Chris said he preferred Misfits to A Clockwork Orange

The marshlands of the Thames estuary are bleak and exotic landscapes which allow your imagination and megalomania to flourish. Dickens evoked their haunting beauty of big horizons, sky, water, mud and wilderness most vividly. Proximity to London is largely illusory; the water is a barrier more than an artery and this is a different, hidden world and a very different dimension from the metropolis. But its emptiness and isolation provided a blank canvas for big kit and the twentieth century transformed estuarine outer London into a ragged industrial landscape: factories, refineries, power stations, sewage treatment works, mineral extraction. They are not beautiful but the heroic scale of the ventures and the ambition with which they were accomplished impresses. But in the neo-liberal age of manufacturing decline much of the infrastructure became redundant, leaving big brownfield sites, conveniently out of view for the ruling and chattering classes, and therefore highly suitable for redevelopment, at least in theory. With the glittering precedent of Docklands regeneration, it seemed obvious to extrapolate regeneration to ultimate fantasies – a Thames Gateway linear new town to deflect development from nimby constituencies and a new mega-hub airport to expand London’s continental hegemony whilst only disturbing seabirds and bankrupting the Treasury.


The Thames Estuary Landscape

Neither of these were new concepts. The Woolwich-Erith marshes, formerly part of the huge Woolwich Arsenal installation, were designated in the 1960s as what was effectively the new town of Thamesmead. For Boris’s super-hub airport read Foulness, whose very name helped scupper plans to put London’s third airport on the Essex marshes in the 1970s. The then Michael Heseltine flew over the estuary to view the proposed airport sites and saw vast swathes of derelict docklands and contaminated ex-industrial land. When he became Secretary of State for the Environment he quickly established the London Docklands Development Corporation. Heseltine was cute enough to side step ‘the romantic view of what the market would achieve in such an area when left to its own devices’ (I think we know who he was thinking about). His face saving formula was to pour public money into infrastructure and site development but to give private developers control over the built environment, let them keep the profits of enhanced values and to credit ‘success‘ to the virtues of free market enterprise. And as we know Canary Wharf was such a success it was the poster for Thatcherite Britain in all its tawdryness and self serving delusion. So obviously you roll out this model along the estuary all the way to Southend and Sittingbourne, right?


A little bit of Radburn, but not too much

The Blair government set up the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation in 2004, which quickly sank into the mud of its lack of realism. It was a bonkers concept without clear focus and priorities, reliant on the co-operation and good will of the development industry which surprisingly was not forthcoming. The LTGDC folded in 2012, but nobody much noticed. Now the Centre for London has published a new report ‘Go East; Unlocking the potential of the Thames Estuary’. It is authored by luminaries such as grands projects junkie Lord Adonis and the veteran planner Sir Peter Hall (always good value), with an introduction by veteran and unrepentant Bourbon Lord Heseltine. There is good analysis of what went wrong with the Thames Gateway and somewhat less convincing proposals for how to go forward with a rebranded ‘East Thames’ development strategy. It proposes ‘new towns’ at Ebbsfleet, Barking Reach and Thurrock and a Disneyland at Swanscombe. The recommendation to reinvent the proactive development corporation model as used at Milton Keynes however is sensible. MK is now seen as the great success story although urbanists might disagree.


Form and integrity

Like Milton Keynes, Thamesmead was a Mk2 new town, a hugely ambitious project but one of the newly established GLC not the government. It is not generally seen as a success. Thamesmead was expected to have a population of 100,000 with all the amenities of a town but these were not forthcoming. Crucially, the projected Fleet underground line from the West End and City to Thamesmead was abandoned in 1979, so the town was always peripheral to London. 40 years late Crossrail will soon open to Abbey Wood on the edge of Thamesmead, dramatically transforming its accessibility with huge implications. Buy, buy, buy – (relatively) cheap houses and fast trains; the gentrification monitor is likely to go off the top of the scale. This is especially so for the early phases of Thamesmead (close to Abbey Wood) with their modernist chic of striking sculptural rectilinear blocks and what could be attractive squares.


The futuristic city

Following the usual trajectory there were high expectations for Thamesmead the futuristic city, initially viewed through the prism of the slum conditions and overcrowding of inner London. But as with so many supremely self confident large scale public housing projects of the 1960s, poor  maintenance, lack of the promised new town facilities and its poor transport connections soon took the shine off the vision. Filming Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange there sealed Thamesmead’s fate in popular and media perception and it was thereafter stigmatised as a concrete disaster, a sink estate. But what is interesting about Thamesmead is how well it illustrates the progress of housing development from utopian modernism through municipal attempts at more traditional interpretations of Merrie England (but in a social housing context) to big builder cynicism and incompetence and the death of Buildings for Life.

Pending the completion of Crossrail we arrived at Woolwich Arsenal via DLR. Since our last visit Woolwich has acquired the mother of all god awful Tescotowns, the largest in Europe with over 900 apartments stacked above. Designed by Sheppard Robson it is gross in its concept and bulk and sleekly indifferent in execution,  showing utter contempt for its neighbour, Pugin’s St Peter’s church, which now faces a fine composition of ventilation grills and service entrances beneath a cliff of vile, garish green and yellow cladding. I’m not sure if this is the kind of ‘sod you’ architecture we are now told to admire but what it seems to be missing is the now rehabilitated Owen Luder’s ‘this is what I think’ bit. Its companion, also of vast scale, is the new Greenwich town hall on Wellington Street designed by HLM and cited in the Carbuncle Cup as ‘spectacularly awful’, which is a bit harsh. Perhaps this bad press accounts for the security staff telling me I could not photograph the building even from the street.

The scenic walk to Thamesmead starts via the Royal Arsenal development where apartment blocks are shooting out of the ground next to the Crossrail station. Berkeley Homes announce that ‘in the last five years we have invested £260million in the facilities communities need’, which is awfully nice of them. Overall the scale, grandeur and order of the retained Arsenal buildings provides framework and restraint for new development; it is only when you get to the Thames that the monoculture of vacuous apartment blocks takes control, all sullenly fenced off from the waterside ‘public realm’. However the battery of apartment blocks across the river look even cheaper and nastier.


Stunningly banal – Gallions Reach 

Beyond the derelict and fenced off lock of the Broadwater canal you enter Thamesmead, or rather Thamesmead West. The reality is that the ‘new town’ has very little urban integrity, being broken up by megalomaniac roads and the substantial physical barriers of tips, watercourses and Bazalgette’s massive outfall sewer. Away from the river the housing immediately becomes about as Noddy as you can get and it is hard to imagine you are still in London. In later phases development slightly recovers its balls, at least in scale and crudity, no longer trying to be twee and indeed the new barracks ‘communities’ are gated as effectively as Stalag 17. The token Ecopark estate is bizarrely laid out around a huge car park.


Building for the housing ladder, not places


The Eco Car Park

Behind this is the unsettling mound of the Tor which you can ascend to get a fairly spectacular overview of development and dereliction. You survey a vast prospect of contaminated tips some of which is being reclaimed as parkland and nature reserves. You can imagine the whole area as a fantastic new park, as wonderful as the Royal Parks and a great new asset for London. But where would such vision and patronage come from these days? The best we can hope for is the condescension of ‘planning gain’ on the back of some fat cat asset stripping.


The Tor and its public provision

And there is another problem – the East London River Crossing. There is no road bridge or tunnel between Blackwall and Dartford and even to me the case for a new crossing linking Thamesmead with Becton seems pretty overwhelming. But as with the Fleet line, the bridge plans have been scrapped, first in 1993 and then by Boris in 2008 – surprising for a Mayor who gets off on big infrastructure gigs and is happy to invest £30m in Joanna Lumley’s absurd garden bridge. The Go East gang are big on reviving the East London bridge whose motorway access will slice across the current wasteland.


Can you see Joanna Lumley from here?Parkland potential.

Then there is the projected ‘Tamesis Point’ development on a large tranche of the tips east of the new road. This is promoted as ‘the last piece in the jigsaw of Thamesmead which will be dramatically different from other development in the area’ according to Tilfen Ltd who acquired the assets of the defunct Thamesmead Town. Outline planning permission has been granted for this 25ha development of 2,000 homes with a mile long riverside esplanade of vibrant uses to a masterplan drawn up by David Lock Associates and adopted as SPG by Greenwich in 2003. Certainly this is as grand an essay in Beaux Arts planning as you are likely to see from the air, allegedly taking inspiration from the Paragon at Blackheath and evoking London squares if you can suspend your disbelief, which I can’t. Anyway it has not happened yet. The walk along the Thames path is almost rural with god knows what behind the high duty galvanised security fencing. Eventually you reach earlier attempts at an esplanade, with quite striking rusting ironwork art and concrete bunkers.


A whimper - Thamemead town centre

Looking back across a lake you see Thamesmead Centre. Originally conceived as something like Cumbernauld, it ended up as a whimper, a rather charming toy town vernacular precinct with whimsical clock tower and a stepped plaza down to a watercourse. The few shops look downbeat as well they might as the action has moved to the vast adjacent retail park with its dismal brick dressed Morrisons, tin retail sheds and loathsome drive thru artery blockers all around an ocean of car parking. There is a nondescript leisure centre nearby and a health centre (both much needed given Macdonalds and Colonel Sanders) but for a town of maybe 50,000 people this is just a miserable excuse for a town centre.


Drive Thru

The housing of Thamesmead North continues this theme of loss of confidence and lowest common denominator. Some of the houses are more up market with a dash of Surrey exec and a rash of Edwardiana flats (in marketing concept, not execution). The Thames path is pleasant, looking across to a hauntingly desolate Essex marsh where electricity pylons emphasise its horizontality. But generally the new housing is just so dire it should win prizes. It lays bare the futility of hopes for better housing and place-making invested in By Design, Manual for Streets, Places for People and similar positive tracts of the Cabe era, when there was a batsqueak of optimism for the future. The plan is worse than the house designs, endless disorientating looping roads and culs-de-sac; thank god for mobile phone satellite maps or I’d still be out there. Everything is designed around car parking; a Tony Robinson of the future will definitely conclude we worshipped the car and he or she would be right. Pedestrians certainly don’t get a look in.


