. The most recent developments at Hammarby and Årsta Hamnväg are more profit driven, and the 5 krona public toilets and overpriced museums do their best to keep the poor out of the inner city. There is also an ongoing debate about the relative success of the mid twentieth century social democratic suburbs. Though they were often successfully designed for living, they can lack high street activity and are isolated by aggressive expressways. I can understand this problem but I think for the most part it is successfully tempered by a comprehensive public transport and cycle network. We stayed in one of these suburbs 5 miles from the city centre at Telefon Plan, where the old industrial Ericsson buildings are smoothly being converted for public education and the creative industries. Some major expressway junctions littered the space between here and the town centre, but we never had cause for complaint because the off-road cycle lanes were so profuse.


Tackling the suburban expressways with cyclist expressways


Mid twentieth century tenement suburbs near Telefon Plan


Tenement stairwell: designed for living


Industrial apartment conversion at Telefon Plan


Thank God for Malmö


Malmö – sustainable and social
As my train arrived in Malmö I noticed that I was sick of Stockholm and its stuck up stucco. I was surprised at how much I had missed bricks. Malmö was like a breath of fresh air - a diverse and working class inner city - where it is easier to do what you can't in Stockholm: afford to live. The feel of the place hits you like a cross between Hull and Sheffield but as though it was made in Holland, or of course Denmark - the region of Skåne was Danish until the 17th century. You could argue that Folkets Park was where Swedish social democracy had its first impact on development. The Moorish style of the Moriskan was chosen to avoid associations with class, though British visitors would instantly associate it with George IV's Brighton Pavilion. Neighbouring this is a dense urban cluster of various mid twentieth century working class tenements, many with their own national romantic (moose) paintings in the lobby. At times this could be homogenous and disorientating but for the most part is a very sustainable and social urban inheritance.


A nod to Norman – geodesic entrance at Station Trianglen

The later half of the twentieth century wasn't so kind to Malmö with the city’s decline in its ship building which resulted in unemployment and crime rates worse than most British cities. What to do eh? The substance and ambition of local Mayor Ilmar Reepalu certainly puts Boris Johnson in the shade. Malmö built over 400km of cycle lanes, ceded itself away from oil, produced renewable energy from its own waste and stuck its buses on biogas. All this saved the city £100m per year. Sounds great, but the tangible visible changes to its infrastructure and urban development is what hits you on arrival. Clearly the Oresund Bridge is a major feat - you can now wiz over to the capital of Denmark in thirty-five minutes. But it doesn't end there: this new rail connection has facilitated a circular underground metro system called the City Tunnel. Including the central station upgrade there are new stations, some of which are wonderfully designed by Metro Architects, and though comparisons can be made it is easily more polished than the Jubilee Line extension.


Back to the Future - Station Trianglen

At Station Trianglen (designed by KHR and Sweco) you descend in an elevator from a very Norman Foster geodesic shell onto a cavernous room carpeted with a mosaic called 'patterns of everyday life'. The lighting is careful, there are no adverts or barriers, just raw concrete and 60s space age silver balls hang from the ceiling. You descend again, this time to the platform. This is not like getting the underground at Bank - squashed by the ostentation and advertising idiocy of the city. The platforms are split by mighty concrete columns which create a generous elevated space and on either side a white grid of steel panels line the tunnel. You stand there taking in the fantastic visual sense of time and distance, and suddenly you notice tiny beams of light within the grid dance the length of the tunnel to the sounds made within the station. This is not look-at-me Zaha, but rather look at the people, elevating our ordinary experiences. This is how good it can be.


The City Tunnel deserves an entire blog to itself

I have no pictures of Västra Hamnen as I was advised to go at night and rightly so. I knew this was a model of sustainable residential brown field development but wasn't quite prepared for how good it was - more thorough and inventive than Hammarby and Sluseholmen in Copenhagen (see below). A plan of coherence, variation and surprise which embraces the sea and shelters from it amid streets, esplanades, courtyards, water and walkable back gardens. Architecturally the style it is very "allotment modernism", a dash of Gropius here and bit of pedway contemporary brutalism there; each functioning in very different and place specific ways. At night the lighting is carefully composed to create interest as you walk though; walls, lamps, floor, knee height, up light, down light, even the glowing windows have been considered. The landscaping is the big winner here with planting based on the natural location and numerous public artworks and facilities. On a moonlit midnight we saw a man walk through the streets in flip-flops and towel and as we ventured towards the bathing decks beside the sea we could see people swimming. Yes it is gentrification of a sort - housing generally for the middle class, but it is not gated and the public facilities, especially the bathing decks - are used by the whole of Malmö.


