Keep the Ziggurat

Birmingham is Britain’s second city in a statistical sense – its largest local authority with a population of over a million. But it doesn’t feel like Britain’s second city. How can it compare to the shock of Glasgow’s scale, grandeur and architectural invention or to Manchester’s style and pizzazz? It looks tame against the thrilling townscape drama of Edinburgh or Newcastle and dull compared to the magnificence of the mercantile heritage of Liverpool or Bristol. But although Birmingham’s city centre initially appears small and unexceptional it is a very big city nevertheless with an even larger conurbation sprawling out over the watershed of middle England into bucolic Borsetshire and gritty Staffordshire. However one town merges into another with few topographical or distinguishing architectural features. Its exoskeleton is the prominent and mostly elevated motorways since Brum is the centre of England’s motorway system, and indeed of its rail network, but paradoxically this makes it more travelled through than to. Birmingham remains inscrutable to outsiders.


Mk 4 Birmingham - City of London outsourcing (Snow Hill Queensway)

I first went there for an interview at Birmingham University. The city was frenetic and confusing, then tearing itself apart for the Mark Three version of itself. I liked the University but they didn’t offer me a place which as my first choice, LSE, had accepted me without an interview I took as an insult. How different my life would have been if my UCCA offers had been the other way around.


Mk 2 - civic gospel (Margaret St)


Mk 3 - forward (Birmingham Ballroom)


Mk3 - backward (Charles St Queensway)

The Mk3 version of the city quickly lost the gloss of its vulgar new modernity. Certainly it seemed to lack presence, with most of the disadvantages but none of the glamour of the industrial north. Birmingham’s image was irredeemably naff, like Noddy Holder’s ‘Merry Christmas’, Crossroads and that ridiculous advert jingle – ‘at the Bull Ring shopping centre there’s a smile on every face; from the moment that you enter you know it’s a friendly place’ (So why did they tear it down then?). This was then still the workaday ‘City of a thousand trades’ with its own inward looking self confidence and self reliance, but that did not save it from catastrophic industrial decline in the 80s; it was the worst hit of all the manufacturing heartlands. The story of the last 20 plus years has been about Birmingham struggling to reinvent itself – to make a Mk4 city and, as we shall see with the current ‘Big City Plan’, a Mk4 on steroids.


Mk1: The Great...


...Village

Mk1 industrial Birmingham developed quite differently from the big northern cities - Asa Briggs in Victorian Cities describes its myriad small businesses, the many workshop entrepreneurs, the relatively skilled workforce and social mobility. Although capable of grand civic statements like the Town Hall, a symbolic Roman temple of 1835, Birmingham was more typically described as a ‘great village’. However in the later C19th under its charismatic mayor Joseph Chamberlain the city came to symbolise municipal enterprise and improvement such as Lord Heseltine would like to reinvent today. Birmingham had the vision, the confidence and the ability to shape its own destiny rather than rely on Westminster and in 1890 it was considered ‘the best governed city in the world’; its greatest asset the municipal civil service. The achievements of municipal enterprise in the late C19th and the first half of the C20th – municipal gas, electricity, water, sewerage, tramways, hospitals, schools, libraries, colleges, parks, art galleries, fine civic buildings, grand new streets and of course Council housing - are extraordinary and especially when considered at a time when the present leader of Birmingham City Council says that Coalition cuts mean the end of local government as we know it.



Corporation St: a love story in 6 parts: #1 The beginning


#2 Pride


#3 Expansion

One of the grandest expressions of civic enterprise in Birmingham was the construction of Corporation Street. Begun in the 1870s and conceived of as a Parisian boulevard it radically altered the whole topography of central Birmingham. Its rationale sounds very contemporary: the city was considered to be ‘under shopped’ and lacking in dignity, but the new street was never quite a Parisian boulevard - its architecture is highly eclectic and lacked Haussmann’s ruthlessness. Corporation Street is now difficult to appreciate as an entity because it has been truncated by Mk3 Birmingham. The section north of New Street shows the fine conception with a host of good buildings with exciting rooflines of gables and turrets, some in warm stone, others in the characteristically Birmingham harsh terracotta. However we are quickly into postwar rebuilding, the former C&A store exhibiting residually elegant moderne whilst the huge House of Fraser store designed by T.P. Bennett 1957 is a rather fine monolith. But opposite is the totally trashy Martineau Galleries of 1999 – Birmingham, what the hell were you thinking of? Fortunately the second phase of this cancerous development has been shelved by the recession but it still threatens the Corporation Square shopping precinct of 1963 by Frederick Gibberd which has an admirable clarity of design and plan and would be even better without gimmicky additions circa 1990. The former Lewis’s store of 1924 opposite is huge and classical, certainly the architecture of imperial pretension and of a Big City.


#4 Intimacy


#5 The pinnacle 


#6 Vintage years

Beyond Old Square Chamberlain’s boulevard reappears with a fabulous flourish. The Victoria Law Courts designed by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell in 1886 are absolutely stunning, the sumptuous detail made possible by the lavish terracotta. Opposite, the Methodist Central Hall of 1900 by Ewen and Harper is also faced with lavish terracotta and, as Andy Foster notes in his Pevsner guide, its strong defined composition and verticality is the perfect complement to the informal composition of the Courts. The ensemble of grand buildings in this area is one of the glories of Birmingham but it is out of the mainstream with a neglected and slightly bohemian feel, not surprising as this is now a dead end. The northern part of Corporation Street has been subsumed into the Aston Expressway – that terrifying free for all between Spaghetti Junction and the switchback of Manzoni’s inner ring road. The subway which takes you under the expressway to Aston University looks horribly uninviting but actually Lancaster Circus is an exciting place – a green space with the drama of a beautifully sculpted curving overpass running through it, the roar of traffic overhead. This could be a great urban space if animated with the sort of uses and designs by young architects which Olly Wainwright recently showcased on the Culture Show, but at the moment it is probably pretty scary after dusk.


The end of Corporation St - sigh


Ok Manzoni, that's actually impressive (Lancaster Circus)

Lancaster Circus shows at its best the powerful, masculine, muscular character of Manzoni’s Mk3 road building trip. He was the City Engineer from 1935 – 1963 and in charge of all municipal works from road building to housing. An engineer, not an architect or a planner, he had little time for either; this explains quite a lot. It is easy to see him as the direct heir to Joseph Chamberlain and his confident gospel of civic enterprise. Certainly the basis of the post war rebuilding of Birmingham city centre was laid in a 1918 plan by the City Architect, with a foreword by Neville Chamberlain.


If Coventry made Birmingham


How the rest of the inner ring road should have looked

The war gave the opportunity to reimagine the city centre. Manzoni drew up the inner ring road plan in 1943 but this was not a comprehensive rebuilding plan for a blitzed city, like Gibson’s Coventry plan. It was an inversion of that - a road plan that the city was to remake itself around. This misplaced confidence in the benefit of infrastructure investment per se still underlies Birmingham’s planning today. Post war austerity delayed construction until 1957 and it was completed in 1971. The earliest section, Smallbrook Queensway, is by far the best. It was conceived as a boulevard not a motorway and is on a grand scale with arcaded shops. The careful massing of the blocks, the subtle curve of the street and the deeply modelled facades with super trough uplighters make this an underappreciated masterclass in urban design. Ironically it was planning dogma as translated by ‘Traffic in Towns’ which dictated the disastrous vehicle and pedestrian segregation along the later sections of the ring road where 8 lanes of traffic writhes through under and over passes and swirls around circuses with pedestrians lost in labyrinthine subways. Only Glasgow can rival Brum’s motoring hubris.


Go Kart Mozart - the concrete collar

Disillusionment with Colin Buchanan’s urban nostrums was quickly followed by Mrs Thatcher’s slaughter of the manufacturing sector and Birmingham realized it had to reinvent itself as a service economy. The city core within Manzoni’s ring road is very constrained and densely built up, a physical and psychological barrier to expansion, a ‘concrete collar’. Birmingham, first to embrace a ‘Traffic in Towns’ future, became the first to decide to dismantle parts of its ring road to allow the city centre to expand, although this has proved much harder in practice than in concept.


I AM IRONMAN (sorry, had to say it)

The early planning for diversification of the economy included the ambitious Convention Centre and Symphony Hall beyond Paradise Circus. This is architecturally disappointing, particularly externally and the American style mall street is really the opposite of what Birmingham needed – the reinvention of urban structure. However there is no doubt of the economic and cultural success of the project. The city core is linked to the convention quarter by an ill conceived, confused pedestrian route, a ghost of Buchanan’s segregationist vision. This starts at Victoria Square, an almost accidental space between the Town Hall, Council House and the end of New Street which was somewhat floridly overdesigned as a pedestrian space replete with grand flight of steps, fountains, ‘the Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ and a Gormley iron man.


John Madin's Birmingham library - internationally important

Up the steps you find the smaller Chamberlain Square with, on the one side, the magnificent Art Gallery proudly located above the Gas Department in the Council House and on the other the stunning Central Library, designed by John Madin in 1964. Andy Foster calls it ‘the finest example of the Brutalist aesthetic in Birmingham and a civic project of European importance ….. typical of Birmingham in being entrusted to a local architect’. The massive inverted ziggurat of the reference library contrasts with the lighter curving wing of the lending library; it is a real tour de force. The space within the inverted ziggurat, which is quite small, has tremendous power but in 1989 it was enclosed with a glass roof to form an arcade route to the convention quarter. It was also filled with ‘retail offer’ tat currently including a Wetherspoon’s and Eat 4 Less. Other alterations have also undermined the integrity of the building’s design. This degradation is sadly only a prelude to total demolition which the Council has pursued with a boneheaded philistinism recalling Macmillan and the Euston Arch.


After the revolution this will be rebuilt (bar the advertsing hoarding)

The motives for this vandalism are instructive. The library, only 40 years old and generally regarded as a model, is apparently ‘not fit for purpose’. Yeah, right. The site needs to be redeveloped to provide a new vibrant, mixed use street network bridging the ring road to Centenary Square. But what is wrong with reconnecting Paradise Street direct to Centenary Square? The real reason is stylistic fashion, or a rather sad conformity; the Prince of Hearts probably sealed the fate of the library when with typically bloodless incomprehension he likened it to ‘a place where books are incinerated, not kept’.


An impressive Hall of Memory for a city which keeps forgetting

Centenary Square is a huge plaza which would be at home in North Korea except for the OTT red brick paving which tries to give coherence but actually emphasizes formlessness. Around the space are various monumental buildings. The most exciting is the Alpha tower from Richard Siefert, 1969, reminiscent of Centre Point. It is dramatic, elegantly tapered and cranked at the centre; a fine piece of townscape although sadly isolated by the ring road system. Next to this the municipal savings bank and opposite grand council offices, both good Portland stone classical by Howitt (of Nottingham’s Council House). At the far end of the plaza a black glass Hyatt Regency which the late Larry Hagman would have felt at home in and opposite the unprepossessing entrance to the Convention Centre.


Interesting buildings but the public space is tawdry

Still behind wraps is Mecanoo’s new library; it will be the biggest library in Britain, Europe, possibly the galaxy. The scale and massing work well against the vast plaza although the relationship with the underwhelming Rep Theatre next door is not very well resolved. A sunken amphitheatre will project into the plaza, an interesting concept. The interior spaces under the curving rotunda could be good. The main design motif is the filigree façade of overlapping aluminium rings which will cover the library from the first to the eighth floor. The architect says these were inspired by the gasometers, tunnels, canals and viaducts which fuelled the city’s industrial growth. Hmmm.

Through the Convention Centre mall and beyond the rejuvenated canalside is Brindleyplace, something of an urban exemplar illustrating a more reflective period of Birmingham planning when size was not quite so important as it seems to be now. The Tibbatts, Colbourne, Karski, Williams study in 1990 looked at the urban structure and morphology of Brum and provided the basis of much more studied approach to urbanism. Brindleyplace was an early example, a mixed use predominantly office scheme around a square laid out in 1995. The blocks are big and various from cool Stanton Williams modernism to Porphyrios’s flat vaguely Byzantine classicism. The place is not exactly vibrant although Piers Gough’s café does its best. Overall it is an impressive achievement. Nearby is the splendid Ikon Gallery, a Ruskinian Gothic board school neatly restored and converted in 1997.


Cube - made with Adobe Illustrator's vacuous building tool

Broad Street running from Centenary Square to the cluster of office towers at Fiveways is a louche, eclectic mixture of building styles but tending towards the 60s and a penchant for vertical drinking. Lots to explore but particularly interesting is the 16 storey slab between Gas Street and Berkley Street designed by John Madin, 1965, with very expressive textured abstract reliefs. Next to this Jury’s Inn limit the damage by converting a Seiferian-like tower. Down Berkley Street is the nice CBSO HQ with a retained façade of 1921, but you are likely to be gasping ‘oh my God’ as it is Make’s Cube which dominates the prospect. This is a typically glitzy show-off building with one side of the cube a gigantic open fretwork at upper levels. Marco Pierre White is somewhere inside the pokey atrium but not, it seems, many punters.


Hate to admit it but the Mailbox has balls

The Cube gives on to a canal which charts the progress of regeneration styles from timid to contextual to braggart. Beyond the lively basin is the Mailbox, an extraordinary development which displays a quite opposite ethic to the Cube. This was a gargantuan postal sorting office built in 1970. It was converted to upmarket retail (Harvey Nicks et al), hotels and flats in 2000, an extraordinary act of commercial imagination given its location, isolated by the inner ring road at Suffolk Street. From this street the building has tremendous presence, almost like an Italian palazzo as Andy Foster says. A narrow internal arcade was cut through the structure, open to the skies, the shops on three levels which adds drama, supporting piers with dark metal framing and terracotta panels. It is quite something especially at dusk. You are guided on the far from inviting route to New Street under the ring road and along Navigation Street by coloured baubles and street art, some by Thomas Heatherwick, but the really exciting thing you see is the New Street Signal Box, a wonderful abstract Brutalist composition in massively corrugated rough concrete.