Street life


Don't want to play outside


Sod it, can't be bothered to join up the paths, just take the money and clear off.

The formlessness and timidity of Thamesmead’s recent development epoch could not be more different from the boldness of the original vision and the linear clarity of early phases of building. To appreciate how this early development evolved you are best to approach from Abbey Park station via the magnificent Lesnes Park with its Abbey ruins. From here an elevated concrete pedestrian walkway takes you from south east London suburbia to a new world as imagined in 1967. The concept was of linear blocks with raised pedestrian walkways, creating a coherent and very urban framework within a landscape of lakes and greenery. The lakes and watercourses are one of the most distinctive features of Thamesmead and both are essential, for this is a marsh. They provide a strong aesthetic counterpoint to the uncompromising linearity of the housing blocks. The upper level walkways were a requirement because of flooding (the area was inundated in the great flood of 1953, so they really made sense).


Clearly good quality housing which deserves better maintenance

Parkview, closest to Lesnes Park, was the second phase of development begun in 1969. It incorporates the same elements of spine block, lower terraces and point blocks as the first phase, Lakeside, but has a simpler and more relaxed layout around larger space.


Tasty refurbished  concrete. If only the 90s was about this.

Lakeside is denser, more complex and visually dramatic. The upper level walkways with parking and many internal garages at ground level makes for some awkward spaces and relationships but this is not the fetishised separation of traffic and pedestrians which caused such complications in later Radburn estates. Industrialised building was the big idea of the age and these early phases of Thamesmead used the French Balency system but prefabrication was not a success: the process was too complicated and expensive so it was abandoned in later phases. The pale concrete slab construction with wood frames still looks pretty good although purists will hate the ad hoc DIY additions and alterations of right-to-buy owners. The crudity of much of the repair and renovation work by the Gallions Housing Association (which took over the public housing stock from the GLC) is also a disappointment. Recently some improvements to point blocks have been done with sympathy and just a whisper of De Stijl but more substantive make-overs of lower blocks completely destroy the original ethic.


How long before the hipsters move in?

It is interesting to see how the flats and terraces have been adapted by residents, almost invariably to try and evoke a cosier look and to reinforce private space. However the likely gentrification following the arrival of Crossrail will almost certainly take things in an opposite direction, celebrating the modernist sparseness and clarity. It is easy to see how this could become very desirable territory; in places it evokes Bloomsbury squares and the setting of South Mere lake is stunning. But this of course places the value of architectural style above the evils of social cleansing. Thamesmead remains for the time being a working class redoubt.


Bit like Span but without the snobs


Terrible paving and pedestrian crossing

One thing Thamesmead shares in common with MK is lots of serious dual carriageways. Yarnton Way bisects the Lakeside development, which made some sense with a network of high level walkways but these are being dismantled, so you cross the road as in Brasilia or some third world country – at your peril. The Tavy Bridge local centre across the main road at the edge of South Mere contained shops, community rooms and a health centre. This was designed by David Stow in 1970, dramatically jutting out on piers over the lake. It was significant enough to be one of only 10 illustrations of post war architecture in Pevsner’s South London but has been demolished to be replaced with this:


Decline - the new health centre

The rest of Tavy Bridge has also been demolished as part of the ‘regeneration’ of Thamesmead by Gallions Housing Association. The rationale is full of clichés about concrete, planners’ dreams (sic) and failure. Incredibly Clockwork Orange is presented as evidence of this failure; it was a film for god’s sake. The mendacious images of the new development, renamed Southmere village, show stark blocks and towers in what could be concrete but is probably render foiled by beautiful formal gardens in the foreground, sun glistening on the water, swans preening, bluebirds singing. Strangely there are few happy, smiling people. I don’t buy the vision but history is written by the winners.


Thamesmead had vision

South Mere is very impressive, large enough for sailing and there is an attractive boat club (1977) at the far end. The lake provides a fine context for the point blocks of the original new town, and with the three storey terraces and the extensive park in this part of Thamesmead it looks as though the planners’ vision was actually realised. There is cinematic evidence too: the 1996 film Beautiful Thing depicts not a dystopian Thamesmead but a lush, exotic setting for a love story, helped by an overwhelming soundtrack of Mama Cass. However the Southern Outfall Sewer is the effective boundary of such dreams. Together with Eastern Way this cuts Thamesmead in two and you have to be determined to cross it.


Checkpoint Charlie – Eastern Way


Fortress Thamesmead – The Moorings

North of Eastern Way is the third phase of the new town built 1972-77 and called The Moorings for no very evident reason. Here the perimeter block along Carlyle Road becomes a grim barracks which is hard to like but the lower blocks behind, faced in brick, sober and well proportioned are much more successful. There are some nice details like the metalwork panels but the community centre in the middle besieged by razor wire and CCTV tells a depressing story. Possibly an ironic joke is that the streets are called after social reformers: Attlee Road, Bentham Road, Booth Close, Tawney Avenue, Titmuss Avenue etc. There is also Malthus Path.



After The Moorings the original conception of the new town was replaced by attempts at lower density rus in urbe social housing around Radburn layouts, but it is hard to identify any really successful examples. Things went downhill quickly after the assassination of the GLC in 1986, with big builders’ standard dross becoming the norm, eventually giving way to Blair and now Osborne bombast, as we see at Tavy Bridge.


A waterside landscape to work with


Thamesmead paths and natural lanscaping

The extensive watercourses of the area provided a basis for a network of green paths which are very attractive and one of the big successes of Thamesmead. From The Moorings one such route takes you west through the remains of the massive walls of the Arsenal beyond which is what was Waterfield School. This was designed in 1975 and described in Pevsner as ‘like a sleek and glossy high tech factory’. Now the Woolwich Polytechnic School, it appears somewhat altered but still with a clear influence of Hunstanton. Of course security makes it pretty impossible to photograph schools these days, but on Yarnton Way the Bexley Business Academy by Foster is worth looking at. He also built the Modern Art Glass warehouse deep in the Eastern Industrial District.


An old military history still visible

It is difficult to leave Thamesmead without a sense of disappointment. Clearly, the visionary concept was flawed but it honestly expressed social purpose and optimism for the future. Most of what we see today suggests tawdry short termism and self serving hype. Thamesmead was unlucky it was not a government designated new town, as with an autonomous development corporation it might have had more of a chance. It is divided administratively between Greenwich and Bexley and is entirely peripheral to both. Thamesmead seems like a place that has things done to it, mostly by the ubiquitous Tilfen Ltd and Gallions Housing Association. Who is responsible for Thamesmead and why is it such a neglected place? Wild horses roam as in the wild Dublin estate of Into the West (the one with the horse in the lift). Litter is strewn without hope of collection, the toilets in the town centre are ….. disgusting. And this is London, global city blah, blah, blah.


Wild horses and concrete, reminiscent of the film Fish Tank

If localism meant anything it would mean places like Thamesmead controlled their own affairs and had the power and resources to sort out their own problems and to realise their own opportunities. The town would control its land and assets for the public benefit just like the garden cities the government are so fond off (apart from the last bit). But despite all the rhetoric froth I don’t see this happening to Thamesmead.

Thanks to Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy for the guided tour.

Owen’s Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain contains an extensive analysis of Thamesmead in the Greenwich chapter.

Will we survive the impending anniversary of World War One? Can I stand any more of Michael Gove’s lectures on patriotism, Dan Snow poncing about in old army uniforms, VAD romances on the telly and Niall Ferguson’s flights of historical fancy? One of the best places to go to really appreciate the import of WW1 is Berlin. Here in 1914 was imperial bluster to match Edwardian England but also economic and technical dynamism to rival Chicago. The consequences of defeat were both devastating and liberating; a flowering of arts and architecture before the horrors of Nazism, almost unimaginable destruction, the brutality of Stalinism and then global capitalism’s ‘end of history’. Berlin is awash with British school parties ‘doing’ Hitler but of course the broader lessons of this history is what Little England seems so determined not to learn.


The end of history at Potsdamer Platz (it's a bit empty)


Radio HQ from the the Weimar years (a Maccreanor Lavington favourite)

Berlin is not an easy city to understand, especially from a few short visits. It is a big city but its infrastructure is intended for a much larger population than the current 3.5 million people, less than half that of London or Paris which it used to rival. In places it seems strangely empty, cars racing along wide boulevards whilst the few pedestrians wait for the green man who here wears a distinctive little hat, a cute bit of Ossie nostalgia. Greater Berlin was created in 1920 in an amalgamation of 12 separate boroughs. The Weimar years were exciting for architecture, much more of which survives than that of the brief Third Reich which was either bombed or deliberately exorcised like the bell tower of the Olympic Stadium. The arena itself survives as a modern venue, cold and chaste rather than chilling. The old city centre largely lay east of the Brandenburg Gate so after 1945 West Berlin had to duplicate most of the city’s institutions, creating a yet more polymorphic city.


The generous infrastructure - new Hauptbahnhof


Prenzlauer Berg - gentrification central

Berlin’s architectural monuments are not quite what they seem. Bomber Harris and Red Army shelling destroyed 70% of the city and most buildings were massively damaged. This is obvious and explicit in, for example, Foster’s masterful re-building of the Reichstag and Chipperfield’s utterly extraordinarily brilliant and moving re–imagining of the Neues Museum. But much of Schinkel’s shattered legacy was just quietly reconstructed, as was the Schloss at Charlottenburg. The impact of WW2 and its aftermath is overwhelming and everywhere apparent, but is also very matter of fact; this is just how it was. The theatrically retained ‘hollow tooth’ of the bombed spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is unusual and seems slightly hysterical. The city mostly rebuilt itself pragmatically, not through the hidden hand of the market, but by huge and countervailing political wills. In doing so it became a very different place from its former self or from the rest of Germany. The GDR undertook massive housing redevelopments like Karl Marx Allee but invested nothing in maintenance of older areas which had largely survived bombing, like Prenzlauer Berg. By 1989 half the older properties were vacant. Even before the fall of the wall the authorities had begun to focus on renovation and there was pressure from artists and liberals for city centre housing. A squatter culture developed, first in West Berlin in 1979-82, and then in East Berlin after the fall of the wall. Although both movements were suppressed they established a culture and image of the city. The expected boom post the 1990 re-unification and the re-establishment of Berlin as Germany’s capital did not happen. Instead we got Bohemian Berlin, cheap and easy going and so unlike other German cities. But West Berlin still drips affluence. Potsdamer Platz shows the teeth of aggressive capitalism and formerly Ossie alternative Prenzlauer Berg has transmogrified into gentrification central.