Inventive Copenhagen


National Romanticism at Copenhagen Town Hall

Stockholm prides itself as being "the capital of Scandinavia" an obvious rebuff to its nearest rival Copenhagen. Yet the tag line is misplaced. Whereas the former is picturesque with silly Venetian sensibilities, Copenhagen is innovative, permissive and more comfortable about being in northern Europe. For my money Nørrebro beats Södermalm at the Hipster Olympics. You can arrive where you leave off at Malmö - at the work of Metro Architects, via the thrillingly futuristic Oresund Bridge - an amazing commuter journey. For the metro at Copenhagen, Metro Architects appear to have been given less freedom than at Malmö, but are still singing from the Norman Foster hymn sheet.


Sarah Lund’s workplace: the neoclassical Police HQ
The harbourside is a wealth of contemporary development such as the iconic new Opera House, which is typologically similar to Roger’s Welsh Assembly. Yet the best stuff is the most understated and it appears to be what Copenhagen does best; apply confidence in materials to a sort of neo classical modernism. Nearly anywhere else such buildings would be conducted in a slap dash dull manner, but not here. Like Stockholm the transitions from through the ages have been smooth. Hack Campmen's neoclassical Police HQ was one of the location stars of The Killing TV series - an understated and powerful building - one wonders if Vincent Harris was ever looking over his shoulder.


A dazzling visual rhythm - Gutenberghus


Harbour side townscape - Maersk Esplanaden & the Customs and Excise Museum
I didn't get chance to see a single Arne Jacobson building (this whole article is clearly cursory), yet I did see the same school of thought throughout the city. Though it is often called functionalism, you can often sense a sort of neoclassical undertone. Gunnar Asplund could easily have had a hand in the town halls at Lyngby and Søllerød for example. Alf and Søren Cock-Clausen's Gutenberghus and the Maersk Esplanaden by Ole Hagen display a later development of this restrained modernism. Beside the Maersk Esplanaden is the Customs and Excise Museum. Designed by Eva Koppel in the late 70s, it is an intelligent addition to the historic harbour, and the neighbouring public artwork could easily have been found in the mouth watering pages of Cosmic Communist Constructions.


A public and accessible Silo conversion


Islands Brygge: Insensitive compared to Sluseholmen & Västra Hamnen

Olaf Lind's 2005 guidebook appears to be pleading for more international work, but I think opposite: the rest of the world should be pleading for Danish design. Contemporary design appears to be at loggerheads between continuing in this tradition and breaking with it through big and brash statements. Sluseholmen is successfully continuing in the former vein, a successful waterside system of Amsterdam style variation. The saying goes here that instead of a house, two children and a car, the aspiration is for an apartment, a dog and a canoe. This culture of sustainable living is repeated at the thrilling Bryggebroen cycle bridge and Silo conversion, yet the neighbouring new apartments are a little insensitive. The Fisketorvet Shopping Centre is even heading towards the base standards of British regeneration, and a similar ‘death of the high street’ retail problem has also occurred at Frederiksberg Centre. Copenhagen does have a major problem with sprawl and the city must be careful with out-of-town brash projects such as the new car park city of Ørestad.


A new Greenway – from Frederiksberg to Nørrebro

Contemporary restrained modernism - Fredricksberg Gym

British highway planners should clearly be conducting in depth studies of Copenhagen - the impressive cycling infrastructure is inspiring. The extensive network of segregated road-side cycle lanes has helped to develop a huge cycle economy with independent cycle shops everywhere - especially in Nørrebro. This culture has bred small and intelligent measures such as shared cycle and pedestrian crossings, cyclist priority over cars at junctions, segregated traffic lights and now Greenways. At Frederiksberg the Copenhagen business school, plaza and understated Frederiksberg Gymnasium is built to face and appreciate the Greenway. This development-beside-greenway typology is hopefully a vision of the future.


The success of profuse, segregated road-side cycle lanes.

So what did I miss about Britain? Considering the corruption, ostentation, squalor, ramshackle infrastructure, jingoistic media and the long arm of global capitalist retail, the answer is of course not much. Though the pubs, the cheese and the free museums spring to mind, it was the sheer diversity and density of places and people that resonated most. My mind wondered to Leicester with its fresh confidence and Emily talked about Nottingham’s Old Market Square as if it were an exotic melting pot, which from a Stockholm viewpoint it is. So if we take these lessons and apply them back home, there’s hope of creating an innovative urban Britain.


The socio-economics of cycle culture