Charming - Birmingham Marylebone


Obsessed with its Selfridges


The sunken church is weird; Bull Ring view re-emerges

The biggest challenge in the Mk4 reshaping of the city centre was the Bull Ring, a hopelessly confusing failed prototype for indoor shopping which was also part of the megastructure of the ring road. It is to Birmingham’s great credit that it had the vision and tenacity to make the redevelopment happen despite the myopia of the property market and the need to take out a whole section of the inner ring road – a huge conceptual leap and an example to other cities like Nottingham. The new Bull Ring with its iconic Selfridges by Future Systems has transformed Birmingham’s retail ranking, now third in the country. A key urban design requirement of the redevelopment was to make a new open street between New Street and St Martin’s, with Digbeth beyond. This is an important achievement; the view is quite spectacular and makes you realize what a hilly place Brum is, often hidden by the dense massing of tall buildings and the complex levels of Manzoni’s rebuilding. St Martin’s looks diminutive at the bottom. However the new street is almost too steep needing steps in places, an awkward arrangement dictated by an unnecessary tunnel for buses between the severed sections of the ring road. The pedestrian street has to rise up from New Street before descending and the street levels also have to defer to 3 levels of internal mall, one of which goes under the new street which is quite disorientating. Internally the malls are utterly standard anonymous. However the floors of Selfridges, each fitted out by different architects, are interesting as is the extraordinary elevation in long views at least. From the street the long blank facades are overpowering and inhuman, but at least honest in turning its back on the street – form following function. There was a nice café by the St Martin’s amphitheatre by Marks Barfield, apparently already demolished to make space for more Chapman Taylor. Other architecture is standard Benoy and all very dull. The Debenhams facing Smallbrook Queensway has the same depressing dumb drum at its entrance that you find in most retail parks.


Pedestrians battle with highway engineering


Hesitating over Brum's second city status

A really big problem however is the relationship of some of Birmingham’s Big City projects, the Bull Ring, New Street station and the future HS2 terminal to each other. Your view from the exit of New Street station is disastrous – the open maw of the bus tunnel and service areas, a narrow passage of steps leading you up to the Bull Ring upper plaza. If anything it is worse from the other side. Moor Street station (Birmingham’s Marylebone) now looks out at the intestines of the Bull Ring and the backside of the Selfridges where the AR’s assessment of it as ‘blue blancmange with chicken pox …. scaleless, uninviting’ sounds generous. This is where HS2 passengers will arrive in Birmingham. The Big City Plan promises that ‘a high quality pedestrian route will provide an attractive an convenient connection, but is short on how. A bit of a lash up.


The Indoor Market - socially a very good thing anyway


Looking up to the arts at the Custard Factory

The huge markets have been relocated in unpretentious sheds at St Martin’s and are teeming with life, a good barometer of Birmingham’s multiculturalism. Beyond, the newly revealed Digbeth is an interesting organic place with occasional traces of its market town past. The (Bird’s) Custard Factory conversion by Glenn Howells is a slightly flashy but apparently successful artistic colony amongst the factories and magnificent artefacts of the GWR viaducts. This area give a real flavor of the industrial Brummagen of small workshops. An amazing find amongst this is the Arts and Crafts primitivist St Basil’s church on Heath Mill Lane. Back up Fazeley Street are interesting examples of Birmingham’s history at the centre of Britain’s canal network including a warehouse as late as 1935. New Canal Street leads to Curzon Street where the frontage of Hardwick’s counterpart to Euston – Curzon Street Station of 1838 – survives in a wasteland pregnant with ambition.


Lurching from one badly planned railway boom to another


If Mies van der Rohe was a Park Keeper

This is Eastside, a vast post-industrialscape with only a few artefacts for memories; derelict pubs, roads that no longer make sense. It is what you see from the train as you approach New Street. In the middle distance an immensely long steel and glass shed with terracotta sun screens that is Millennium Point, sort of designed by Nicholas Grimshaw. Between that and Curzon Street a linear City Park designed by the excellent Patel Taylor is nearly complete. It provides a new structure for the area and a coherent link to the city core at Moor Street; ambition to be applauded. The wasteland between the park and the railway is earmarked for a new HS2 station. Birmingham is a main cheerleader for this expensive boys’ toy – the central idea seems to be to make Brum as convenient as Croydon for City outsourcing.


Better than Grimshaw - Jennens Lane Car Park


What's the Millennium Point?

You can’t fault Birmingham for ambition but fulfillment can be very disappointing as Millennium Point demonstrates. This is a strange hybrid designed around lottery funding criteria and in the process failing to express or celebrate its uneasy components, the Think Tank (the Science and Industry Museum which includes good stuff in a dismal setting), an IMAX cinema and accommodation for City University. It is Birmingham’s equivalent of the Dome. Can I be more damning? Well yes, just try accessing its gloomy atrium from Jennens Lane on the Aston University side. The multi storey car park is more interesting. Jennens Lane is the spine road for an academic quarter including Aston University, City University and other colleges. It is all unremittingly and pitifully awful. It makes Cardiff Bay looks, well better. How is it possible for a high ranking university like Aston to commission such shit? I despair.


Stupid - Aston University


Taking down the concrete collar to build this...


...but things are getting better for pedestrians (Masshouse Circus)

Birmingham has put huge effort and resources into reshaping Eastside, most spectacularly dismantling the huge ring road megastructure at Masshouse Circus. Rebuilding is maybe half completed; every building wants to be 20 storeys high, as cheap as possible and to hide this by brash assertiveness or attempted anonymity. There is no relationship to the street, no streetscape, no street life. Vast open car parks await a similar fate.


Reconnecting this...


...with this

Birmingham is currently rebooting its 1990 city centre strategy with a new BIG CITY masterplan. This appears to envisage the next 20 years as a heady continuation of Urban Renaissance boom times. The scale of the ambition is heroic. The city centre floorspace will be expanded by 25%. If you look on the plans the areas slated for redevelopment are vast, not only Eastside but the ‘Southern Gateway’ (Digbeth and Smallbrook), ‘Westside’ (Central Library and Paradise Circus), Snow Hill and New Street station.


Digbeth High St - the ghost of legibility 

Redevelopment is already underway at New Street station. This is of course the worst advertisement for Birmingham and for the 1960s, so unfathomable that I have never managed to exit it where I hoped I was going to. Its rebuilding to a concept by Foreign Office Architects is to be welcomed and only in Birmingham would the Council have the balls to make it happen by buying up the wretched Pallisades shopping centre on top. The plan is good given the immense constraints of the site; the concourse will be 3 times larger with glazed dome introducing daylight, a masterstroke. However I’m not convinced by the swirl of silver external cladding; didn’t work at Newport. Images of the new John Lewis sitting alongside the station are also unsettling – is not one vast free form department store that doesn’t relate to anything and particularly the street enough for Birmingham?


A Big City Plan which needs to focus on its detail

The Big City Plan, like so many plans, says many of the right things - about place quality, cultural and economic diversity, connectivity etc. However this is all Big Picture stuff; it is not translated into any convincing expression of how this will create successful streets, social spaces and urban quarters. The plans are just broad brush diagrams and pious intentions. But, as can be seen in Eastside and elsewhere, fine words and good intentions do not deliver what is hoped for and promised. As Jonathan Meades (quite a fan of the city) comments, Birmingham is ‘all vigour and no finesse …. low on aesthetics, high on energy’.


Another piss up by Urban Splash

Birmingham’s obsession with big projects, its Big City bluster, must surely be rooted in an inferiority complex. Yet the city has lots to be proud of from all stages of its development. Strangely for a place with such a tradition of enterprise its planning often seems heavy handed, over prescriptive, even ruthless making for simplistic urbanism and limiting the potential for innovation and organic developments. The city has not come to terms with its past, and again like Glasgow does not seem to appreciate its own great achievements. Birmingham’s insouciance about its post war architecture is very much in the Manzoni tradition. He is quoted as saying ‘there is little of real worth in (Birmingham’s) architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement as long as we keep a few monuments as museum pieces.’ For Brum the post war icon is the Rotunda, the 24 storey tower which survived redevelopment of the Bull Ring but was dumbed down by Urban Splash. The rest is expendable. So one of the great periods of the city’s history is air brushed out. The extraordinary contribution of John Madin is discounted, demolished; the Central Library soon following in the footsteps of the Post and Mail and Chamber of Commerce buildings. Like Glasgow and Greek Thompson.


Grand old Old Snow Hill


The Jewellery Quarter: proof that Brum does urban renewal 

Yet there is much to discover and admire; like its two cathedrals, St Phillip’s, an C18th church of national importance and Pugin’s St Chad’s at Snow Hill. The remnants of old Snow Hill are wonderful, like Farringdon, and in the capital would be highly prized. The Jewellery Quarter deserves its national reputation. The commercial streets around Colmore Row are very fine; classical plus gorgeous Arts and Crafts, lots of inter war buildings of quality too and of course Madin’s National Westminster with its stunning metal doors – empty but standing. Across the city centre there is so much good architecture but the streetscape is often fractured. The Big City Plan approach of massive redevelopment is a sledgehammer to crack this nut. The city actually needs more appreciation, understanding, reuse and repair rather than wholesale demolition and start again. That way lies mediocrity, but Birmingham can become a mature city if it wants to.


Birmingham: you can not go forward without learning from the past

Andy Foster’s Pevsner Architectural Guide to Birmingham (2005) is your indispensable guide to the often hidden riches of the city and I have drawn on it heavily in this blog.

Owen Hatherley’s analysis and critique of Birmingham and its recent developments in ‘A New Kind of Bleak’ (2012, Verso) are both very insightful and extremely funny.

Asa Briggs’s history of Birmingham’s great period of civic enterprise in Victorian Cities, published in the 1960s, is worth going to the library for.

Fabric was always disappointing after viewing this

Islington’s planning strategy seems to be to try and contain the impact of Farringdon’s new uber-accessibility to development in the narrow Fleet valley corridor. Some good urban design studies have been produced to give backing to quite restrictive development policies and include interesting ideas for making more of the dramatic cutting of the Metropolitan line, with hanging gardens and green bridges evoking the spirit of the culverted Fleet valley. Would be nice. But it is likely that the massive public investment in Crossrail and Thameslink will sex up the Farringdon property market rather more than the thoughtful local planners want.


An impressive race track for white vans and taxis


The goods station: one of those "London is big" moments

South of the new interchange is Smithfield Market in the territory of the City of London which has a very different outlook. Here is a new conservation cause-celebre as plans for the redevelopment were recently submitted to the Corporation, which of course also owns it. Smithfield is the only one of the great Victorian wholesale markets to survive supermarket buying blackmail and motorway distribution parks, although it is contracting. Serving the restaurant and local market it opens before dawn and its business is largely done before you have had your second cup of coffee, so quite a dead hand on the area in some ways. The main market halls date from 1866 and are not one of the greatest architectural works of the era - Pevsner is distinctly lukewarm – but the plan was amazing as underneath was a ginormous goods station accessed by a lovely spiral carriageway in West Smithfield Square. The adjacent Poultry market was rebuilt in 1962 and is very handsome with an elliptical concrete dome, the largest in Europe when built, with small circular glazed lunettes. It makes a very impressive space with tremendous possibilities for the future.


The Poultry Market - twinned with Coventry Market


Could easily be restored - The General Market

But the issue is about the General Market to the west dating from 1879, similar but less lucid (Pevsner) than the original buildings, together with the adjacent wedge shaped Fish Market of 1886 and its Red House cold store, the earliest such example and recently listed. Plans for redevelopment were thrown out in 2008, even Hazel Blears accepting that the buildings made a significant contribution to the area. Now plans by McAslan propose largely gutting the buildings to construct lowish office towers within a girdle of retained perimeter buildings with shops and restaurants to the streets and a new internal arcade.


A grand procession

SAVE however sees Smithfield as ‘the grandest procession of market buildings in Europe’ and evoking old battles like the Coal Exchange (and indeed Les Halles) has commissioned a very different plan from Burrell Foley Fisher to save the buildings. This sees refurbishment and restoration of the ‘magnificent’ glazed roofs to provide a ‘fashion hub’ and retail/leisure space which certainly seems much more likely to be interesting than the McAslan version. Better, the SAVE plan proposes opening up the huge underground areas for various public uses. No contest – this is just a much better idea, it really clicks with the character of the area. The McAslan scheme frankly looks silly, hiding itself behind frontages but with its dim towers apologetically poking up above, giving the lie to the whole obfuscation. This isn’t about conservation versus development; rather it is about the whole direction of cities – between creativity, livability and distinctiveness on the one hand and financial commodity and standardisation on the other. The Corporation own the building, so it will be ok then? Probably not.


Flint: a nice reminder that we are in the south-east of England


Charterhouse Square


Austerity Britain - College Hall

Charterhouse Street is big powerful stuff alongside Smithfield  but becomes small scale as it kinks to Charterhouse Square, with an amazing Art Nouveau front to the Fox and Anchor. The Charterhouse, which Nairn describes as ‘a nest of medieval and Renaissance buildings …. demonstratively private’ remains so today but you can access the former school campus, now a medical university with a disparate collection of buildings including the carefully proportioned College Hall of 1949, a very satisfying piece of architecture with super wavy balconies to the top floor. Charterhouse Square itself is quite surprising with its most prominent building, 10 storey service flats of 1936, poised as Pevsner says between modernism and Art Deco. The view across the (private) green is dominated by the miraculous towers of the Barbican Estate.