The 12 year Reich (1936 Olympic Stadium)


Crazy mixed up place

The 1,000 year Reich lasted only a dozen years, less than the Weimar Republic. 1945 was Year Zero and the division into east and west seemed immutable, although the city remained permeable until 1961. The wall existed for 28 years. It has been dismantled for nearly as long but is still the enduring symbol of the city. The remnants seem remarkably flimsy; it was machine guns that made it effective. Mostly quickly destroyed, what remains of the wall and its death strip is now either fetishised as living history (and actually very moving memorials) or is being redeveloped for glitzy yuppie apartments. Berlin is a crazy mixed up place.


'Doing Hitler' - the popular beginning of history at the Reichstag

A whole generation has grown up since the fall of the wall, but the triumph of neo-conservatism proved more problematic than the ‘end of history’ anticipated. Agata Pyzik in her fascinating ‘Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West’ explores the tensions and contradictions embedded in the whole concept of western ‘normality’ and the expectations that the east should or can conform to this. Berlin represents in a sense a privileged version of the tensions of eastern bloc countries like Poland, sheltered by the strength and power of the Federal Republic from the full cultural and economic shock of privitisation and de-industrialisation. It is the capital again but remains peripheral to the economic, financial and real political power of West Germany, still clinging to an exceptional status.


Spartacist uprising memorial - the alternative history is a lesson for us all

The ‘alternative’ pedigree of Berlin back to Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic, but post war is a culture grown in the laboratory of the strange half life of a semi de-populated city with its vacant tenements and factories and wilderness plots, vividly evoked in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. Here left wing alternative politics meets financial institutions which see their role as enablers of social and economic objectives – a concept unimaginable in the Anglo-Saxon world. This is why Berlin is a poster-boy for the Baugruppen model of collective custom build housing.


Ideological and belligerent - Wilford's rented British Embassy 


Britischer Architekt - Chipperfield's magnificent Neues Museum

In Blighty an intellectually impoverished, ideologically obsessed and consequently delivery-impotent government thrashes around in the morass of its housing failures. Bandwagons, gimmicks, sound-bites and scapegoats are the order of the day. How to deflect scrutiny from the government’s dismal failure over – everything really, but especially housing policy and especially the lack of social and affordable housing? Boles invents a ‘right to build’ as useful flak to draw enemy fire. Which is a shrewd move as custom build is seductively libertarian and appeals across a wide spectrum. In fact it is such a good idea it deserves to be taken seriously not treated as a gimmick. And of course the government can't resist casting local authorities as a phantom enemy with a new ‘right to sue’, which is extraordinarily disingenuous even by the standards of the Coalition. In fact it is more often local authorities who champion collective custom build, as in Lewisham, Bristol and many other places. Meanwhile the government’s own Homes and Communities Agency support is not even lukewarm.


But will the neo-liberal wall ever come down?

But local authorities actually control very little development land – is the point. It would be far more effective to require big house building companies to deliver a small proportion of their land holdings for custom build, but that is not going to happen is it. The lack of public control over housing land is a fundamental problem for delivery not just of custom build but of all affordable housing and the pre-conditions which make self (or custom) build successful in Holland or Germany don’t exist in England because of, err, Tory ideology - as Andrew Lainton explains. There are some welcome bits in Osborne’s budget package like funding for ‘up to’ 10,000 serviced plots for custom build. But – do the math – this is small beer in the context of the overall shortfall of house building and the collapse of affordable housing supply. And it is such a characteristically bizarre and anti-democratic idea that you empower local people by encouraging complex ad hoc ‘community’ arrangements and at the same time disempowering their elected local authorities.


Ok Britain, this is how co-housing works (Spreefeld)

The Baugruppen model does have a lot to teach us if we are willing to learn the real lessons. A recent study tour to Berlin organized by Sam Brown of the University of Sheffield and Ash Sakula proved very instructive. There housing co-operatives provide about 10% of the housing stock and 10% of new build, which is astonishing and impressive. Historically land and rents were very cheap in Berlin and there are rent controls. But both land costs and rents are rising fast, although still only a fraction of the absurd London values. However this is a big problem for the co-operative housing movement. In particular, Berlin is saddled with €60bn debts from the post unification binge and so the cash strapped local authority is no longer able to provide cheap land.


We've got plenty of this is in Britain - tick

There are about 200 Baugruppen projects in Berlin, representing about a tenth of new co-operative housing provision – a small but significant part of the city’s housing mix. Some of these projects have very strong communitarian ethics, owing much to Boho Berlin and the philosophy of the earlier squatter movement. The Spreefeld Genossenschaft project is in the Kreutzberg area which, according to the Rough Guide, is a magnet for left-wing anarchists, gays, Turkish immigrants, hipsters and tourists. It certainly takes itself very seriously. The development is on a backland site next to the River Spree looking out towards the East Side Gallery section of the Wall with its rich political symbolism. It adjoins a disconcertingly well organised colony of hippies in yurts.


The community room is not quite ready yet (Spreefeld)

Spreefeld Genossenschaft is a co-operative with about 120 members, mainly middle class with quite a lot of older people but there are also many people with children. The development consists of three blocks of flats, each designed by a different small architectural practice, although externally they look very similar. The ground floors will be for various communal uses or workshops. There are about 60 flats in total and each block has a slightly different tenure structure, from essentially conventional to providing significant communal living, including shared kitchens and living rooms. Managing the different requirements/specifications for individual flats and blocks is very complex and time consuming so there are sub groups of about 10 flats/20 people. A core group manages the project.

Spreefeld interior 

Funding is via a public ethical bank which supports sustainable housing; experience shows that ‘Baugruppen’ housing has a very low default rate and banks are happy with this kind of project, so different from the British experience. It is a shared ownership scheme with a maximum 50% ownership and this share cannot be used for speculation. If co-op members leave, the value of the share is assessed independently and repayment can be up to 2 years, allowing time for another acceptable co-op member to be recruited. This could not be more different from the acquisitive ‘housing ladder’ model beloved of Britain’s right wing press.


The generous and utilitarian balconies 

The overall budget is €17m, but it is not really clear what comparative costs are, partly because of the variety of units and the complex menu of works. Land is much cheaper than in Britain, especially London, and is said to represent only about 20% of overall costs. The average flat has 60 m2. with pro rata 30 m2 of communal space. It is claimed that there are savings of 15-20% by taking out risk and developer profit, but the bespoke nature of so much work must push up costs. The shell is built to Passivhaus standards. Internally finishes are very basic and the structural layout allows maximum flexibility, although kitchens/bathrooms are in service stacks. The flats we saw were satisfyingly minimalist with concrete walls, few partitions and very basic fittings, an ethic and lifestyle that evidently appeals. Self fitting out can potentially reduce overall project costs significantly. There is a small communal heating plant and the development is car free but belongs to an electric car club and has 200 bike spaces.


The R50 Project - probably the most successful 

Spreefeld Genossenschaft is undoubtedly impressive but the unusual nature of its communal requirements makes delivery of this project especially challenging. Distant memories of shared student flats made it hard for me to buy into the idealism. A fascinating exposition by a founder member of one of Berlin’s few surviving ‘legal squats’ from 1989 ended with the admission that he left over arguments about who had eaten whose breakfast. But Baugruppen projects are usually more straightforward. The R50 project also in Kreutzberg seems to offer a more practical, replicable approach. This provides 19 flats ranging from 70 to 130 m2 and is explicitly about cheap build and flexible space. The exterior looks very basic with plywood cladding, galvanised metal balconies and mesh and would probably struggle with British planning. Internally the spaces are well considered and attractive. The interior exhibits a strong industrial ethic which is celebrated by some (mostly architect) residents although others go for much more conventional finishes. The project incorporates 25% of the overall floorspace in communal spaces – a lounge/meeting room in the semi-basement, laundry, bike storage and communal balconies and roof garden space. It is not clear how much the basic specification and self fit out have reduced overall costs but it seems a robust and businesslike project that the residents really enjoy and value.


Not always popular with the locals

Not all custom build schemes are so successful. Some looked like standard developer apartments and were apparently unpopular with existing communities in what is evidently the highly fractured politics of the area. One block was repeatedly vandalized and this was partly blamed on ‘insensitive’ design although other blocks looked fairly similar.


Living on a co-building site (Spreefeld)

Can the Baugruppen model be translated to the broken British housing market? Certainly such projects can provide a quality of space and community ambience which is very attractive to the cognoscenti. The greatest benefits of custom build seem to be the engagement of residents in the process from the outset, their ownership of the project in the widest sense and the ability to at least partly create the spaces they want rather than adapting to someone else’s idea of a dream home. The ‘I made that’ tag is hugely important, even if you almost certainly did not build it yourself. But I’m sceptical about the claims that custom build is cheaper. By stripping out developer profit there are clearly savings but volume house builders will have much lower costs in materials and supply chains whereas custom build usually ends up being expensively bespoke. So realistically you may expect to get a better house for the same cost, rather than a cheaper one. System building a standard shell may reduce costs and self-fitting-out can make the process more affordable and income-flexible, although it does require living in a semi-building site for an extended period, as at Spreefeld Genossenschaft.


The R50 entrance and bike storage

The two big problems for custom build are organisational complexity and land costs. Baugruppen schemes are inevitably going to be complex; it is in the very nature of the beast, a collective building project with many individualistic clients, usually idealistic and inexperienced. Project management has traditionally been led by architects but the German experience suggests that the different skills of a facilitator and enabler are required to see the project over a development timescale which can be 3 to 5 years. It is a long haul, and only the fully committed will succeed. Potentially ‘ethical’ or niche developers can bring experience, development skills and essential disciplines required to reduce costs and delivery times. The concept of shell and façade with customised and potentially literal self build behind is a seductive one, drawing on the successful Georgian tradition (Bath and Edinburgh for example). But there is a danger that commercialising custom build can reduce the concept to choosing the fancy dress for standard builders' products, as we saw in Almere.


The R50 community room is ready

The cost of housing land, and its availability, is the elephant in the collective custom build room and especially in London. Of course orthodox believers maintain the market would resolve this little problem if it weren’t for planning. And planning’s obsession with detail rather than overall structure is a problem for custom build which requires more flexibility than the standard developer products (which usually turn out to be dire despite the shed loads of planning conditions). Using planning to collect development tax rather than land tax is also a big issue for affordability, but the central problem is really planning's hopelessly emasculated powers vis-à-vis big landowners and developers. Thatcherite, Blairite and Bolesite housing policies over decades have privatised the enhanced land values as a result of planning permission, rather than captured this for the public benefit. We could adopt, for example, the Amsterdam model where land for development is acquired at existing use value by the public authority and publically commissioned masterplans form the basis of land disposal for appropriate developments. But hang on, that is what we used to do before the neo-con putsch, isn’t it? Well, sort of; that was the idea in the 1947 Planning Act but it was quickly compromised. The mechanisms are still there but the political will isn’t.


Well he's happy with the R50 interior and so am I

If land costs can be reduced and land made available through a planning system that really controls the release of land, then Baugruppen schemes will become much more realistic and deliverable. That would be great, but even in Berlin collective custom build only represents 1% of new housing. It can only therefore be a small subset of what is required to tackle the terrifying housing crisis facing Blighty. Public control over development land would be a game changer for all types of housing provision, but requires a counter-revolution in thinking – an escape from the fear and tyranny of the market God.


Pretty damn good - the Armoured Cruiser at Siemensstadt


Take your pick. High quality social housing abounds in Berlin

Berlin of course has seen dramatic political swings but what has survived remarkably well is the legacy of social housing from the Weimar era. Two World Heritage sites provide some of the best examples. The Siemensstadt Ring at Charlottenburg-Nord is an urban tour de force, part of a self contained industrial suburb around the huge functionalist Siemens factory complex with its chimneys deliberately evoking a traditional German Rathaus. The estate was designed by Gropius and others for low wage workers and built in 1929-31. The flats are small and standardised, laid out it long blocks, but with great subtlety and care. At the entrance to the estate is a moderne extravaganza known as the ‘armoured cruiser’, but most blocks are architecturally undramatic, just very well handled, with subtle curves deflecting their length and visual drama provided by arching over roads, all softened with parks and greenspace. Gropius’s apartments with their great modernist windows and roof terraces are much more striking, as are the nearby blocks with protruding curved balconies.


Britz, by Bruno Taut


Joyful - lets do more of this

Britz was a greenfield suburb designed by Bruno Taut and Otto Wagner in 1925 and completed in the annus horribilis 1933. This was a prototype for low cost construction to be affordable for working people and was designed around idealistic principles of community. The centerpiece is the Horseshoe of 1,000 flats, explicitly modern but with a very humane and neighbourly character. Dramatic use of colour enlivens the elevations and also spare details are made to count, like the attic windows and the brickwork of the entrance arches. Other blocks make dramatic uses of features like stairwells and balconies, creating strong geometric patterns. Behind the Horseshoe are terraces, almost garden city in inspiration but without the whimsy, and again making excellent use of colour and spare details. Traffic and parking are subservient, there are local shops, convenient U-bahn stations, gardens and public spaces are generous and everything seems well maintained. Britz is a pure joy, a re-affirmation of faith in collective action and society, a triumph of careful planning and design. And this was possible in the economically devastated Germany following defeat in WW1. Compare and contrast with the TINA defeatism of today.


Britz, but it could be Letchworth, or Aspley

Berlin has a lot to teach us, about history, about social housing and about custom building. The thing is that we often take from it only those things we want to see.

Five Leaves Publishing, Adrian Jones and Chris Matthews are pleased to invite you to the book launch of:



Tuesday 24th June 2014, 6.30–8.00pm
Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Refreshments provided RSVP to Adrian, or Chris, or bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham, NG1 2DH
0115 8373097
www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk 
www.fiveleaves.co.uk

Adrian and Chris will also be presenting a free illustrated talk about Towns in Britain at 3.30pm on Saturday 28th June at Lowdham Book Festival
www.lowdhambookfestival.co.uk

Mail order UK: bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk / 0115 8373097
Overseas orders: www.bookdepository.co.uk

This lavishly illustrated book takes an irreverent, sometimes angry and amusing journey exploring our towns and cities, from Hackney and its hipsters to Rab C. Nesbitt’s Govan, from the screaming incoherence of Cardiff Bay to the alleged idyll of Hertfordshire’s garden cities. Written for the informed general reader, Towns in Britain looks at what is happening to our cities today, and is essential reading for those interested in urban design, architecture, and town and transport planning.


Example of spreads – Introduction

Towns in Britain will stimulate discussion about important topics which affect us all, the housing crisis, the quality of urban regeneration, place-making and the creation of civilised streets. It challenges current political and planning orthodoxies and the baleful impact that so much recent development has had on our cities. It also confronts popular and media stereotypes which dismiss so much of our built environment as ‘crap towns’ and ‘concrete monstrosities’ and illustrates the value of underrated places.


Example of spreads – Coventry


Example of spreads – Bristol


Example of spreads – Deptford to Woolwich

Towns in Britain expands on the themes of the popular jonestheplanner.co.uk blog. Both are primarily written by Adrian Jones and presented by Chris Matthews. Adrian Jones is a town planner and urban designer, formerly Director of Planning and Transport for the City of Nottingham and member of CABE’s national Design Review Panel.

Published by Five Leaves Publishing.

Sheffield is heroic. It’s like a boxer struggling back to his feet after a series of knock-down blows; down but not out. Sheffield is masculine, raw and powerful. But it is Pittsburg, not Detroit, still optimistic that its past, improbable, greatness can be rekindled. And it is often wrong-headed about how to do this.


Takes your breath away


An ungracious but entertaining city centre – High St

Clinging to the steep valleys at the edge of the Pennines its location is extraordinary and its views spectacular but the topography is challenging for a big city. And with a population of 550,000 Sheffield claims to be the fourth city of England, although this ranking doesn’t reflect the larger conurbations of Manchester, Liverpool or Newcastle. Sheffield is certainly a city of two halves, struggling post-industrial to the east around the husks of the heavy industry which had made it such an economic powerhouse, but highly des res to the west beyond the University, giving onto the superb Peak District landscape. Betjeman described Broomhill with its stone built villas as ‘the prettiest suburb in England’. The city centre is not gracious – Ian Nairn said ‘the old buildings are something of a joke’, but you can trace a Georgian grid and there is a coherent and characterful area of austerely detailed late Georgian houses on the slope plunging down the Don valley from the Cathedral. There are remnants too of the myriad cutlery workshops of independent craftsmen, the ‘little mesters’. The city had an industrial structure more like Birmingham than, say, Leeds, and has followed a similar economic trajectory.


Georgian townscape plunging down the Don Valley – Bank St


A post war pub – Park Hill

What makes Sheffield so interesting is the ambition and confidence of its post war planning and public building programme. Nairn said in 1961 ‘without any doubt, the buildings put up in the last ten years and projected for the next twenty are as interesting and exciting as all the older buildings in the city put together, and this, for Britain, is quite an achievement’. That new world was of course kicked in the groin by over 30 years of the government’s non-industrial policy. Sheffield’s Modernist heritage is now seen as a badge of economic failure. The city wants to put its future behind it and re-invent itself as an imitation of flash Leeds and Manchester’s northern cool, to make itself more ordinary. Now Osborne says he wants Sheffield to be a constituent of his ‘Northern Powerhouse’. Well there is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth …. but whilst this may be a welcome and long overdue recognition of the North’s potential, adding HS3 to Alsop’s M62 City is hardly a realistic prospectus, more an enthusiastic Year 1 student’s flight of fancy.


Ostalgie for full employement 

As you approach the city by train its setting amidst the green hills and moors is remarkable. From a distance the city centre looks impressively metropolitan, with towers piled up on the hill above the Sheaf valley, although in closer views these quickly disappoint. On the other side of the valley the monumental and marvellously Brutalist Park Hill flats become the topography.


Strangely thrilling – Tinsley viaduct

From the M1 you see the different topography, the broad lower Don valley, an archetypal post industrial landscape, the steel mills replaced with sheds, malls and dereliction. Although Sheffield still produces prodigious volumes of steel, it just doesn’t employ many people. The valley is spanned by the iconic two-level Tinsley viaduct, an unusual steel box construction of 1968. Sadly, the adjacent much admired cooling towers that formerly announced your official arrival in The North were demolished in 2008, despite a strong campaign. Just so we know our place in privatised utilities world.


Well at least they haven't knocked that down – Institute of Sport

Skulking below the M1 viaduct is the glittery Meadowhall shopping mall, an utterly vacuous and claustrophobic incubator of consumerism, the anti-city centre of Sheffield. Built as a response to the ‘Full Monty’ wreckage of Steel City’s former raison d’être, it was a spectacular own goal of Sheffield’s planning, but other efforts to regenerate the swathes of dereliction were more imaginative, like the venues for the 1991 world Student Games. However the striking Don Valley stadium, Britain’s largest athletics venue other than the Olympic stadium, was closed in 2013 and has been demolished as part of the Olympic legacy. National scandal. Next to the demolition site is Faulkner Brown’s English Institute of Sport, elegant in a confidently modest way, despite its size.


Attercliffe city centre

Sheffield still looks convincingly industrial along Attercliffe Road, which also retains the ghosts of extraordinarily grand shops, commercial buildings and the amazingly exuberant Adelphi Cinema of 1920. Closer in to the centre industry gives way to a post-apocalyptic world of Tesco Extra, in the most lurid (red) cladding I have ever seen, so awful I laughed out loud, though future generations may appreciate it. Next to this and in silent reproach are the magnificent Wicker arches of the closed Manchester-Sheffield railway. These frame the view of Wicker, once an important high street as can be seen in its eclectic buildings, which now eke out a marginal existence as some interesting alternative shops.