Future historians will point to Arthur Scargill's flat

Ah yes the Barbican, where conventional urbanist nostrums are turned upside down. Concrete tower blocks, elevated walkways, inscrutable, impermeable, highly prized by its residents and increasingly fashionable. Yes, say the critics but it was designed for the middle class and is well managed and maintained. True dat, which rather makes the point. The Barbican is another world, a bastion of civilised life turning its back on the barbarian world of London Wall and Moorgate with their bloated and loathsome office towers of corporate finance. Barbican means an outer fortification to a city, designed as a cover to the inner works, and this is exactly how the development works. From Barbican station the enclosed concrete ramps even have fanciful arrow slits and from most points elevations are resolutely blank and access initially inscrutable, although in places you can see from the street into the gardens. The best way to begin exploring is from the perimeter on the ‘highwalks’ the elevated pedways that were part of a much larger system of vertical segregation envisaged in the late 50s, which was probably no more mad an idea than many current follies like building the Walkie Talkie because it will include a public viewing gallery (the excuse of Peter Rees). From here the overall plan is apparent and you can appreciate the historic context and relationships – the remnants of city walls and few remaining old buildings like St Giles Cripplegate - to which the design is remarkably deferential. It has been argued that given its emphasis on historical references and decoration the Brutalist complex is actually post-modern in spirit.


The birth of the post-modern?

Once you have entered into the heart of the complex you are seduced into an almost magical, secluded world, like walking through the wardrobe. The scale and drama of the ultra long blocks, often ten stories, the huge columns, the massive spans is breathtaking. The towers with their upwardly curved balconies are magnificently sculptural. The main material is dark grey concrete with granite facings, bush hammered, and as Simon Bradley in Pevsner says ‘used in tough masculine forms in a mighty way …. It must be allowed that none of this is for the faint hearted’. But it takes your breath away. The grandness of the conception maintained over the 25 years it took to build (1956-81), the confidence and quality of design and detailing is just wonderful. The care that was given to the choice of hammered concrete finish can be seen in the many trial panels kept behind the locked doors of the materials library, which you can see on guided tours (highly recommended). The blocks of flats are formed around piazzas and large mostly private gardens at the lower levels which you look down on from the second floor podium. The central feature is an extensive formal lake which is bridged by buildings and walkways in the most dramatic way and flanked by a south facing promenade in front of the Barbican Arts Centre. Above this is an extensive winter garden.


Getting lost is part of the fun

The whole amazing Barbican project is entirely exceptional, made possible by the blitz, conceived and lavishly funded by the City Corporation for its own oligarchical reasons. There are over 2,000 flats, built for professionals. The population intended to be 6,500 is depleted especially at weekends as nearly all the flats were bought by wealthy tenants and used as pieds-a-terre. The Barbican is not without its difficulties. It completely lacks legibility for the ingénue and it is deliberately designed to be inward looking, so you need to want to explore it, in which case the walkways work really well. It is sad that the highwalk is being deliberately run down, with what would be a very useful group of small shops now vacant and boarded up. The biggest problem is finding the Barbican Centre which has no real street presence. Within the arts complex the levels are notoriously confusing, apparently because of late changes to the brief which greatly expanded the size of the concert hall and theatre. However internally the halls are very fine. The Barbican breaks all the urbanist’s rules, but it does so magnificently. It shows just what well resourced and independent local government can achieve.


Light and space


A more reasonable design idiom than the Barbican

The architects were Chamberlain, Powell and Bon who earlier built the highly influential Golden Lane estate immediately to the north of Barbican. As relatively unknowns they won the 1952 competition to develop 1,400 flats for the City Corporation on a bombed site then in Finsbury Borough. It was one of the most ambitious schemes since the war. The architects had a strong urban concept of blocks on a loose grid around four courts of differing sizes. The tallest block is 16 storeys with bright yellow glass curtain walling, two stacks of balconies and perched on the top a wayward concrete butterfly which hides plant, ‘an early and much remarked expression of discontent with pre-war Modernism’s limited vocabulary of forms’ (Pevsner). Lower blocks also employ strikingly bright coloured curtain walling. Nairn thought the architecture somewhat fussy ‘but this is unimportant compared with the spaces between them. Every trick in the book is brought in, and not for cleverness, but to create a real place. There are half a dozen ways of crossing the site …. all are meant to be used’. Eat your heart out Alice Coleman. Nairn talks about the space fluctuating and flickering, new views always opening and faster than the eye can take them in. The courtyards exploit different levels, some hard, some down to grass. There is a rose garden, well kept private gardens for some flats, tennis courts and a recently restored swimming pool open to view under one block. Entrances are sometimes foiled with delicate screens, almost like the Alhambra; the whole ensemble is an absolute delight, a quite exceptional achievement.


St Luke's and the pleasant sounds of five-a-side football


A bigger splash - contemporary municipal design

Back to Old Street to discover the extraordinary fluted obelisk spire of Hawksmoor’s St Luke’s. The church was scandalously left ruined until rescued as a venue for the LSO now celebrating its tenth anniversary.We found these traffic free streets enlivened by the spectacle of five-a-side. Around the corner is the recently restored Ironmonger Baths by Tim Ronalds; sensitive to history without whimsy and offering some hope for a municipal future. To us, this sort of thing is infinitely more important than the Shard. Further west along Old Street quite elegant shops and offices from the early 50s front the Stafford Cripps Estate, named after the Chancellor who invented austerity but managed to maintain high levels of social spending whilst rebuilding the economy. Some lessons there maybe, but sadly this estate is a rather poor relation to Tecton’s achievements in Finsbury.


Reading the landscape: the Fleet valley descends on Wharton St


Sober and understated - Amwell Street

The northern part of Finsbury was developed as a series of late Georgian residential estates in part overwhelmed by later building, like Northampton Square laid out in 1805 which now foils and civilises the extensive campus of City University. However on the hills north west of Rosebery Avenue, which provided the springs and eponymous wells for London's water, there is an extensive zone of streets and squares from the early 1800s - Amwell Street, Myddelton Square, Lloyd Square, Lloyd Baker Street, Percy Circus. The houses are sober and understated, rather like Edinburgh in their austere feel but in stock brick of course. Nairn says of these streets and squares ‘they need to be seen as an unselfconscious chain, not as isolated architectural specimens. In fact their merit as places to live is the lack of architecture’. Not architecture maybe but pretty impressive townscape and highly desirable – and being inside the Congestion Charge zone amazingly quiet.


Looking for Albert Angelo - Percy Circus


Sleeping policemen - Charles Ronan House

The surviving late Georgian sits reasonably happily with later developments. One of the most startling is Charles Ronan House on Merlin Street designed in 1927 as flats for the Metropolitan Police, expressionist in red brick with strong verticals and quite wild chimneys. At Holford Street is Bevin Court by Lubetkin and others, 1952, an 8 storey Y shaped block in the distinctive Tecton style but somewhat pared down; balconies were too expensive. Pevsner says the surprise is a stunning central staircase, ‘one of the most exciting C20th spatial experiences in London’. Unfortunately we did not get past security to appreciate this. Interestingly ‘urban authenticity’ now extends to sold off Tecton flats which are advertised by estate agents for their edgy social credentials. Welcome to Coalition Britain. Nearby, Penton Rise flats is a dramatic example of the sculptural possibilities of concrete, but it needs maintenance, a quieter road and some better landscaping. Perhaps it could take its cue from Priory Green on the other side of Pentonville Road. This Tecton design for the council is now under the management of Peabody and the treatment is altogether more sensitive.



An essay in social housing and Anglo-Soviet relations


Peabody takes over council housing at Priory Green

Clerkenwell or Finsbury is a really enjoyable urban experience, an outcome partly of historical accidents, partly of the tremendous wellspring of creativity which London taps into. But it is also a consequence of humane social policy and good planning over a long period so that in the heart of a world city you actually have very liveable villages not just for the rich and artistic, but for ordinary people too, although under tremendous pressure from the mad housing policies of recent governments. What we really liked is how humane London can be - despite the brash shit nearby in the City and the inevitable unwanted views of the Shard from everywhere. Nice schools, good council housing often next to an attractive little landscaped park or five-a-side pitch, well kept pavements, cycleways, all without the dominance of traffic we usually get in Britain. But then London has powers of control and government funding for transport that the rest of us can only dream about. And we do.


More grown up than the Walkie Talkie - Rosoman Place

--

The Pevsner Architectural Guide to North London by Bridget Cherry (covering Finsbury) is invaluable as is the City volume by Simon Bradley.

Elain Harwood’s book on Chamberlain, Powell and Bon for the C20th Society and EH is excellent.

Nairn’s London does not say much about the area but savour what he does say,

To be just another dormitory of London

The HS2 case is a house of cards stacked on a series of questionable and sometimes dubious assumptions. When did we decide that the only future for the Midlands was as a dormitory of London and that promoting long distance commuting was a sensible idea? It may be the case that passenger numbers will grow exponentially at the rate we saw during the Blair-Brown financial bubble, but why is it a sensible policy to make this a self fulfilling prophecy? The DfT maintain that the West Coast main line will run out of capacity south of Rugby by 2025 but this is highly questionable especially with the revelations that Beardie is running his Virgin trains half empty in the rush hours to maintain his rip off peak fares. Lord Adonis claims it would cost more to provide higher capacity on the WCML than to build HS2. Well, he would say that wouldn’t he, but it is absurd to maintain there are no other cheaper, more incremental and flexible options.


Edward Watkins was "a pig headed man". Plus ca change.

For a start, half the trains heading north from Euston on the HS line will not be to relieve the allegedly crowded West Coast line but replacing Midland or East Coast trains where speed and capacity enhancements are already planned and station capacity already available. Further improvements are also possible without spending the megabucks required by HS2. There is already the alternative Chiltern main line to Birmingham which could be further upgraded to take more traffic. With Crossrail taking over Thames Valley commuter services there should surely be spare capacity at its original Paddington terminus. Then there is the old Great Central, another hubristic high speed line to the North that Beeching axed. Its route is still largely extant from London through Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire to Rugby and could be reinstated to provide additional capacity for the congested section of the WCML with much less environmental disbenefit than HS2.


Porte-cochere renewal: calling at Sheffield, Leicester and now Nottingham

The strength and weakness of the HS2 project is that it is a completely new network. You can’t build it incrementally and it doesn’t connect with the ‘classic’ network (although hybrid trains will run north of Manchester and Leeds). It really only serves Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds and here the HS stations are separate from the mainline stations, so interchange is going to be a problem. HS2 bypasses other important places such as Milton Keynes, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield, cities whose economies and planning and sustainability strategies are effectively being sacrificed to the glory of the grand projet.


HS2 will actually arrive in only three city centres. Slow hand clap.

HS2 is seen by its promoters and the government as a virility test; it is no longer capable of objective analysis, just like other expensive symbolism such as Trident. But the cost will be eye-watering; even the promoters say it will cost £30billion, plus the rest, and take 20 years to build. Would it not be more sensible to spend this money on improvements to the network as a whole? And would not the big city cheerleaders be better off with investment in their urban transit systems? What European city of Manchester’s significance does not have a proper metro system? Birmingham has only a single tram line. Leeds will be lucky to get a trolleybus. Meanwhile we blow billions on HS2 - this is crazy.


St Pancras - made in Derbyshire (the iron girders)

However, despite the gloss and the spin HS2 has an Achilles heel, Euston. Ministers and mandarins know little and care less about transport outside the capital but are touched by London issues. The fantastic and unreal plan is for HS2 trains to arrive at tube like frequencies – every 3 minutes or so which will require a massive expansion which  be extraordinarily difficult to deliver. The models predict trains will disgorge thousands and thousands of extra passengers into the already thronged concourse. Euston is only served by 2 tube lines, the Northern and Victoria, whereas King’s Cross/St Pancras (where many of these passengers will transfer from) has 5 tube lines plus super Thameslink. Boris Johnson has foolishly scrapped the sensible plan for a tram from Euston to Waterloo. But he is plainly right when he says that Euston cannot possibly cope with the vast projected increase in passengers without further tube lines and Crossrail 2, which are not in the of the plan or the budget.


Kings Cross improvements - has it all been in vain?

Belatedly proposals have been made for a grand new interchange with Crossrail 1 at Old Oak Common, which Theresa Villiers accurately if disparagingly described as ‘somewhere near Wormwood Scrubs’. So if this plan works HS2 trains will run half empty into a huge new Euston white elephant built at vast cost and with destruction and community damage evoking Dombey and Son. This will not be made right by reconstructing the Euston Arch in front of it. The Euston plan just does not make sense and the Lords are plotting an alternative plan for an underground HS2 station beneath Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross so that trains can run direct via HS1 to the Continent. So perhaps the eccentric Sir Edwin Watkin (he who wanted the Great Central to continue to Paris) was right – just 120 years ahead of his time. Dreamers and visionaries there are aplenty but train spotter Lords are herbivores; HS2 is a serious carnivore determined to get its way.


Tomorrow just got worse (former GCR bridge, Leicester)

The impact of HS2 on the rail network as a whole will be massive – it will completely change the structure of train services on the West Coast, East Coast, Midland and Cross Country networks. There has been no consultation or discussion about this, principally because no one has thought it through and basically we are just going into this huge grand projet blind. There is no overall plan for the railway network, no consideration of the implications of concentrating finance on one big prestige project, or the impact of inevitable years of blight and indecision for the future of our national rail system. Indeed the problems have been deliberately hidden and there has been no honest debate. HS2 is only interested in its own game – just look at its website, all gloss and spin, evasive on real information. This is a very British debacle.

To summarise

Modernism & road engineering

When my parents first took me to London we got the Bakerloo line from Paddington and as the tube train came thundering out of the tunnel I saw its name was ‘Elephant’. This I found perplexing and intriguing. Later my first Uni digs were in deepest suburban South London, a very long 68 bus ride from Swinging London. It dawdled along (what then seemed) the dowdy and desperately un-trendy Victorian and hidden Georgian parades of Camberwell Road and Walworth Road before swirling around the glitter of the new Elephant and Castle, but I never got off the bus there. I soon moved north of the river and South London remained an enigma for me, as it does for so many people. But Elephant and Castle today is hot property and here we can see in the starkest terms the consequences of 30 years of neo-liberal housing and planning dogma and of the globalisation of the London property market.