Welcome to Sheffield

Sheffield is just two hours from St Pancras. Sheffield station, if not quite as stupendous as the Midland’s London outpost, is extremely fine and an excellent introduction to the city. Designed by Trubshaw in 1905 it is unlike the Midland’s other great stations, being classical and built in ashlar stone rather than brick and terracotta. Like Nottingham and Leicester it has a magnificent porte-cochère, here long and low and now enclosed in glass to provide a fine new entrance, part of an excellent restoration and enhancement scheme initiated by the city with typical initiative and determination. It is a pity that the qualities of the space are now debased by the indiscriminate and cretinous advertising of the carpet bagging privatised rail companies.


In fact, you're more than welcome

Sheffield’s topography is a challenge as well as an asset. Its post Blitz reconstruction spectacularly ballsed up the relationship between the station and the central business district up the hill, which makes the city initially incomprehensible to visitors. Nairn talks (approvingly) of plans to completely deck over the Sheaf from Park Hill to Castle Market. Well, that would have been heroic, and certainly disastrous, but it didn’t happen. Sheffield’s city planners have boldly tackled the inherited disconnect between the station and the city centre by creating a new pedestrian axis. The formerly dismal setting of Midland station has been transformed by the creation of Sheaf Square with its inspired steel wave water feature. This both enfolds the square and leads you towards the city centre via Howard Street, which has been repaved with impressive confidence. It incorporates artworks and water features with some amusing mosaic bling: someone had clearly been to Barcelona. And it works – at least as far as Arundel Gate.


The successful cultural quarter 


Persistence Works Studios

Opposite Sheaf Square is the Cultural Industries Quarter, a considerable success which has helped to animate Sheffield’s lively arts and music scene with new studios and galleries, mostly conversions of modest older buildings. There is a striking conversion of thirties car showrooms, all jazzy faience and Crittall windows, now cinemas and workspace. Nearby, the ill fated silver drums of the National Centre for Popular Music by Branson Coates, converted to a students’ union. The best new building by far is Persistence Works by Fielden Clegg Bradley, completed in 2001 and still looking very sharp.


Arundel Gate welcomes you


Hells bells

Arundel Gate, inspired apparently by Manzoni, is a dual carriageway reinforced by massive, lumpen and inwardly focused buildings lacking any meaningful relationship to the over-engineered street or indeed to each other. It forms a very effective defensive palisade to the motte of the city centre. It didn’t have to be like this, as Birmingham’s Smallbrook Ringway shows. Worthy attempts to improve things by narrowing the carriageways and introducing pedestrian crossings are dashed by the sheer awfulness of the buildings such as the black glass Novotel, a burly gangster with shades, which blocks your direct route to the central area. This dates from the ‘desperate response to de-industrialisation’ phase of Sheffield’s planning history, circa 1990, along with Meadowhall. Next to it is Conran’s dumbed down 32 storey tower, which should have been so much better. If Allies and Morrison’s car park of faceted steel panels is also defensive it is at least appropriate, arresting and visually satisfying.


Tacky additions

The original buildings of Sheffield Hallam University, designed by Gollins, Melvin, Ward and Partners between 1953-68, also turn their backs on Arundel Gate, but the 12 storey Owen Building and the lower Surrey and Norfolk Buildings are ‘impressively simple and well related’ (Pevsner City Guide). Their street relationship is not improved by various tacky additions but the atrium between the blocks, introduced in 1992, is a dramatic and successful space.


A real come down – Sheffield Bus Station

Across Pond Street is the vast, amorphous, underused and deeply dispiriting bus Interchange. Sheffield’s bus services, once famous for cheap fares and high patronage, were naturally privatised by a vindictively ideological government. The poverty of the environment of bus stations, and indifference to their architecture, is one of the really telling class issues in Britain. Yet few things can lift the quality of a city as much as well designed public transport infrastructure, as the Jubilee Line stations show, or Southampton University bus station for example and indeed Sheffield railway station. The sensible thing would be for Hallam to extend its cramped campus onto this site and for Sheffield to commission a series of inspiringly designed smaller bus terminals, better related to the city centre. But that would require decent funding and effective regulation of buses, so no chance then.


Sheffield fights back – with swimming and slides

North from the station along the traffic hell of Sheaf Street you spy a shiny new building, all glass, cladding, curves and angles which is, well, not as bad as most of its genre. But it is not clear what it is. I guessed a PFI tertiary college, partly because of the aggressively authoritarian signs – private property, you are on CCTV, no smoking, no loitering and definitely no skateboarding. So fuck off then. Turns out it is Electric Works, creative industries workspace designed by Leeds’s finest, Carey Jones. Beyond this is Pond’s Forge, another legacy of the World Student Games, a strange building where a bog standard leisure centre seems to have collided with what would have been the impressive proportions and restrained classicism of the international pool.


The exciting Park Square

Park Square is one of those fanciful Sheffield squares that are really giant roundabouts, this one on steroids. But the good thing is that, like Fiveways in Brum, it is so big the pedestrian walkways become almost majestic in scale. From the Supertram bridge you can survey the evolution of Sheffield’s visions of the future.


Park Hill - still an amazing post war achievement


Do you remember the working class?

Park Hill flats, which command the eastern slopes of the Sheaf Valley, are undoubtedly one of the greatest constructs and constructions of the C20th. Conceived by the City Architect J. Lewis Womersley in 1953, and designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, it was completed in 1961 and became hugely influential giving Sheffield international acclaim. Nairn said ‘from the outside the flats look terrifying; towering slabs form a wall half a mile long (but) inside the scheme this feeling disappears; each flat has a glorious view …. and the effect of a big block is almost taken away by the brilliant use of the street-decks’. But really the layout is more about the generous landscaped courtyards than the famous 'streets in the sky'. Park Hill was freighted with political symbolism from the start and, as a product of idealistic socialism, it is hardly surprising that the right wing made this a totem for municipal housing failure. After decades of deliberate neglect of the structure, and its listing in 1998, it is richly symbolic that Urban Splash-isation was the only politically acceptable renovation solution, in other words pouring public money into the yuppiefication of spacious, well located public housing. Read Owen Hatherley on this and it will make you weep. In fact only a small part of the complex has been renovated. Despite Urban Splash slick advertising, like its marketing appropriation of the graffiti ‘I love you will U marry me?', renovation progress has been remarkably slow in the two years since our last visit, but now virtually all the council tenants have been evicted and the flats are tinned up. You can still wander through the empty, eerie courtyards, which retain their remarkable spatial qualities and legibility and admire something that was truly exceptional.


Told you it was hardcore


Tasty refurbished concrete but new sickly panels  

The renovation of this magnificent Brutalist structure (to designs by Studio Egret West and Hawkins Brown) is obviously to be welcomed and certainly has its good points, like punching through to create a four storey high entrance. But why does the social cleansing of the old Park Hill have to be celebrated with garish yellow to red panels, so at odds with the character of the buildings? Hatherley perceptively points to the irony that Urban Splash fetishises the concrete Brutalism of the flat interiors whilst deliberately emasculating the extraordinarily raw power of the structures themselves with these spivvy colours, to make it look more like standard apartment clichés.



Beyond Park Hill (and the surprisingly sylvan villas at the top of the hill) is the even larger Hyde Park complex. This was, like Southwark’s Aylesbury estate compared to Heygate, a step too far in scale and severity, and the original design has been changed beyond recognition by demolitions and recladding. Strung out along the expressway below, which leads to the M1, are a numbing array of boxy brick and render flats with cheap tin roofs, the sort of thing which is the approved norm in regeneration-world. You wonder why nothing has been learnt.


Always a winner: canal-side conservation

North of the expressway is an attractive enclave around the restored canal basins of Victoria Quay. Some good stone buildings and viaducts, traditional brick warehouses, the precocious steel frame and concrete 1895 Straddle Warehouse, water, boats and some very nice paving just about absorb the deadly dull Hilton hotel. The view back towards the city centre between the warehouses is the glittering vacuity of the iQuarter tower, by Cartwright Packard, a typically place-neutral piece of recently promoted regeneration. Next to this is North Bank with its clichéd wonky piloti, marketed as ‘a striking piece of architecture which defines the progressive nature of Sheffield’. Designed by BDP it won an RIBA award and is certainly better than Aedas’s Wicker Riverside which looks like a nervous breakdown. This is the sort of thing Sheffield wants to replace Castle Market, opposite on the south bank of the Don. But at Lady’s Bridge you can feast your eyes on one of the most striking sights in Sheffield: Royal Exchange Buildings of 1899, a riot of glazed brick, crow steps, battlements, chimneys and lovely iron work, and the smaller Royal Victoria Buildings, which will restore your soul.


What, who, when, why, how? Brilliant. 


Goodness me


Makes you want to write a song about it


So that's what Richard Hawley was on about – Lady's Bridge

Nairn loved Castle Market, completed 1965 and part of Womersley’s extraordinary legacy to the city (the actual architect was Andrew Darbyshire). 'Like all of Sheffield, it has a sloping site; a simple concrete and glass exterior conceals an elegant dovetailing of two market floors with gaps in the upper floor to look down on the lower and a half-way level which runs into the pre-war meat and fish markets – a staggering perspective of hooks and flesh …… everything flows together, as it ought to, and so shopping becomes a pleasure not a chore. And because it has been designed carefully and sensitively, life comes rushing up to meet it – as it always will, given the chance'. Like Park Hill, Castle Market was a symbol of the excitement and confidence of Sheffield in the sixties. Its sculptural form is thrilling, especially the abstract skyline composition of stairs and ventilation towers and the spiralling ramps to the rear. The adjacent two-level precinct of shops has a wonderfully confident, spare geometry which was evidently too subtle for the Council and subsequently jazzed up with silly ironwork, like the entrances to the market itself. All life has now been crushed out of the market, forlornly shut up and like the precinct awaiting the bull dozer, 'cos it was a concrete monstrosity, see. Lets have some cheap, shiny, wonky offices and apartments instead. And exhume some poxy foundations of a castle demolished in 1648 with a fake reconstruction as a tourist attraction. God strewth!


Castle Market democracy to be replaced with a symbol of feudalism 

Across Waingate admire the Magistrates Court of 1978 with its very robust rough textured ribbed concrete. Above this the main elevation has a smooth concrete grid with elegant glazing. You enter via a thin bridge across an internal courtyard. This is confident stuff. Further up the hill the Old Town Hall, built in classical style between 1807 and 1897, is empty and mouldering, euphemistically awaiting a new use. Down Castle Street see the fine granite splay of the Co-op department store, designed 1959 with nice contemporary features. Of course it is empty. It now faces a Premier Inn of spectacular banality, basically stacked-up and rendered portacabins. At this point Sheffield seems terminally dispiriting, but it does get better.


Towards Castle Square

The once famous ‘hole in the road’ at Castle Square, which made subways cool, has been filled in, another step towards urban anonymity. Arundel Gate leads south towards the ‘Heart of the City’. After the traumas of the eighties and the appeasement of Meadowhall, Novotel etc, the city recovered its nerve and initiated this ambitious and imaginative project to create a series of new public spaces and public facilities – urban regeneration in its true sense.


Pedestrian friendly stuff near the Crucible


Inspiring

Up Norfolk St the stark, angular elevations of the Crucible Theatre of 1971 clearly express its ambition to be cutting-edge. Next to this is a quintessentially fin-de-siècle extravaganza, the Lyceum theatre and, facing Surrey Street, the Beaux Arts Central Library and Graves Arts Gallery. The new square between them is partially successful but a somewhat austere space, the big sculpted planters seeming faintly aggressive. Facing the square is the superb Winter Garden, the design competition for which was won in 1995 by Pringle Richards Sharratt, together with the adjacent Millennium Galleries. The winter garden is a brilliant idea for a city centre and the design does not disappoint. Twenty one parabolic arches of laminated strips of untreated larch together with slender purlins and glazing bars create a fine glass house, the central section 22 metres high. This is inspired architecture and civic enterprise at its best, an object lesson in regeneration, but it is a pity it is not better maintained, whilst the moronic music pumping out of its café unfortunately ruins the intended tranquility.

The Millennium Galleries which front Arundel Gate are deliberately understated. They are intended as part of the new pedestrian axis from the station to the city centre but the route through the building struggles to assert its legibility against the adjacent bullying Novotel. The lower level, giving onto a small plaza, contains a café. The upper level has exhibition space and an excellent permanent collection of metal and silverware, the galleries cleverly lit by natural daylight. Through the Winter Garden is another, irregularly shaped, new square flanked by fairly standard new offices, restaurants and a hotel. These commercial elements have attracted criticism, but seem quite decent to me compared with much of Sheffield’s recent development.


Everything working well together


Quite utopian really

The Peace Gardens are the ‘pièce-de-resistance’ of the Heart of the City, a master-stroke of design that makes this immensely popular space feel like an exotic oasis. They provide just the right balance between intimacy and spectacle. The water is both tranquil and exciting, the integral artworks are impressive and fun, the herbaceous borders very welcome in the hard world of city centre paving. The gardens provide the setting for the florid French or Flemish style Town Hall with its swaggering campanile. This grand town hall was a long time coming, compared to Leeds or Manchester, begun in 1890 with extensions in the 1920s, reflecting the city’s late developing civic pride. Nairn says the detail is right - but ‘it is absolutely stone cold dead as a building’, a typically inscrutable announcement.


One of the moments when Vincent Harris did alright 

By contrast, he says the City Hall (concert hall) is ‘dourly and urgently alive’. Designed by Vincent Harris in 1920 its ‘Classical Re-Revival style’ is not what you would expect Nairn to praise, but his great gift was to confound expectations and received wisdom. He was especially struck by the semi-circular apse at the rear, with giant columns rising above the hall supporting a colossal curved entablature to astonishing effect.


70s ceramic brutalism – Fountain Precinct 

To either side of the City Hall are interesting offices from the seventies and eighties. Fountain Precinct, clad in buff and brown tiles, has a generous open ground floor, a very civic gesture. The former NUM offices with thin columns and stripped down stone with black glass are unusually confident, an example of what might be called contextural Modernism. They are empty and fenced off, but with planning permission for a 24 hour casino and restaurants. So endeth the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.


More high quality public space stuff 

City Hall faces Barkers Pool, another in Sheffield’s great series of public spaces; it really knows how to do water features. Opposite is Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall’s 1965 John Lewis store, clad in their characteristic white tiles. This was a prototype for the ubiquitous JL box, but here it seems well mannered, with a happy relationship to Barkers Pool. However its future is uncertain, apparently not now big enough for the retail behemoth. Sheffield’s retail offer, like its other services, is surprisingly small for such a big city. Of course Meadowhall didn’t help. Now the city is promoting a big expansion with a development along the lines of Liverpool One – open (privatised) streets and real buildings designed by a pride of architects. The masterplan by BDP involves shifting JL several blocks to the rear in order to ‘anchor’ the new scheme, but the market is not playing ball; Hammersons have ditched the project and now the City with admirable enterprise is trying to reboot it. The problem is that the masterplan goes against the grain of the Georgian grid and requires the demolition of interesting streets, buildings and townscape, including the 1965 store and the contemporary, diminutive, well mannered tower of the Grosvenor Hotel, once a showpiece of the rebuilt city. This is a difficult dilemma, especially given the government’s recent approval for a major expansion of Meadowhall. Yet Sheffield loses a lot of its identity in pursuing what really ends up as a standardised, glossy, in-town shopping centre, which will anyway take years to achieve - a self fulfilling prophecy of blight and neglect. Ironically Telephone House, opposite the Grosvenor and a real bit of rough from the same era, is apparently to stay and be duffed up as ‘luxury apartments for students of discerning taste’.


The Moor


Power (the substation)

If Castle Market was an outstanding example of post war retail planning and architecture, The Moor, rebuilt after the Blitz in plodding style, represents its mediocrity, although there are some interesting touches like the crumpled corner of Fox House. Now relegated to ‘value retailing’ it will be helped by the relocation here of the market to a new building largely tucked away behind the shops. This falls between an attempt at ‘architecture’ and a basic shed but the stalls still provide a lively atmosphere. The Moor is terminated by Moorfoot, which Owen Hatherley calls a ‘thrillingly paranoid Cold War megastructure’, a red brick Ziggurat of government offices from 1978. You have to admire the balls. Nearby the Brutalist Moore Street sub station by Jefferson, Sheard and Partners (1965) is an absolutely stunning tectonic creation, and quite rightly has become a Sheffield totem, its allure enhanced by dramatic lighting at night.


And then the planning department took a trip to Barcelona

Division St, leading towards Sheffield University, is a lively place. Its mix of ‘heritage’ buildings from the stone classical Water Works offices at Barkers Pool to mad Victorian polychromatic brick facing Devonshire Green, and with interesting former metal works, chapels and a stunning Mussolini-esque former fire station on the way, manages to absorb newer infill which is mostly not very exciting. Devonshire Green is another, rather charming, attempt at Park Güell.


Division St

What makes Division St buzz is students – lots of them. There are over 60,000 students studying at the two universities, hence the array of bars and restaurants. The universities, as in the other Core Cities, are huge drivers of Sheffield’s new economy, and their dynamism, creativity and financial clout has a profound impact on most aspects of city life. Whilst this is overwhelmingly positive you might wish for a more considered, informed and intelligent approach to procuring new buildings. In 1967 Nairn wrote ‘the university scheme has gone from success to success, an amazingly consistent achievement, without a bad building, yet completely free from monotony …. Perhaps the best place in the country to see modern architecture in all its variety settling down happily with older styles and shapes’.



Mum, I think I'll go to Leicester Uni instead

You could hardly say that about Sheffield University today. If you arrive by tram you will immediately perceive the problem. The tram stop is in the middle of a roaring ring road. Around you a visual chaos of university buildings, some just boring, some interesting like the quirky recording studios built literally like a sound box, others simply vile like RMJM’s computer library in hideously strident blue-green. Are they really so lacking in confidence? The new Jessop West building is all attention-seeking strips of coloured glass and it is difficult to agree with the architects, Sauerbruch Hutton, that it ‘forms a harmonious relationship with the adjacent Victorian and Edwardian buildings’. In any event few of these survive – the area is now a construction site for the huge new Diamond Building, which will feature an all enveloping diamond lattice screen (shades of Mecanoo’s Birmingham library rings) and will be ‘a statement to celebrate the city’s Engineering excellence and heritage’. Or just a simplistic marketing device – too early to say.


I can see why Steve Parnell likes concrete

The campus has the misfortune of being divided by two major roads, but at least with Western Bank it turns this to advantage. A quad has been created taking you below the elegant rising viaduct carrying the A57 and thus providing a dramatic entry towards the original university buildings, hard red Accrington brick in an Edwardian Tudor style. Next to this is the 1971 Alfred Denny Building, originally conceived by Gollins et al as a curtain wall but built of brick to ‘fit in’. It is actually a very powerful and uncompromising statement, not fitting in at all.


Pitch perfect - The Arts Tower


World class

But you will have come to see the Library and Arts Tower, sublime buildings of another era and another world. Designed by Gollins et al as part of a masterplan for the post war expansion of the university, the horizontal library was built in the late fifties and the superb Miesian tower in the early sixties. They are amongst the best post war buildings in the country and the view from the adjacent Weston Park is just wonderful. The clarity of design and the carefully minimalist detailing are an absolute joy, like the relationship between the tower and the ground plain, and between the tower and the library, linked by a first floor bridge. You ride the tower in a paternoster. It is all the purest satisfaction. Across Weston Park is the quiet and organic Geography and Planning Building, a series of hexagons designed by William Whitfield in 1968.


There's more of it!

There is a lot more of the campus east of the ring road but much of this seems run of the mill, the tone set by the pompous Wrenaissance Sir Frederick Mappin Building and reaching its nadir with the weak classicism of buildings like Mappin Court by HLM, 1991. But opposite this and contemporary with it is the red brick box of St Georges’s library by BDP. The Pevsner City Guide says ‘minimal classical details point to the influence of Aldo Rossi and Italian Neo-Rationalism’.