Twinned with Old Street, Birmingham and Croydon

What makes Elephant and Castle hot property is proximity to central London and a large supply of publically owned housing which can be flogged off cheaply for redevelopment. Your mental map puts Elephant somewhere in the Dakotas but actually it is as close to Westminster as Aldwych, no further from Bank than the Magic Roundabout and as near to Piccadilly Circus as is King’s Cross. And unlike the rest of South London it is very well connected by tube with the Bakerloo and Northern lines and also Thameslink. From the elevated Thameslink station you get a great view of two projects which define the current failure of urban renewal: the soon to be demolished Heygate Estate and Strata.


East Berlin, or something like that

Elephant and Castle does not have the dense urban texture of Bankside and Borough nor their Ackroyd-like historical interest. Enfolded in the bend of the Thames it is one of the hubs of the confusing roads mostly laid out in the early C19th which lead to Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark and London bridges. The careless jumble where six arterial roads came together at the  eponymous pub was swept away in the 1950s by over enthusiastic traffic engineers to make way for a much hated mega roundabout and subway system, leaving only tiny fragments of the cosy old Elephant.


They're knocking down the wrong one at St George's Circus


In vogue - at  last! Austerity modernism by Maccrenor Lavington

The masterplan for redevelopment included a new shopping centre and a cluster of office towers but the results were a disappointment. The tower above the shopping centre is characterised by Bridget Cherry as ‘early depressing examples of the species’. North of the roundabout is Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House of 1959, a very austere, even intimidating, group of concrete office towers now converted to flats. The gap between aspiration and outcomes is similar to Croydon if on a smaller scale. South Bank University occupies a large triangle north from the roundabout towards Borough Road but has little relationship with Elephant and not much coherence as a university campus. It is really very dull, injecting little vitality into the architecture, townscape or street life of the area. Indeed buildings like McLaran House facing St George’s Circus are so gross as to crush any prospect of life out of the place. The circus was intended as a delicate rond-point and does have a certain Parisian feel, a few students sitting in the sun next to an obelisk in its centre. And not all the buildings are bad. Erlang House is a simple 70s office block but has some elegance and is now a gallery and artists studios, that is until it is knocked down for 400 Barratt flats. On the corner of Waterloo Road is the much praised new H10 hotel by Maccrenor Lavington; spare, well considered, well proportioned, well executed, its virtue is exactly that it does not set out to be an icon.


Wolcot Square: Austerity modernism again, oh hang on a sec this is... 


The back streets of London are more rewardimg than its sights - Cotton Gardens

The streets radiating towards the bridges from the hubs of Elephant and St George’s Circus are quite grand and tree lined with handsome terraces surviving in places amid a heterodoxy of social housing developments. But traffic races in platoons along unnecessary one way systems which is one reason why street life is largely noticeable by its absence. St George’s Road leading west from Elephant shows something of an eclectic mix of Georgian and high Victorian with quite grand houses cheek by jowl with tenements. The side streets still look like a black and white photograph from Nairn’s London. Towards Kennington Road there are very des res streets like West Square and Walcot Square with its wonderfully ascetic 2 storey (with basement) Georgian terraces, which look like the inspiration for so many architects re-interpreting the terrace tradition today. It is worth a detour south to Kennington Lane in order to see the extraordinary Cotton Gardens estate, which from a distance looks like tower-houses on concrete steroids. Close to the buildings are well detailed and articulated.


Traffic free (for a split second)

At the heart of Elephant and Castle is the now run down and shabby 60s shopping centre, reminiscent of the exorcised Bull Ring in Brum. It sits tentatively next to a swirling cauldron of roads, all difficult levels, subways, jolly crowded markets, quite exciting but very confusing. It was never a looker but successive attempts to jazz it up have obscured a certain elegant sparsity of the original design and just made it look tatty. However the decoration and murals of the labyrinthine subways dating from the early 90s are rather fine, including not only Cockney nostalgia but exotic jungle scenes. Of course the new orthodoxy is that all this should be swept away and replaced with new vibrant open shopping streets and boulevards with subdued traffic and wide pedestrian crossings. The present centre is distinctly short of places to sit and sip cappuccino. However plans for radical redevelopment seem to have been shelved ’cos of the recession, and a make over of the existing complex is now on the cards. Certainly the malls look drab but with new shop fronts and lighting what’s the fundamental difference from Olympic Westfield? Well size obviously and tenant mix – the centre clearly does not cater for the sort of resident to which Southwark’s housing and planning policy aspires. Gentrification is applied to shopping centres as much as housing estates.


Would you like to walk this way...

Meanwhile Boris Johnson still wants the notorious roundabout converted into a pedestrian-friendly peninsula. Witherford Watson Mann has been asked in a rather florid way to ‘show how these proposals will enhance the area (and) help to deliver transformational change from transport-dominated space to a delightful place, cherished by locals, regulars, and occasional visitors alike.’ This must mean reducing traffic volumes which are very high, partly because this is the perimeter of the congestion charging cordon, as at King’s Cross. Interestingly the idea of getting rid of the subways is being challenged by a sparky campaign to keep them. What this opposition really seems to illustrate is the deep seated distrust of residents for the way that Southwark and Boris are treating their area; people are fed up with having things done to them. However I can’t see how it can be a good idea to retain the present structures which impose such a tyranny on pedestrians and prevent the evolution of a more social space. The subways are really impossible to navigate and actually there are already tentative surface crossings, from which you can appreciate what a large area of roadspace can be released for public space. And what Elephant desperately needs is some space to breathe – at the moment it is all sound and fury. Perhaps more too can be made of the aluminum clad generating station in the middle of the roundabout, apparently a monument to Michael Faraday.


...or this? I'll go for the latter please.

The Southwark Plan designates Elephant as ‘an Opportunity Area’ for large scale redevelopment and intensification, including 5,500 new homes and a big expansion of retail to make it a ‘town centre’. The policies supporting this are all very worthy, about mixed development, community, sustainability etc. etc. but the reality is rather different. In ‘The Lobby and the Failure of Democracy’ Anna Minton quotes Southwark’s former Director of Regeneration as follows: ‘Social housing generates people on low incomes and that generates poor school performance, middle class people stay away’. The plan is therefore for ‘managed but inclusive (sic) gentrification’. This goes to the heart of things.


This is what authority looks like from here

The late Mrs Thatcher will of course always be remembered for selling off council housing and pocketing the proceeds rather than re-investing them in housing, but the Blair policy of state sponsored gentrification is even more insidious because it was presented as community renewal whereas in fact its objective is the destruction of communities if they are working class. The urban design concepts of ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’ as translated into planning policy pieties about mixed communities are hijacked in this cynical process, the consequences of which are now becoming fully apparent. Councils have been forced into the ideological disposal of housing in order to get funding for maintenance and improvements. ‘Partnership’ with big developers and construction firms becomes essential, the largesse of the HCA is conditional upon this overtly political policy. Some councils like Southwark embrace it enthusiastically, others reluctantly because it is the only game in town. Elephant and Castle shows this in the starkest way. In Bermondsey for example gentrification seems to be happening more subtly.


Strata looms over the lively Walworth Rd

Strata, which was intended to be a flagship for the new ’opportunity area’ actually illustrates much that went wrong with urban policy in Blairite Britain. It is that cheap looking tin cylinder of yuppie flats with those ridiculous wind turbines on top that insult your prospect of South London. The worthy winner of the 2010 Carbuncle Cup, Ellis Woodman who led the judging panel said it was a damning indictment of town planning “quite simply the worst tall building ever constructed in London ….. Councils are meant to protect us from these buildings. How on earth did it win approval? A skyscraper is an energy-greedy building form, both in terms of construction, and the power needed to take people to their front doors in a lift. To top one off with some wind turbines is the worst sort of greenwashing.” He concluded that the award was for “services to urban impropriety and breakfast-extracting ugliness”. How true, but Strata was not an aberration but the outcome of systematic political and planning objectives, as can be seen by the tragedy of the Heygate Estate, of which more later.


Fugly - which ever way you look

Strata does succeed through its sheer scale and ugliness in providing a marker for Elephant and Castle and also provides a grim forecast of what is to come. Across the road Lend Lease have just got planning permission for a 37-storey residential tower, the first phase of the regeneration ’partnership’. The sale of this land has apparently funded John McAslan’s £20 million leisure centre which will sit alongside. Meanwhile Stanton Williams has been commissioned to give the adjacent London College of Communications an £80 million revamp. However Allies & Morrison’s plans to replace a disused office block with 41 storeys of apartments have been famously thwarted for the time being at least by The Ministry of Sound and now squatters protesting at rip-off housing, gentrification and corporate profits. Developers Oakmayne are also having problems getting ‘Tribeca Square’ on New Kent Road underway. This planned cluster of towers ranging from 24 to 16 storeys is next to the Elephant Thameslink station and part of the Heygate masterplan. Allegedly ‘on site’ in 2011 there is nothing other than hoardings.


Architect speak on Arch Street

Opposite this the striking Arch Street development by S333 provides a different and altogether more intelligent kind of brash. A relatively small housing scheme, as the BD review says, ‘with its shamelessly garish garb – as loud as the roar of the traffic along New Kent Road …. it is a startling sight that behaves more as billboard than building – strangely appropriate for the site. Veneered timber panels ascend the facade in shades of deep reddy-brown, graduating to lighter tints of yellow at the top, like flames licking up the side of the building.’ The architect comments that ‘we like to think of our facade as a piece of urban marquetry – something that gives the housing the luxurious appearance of a bespoke cabinet.’ Well, ok, that’s architect-speak for you but at least they are serious, not taking the piss like Strata and its ilk.


Screwball Scramble - Heygate walkways

The cause celebre of regeneration at Elephant is of course the Heygate estate right next to the Thameslink station. Designed by the Borough architects, the 1,100 flats were built in1970-4 in a series of massive slab blocks delicately thin when seen end on and forming an impressive townscape. Together with lower maisonettes these are linked by complicated but elegant walkways all set in a landscape of mature trees. It is not architecturally exceptional like say Robin Hood Gardens; in fact it is fairly typical of a genre of late post war inner city high rise council housing. These estates had helped solve the post war housing crisis but were swiftly overtaken by a political, economic and social revolution which was ideologically opposed to social housing. We have been conditioned over decades to see such estates as ‘concrete monstrosities’ and ’crime ridden ghettos’ which need to be swept away.


Absolutely flipping massive - Aylesbury

The Aylesbury Estate further south off Walworth Road is a classic example. When built with its 2,700 flats for 10,000 residents it was the largest housing project in Europe, but even before it was completed in 1977 Oscar Newman toured the estate and pronounced ‘modern architecture actually encourages people to commit crime’. Well, that’s not borne out by the statistics for Aylesbury, which also happens to have high educational attainment. But the estate has became a symbol of perceived failure, and despite 73% of residents voting against demolition in 2001 a few years afterwards Southwark approved a plan for phased redevelopment. This follows the usual pattern seen in Hackney and elsewhere – double the density with over half the new homes being for sale.


Aylesbury: old walkways, making way ...

The scale of Aylesbury certainly comes as something of a shock, especially if you approach via modest terraces like Cadiz St and Liverpool Grove, the archetypal South London ‘little palaces’. Bridget Cherry says ‘an exploration can be recommended only for those who enjoy being stunned by the impersonal megalomaniac creations of the mid C20th’. What makes the estate difficult to understand or admire as architecture is that the blocks are so massive and uniform and pedestrian life has been so completely divorced from the streets which are given over to garages and servicing, slavishly following the paradigms of the day. Of course this is an outsider’s view and the estate could easily have been adapted and improved as the residents wished, but current political paradigms preclude this. The first phase of re-development designed by Levitt Bernstein has recently been completed and won the London Planning Awards ‘Best Place to Live’ for 2012/13. Let us hope it is.


... for Mr Sensible

By comparison with Aylesbury there is no case for equivocation about Heygate. In 1998 Southwark commissioned a survey of Heygate which concluded that the buildings were in good condition, although in need of some maintenance. As with Aylesbury residents were generally happy with the estate and it was not a ghetto – crime levels were relatively low. Many people had strong connections with the area. Nevertheless in 2002 the Council made the decision to demolish the estate and decant its 3,000 residents. In 2008 Lend Lease was appointed as lead developer. A masterplan by Make was adopted, paying lip service to all the Urban Renaissance nostrums. This includes 2,535 new flats of which only 79 would be social housing.


Heygate - still in good nick (C20th Soc says so!)

So this is the definition of regeneration today after 30 years of ideological attrition against Council housing. The Capital is facing a huge housing crisis and the need for social housing is greater than any time since the immediate aftermath of WW2. Yet just 3% of the new flats at Heygate will be social housing. Another 22% will be ‘affordable housing’ – affordable that is if you can afford 80% of market rent. The cynicism, stupidity, short sightedness, incompetence and desperation of housing and planning policy could not be clearer. And despite the outrageousness of all this the plan is going ahead. Boris Johnson has just approved demolition: ‘It is vital that we push forward with work to unlock the massive economic potential of the Elephant & Castle area which has languished in a no-man’s land for too many years.’


Depleted social housing & container box retail

Exploring the Heygate today, now uninhabited apart from one defiant resident, is desperately sad because it is so clearly an act of civic vandalism. As the C20th Society has said ‘there is no doubt the blocks could physically be refurbished. There are no major structural concerns, the concrete appears to be in excellent condition, increased insulation, new services, kitchens and bathrooms could be installed’ – all at modest cost. More housing could be built by demolishing garage blocks to provide a more conventional relationship with surrounding roads although arguments about lack of legibility and permeability are grossly overstated. The estate has a clear structure with Heygate Street running through the middle and the layout is immediately apparent. The empty boarded up structures are covered with graffiti, much celebrating the fight against demolition, and it has an eerie beauty. There is a danger of being seduced by the tristesse of decay, like Dan Dubowitz’s anthology of dereliction. But the right response to what has happened is anger.