Activity and banality

An unfortunate downside of the great expansion of universities is the flood of dismal, cheap and anaemic student barracks going up in all big cities, and of which Sheffield has more than its fair share: telling evidence of the commodification of – well just about everything. By comparison with this dreadful norm West One, a savage and overpoweringly arrogant pile by Carey Jones glowering over Devonshire Gardens, does at least has some guts and drama.


West St

West St leads back to the city centre, an inherently handsome street but scarred by some crass new buildings as described above. Its former role for upmarket shopping is suggested by the quality of buildings like the super terracotta Boots store, designed by Bromley, as is their original department store in Nottingham. Nearer the centre the Edwardian elegance gives way to more stripped down inter war motifs. However the street gets overwhelmed by overscaled and dumbly articulated flats. It is not just the crude disjunction of scale; if these buildings had any design interest whatsoever the scale would be worthwhile, but they are just gross.


Are we in Leeds? Velocity Tower


Still made in Sheffield (off Hillbroad Lane)

An alternative route back from the university along Hillbroad Lane (actually the A57) shows you an interesting juxtaposition of Sheffield’s traditional industrial base of many workshops all jumbled up in the valley with the expected future, the vast concrete office blocks of the formerly Midland Bank Pennine Centre (to me at least impressive), and the present future represented by the glassy speculation of ‘Velocity Village’ opposite. Hardly a village, it’s fifteen stories high. I have no idea where velocity comes into it, or why it is here.


Paradise Street

Nearby is Georgian Paradise Square, one of the townscape delights of Sheffield, but not quite what it seems as the square had become largely derelict and was restored and partly rebuilt in the sixties. The town houses face across the steeply sloping setted square given over entirely to car parking. Sheffield Cathedral is higher up the slope. Essentially a medieval parish church done over in 1880 with advice from George Gilbert Scott, there were grand plans for its extension in the twenties and the fifties, but what you see today is actually much more modest, what Nairn calls ‘an eerie design by Ansell and Bailey which …. inspires astonishment if not respect’.


The Cathedral

From the Churchyard, with the proud Cutlers’ Hall opposite, you can take a tram through the Don Valley to Meadowhall. Forget the city centre, this is the new powerhouse for the Sheffield City Region as intended by Osborne and his pals. Whitehall has rubber stamped a major extension to the shopping centre for Lord Wolfson of Next, that champion of planning, overturning Sheffield’s sensible planning decision to focus new retail in the city centre. So much for localism.


Demagoguery

Even worse are the plans for Meadowhall to be the HS2 station for Sheffield. But hang on, this is four miles from the city centre; how is that going to help improve the accessibility and commercial attraction of Sheffield? Surely this project is intended to regenerate our big northern cities, not sideline them. The implications of HS2 are disastrous for Sheffield, which, like Nottingham, has foolishly supported this folie de grand projects that ends up marginalising their city centres, the focus of regeneration strategies. The irony for Sheffield is that journey times to London from Midland station could be drastically reduced at a fraction of the cost of building HS2, and without the idiotic need to change trains at Meadowhall. London expresses could use the shorter and underused Erewash valley line rather than diverting through congested Derby, and will anyway be further speeded up by planned line improvements and electrification to the Midland route, which would benefit all passengers. And why would Sheffield need HS3 when there is already the disused Great Central line to Manchester via the Woodhead tunnels? The imperative to electrify and speed up services to Leeds now, not in 2032, is obvious to all outside the circles of Whitehall mandarins and ministers.


Gleadless Landscaping


Deserves better maintenance and refuse collection

For more than thirty plus years after the war Sheffield was an economic powerhouse, ambitious, innovative and confident. This was expressed in some powerful architecture which has yet to be fully appreciated, largely because its purposes have been trashed by an overwhelming conservative political agenda. Gleadless is a good example, a large estate of Council houses and flats, designed by Womersley and contemporary with Park Hill. The site is dramatic – a steeply sloping wooded valley – and the response to that is hugely imaginative, especially in the Rollestone area. The terraces and flats make a great virtue of the difficult terrain, and as at Gaer (Newport) and Penrhys (Rhondda) on similar precipitous sites, create striking relationships. The views are spectacular, the landscaping is magnificent, using the original trees in the most picturesque way. The house designs use a simple language of modernism in a sophisticated manner; it could be Span housing, but being in depressed Sheffield, this has no cachet. This is still a community where the children play hop-scotch on the pavement but it is neglected; the paint is peeling, there is too much litter, the pubs have closed.


So much skill and variety


A world heritage site? Get on the case C20!

In Berlin recently we visited the housing schemes at Britz and Seimensstadt which, like Gleadless, are remarkable examples of social housing design. They have been declared World Heritage Sites. Their ambience, maintenance and prospects are a world away from Gleadless. Why? Well it's because of the impoverishment and disempowerment of industrial cities like Sheffield in the last thirty years, which was deliberate and gratuitous.


Imagine if this was in north London

What the Meadowhall-isation of the conurbation shows us is the unfettered power of capital and the impotence of local democracy. Within that reality Sheffield continues to struggle for its future by planning often creatively and with considerable energy, if sometimes wrong headedly. Sheffield is not short of patronising advice about how to accommodate itself to the realities of the government’s neo-liberal agenda. But just don’t believe that we are all in this together.

A much fuller critique of Sheffield’s post war and recent architecture and planning is found in Owen Hatherley’s ‘Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’ (Verso)

Ian Nairn’s essay on Sheffield has been re-printed in Nairn’s Towns (Notting Hill Editions)

The Sheffield Pevsner City Guide by Ruth Harman and John Minnis (Yale University Press) is very comprehensive, and published in 2004, relatively up to date. It is invaluable.

There is a lot to like about Wakefield and a lot to admire, but a visit there will also make you despair about the impotence of planning and architecture in the face of the unbridled power of over-mighty business to dictate the future of our cities. The Hepworth Gallery and thoughtful renovation such as  Crown Court may give you hope but by the malls of the recently-built Trinity Walk shopping centre  you sit down and weep.


Not a backwater 

Few people realise that Wakefield is one of England’s dozen or so largest cities, with a population of 325,000. But this is because the West Riding of Yorkshire is about the only part of the country where cities have sensible boundaries, incorporating their natural hinterlands. So Wakefield’s population includes towns like Castleford and Pontefract and many other smaller places. Wakefield proper, the former county town and cathedral city, is really a much smaller place with a population more similar to Lincoln or Exeter. It resembles these, most especially in its lively market town feel and the strong visual relationship with the surrounding countryside. Today Wakefield has been conscripted into the ‘Leeds City Region’ which attempts to reinvent a sub-regional structure for the West Yorkshire Metropolitan County that Mrs Thatcher abolished in order to centralise power in Westminster. But Wakefield is not part of the Leeds conurbation and, like the other big West Riding towns, is very much a place with its own identity. Its skyline, dominated by the spires of its cathedral and civic buildings, is quite unlike the prospect of Leeds’ towers of Mammon.


Glad about Kirkgate renovation but pub needs to be on the 'to do' list too


A smart new station


Metro tiles return to the railways (after Homebase)

Wakefield has two stations but if you arrive at Kirkgate, close to the Hepworth gallery, you will wonder where the hell you have come to. The train service is appalling - those awful Pacers especially reserved for Northern Rail. Londoners could not conceive of how slow, rattley and uncomfortable they are, and of course they don’t have to. Kirkgate station is more desolate than you can imagine, although the impressive frontage buildings of the 1860s are , finally and commendably, being renovated. However the approach to the city centre remains utterly dismal. Westgate Station is on the main London line and has recently been rebuilt. The new station building is quite smart in a flashy way, a sleek black and glass box above a long, sinuous frontage. This faces a small green square which incorporates a jolly art work representing local landmarks stuck on poles. There is a covered bike park by the entrance (good) and (not so good) a ginormous new car park clad in shades of grey Trespa with a bit of yellow. However this looks sensitive and considered compared to what we will see later.


Well planned but poor finish

Opposite the station is Merchant Gate, a mixed use development by the English Cities Fund to a master plan by Carey Jones and landscape architects Camlin Lonsdale. It is then an example from an almost forgotten era when public agencies sought to promote the reshaping of cities along the general lines of Towards an Urban Renaissance. It half works; there is a recognisably urban structure with clear pedestrian routes and new public spaces; the scale is right and works well with surviving older buildings. What goes wrong is that the buildings are mostly executed cheaply and crudely, no doubt reflecting realities of provincial property values. Almost worse, the intended active uses of the ground floors, that shibboleth of New Urbanism, have just not materialised and anyway the units would only be suitable for the usual chain suspects. It is sad to visit Burgage Square, a reference to the ancient burgage plots of the medieval town, meant to evoke the distinctive characteristic of the adjacent urban grain. The masterplan promises it will provide ‘the setting for the public life of the new mixed-use quarter and conceived to offer a broad range of leisure opportunities akin to a river, where the backwaters and eddies provide refuge from the main flow of movement’. When I visited it was deserted apart from a few office smokers.


City sensibilities - the Civic Justice Centre


The Art House – a bit of a let down

Nearby the Civic Justice Centre, actually a spec office building by Carey Jones, is less pretentious but more successful. It is fortunate in being able to respond to a curve of the highway engineers’ new road, and to the Georgian chapel and graveyard behind. It is a modest building employing brickwork and a good rhythm of fenestration, and all the better for that. It contrasts with Allen Tod’s strident, over mannered pattern of cream and red brick for the new Art House opposite; this apparently at the behest of English Heritage. Given the number of characterful buildings in the city centre crying out for a new use, commissioning a fairly banal new building as art studios seems like a strange decision. The dignified old library on Drury Lane is being converted to studios, and nearby too is the Regency Orangery converted to a gallery.