Somewhere an architect is taking notes (but not Ken Shuttleworth)

The Make masterplan for redevelopment is what you would expect. Its stated objectives are to ‘create a thriving and sustainable urban quarter …. a network of quality spaces …. deliver quality architectural design and distinctiveness using a variety of architects’, amongst many other good intentions. Key components are new shopping parades to connect Elephant to Walworth Road. This is an old fashioned shopping street teeming with life, with the fabulous East St market further south. There is a civic group of buildings here, the old Town Hall, Library and Cuming Museum together with a 1930s health centre. The plan is to create a new shopping street linking this to a new open market next to the Thameslink station. Much is also made of a new park as a central axis, although this is not as grand as it sounds, being scarcely larger than the nearby Victory Community Park. The height and massing plan shows how such a large quantum of development will be fitted onto a 9 hectare site – big blocks and taller towers. ‘Two buildings of 37 and 27 storeys create a visual termination to strategic routes and create a complementary cluster of taller buildings towards the centre …. a 25 storey block frames the park and provides a visual focus along local view corridors.’ Walworth Road and New Kent Road will be lined with towers with large retail units underneath. It is a familiar package of property greed passed off as urban design.


Packed - East Street Market

What is noteworthy is the way that environmental determinist dogmas are so confidently asserted as revealed truth by government, their agencies, councils, developers, architects and planners in order to justify public interventions and public funding which ends up marginalising the poorest and creating even more inequality in a dangerously unequal city. The post war modernists who built the estate too had their certainties, at times misplaced, but their ethos and objectives were at least laudable.


Gentrification & the destruction of social housing

Some of the new architecture may indeed be good and the first phase of Aylesbury is at least promising. London’s cosmopolitan vitality could embrace the new ‘streets’ of Heygate and you certainly need somewhere you can get a decent cup of coffee. But what sort of London are we really creating, and why? Last year the number of social housing starts in London fell to just 1,672, an astonishing indictment of 30 years of reckless ignorance and indifference about real housing need. Meanwhile flats in the new Heygate are being advertised in the Gulf states. This is the true nature of the housing scandal which all the guff about regeneration serves to obfuscate. It is certainly not something architects and planners can be proud of being complicit in.

Cities alien to one another can share similar circumstances

A few days spent in Napoli give cause for some reflections on similarities and differences with Blighty. At first sight you may think there are few. Think Naples and the immediate associations are decaying grandeur, chaos, the Cammora and rubbish piled high in the streets. Grandeur is right and much has been restored. The city is not chaos, rather a very different structure of organisation which is more of a barrier to understanding than the limitations of my night school Italian. Not sure about the Cammora but Naples failed to live up to its reputation for crime and there is very little rubbish indeed in the streets.


On the street where we lived, scooter eye view

In the C18th Naples was the biggest city in Italy and a key destination of the Grand Tour. The Bourbon kings and the aristocracy built themselves magnificent palazzos. It was a city of rentier consumption and indulgence as can be enjoyed today in the splendour of the magnificent San Carlo opera house, the oldest in Europe. But there was a huge underclass living in desperate poverty for whom the government cared little. Let’s not push the comparison with present day Londra too far but …. . Naples was subsumed into a united Italy in 1860, much against its will, swapping the indolent Bourbons for aggressively incompetent Piedmontese kings who all seemed to be called Vittorio Emanule except for Umberto 1, who gave his name to the grand new Corso slashed across the town. This follows the tradition of earlier occupiers like the Spanish who created the Via Toledo, the main street of the city. The main squares are called after Risorgimento heroes like Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini – a quasi colonial humiliation since Naples and the south was marginalized and impoverished by the new centralised and northern dominated state. Comparisons with the situation of ex industrial Northern England are not too far fetched.


Santa Chiara(like Coventry)

Naples was knocked about a bit by the Allied invasion in 1943 and the partisan liberation of the city, its desperate situation captured in the wonderful but heartbreaking contemporary Rossellini film, Paisa. The restoration of Santa Chiara after its bombing is a triumph, very simply done and very moving with magnificent new glass, a real quality of space and sense of peace. You could compare it in feel to Coventry Cathedral although it is not a new build and the magnificent medieval cloisters remain intact. The restored Santa Chiara is so much more satisfying than the acres of Baroque decoration you find in so many Neapolitan churches, but there are also exquisite Byzantine and Renaissance examples too.


Archaeology comes to life at the Museo

Post war there was industrial expansion but Naples remained a poor relation to the northern cities and does so today. Its culture and way of life is so stubbornly Mediterranean that at times the trappings of Italian formality and the officiousness of the Italian state seem like a very thin veneer. Interestingly this poor metropolis seems to integrate immigrants much better than the richer northern cities, and there is a relaxed and tolerant feel to the place.


Nottingham alabaster has pride of place in Capodimonte

Naples, a former capital city, does magnificent palaces, museums and art galleries, lots of the stuff looted from elsewhere just like the British Museum et al. The Archaeological Museum has a tremendous collection of Greek and Roman, where you find statuary of 200BC that is copied from earlier Greek originals, which is fairly amazing. Most of the exhibits in the current BM Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition come from here but represent only a tiny fragment of the Napolese collection. The city nestles under Vesuvius and now it sprawls around the famous bay (even finer than Swansea Bay) looking towards the magical islands Capri and Ischia. Herculaneum is effectively a suburb of this metropolis of 2 million people or more. The first sight of the excavations is stark, the initial thought is of Dresden after Bomber Harris, but exploration of the ruins is very rewarding.


One hell of an explosion

As with most Italian cities there is a striking contrast between the urbanity of the  Centro Storico (Naples has the largest designated area in Europe) and the formlessness of much of the more recent suburbs. Surveying the endless blocks of lowish rise flats peppered with warehouse retailing, roadside restaurants and filling stations it will not be a surprise that Italy consumes four times as much concrete as Britain. Later in Amalfi our hotel owner talked about the difficulty of getting planning permission – so many layers of government, conflicting laws and as he nicely put it ‘too many people eating’; it all sounded like the rhetoric of Pickles and Boles but actually as in England Naples needs more planning rather than less. Naples is unusual in that it has a new business district north of the Stazione Centrale, the Centro Direzionale, an Italian version of Canary Wharf without the water. It was designed by Kenzo Tange in 1982 and it looked pretty arid from the distance I saw it. By contrast the Centro Storico is teeming with vitality. The wonderful thing about Italian cities is how the historic centres are continually adapted and reused. We stayed in a magnificent C17th palazzo converted to apartments high on the hill overlooking the city. Naples is certainly not a tourist town and many of the buildings are very run down, but still lived in, with local shops, bars and restaurants – a very different scenario from the decline of the English high street, although the grand Galleria opposite the Archaeological Museum is sadly empty. There is an even grander Galleria Umberto 1 (who else?) next to San Carlo which is open 24/7, raggazi playing football in it at midnight. Now that is inconceivable in England.


Democratic Space

The Risorgimento brought with it a lot of architectural bombast in florid stucco lining the grand new Corsi. New quarters for the middle classes were also built like the Chiaia district with its seaside esplanade (although you dare not cross the road to reach the actual seashore). The Vomero area on the hills above the city, reached by funiculare, has something of the feel of Eixample here but without the genius of Gaudi. You can see a direct line from the Bourbon extravagances via the Risorgimento state asserting itself to the impressive futurism of the Fascist era and the post war public buildings and banks on the Via Toledo.


A direct line from the power dressing of the Gesu...


... to the justice of the 1946 republic

Mussolini was famous for (allegedly) making the trains run on time and the Ferrovia Statale is still one of the great joys of Italy. The trains are cheap, fairly reliable, and at least are honest when ‘in ritardo’ (unlike the bizarre British practice of ‘retiming’ wayward services). I love the lugubrious announcements. Napoli Centrale has the remnants of an elegant stripped down 30s classical station like the wonderful Florence Santa Maria Novella, but the concourse has been replaced by an anonymous glassy effort such as Network Rail would think appropriate. For a more gutsy façade go to the Circumvesuviana station, terminus of the quirky narrow gauge suburban lines which go to Herculaneum and Pompeii. This has a wonderfully uncompromising Brutalist façade, but I think dates from 1937.


Circumvesuviana station makes no compromises

The Circumvesuviana, which does not quite do what the name suggests, is part of a complex and eccentric public transport system for the Naples metropolis. There are underground lines, metros, funiculars, trams, trolleybuses, buses, electric buses - but virtually no information. Metro lines don’t connect and buses are a mystery. Even getting to main attractions like Capodimonte, one of the finest art galleries in Italy, relies on the kindness of strangers to tell you when to change buses. What Napoli desperately needs is a Frank Pick, a Harry Beck and a Ken Livingstone.


One day Leeds may get one of these

There are integrated tickets once you have found the right Tabacchi but it seems a point of honour not to sell them at stations or especially on buses. There is also some information online – with much searching you will find a map and even timetables (sort of – like the airport bus runs every 22 minutes – thanks a lot!). What you will never find is a public transport map or timetables at bus stops or even at underground stations. The Circumvesuviana timetable is a heavily guarded secret. This lack of integration has been recognized and new metro lines are under construction. In time dramatic new stations designed by Richard Rogers, Future Systems and others will emerge. But really the key requirement is integration of information and a uniform house style, one thing at least London has got right. So getting around Naples is hard work, but at least the fabulous funiculari, subject of the famous popular song, work like clockwork which is sort of what they are.

Naples is a city very much in love with the car and, as with Mrs Thatcher, using public transport and, worse, walking is seen as social failure. This class conflict is played out on the streets in a fairly terrifying fashion as crossing the road requires even more balls than in Rome. You just have to believe they will stop and they do at the very last moment. There are pedestrian zones where the traffic becomes slightly sheepish about its dominance but what really pisses you off is that cars just park all over the pavements. All this is very different from some other Italian cities like Modena where walking and cycling are the normal way to travel.


OK I admit it, these are my holiday snaps

Naples is a great city, a fantastic urban experience, an unjustly underrated city. But would its tremendous vitality be undermined by a more civilised approach to traffic management? The experience of its historic streets and squares and the relationship with the Bay could be much enhanced if cars took second place to pedestrians at least sometimes. And you could enjoy so much more of Naples if its public transport system was more user friendly. But then maybe it would not be quite the exciting Naples that is it today, nor such a colourful contrast to the gloom of Coalition Britain.

The heterogeneity of the waterside does something to absorb the various architectural grand gestures, most of which are pretty awful. The worst is Lloyds TSB HQ at Canon’s Marsh designed by Arup 1988, a desiccated Beaux Arts curve enclosing an arid amphitheatre at the confluence of the Avon and Frome channels – a key position which should be full of activity but is utterly lifeless. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Bristol’s Millennium Square is tucked away behind this, jolly with fountains on a sunny day but not really much of a square, having to rely on what look like exaggerated ventilation stacks from the car park beneath for enclosure on one side and completely lacking enclosure on another. However Explore@Bristol, a conversion of a 1904 concrete goods station by Wilkinson Eyre does the business on the north side. Wildwalk by Michael Hopkins is awkwardly related to the Square and to the adjacent restored former leadworks and does not make much of an impression, externally at least. Cullinan’s  Bristol Harbourside residential scheme at Canon’s Marsh certainly makes an impression and a very bad one too. Whereas the character of the Floating Harbour is generally informal, relaxed and modest, Cullinan’s scheme is mega, formalistic, institutional, brash – horrible really but clearly not entirely incompetent which makes it worse. As you would expect the public space is private – loved the ‘no sunbathing’ signs. Across the water Fielden Clegg Bradley wow us with The Point, which is very sharp indeed, a trick which impresses the first time. There are the usual dire residential blocks which could be anywhere and are everywhere but also quite a lot is town houses which are certainly not great architecture but seem to work well with the informality of the place. And there are even boat builders still working here who let you wander through their yards. And all around you the hills and stucco terraces, windsurfers on the water. It is quite seductive.


It's that Medieval Brutalism thing (the Shot tower)


Shred this

The Floating Harbour even manages to lift Temple Quay, the new office quarter. You might think Bristol needed a new office quarter like a hole in the head, given the massive oversupply from the 70s boom which did so much to disfigure the city, but that is not how regeneration works. The location next to Temple Meads is sensible and the waterside location at least gives it a fighting chance, eye-catching new bridges and all, but the results are mediocre and as for vibrant mixed use, well if you are boycotting Starbucks you can whistle for a coffee. The best building is the vaguely 30ish looking Temple Quay House, home of the Planning Inspectorate. That the planning agency chose Bristol as its HQ says a lot; clearly it was not the quality of architecture that brought it here as its former home was the infamous now demolished Tollgate House. Temple Quay House and Pickles’s Whitehall HQ will be the scene of some high octane battles as the Inspectorate is instructed to overcome the contradictions and obstacles created by the Tory opportunistic folly in opposition of Localism, and its consequences for the Chancellor. Further along the water are the RBS buildings, a dreadful if instructive example of the genre. You can see how there has been an attempt at some sort of proportion and orders, even starting promisingly with the plinth, but then it just becomes too difficult to bother with. In planning it’s the gesture that counts, not the outcome. To cheer yourself up continue along the quayside towards St Philip's Bridge to see one of the great icons of Bristol – the Shot Tower of 1968, a pure form in concrete, now disused but incorporated into a residential development.


Suspense


Crumbling back into the cliff


A huge architectural inheritance (perfect for Made in Chelsea)


Traffic wardens kowtow to Clarkson

Different worlds collide in Bristol as they do in all cities but here it is more pronounced. This is most evident in Clifton, arguably a different city from Bristol altogether. It has no parallels in other English cities, unless you include Brighton. It is not just that it is a lovely inner suburb because most big cities can do that, Leicester or Birmingham for example. Clifton is in a different league because of its sublime picturesqueness, its scale and the confident bourgeois life of its own it exhibits. The position above the Avon Gorge is magnificent even without Brunel’s suspension bridge to emphasise it. The Regency terraces and villas have that wonderful carefree quirky stylishness which makes Bath look too buttoned up. Royal York Crescent is hubristically daring and possibly not that well built, another Regency feature. But Mary Portas has no need to worry about the vitality of its shops and restaurants. I am sure it's possible not to like Clifton but difficult to see how. Victorian Clifton is less sensational and here religion is more in evidence, the two possibly connected. Up Pembroke Road is Clifton Cathedral (Bristol Cathedral at the bottom of Park Street is rather better than John Betjeman suggested).  The RC Cathedral, designed by the Percy Thomas Partnership and completed in 1973, is a response to Vatican 2 and its austere interior seems very un-Catholic especially after an eyeful of Napolese Baroque. However the complex hexagonal plan and volumes and the exposed concrete walls illuminated by clever natural lighting are very satisfying, a quiet, contemplative and not at all a show-offish triumph. Further up the road the Anglican All Saints, originally Street but rebuilt after war time damage, is quite the opposite, all emotion and ritual.


The Communist Council of Catholic Clifton


Fact: Pope John Paul II loved Star Trek




Relax, we're in the south-west

Bristol’s exciting topography is one of its great assets, with very attractive inner city suburbs like Kingsdown and Montpelier on the hills north of the city centre. South west across the Clifton Bridge you are immediately into wooded countryside and from Brandon Hill you survey rural Somerset. Bristol is not a huge city, the population of the immediate urban area is about 600,000, but it is an uneven city spreading into a much larger but ill defined hinterland of places especially to the north. Its big problem is its transport system. Hugely dependent on the car, it has no convincing strategy for how to tackle this. Bristol is the only big city which did not develop municipal tram and bus services and that legacy persists today with very low public transport usage – half that of Nottingham, a similar sized urban area. And whereas Nottingham is extending its tram system, Bristol is …. not sure what to do, which is maybe why George Ferguson was elected. Unfortunately, unlike carpet bagging Boris, he doesn’t have control of public transport.


The neo-liberal era

It is ironic that the two big provincial cities that prospered most in the boom years of the financial bubble, Bristol and Leeds, both failed to provide the civic leadership to take advantage of this in terms of creating good architecture and new spaces of urban quality. There was not the vision or the planning framework for this and, despite the cities' good bargaining position, the developers called all the shots, as we can ruefully see today. Now George Ferguson must try and turn this around in austerity, which may be more propitious than boom for the right outcomes. This will require a really bold practical vision and a long term commitment, the two are mutually dependent and self reinforcing.


Something positive to build on: a cycling culture

The new vision for Bristol will need to tackle the really destructive legacy of road building and traffic dominance in the city centre and reconnect its fractured parts. So much of Bristol’s post war architecture and planning has been unadventurous and the 1970s office boom was an unmitigated disaster so it really needs to be bold now whilst dealing with things as they are, not being nostalgic for the place it once was.


Massive Attack this - with municipal transport

Why not tackle the inner circuit road head on and transform it over time into it a new boulevard to reconnect the city? It could be the route for a new tram linking the suburbs to Temple Meads, the Old Market, Broadmead, Cabot Circus, The Centre and Clifton which would knit the place together and be a catalyst for a real urban renaissance. This could be an overarching framework for dealing with problems like the isolation of Temple Meads, the decline of Old Market St, for Broadmead and Cabot Circus to look outwards, to fundamentally rethink St James Barton and to make some sense of Lewins Mead.

Andrew Foyle in his City Guide says of Bristol that it reveals its charms slowly. Well we fell for it straight away. But Bristol deserves better and now perhaps it may get it..

What is really good about the scheme is how the streets and squares connect and relate to the rest of the town, making for a complex townscape, quite the opposite of the banalities of Westfield and their ilk. Of course the shops and restaurants are the same and most of the architecture too is standard shopping centre issue, but it does make a big difference that this standard kit is disported around proper streets and spaces which are part of a bigger outward looking picture. Views of the Cathedral are maximized and new spaces frame a section of the old walls and create an attractive relationship to Georgian Southernhay. Car parking and servicing are well handled so there is no real backside – even the car park elevation is quite carefully considered. The spaces flow seamlessly into the 50s High Street and what I liked particularly was what I took to be the referencing of the character of the usually utterly dismissed post war buildings, for example the ‘festival’ style of the new Debenhams building and the oval Next, echoing a nice circular arcaded shop at the corner of Paris St. A lot of creative thought has gone into this development at least by most of the architects, although at times it is dragged back to the formulaic like the sneaky way some of the side ‘streets’ become malls. Overall probably about as good as it gets and on a sunny day Exeter was clearly enjoying it as urban and social spaces, not just a shopping machine. Eat your heart out Southampton, Derby and all the other victims of mall-omania.


The most sedate shopping centre car park in Britain


Southernhay: estate agents and lawyers have not gone out-of-town

Southernhay, with its fine Georgian terraces and central gardens, skirts the city walls and enfolds the Cathedral precinct and Princesshay. That it still retains its character owes much to Sharp who fought off attempts to make this an inner ring road. (His plan for a ‘Freeway’ along the northern walls was thankfully not executed.) Western Way is the relief road that got built and it manages to do a great deal of harm cutting through the walls and creating a formidable barrier between the Cathedral, Southernhay and the Quayside. Pedestrians can partly follow the walls using a footbridge across the new road. Circular brick stair towers, presumably the ghosts of demolished barbicans, connect to the streets, a nice touch. However the route to the Quay becomes confused. One thing Southampton could teach Exeter is how to use its walls in a more imaginative way.


Conservation win


Dear Mum, having a lovely time, wish you were here...


Hang on; this is the direct route... so what's with the gates....


... when you can happily wander round Friars Green

The broad cobbled Quay is delightful, set at a bend in the wide river and below an impressive sandstone cliff. Above the cliff are attractive stucco terraces. You come first to the lovely Customhouse of 1680, beyond which is a mummery pub and opposite this open iron sheds against the water. Georgian and Victorian warehouses are hard up against the cliff, now converted to residential and rather crudely linked. Across the river further warehouses are converted to a maritime museum, which can be reached by a chain ferry. There is also a new pedestrian bridge to the far bank which accommodates the obligatory waterside regeneration of the usual witless kind. Here the bridge leads directly to a grand central axis - which is gated and barred. The public must skirt round the outside of the oval development which holds itself primly behind raised walls. The relationship to the canal basin is more successful, with a new piazza and cafes. Opposite is a much more pleasing building, a modern interpretation of a waterside shed used for water activities. Together with views of decent stuff across the canal basin and the river this make for a pleasant space. Back across the regeneration bridge at Friars Green is some excellent earlier regeneration – a dense low rise public housing scheme in red brick with grey tile hanging grouped cleverly around four courts which give onto riverside lawns, showing that the 1970s have lot to teach us.


Queen Street Victoriana


Democracy, history and typography

Much of inner Exeter still has the feel of a prosperous Victorian county town where you could almost film Hardy if you were careful with your shots. Queen Street, which was laid out in 1832, has some of the best C19th buildings, and they are an extraordinarily mixed bunch from the asceticism of the Higher Market façade to the overblown Rougemont Hotel and the uninhibited Royal Albert Memorial Museum of 1865 which uses Early English and polychromatic stone to good effect. Naturally Sharp hated it and wanted it replaced ‘as soon as the opportunity occurs’. Well it survived and has recently been rather splendidly restored and extended by Allies and Morrison. The integrity of the Victorian galleries has been rediscovered and they are cleverly linked to a modern extension clad in Bath stone which gives onto Rougemont Gardens. The museum, which is free and well staffed, has a fascinating collection and is a good advertisement for civic pride. (It sort of makes up for the utterly pathetic 1970 Civic Centre faced in precast panels. The Paris Street bus station opposite has more architectural interest.)



The Norman town planner


The Norman gardener

Rougemont Gardens are laid out around the city walls and the fortifications of Exeter Castle, which retains a formidable red stone Norman gatehouse, the best preserved in the country. Not much else remains of the castle but it provides the picturesque setting for the elegantly restrained stone fronted classical law courts of 1774. Rougemont House near the gatehouse is graceful Georgian with two shallow bows and delicate ironwork balconies above. It bears a Civic Trust plaque recording its restoration but a few decades on looks sadly neglected. The city walls are punched through to link into Northernhay Gardens from where you get a great view of Exeter in its countryside setting.


Central Station - if only Welwyn Garden City could do this


Great fun - the Iron Bridge


Social housing working with the topography

In Queen Street you also find the ‘Wrenaissance’ Central Station built by the Southern Railway in 1933 and if you continue north following the excellent pedestrian signs St David’s Station is about a kilometre further. A more direct route takes you along North Street past the mooning backside of the Guildhall shopping centre and over Iron Bridge which crosses a steep valley. The cast iron bridge of 1835 has immensely thin supports and Gothic balustrades. Below is an interesting looking 70s social housing scheme making good use of the complicated levels. St David’s Hill takes you to the station which is not Brunel’s original but it has an impressive long Victorian façade in front of which the GWR inserted a streamlined structure like Cardiff in the 1930s.


Vincent Harris, again


Clinging to the past during the inter-war period

It is worth continuing a kilometre or so further to Exeter University, set in an extensive hilly campus, not unlike Nottingham University in its inscrutable layout and also in its architectural conservatism. Exeter is of course known for its Sloaneranger students so it is maybe not surprising that your first encounter is with what looks like Lutyens’ interpretation of Jacobean. It is in fact ,Vincent Harris’s 1931 Washington Singer Labs. He also built the chapel, the original library and the Hatherley Labs, but this is more austere post war Georgian. Queens Building by William Holford of 1956 is modern in style but not very special. More interesting is his Devonshire House which is looser Scando-modern with nice details and a sweet campanile. The 1967 Northcott Theatre and adjacent slightly earlier Great Hall, both by Holford, are bold and confident compositions. The heavy purple brick new Library by John Crowther, 1981, is arrogant rather than confident but you can get away with a lot by hiding behind landscaping in such lavish parkland where one stumbles across Barbara Hepworth. These latter buildings have recently been linked by a new structure, the ‘Forum’ designed by Wilkinson Eyre. This has an undulating gridshell roof, its fluid form a contrast with the orthogonal brick volumes, as the architects put it. A new plaza has also been created and the idea is to create a central focus for the scattered campus, which is badly needed. Broadly it seems to work well but the wavy foyer in front of the Great Hall does take some of its dignity.


The grounds are good


New build: trying to urbanise the suburban campus

Exeter University is now hugely important to the economy of the city as is the Met Office which relocated here in 2003. The Met Office HQ is a Broadway Malyan fancy box with pointy things in a big car park near an M5 junction. There was a big fuss with CABE about the design – they preferred an Alsop alternative. Bizarrely it won the ‘best office building of the year’. But the real issue is why a government agency, which surely should appreciate climate change, is located in such a totally car dependent place with just an hourly bus service to St David’s? Even under Prescott sustainability was only window dressing. God help us now.


Thinking about Lincoln (Cathedral Close)...


....and its good suburbs (Pennsylvania).

Exeter is a similar size to Lincoln. Both are the shire towns of large rural counties, historic cities, cathedral towns and now with important universities. They have very different characters but both are success stories in different ways. Both have recently promoted some good architecture and planning and shown a strong sense of civic pride as with their new museums and promoting more pedestrian and cycle friendly streets. The Phoenix envisaged by Thomas Sharp may have been frustrated by mediocrity but Exeter today has a lot going for it.

Distinctive and brilliant

So, Hull – City of Culture 2017 - Cinderella shall go to the ball. Hull, forever propping up the league tables of social and economic failures (the latest for ‘inner city urban vibrancy’ - see Ian Martin’s coruscating take on this here). Hull, an archetypal ‘crap town’ to be sneered at by the Policy Exchange, Kelvin McKenzie and Phil and Kirsty. Even the winning City of Culture bid talks of Hull ‘coming out of the shadows’ and yes there are big problems like not enough jobs, high levels of poverty and low skills. But these are less the fault of Hull than of the malevolence and insane inefficiencies of the neo-liberal market God. Hull is a super place, one of the most distinctive and unusual towns in England, whose assets are being absurdly wasted.


Arctic Corsair, the River Hull and the Clarence Flour Mill

To see Hull you have to really want to because it is the end of the line, that is unless you are going to Rotterdam or Zeebrugge. The A63, which scythes through the Old Town to the port, is also the E20 trans European highway from Shannon to St Petersburg. Which is both bonkers and appropriate, as Hull’s history is all about its European trading position and from the middle ages it was one of England’s biggest ports. History is writ large in the splendid architecture, at once Liverpool and Boston (Holland). Its fin de siècle confidence and civic pomp is breathtaking.


Postwar planning on Jameson St

Hull’s proud history is a defining aspect of the character of the place, along with the impact of the horrific bombing in 1941. It suffered more damage than any city other than London and the scale of destruction was staggering, meticulously mapped in Abercrombie and Lutyens' zombie reconstruction plan. But much of the Old Town survived. Rebuilt Hull is not the brave new world of Coventry nor  the stodgy classicism of Plymouth, more a grittier version of Welwyn Garden City following a civic style set in the 1930s.


Tidal generation trial and the sheer expanse of the River Humber

The Humber gives Hull its very special identity. The water is immensely wide, three kilometres as the crow flies from Corporation Pier to the smudge of the Lincolnshire shore, and it has an ethereal quality with magnificent long vistas and huge skies. Hull’s quaysides used to extend along the estuary for ten kilometres and the port remains huge, if containerised today. You see massive ro-ro ferries in the distance from the city centre Waterfront. The Humber is at one with the soft East Riding landscape stretching to the horizon. In English Journey J.B Priestley said ‘Hull is not really in Yorkshire, but by itself, somewhere in the remote east where England is nearly turning into Holland or Denmark’. Larkin talked of a sense of ‘limitlessness beyond Hull, and then eternity’.


This is concrete - the Humber Bridge

You certainly get that feeling if you approach Hull across the magnificent Humber Bridge, designed by Freeman Fox and built 1972-1981. At 1,400m it was the longest single span suspension bridge in the world, although now relegated to seventh but still the longest you can cross by foot and cycle. The views are spectacular. However the optimistic regional planning ambitions behind the bridge project proved sadly misplaced. Hull suffered badly from the devastation of manufacturing in the 1980s. Its largest industry, fishing, had been ruined by post imperial Britain’s defeat in the ‘Cod Wars’ with Iceland. Priestley was immensely impressed by Hull’s fishing industry. In the wholesale market he noted ‘cod of every possible size …. only a few halibut, but these were of gigantic size, lying there like murdered Roman emperors’. By 1980 the fleet was bankrupt and the trawler-man anti-hero of Alan Plater’s Play for Today Land of Green Ginger, who refused to take a shore job to marry his childhood sweetheart, would have been unemployed. She went to London. In the post industrial world Hull has had to struggle hard to promote a new service and technology based economy, with some success particularly with green energy. In 2001 Humberside University decamped to Lincoln, although Hull University has expanded onto its former campus.


Hull certainly does "grand" very well


Where the end of the line is really something

Hull does not, however, give an initial impression of being run down and is certainly not the basket case conjured by Centre for Cities league table crunching. In the 1930s Priestley thought it had ‘an air of prosperity…. something of the outward character of the Scandinavian countries with which it trades has crept into Hull. It has a cleanish red brick look’. Despite the well rehearsed economic problems this still applies today. A train journey to Hull does give some substance to the jibe about ‘the city at the end of a forty mile siding’, although the Hull Trains expresses from King’s Cross in just over two and a half hours are one of the very few successes of the privatised railways. (Hull like other major northern cities such as Bradford, Middlesbrough and Sunderland had effectively been abandoned by Intercity trains.) You get a great view of the Humber and its iconic bridge before arriving at the exotically named Paragon station, a real big city station even if it does not have many trains. Originally of the 1840s, it was expanded in 1903 and restored by Wilkinson Eyre in 2007, the grand concourse now also providing a bus interchange, surely the finest in the country. The train shed roof of five bays is stunning and excellent period detail is retained in the renovation including an art nouveau kiosk, but the new solid canopy introduced in front of the station looks cheap.


Wilkinson Eyre - outside of their Southwark comfort zone 


Perfect planning - bus station adjacent to the train station

You are now welcomed to Hull by a statue of Philip Larkin, the city’s most famous poet (although Andrew Marvell was born and educated here). Larkin, a curmudgeon, misogynist and casual racist is now beatified as a sort of cuddly northern Betjeman, which is fairly absurd but his poems, a ‘piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent’ are wonderful and evoke a strong sense of place. Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel is set in the grand Italianate job next door with a nice Deco entrance from the station concourse.


The neo-Georgian yawn - Ferensway


Thanks-a-bunch global capitalism - Ferensway horror

Leaving Paragon your first impression of Hull is unlikely to be favourable. It faces the dismal dual carriageway that is Ferensway, conceived in 1931 as a grand civic boulevard along the lines of The Headrow in Leeds, but it is even deader than that dodo. Now an inner circuit road it is a formidable barrier to pedestrians and lined with a motley array of buildings, both pre-war and post blitz examples of neo-Georgian mutton (to mix metaphors), vivacious Edwardian buildings surviving in places, ultra aggressive mirror glass offices ‘To Let’ and retail park tat. The former Cecil cinema of 1955, which then had the largest auditorium in the country, is at least gutsy.


The Shopping Centre merry go-round. Now this is the local top dog.


A good thing but looks silly and already rather tired - The Albermarle Centre

North of Paragon is the 2007 St Stephen’s shopping centre, based on a ‘design concept’ by Lord Foster as interpreted by Holder Mathias. Ellis Woodman commented in BD ‘the results are perfectly awful…the building is conceived as a continuous interior, entirely disengaged from the rest of the city. In case shoppers entirely forget where they are, the architect has thoughtfully introduced a glass roof resembling a fish (as) a symbol of Hull’. The banality of the design is matched by crass planning. The shopping centre’s peripheral location is no doubt justified by the adjacent ‘public transport interchange’ but as with Doncaster’s Frenchgate the result is to hollow out the city centre core. The other ‘planning gain’ is equally illusory, some spectacularly useless gardens at the rear overlooking the Tesco Extra car park and a small, bleak and unused ‘square’ on Ferensway overshadowed by an eleven storey Holiday Inn. Here you find the Albermarle Centre for young musicians, an admirable use but expressed as an already grubby three storey lavender cone? Thanks again Holder Mathias. St Stephen’s expresses all too clearly the distorted priorities of market-led regeneration.


Stylish, civil and substantial - Hull Truck Theatre

Adjacent to the ‘square’ is the new Hull Truck Theatre designed by Wright and Wright, a tough building reflecting the background and ethos of the company. It makes a simple, honest and straightforward statement, rising above the limitations of its context to provide a strong relationship with the street. There are really nice, robust details like the simple composition of purple and glazed bricks with the emergency exit to the street and the lovely stairs with galvanized metal screens to either side, double height window beyond and exposed concrete above – nothing fancy but every detail right. This is a class building.


Cool canopy outside the House of Fraser


Grand old Hull again - Jameson St


Good quality city centre streets

Opposite the station, nicely angled to the corner of Jameson Street, is the striking 1950 House of Fraser store, glass and white wall with eclectic influences of classical, 1930s and festival styles - the best bit of post-blitz reconstruction. Jameson Street is an interesting mix of surviving showy Edwardiana and some of the more assured post blitz neo-Georgian. The parallel Paragon Street and King Edward Street which bisect the area are dominated by neo Georgian commercial blocks which would be at home in Welwyn Garden City but are too prim for Hull. At the junction of Jameson Street and King Edward Street is the extraordinary curved façade of BHS with a vast mosaic mural on nautical themes (1963). This is confident stuff but unfortunately much of the massive building which was the Co-op department store is now empty and semi-derelict, a sad metaphor for that institution perhaps. There are more derelict post war buildings on Bond Street with the slab block Kingston House (Fry, Drew & Partners 1963) waiting for the wrecker’s ball although it does have sculptural interest and I doubt that its replacement will be as worthwhile.


A pleasant enclosure - Kingston Square, with former brewery in the distance


Another good cultural centre - the Hull History Centre

This area, what were the Georgian suburbs, lacks cohesion. Only fragments of Georgian terraces survive, Cuthbert Broderick’s bombed Royal Institution is still an open car park and traffic is very dominant, helped by lots of very recent and unnecessary guard railing, a seriously retro move. There are interesting buildings around: the Central Library (1901) with its unusually proportioned pedimented entrance bay, the New Theatre (well new in 1830) on delightful Kingston Square, the Central Fire station (1927) opposite the super Hull History Centre by Pringle, Richards and Sharratt (2009), similar in feel to the Herbert Museum extension in Coventry. But to see the real guts of Hull you need to go to the Old Town.


Town centre boating activity is all about pleasure now - The Marina

Hull’s town plan is complex. The medieval town grew up along the River Hull near its confluence with the Humber, enclosed within tight walls. What makes Hull’s plan so exceptional is that, as the town expanded in the Georgian period, new docks were built in an arc between the River Hull and the Humber along the line of the town walls, making the Old Town almost an island surrounded by water. First was Queens Dock off the River Hull in 1778, then the Humber Dock of 1809 with the 1829 Princes Dock linking the two. So the docks and the town were all jumbled up – as Priestley said, trams mixed up with trawlers - quite unlike other ports except maybe Bristol.


City Hall - Hull certainly has distinctive porches and hood moulds 


Hull Maritime Museum - more proud civic stuff

Queen Victoria Square, between the Queens Dock and Princes Dock, is the pivot between the Old Town and the 19th century expansion and feels like the epicentre of Hull. Here a grim statue of the monstrous empress famously commands the entrance to the gents’ toilets. The irregular square contains a fine collection of public buildings. The former Dock Office of 1871 (now the Maritime Museum) is splendidly florid and imposing with porticos and domes, all smothered with symbolic imagery. It really does the business in townscape terms on what is a difficult triangular site. To the west is the Edwardian baroque City Hall of 1903, designed by the City architect and providing a concert hall, gallery and commercial premises - a fine statement of civic entrepreneurship. The Ferens Art Gallery is a somewhat austere classical cube of 1927, extended in 1991 and containing an excellent collection. Other important buildings around the square are the 1896 Punch Hotel, a riot of Gothic and Jacobean in faience and brick. The former Yorkshire Bank, an almost miniature terracotta building, turns a tight corner with a lovely two storey cupola. It is now the most elegant Caffe Nero you are likely to find.


Burtons Deco

The irregular space that is Queen Victoria Square lacks tight enclosure and is rather drearily paved in red blocks. The masterplan for the city centre rightly calls for high quality hard landscaping for the square but wrong headedly proposes a new ‘landmark’ building to create more enclosure and focus. The heart sinks – think Liverpool’s new iconic joke buildings to jazz up the Three Graces. The ‘icon’ would block views of the super Burton store at the entrance to Whitefriargate, the main shopping street, all polished black marble and Deco detail (1935). Queen Victoria Square handles complex spatial and building relationships very subtly–just concentrate on sorting out the groundscape.


Hmmm... very Welwyn - Queens Gardens

Inevitably the Georgian docks were the first to close, Queens being filled in as early as 1935 to create Queens Gardens. This is pretty universally regarded as a huge mistake. The gardens were redesigned by Frederick Gibberd in the 1950s as part of a plan for a new civic centre which did not happen, so there is little empathy between the space and the buildings around it.


Princes Quay Shopping Centre - the former top dog.

Princes Dock suffered a less prosaic fate - it now accommodates the Princes Quay shopping centre designed by Hugh Martin and Partners in 1988. Although internally just the usual tat, externally as shopping centres go it is imaginative and visually dramatic, with a striking glass and aluminum structure in part suspended above the water, posts and cables fancifully evoking ships’ rigging. The glazed construction looks especially good when illuminated at night. Its integration into the townscape is helped by its relationship to the water and the dockside buildings on Princes Dock Road, an elegant collection of sober late Georgian, including the well converted Sugar Mill. The backside of the shopping centre is however execrable especially from the E20 neo-motorway which brutally severs Princes Dock from the Humber Dock, now Hull Marina - a townscape tragedy. If Hull was on the other side of the North Sea the road would be in a tunnel, but this is England so the best we can hope for is the plan for sunken underpasses to speed traffic to the docks (benefits for UK plc, see). This is not about reinventing a civilised environment in the Old Town, although Hull has attempted urban repair. The boldly articulated brick houses infilling on Princes Dock Road are probably the best of a number of small scale residential schemes in the area.


The marina


Facing the marina with variation and conservation


Green Backs pub

The marina in the old Humber Dock is a jolly sort of place with masses of yachts, rigging jangling, the Spurn Lightship (now a museum), boatyards and ships’ chandlery, gulls crying, lots of flags fluttering. Two of the many vast dock warehouse designed by Rennie and others have survived, now converted to flats. The Holiday Inn is at least trying but its dumbed down attempted traditional brick warehouse is a poor imitation.


Top quality contemporary public paving - near Hull lock


Hull Lock


A city with little money but plenty of brains - are you listening Leeds?

The great gates of Humber lock with their excitingly robust mechanisms lead you to Humber Quays, intended as a new office quarter. The simple and modest glass and steel office pavilion next to the Humber, by DLA Architects, looks just right for its context: no bombast or attention seeking, just good design. The parallel block by the same architects is more conventional but what is good is the space between them, simple and spare, a quiet quadrangle rather than the standard regeneration attempt at a ‘square’. There is also a bit of an esplanade with excellent views along the estuary from which you can see the working docks in the distance and the extraordinary and very effective massing of The Deep in the foreground, at the confluence of the Humber and Hull rivers. Between the lock and The Deep is the lovely, almost forgotten, enclave of Nelson Street fronting Corporation Pier, from where you used to catch the ferry to New Holland before the bridge. This has an almost French feel about it, a couple of pubs and restaurants, amazing baroque public toilets and a few lime trees in the irregular space. Not much going on other than looking at the Humber, and sadly the pier is derelict with no public access although the thirties ticket office survives.


Towards Nelson St


Excellent cycling provision and unforgettable townscape

Across the River Hull, all shimmering mud at low tide, is The Deep. From Nelson Street a super cantilevered pedestrian and cycle gangway swings you out over the mud to the Millennium lifting footbridge across the river with its really nicely detailed oval control room which looks like it should be in Copenhagen. From this bridge you get a great view of the Tidal Surge Barrier designed by Shankland Cox (1980), with its two massive 37m high concrete towers framing the entrance to the river. Beyond that again is the E20 Myton swing bridge with its modernist control tower. This is a great visual sequence which somewhat makes up for the monster road buggering the Old Town.


Terry Farrell once drew a really nice triangle. Well done Terry.

The Deep (‘one of the most spectacular aquariums in the world’) is the signature regeneration icon of Hull. Here for once it works. It was designed by Terry Farrell, which suggests he is not all bad, despite the crassness of his comments as Tory design guru and the grossness and hypocrisy of his Convoys Wharf plan and so much of his recent architecture. The Deep is massive, rugged and angular, clad in aluminum and blue glass which catches the changing light of the rivers. It looks like a huge chunk of dock plant, possibly a wreck, an iceberg or a rock outcrop – but anyway it looks just right here, rearing up out of the flat estuarial landscape with elemental force. Apparently there are superb views from the observation platform. Predictably however The Deep has not kick-started regeneration of the riverside, as the derelict dry dock opposite sadly testifies.


Fruit Market potential 


See what I mean?


A style worth preserving on Queen Street


ARC: A sustainable technological future - abandoned by a coalition of bankers.

Back across the lifting footbridge is Humber Street, Hull’s old Fruit Market and potentially its creative quarter. The unassuming warehouses would certainly lend themselves to conversion to galleries and studios. Interesting plans were drawn up by Sarah Wigglesworth for Igloo, but stymied by the recession. There are however a few galleries in the area and perhaps the impetus of the ‘city of culture’ will finally launch this project. Nearby is the stunning building that was the regional Architecture and Built Environment Centre. Designed by Niall McLaughlin (2007) it is triangular, with a sloping roof of curved aluminum panels and the forest of poles in front support wind turbines and solar panels – quite a sight. But ARC is closed due to funding cuts, how utterly depressing. The need for it is all too evident by its location in a wasteland next to Castle Street, aka the A63/E20. Crossing this writhing serpent of traffic is not easy but on the other side is the heart of the Old Town. At Market Place you are greeted by a gilded equestrian statue of William 111 (Scheemakers 1734), presiding over superb Edwardian public lavatories. Hull is definitely the place to go for conveniences. Here are Magistrates Courts by Austin Smith Lord (2000), quite a good composition at least compared with the norm for this dismal genre. Adjoining is a multi-storey car park for concrete fetishists with long mirror glass offices which can’t be excused by the reflection of Holy Trinity opposite.


The old Grammar School: when Kings Lynn was not so far away


Prince Street


Holy Trinity - when Boston, Holland was not so far away


Trinity House Lane

Holy Trinity dominates the Old Town, reputedly the largest parish church in England and Hull’s de facto cathedral. It is an excellent example of Perpendicular and unusual in its early use of brick. The lofty nave is outstanding but the ambience of the church is rather spoilt by clutter and soppy piped music. Around the churchyard a fine collection of buildings including the sixteenth century Old Grammar School (now a museum), with very evocative brick. Here you could be in Boston or King’s Lynn. The focus is King Street which has been nicely paved with good street furniture and characteristically ‘regeneration’ street art, but it is all very quiet. Through an arch is Prince Street, a delightful hidden curving terrace of houses from the 1770s, some in stucco. The Trinity House complex north of Holy Trinity is of outstanding interest but unfortunately there is no general public access. Beginning as a medieval guild of mariners, Trinity House controlled shipping and navigation in the Humber and on the East Coast and was also an important charity. The main building, fronting Trinity House Lane and built in 1758, has a very showy central pediment with coat of arms and reclining Neptune and Britannia. The oldest buildings are around a rear courtyard and there is a fine severely classical chapel. The complex extends to the Neptune Inn of 1795 on Whitefriargate, which has what Pevsner describes as a ‘swagger façade’. On the parapet a panel of vine leaves surrounds the arms of Trinity House.


Victorian and Edwardian commerce on Silver Street


A highly original Edwardian National Westminster bank

On North Church Side is a showy Edwardian building with grand arcading and a fine campanile which looks as if it might be a Methodist central hall. It was in fact the indoor market but is now largely given over to a vast drinking emporium. The remains of the indoor market are tucked away behind with curiously inconspicuous entrances, one from the absolutely delightful Hepworth’s Arcade off Silver Street. Here you find a collection of grand bank palazzi, the most striking being the extraordinarily heavily modeled Portland stone façade on the corner of the improbably named street Land of Green Ginger. Most of the banks are now bars, or empty. Across Lowgate is Scale Lane, a characterful alley with Hull’s only surviving timber framed house. Beyond High Street a demolition site has been reimagined as a small public space which leads to the latest in Hull’s collection of distinctive bridges across the River Hull. Designed by McDowell and Benedetti, this is a cool, black curl of a pedestrian swing bridge that you can actually ride on as it opens. It has a ‘sonic landscape’ to tell you when this is going to happen which would be a lot of fun but unfortunately it didn’t happen for us. Currently the new bridge only leads to a raucous Premier Inn above a multi storey car park and a hinterland of car parks and sheds. This is a pity, a prime example of Hull’s assets being wasted by brain dead neo-liberal economic orthodoxies, for the River Hull here is quite something – great views towards The Deep and the west bank lined with warehouses up to the staithes, like some Hanseatic town.


Hanseatic Hull


Bit like Spitalfields, but without Dan Cruickshank - Bishop Lane


Artisan Mannerism and the battle against slavery

High Street runs parallel to the river. North of Scale Lane it has a quite remarkable urban intensity with tall warehouses and commercial buildings crowding in on the narrow street – great townscape. Bishop Lane is even narrower and even more concentrated, like a street out of Spitalfields. Narrow staithes between the warehouses lead from High Street to the river. High Street also contains exceptionally fine town houses, like the externally severe Maister House of 1745 for which Lord Burlington advised on design. The stupendous staircase is attributed to William Kent; it is now owned by the National Trust. Further up the street is the brick built Artisan Mannerist Wilberforce House of 1660, home to Hull’s most famous son. It is now a museum, part of the extensive Museums Quarter which also includes an archaeology museum and a transport museum designed by the City Architect in 1989 with a very distinctive series of hipped mini-roofs. Moored on the Hull is the trawler Arctic Corsair. Hull’s museums and galleries are exceptionally good for a city of this size and are all locally funded by a poor city stuffed by government cuts. Meanwhile London’s cultural institutions gorge on obscene levels of national funding (a scandalous 15 times more per head of population than the provinces) as well as global private patronage. Is it any wonder that provincial talent heads for the Smoke as the latest Cities Outlook report highlights?


Drypool Bridge townscape - worthy of renewal not demolition 


Awesome - Drypool Bridge by the river

One of the best views of the staithes and ‘Hanseatic’ warehouses is from the Drypool Bridge, another fantastic piece of kit; this one a Scherzer rolling lift bridge of 1961. On the far bank is the superb Clarence Flour Mill, rebuilt after war damage in 1952, and a close relative of Gateshead’s Baltic – except that it is disused and planning permission has been granted for a redevelopment of stunning awfulness including what would be Hull’s tallest and tackiest tower. How infinitely depressing to lose real local distinctiveness like this and blight the city with third rate banality.


The Commercial Museum - High Street


High Street - the heart of Hull

High Street continues north to the handsome classical Dock Offices of 1820, close to the entrance to the old Queens Dock, with a few other survivals around. Beyond is North Bridge, similar to and as exciting as Drypool Bridge. The Hull river with its sequence of opening bridges is really one of the great things about the city but the bridges rarely open now; partly the decline of industry and partly to avoid disruption to traffic. Hull should exploit the great excitement of the bridges with a programme of openings as a cultural phenomenon.


Former College of Technology with a mural by William Mitchell 


The Wilberforce Monument an amazing relic from the 1830s

Hull College, facing the head of Queens Gardens and designed by Gibberd in 1962, is a commanding building, although dismissed by Pevsner as ‘run of the mill’. Before it stands an immensely tall Doric column with Wilberforce on top, moved here from Queen Victoria Square. The School of Art and Design (1974) is also by Gibberd. More recent buildings towards North Bridge seem random and opportunistic, without any coherent campus feel.


Liverpool looks over its shoulder - the Guildhall

Back down Lowgate, at the junction with Alfred Gelder Street, you find a very masculine space which doesn’t seem to have a name, but does have a statue of some worthy in the middle. Like Glasgow Cross, which it strongly resembles, it is all powerful buildings and transit, not a people place. Dominating everything is the Guildhall, a tour de force of power and imperial bluster. Pevsner said ‘it would look convincing in an Italian city where they did their stile Vittorio Emmanuele like that’. Built 1905-16 the thirty five bay façade of the law courts along Alfred Gelder Street is utterly amazing in its confidence and ambition. The Guildhall proper facing Lowgate is less powerful and, with its tall central clock tower, mere nine bays and central pediment, is similar to Marylebone Town Hall by the same architect, Cooper. The interiors are naturally sumptuous and, if not quite St George’s Hall, are playing in the same league. Unusually for England the Guildhall is open to visitors.


A very original Georgian - Edwardian inheritance (Parliament St)


A classical age when M&S didn't do retail parks

Lowgate ‘Cross’ is enclosed by the City Hotel and Maritime Buildings, both high quality and thoughtful Edwardiana by Walker, a Hull architect. Less thoughtful is the monumental Edwardian GPO opposite by the Office of Works although reflecting not just the local but the national view of Hull’s importance at that time. The ensemble is completed by BDP’s Crown Courts, post modern which sort of works, full of justifying references like the domes and neo classical bits. Down Lowgate is St Mary’s church, fourteenth century but extensively done over by George Gilbert Scott in 1863. He introduced the very effective stone vaulted walkway under the tower which allowed it to be retained rather than demolished for street widening. The mostly fourteenth century interior is surprisingly large and includes a rood screen by Temple Moore (1912). Lowgate is a mix of superb buildings like Ocean Chambers (Walker 1901) and very mediocre post war stuff. Parliament Street, the best Georgian street in Hull, leads to Whitefriargate, its best shopping street. This has everything the dreary indoor shopping centres lack: well architecture for a start, a diverse array of commercial buildings from the eighteenth century onwards including the ‘Moderne’ former BHS, a Greek Revival M&S with giant fluted columns and a ship on the cornice, and the Deco Burtons. Which brings us back to Queen Victoria Square.


Very Boardwalk Empire - the Tower Cinema

In returning to Paragon Station it is worth exploring Carr Lane with the long erudite elevation of the City Hall, the rather splendidly uncompromising Primark and the delightful Venetian Gothic Paragon Arcade (1892). The former College of Art on Anlaby Road is extraordinarily flamboyant, or overwrought. Next to it the Tower Cinema (1914) is ornamental classicism in faience and opposite is the tremendous pre-Deco former Regent Cinema (1910).


Err... am I in South London? Impressive 1930s council housing

Hull was a great city in this period, the third port of Britain, and it really shows. In the post war period Hull faced immense problems, not just rebuilding the devastated city but catering for the increasing aspirations of its now more affluent citizens, nicely caught in Larkin’s poem 'Here'. Certainly the city did not get everything right. In building some 40,000 council houses in forty years, similar mistakes were made to other big cities, most particularly the infamous system-built deck access flats of the Yorkshire Design Group (along with Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham). The vast Bransholme estate, effectively a new town, also proved very problematical. The impact of the move here from inner Hull is featured in Alan Plater’s 1973 Land of Green Ginger. What today looks like carelessness in the redevelopment of the city centre is much to be regretted, especially cutting the A63/E20 through the Old Town as late as 1981. Hull is of course one of Gavin Stamp’s ‘Britain’s Lost Cities’ and certainly the loss by bombing or later indifference of so many fine buildings is a tragedy.


Brilliant and powerful - the Tidal Surge Barrier

However, in more recent decades Hull has done a lot to respond to the economic disasters inflicted on the city and from this very difficult market base the renovation of the Old Town and the Waterfront must be seen a success. Indeed this is partly because the market would not underwrite the horror and hubris of a Cardiff Bay or Southampton’s West Quay. The 2003 Roger Tym masterplan for the city centre contains the usual uncritical assumptions that market led regeneration will solve economic decline and deliver townscape and buildings of quality. Although its proposals are broadly sensible as a basis for future planning, very little has actually happened except for the spectacularly wrongheaded St Steven’s development. Don’t expect the market or the government to deliver what Hull really needs, which is some sort of national plan to rebalance the economy and much more autonomy for the city over finance, site assembly and project delivery.


Love it, love it, love it - Hull's lifting bridges


Phwarr (North Bridge)

Hull currently exemplifies the problems and absurdities of the government’s Byzantine planning system. The city had developed a local plan through all its myriad stages but at the public examination in 2012 the government inspector raised problems over the ‘robustness’ of the housing numbers. Particularly he objected to Hull wanting new housing to meet at least 14 of the 20 Building for Life criteria and where Lifetime Homes standards were not met that developers should justify this. These are not government policies, said the inspector, and would affect ‘viability’. So Hull slides down the planning snake. A revised local plan can’t get back to the top of the ladder until 2016 at the earliest, by which time no doubt the entire bloody planning system will have been ‘reformed’ yet again.


If this was Bristol it would be full of middle class hippies by now

Meanwhile the City struggles on with schemes like the refurbishment of Orchard Park, a sixties Radburn estate, doing those boring things like external insulation, improving shops, parks and playgrounds for existing residents, and inevitably the demolition of most of the flats to be replaced with fewer new houses. Nearby an Action Plan for the development of 3,400 homes at Kingswood is proceeding towards public examination. The 150 page report looks impressive with lots of nice photos of Upton as an exemplar, especially the SUDS (very important in Hull). You have to be a bit cynical however when the ‘District Centre’ turns out to be an Asda with a retail park.


One of many proper pubs

The successful City of Culture pitch promises much including a celebration of Hull’s architecture in 52 light, sound, film, words and theatre commissions and a new international gallery, dance centre and a new music centre. But there is already much to enjoy in Hull: its history, architecture, landscape, cultural institutions and creativity, Yorkshire’s only Premier football team and of course brilliant fish and chips. And its very special character.

In English Journey Priestley concluded ‘(Hull) is a sound and sensible city, not at all glamorous in itself yet never far from romance with Hanseatic League towns and icebergs and the Northern Lights just around the corner’. I can’t top that.

References

The Pevsner Architectural Guide for Hull by David and Susan Neave (2010) is indispensible and we have used and quoted from it widely.

Pevsner and David Neave’s Yorkshire East Riding 2nd edition 1995 provides more background detail.

J.B Priestley’s English Journey is a delightful read, Hull found strangely in the ‘To Lincoln and Norfolk’ chapter.

Gavin Stamp’s Britain’s Lost Cities has good photographs

Abercrombie’s plan of 1945 is mind boggling

To understand Hull it helps to read Larkin.