Wakefield One – mixed feelings

The largest element of Merchant Gate is Wakefield One, new offices and library for the City Council, sitting behind the magnificent County Offices. Wakefield One is fusion architecture, taking up the more sober style and classic proportions emerging in the architecture of Austerity Britain, but unable to resist show-off Alsopesque playfulness. So below a severe palazzo cornice the fenestration arrangement is tricksy and window reveals are from a Dulux catalogue, although the cladding is from the sober end of the Trespa range. The large recessing windows at the foyer entrances display the names of all the constituent towns and districts of the borough – a nice touch, but the flat imprinted civic crest is horribly mean – even in Osborne’s Britain cities have a right to a bit of civic pride, surely. Internally the atrium is underwhelming but the building does deal effectively with the sloping site, something the private sector can’t manage any more, as we shall see.


Northern Civic – Coronation Gardens


Beside the Town Hall

Wakefield’s civic buildings, reflecting its historic county town importance, are its glory, and they make a fine ensemble along Wood Street as it gently rises up the hill. The original Town Hall is on Crown Court, a handsomely repaved and landscaped little square off the street behind the Mechanics Institute. The Mechanics is in that restrained and self confident Grecian style of the 1820s. Up the street the Town Hall of 1877 speaks eloquently of confidence and civic pride; the architect also designed the façades of London’s Savoy Hotel. Pevsner calls the style ‘free Tudor’. The front is symmetrical, but the great spectacle of the building is the asymmetrically placed tower crowned with a pyramid roof. Next to this are the severely classical Courts of 1810 with grand Greek Doric portico and pediment.


County Hall


Townscape and brutalism

West Riding County Offices at the brow of Wood Street are the most flamboyant, designed in 1894 in opulent metropolitan style, which Pevsner calls ‘a very effective composition with a polygonal corner tower crowned by a dome, the third main accent of the Wakefield skyline after the Cathedral and Town Hall’. But the setting of the County Offices is a disappointment: what should be a square is a strange space, Coronation Gardens – not sure whose coronation but there is a vicious statue of Queen Victoria and a war memorial with recent paving and landscaping. Around the space are a hotch-potch of buildings: a Regency terrace, a concrete multi-storey car park (not a candidate for listing) and an interesting 60s office tower, designed by the County Architect, and, highly unusually with a Civic Society plaque on it. The tower is faceted and stone faced with banding to Bond Street and has a nicely detailed entrance; unfortunately it is less interesting towards the gardens. To the north are the hulking volumes of dumb cladding in strident colours which everywhere signify ‘tertiary college plc’, in this case Wakefield College, complete with enrolment hype.


St John's Regency


St John's North - half way between Spitalfields and Leith

Wakefield was the centre of the Yorkshire clothing trade in the C18th but was quickly overtaken by Leeds and Bradford. Behind the Courts is the Tammy (Cloth) Hall of 1777, later converted to a police station with a Peeler’s head as key stone. The city’s early prosperity shows in the grandeur of its parish church, which has the tallest spire in the county and in the many Georgian buildings often stranded by later developments. There is no Georgian quarter but good Georgian terraces can be found at South Parade and around St John’s Church of 1795. In places like Westgate the eighteenth century town with verdant countryside close at hand can still be conjured. Wakefield sits on a low hill above the broad valley of the River Calder, and that relationship and the slope of the land is important to its townscape qualities. The three main historic streets, Westgate, Northgate and Kirkgate provide a fairly clear structure to the town although the plan becomes complex and confusing where they meet at the cathedral, which still looks like the parish church it used to be until 1888.


Westgate west


Westgate details


Wakefield is fun


Westgate east

Westgate is the most interesting street, an eclectic mix of Georgian survivals, unpretentious 19th century market town, the splendid later Victoriana and Edwardiana of grand banks, commercial buildings, music halls and exuberant pubs like the Elephant and Castle but let down by run of the mill 20th century shopping parades. Today Westgate has a somewhat sleazy, run down feel, the grand buildings given over to vertical drinking and its follow-on vices, but the Opera House has been renovated as a theatre and the Co-operative Society is being restored, the building at least. What makes Westgate really attractive despite the hideous dominance of traffic is the view down the hill to the nearby countryside beyond, reminiscent of Exeter. The other great thing about it is the courts and alleys to either side of the street, one of the most interesting features of the city. The group of narrow tightly packed streets including Cheapside and King Street are highly distinctive and almost Genoese in their urban intensity, despite a lot of gap sites. Although run down they are full of interest, a real ‘creative quarter’ if ever I saw one. They don’t need the heavy hand of ‘regeneration’ but a conservation strategy would be sensible.


King Street creativity


Happy streets and poorly dogs


Dutch inspiration - paving and planting at the Bull Ring

A network of friendly small shopping streets north of the Cathedral leads to the irregularly shaped Bull Ring. What should be a lively market is largely given over to  ‘shared space’; a half hearted effort in depressing grey paving. The Dutch who originated the concept would have done it so much better. Close by is David Adjaye’s ill-starred market building which the Council plans to demolish after only a few years, allegedly because the punters hate it. I assume Adjaye’s building is the token decent bit of architecture, the shame-faced price of planning permission for DLA’s abhorrent Trinity Walk shopping centre which expunged the old market. It is certainly striking in its grey rectitude and clearly was very carefully considered. But it is over-controlling for a market, which needs a vibrant anarchy. The open section under the grand roof works better than the enclosed market hall which, despite many empty stalls, seems claustrophobic, cluttered and confused, not big or open enough. Of course markets everywhere are struggling and it’s mostly not because of the buildings but the consequence of juggernaut retailers. But some of the most successful markets are actually the simplest, like Birmingham’s sheds. Adjaye’s building is a heroic failure.


Heroic failure – Adjaye's Market


The wrong trousers

Trinity Walk by contrast is a shameful commercial success. I have drawn comparisons between Wakefield and Exeter but sadly this does not extend to their new shopping centres. Whereas Exeter’s Princesshay intelligently provides for the retail demands of the chain stores within a context that respects the historic city centre and makes a virtue of this relationship, what you get at Trinity Walk is a complex that has just been thrust (that's the polite term) into the urban fabric. It is one huge box which capitulates to the crudest demands for standardised retail units and anodyne mallscape without any intelligence or design creativity. And because malls are only interested in their own plastic internal world and can’t do changes of level, you get the crassest relationship with the outside world – great fat backsides hanging out and forced into ridiculous combinations of cladding, alternately trying to be very jolly or not to be noticed at all – some hope of that!



Following the street layout (through gritted teeth)


With your face like a group hug ... like a world weary onion   


The sad reality beyond the facade

What is so utterly depressing is that Trinity Walk represents the new norm. There is a nod to urban design nostrums – one mall is an open street and the main drag is a glazed arcade, so it’s ‘permeable’ and that makes it ok, right? Well no, actually it makes it worse as it exposes the utter banality, cheapness and poverty of architecture of these new ‘streets’. Compare and contrast with the interest of the streets around, now overpowered by this hulking brute. This is not just the fault of the architects or the planners. It represents something which we should all be very ashamed of, cowardice in the face of market bullying and our failure to shape civilised cities.


The towers originally had more integrity - see here

South of the Cathedral is The Ridings, which was the first under-cover shopping centre in Yorkshire and is a bit of a period piece with its ‘exciting’ glass lift and food court. The Ridings is tucked away behind Kirkgate and more like an arcade on two levels – in fact an extremely long arcade and a bit claustrophobic. In part it is an extension of the high street shops on Kirkgate but it does have its backside of servicing and car parks; the car park above the newish Morrisons is, strangely, designed as a brick warehouse ruin. There had been much rebuilding of the shopping streets around the Cathedral in the 30s, 50s and 60s. Most of this is very standard, although occasionally interesting like the moderne Boots, and all employ more finesse and provide much more interest than you’ll find in Trinity Walk today. What makes this area attractive is the Cathedral, sitting right there opposite M&S on Kirkgate. Internally it is not exciting (unless you like Kempe’s stained glass windows, which I do), but its close relationship to the bustling street, the spire soaring above you, provides wonderful townscape and reassuring urban continuity.


Cathedral meets pedestrianisation – Upper Kirkgate 

Upper Kirkgate (near the Cathedral) is pedestrianised with a promenade of trees and seating, almost as though it was on the Mediterranean although the weather did not oblige on my visit. Lower Kirkgate is long and gets progressively more run down. It is dominated by unusual tower blocks with groups of projecting floors making the towers look precariously balanced. And of course all Wakefield’s tower blocks are now jazzed up with silly hats and jolly colours, which makes them look sad. Along the street beneath the towers are continuous serrated shops with canopies. It is a striking ensemble which would not be out of place in, say, Minsk. Opposite are the pleasing lines of a Deco cinema, but held behind netting indicating terminal stages of dereliction.


The fall of civilisation – (Lower) Kirkgate

It is a long and unrewarding walk down Kirkgate to the Hepworth Gallery. The road becomes completely traffic-dominated and hostile, but it could be redesigned to provide a broad landscaped sidewalk – not the Ramblas but you know what I mean. This could be extended to some sort of decent approach to Kirkgate station but seems unlikely to happen.


Uplifting, powerful and sober – a must see


One of the best new galleries in the country

The Hepworth Gallery is a world unto itself, beyond even the last fringes of the city centre, under the railway bridge and across the ring road gyratory, next to the River Calder. But it is the interesting world of boatyards with the drama of the water and the weir. The wider context of the area is light industrial sheds and Chipperfield’s concept seems particularly apt and honest for this location. After all the horrid shiny cladding we had seen in Wakefield, trying to make ugly-sister volumes look acceptable - FUN even - the light grey concrete geometric form of the Hepworth looks miraculous, well considered, calm and austere. It is monolithic but so carefully (and appropriately) sculpted; it rises from the water in the most dramatic way. The approach across the pedestrian bridge is a fine visual sequence, everything so carefully detailed - the external seating, the signage; minimalist but perfect. Internally the galleries provide excellent exhibition space, and the particularly fine Hepworth sculpture collection has a superb room with a window onto the weir. 5 stars.


Not a bad a start – Wakefield Waterside


Riverside character and potential


Warehouse renewal

Behind the Hepworth is a vast brick-built Victorian mill complex which is evidently intended to become further exhibition and art space, The Calder. Optimistically inviting you to see ‘What’s Inside?’ the answer seems to be nothing much yet but clearly it has enormous potential for the future. Next to this is Waterfront Wakefield, ‘a dazzling new waterfront destination’. Indeed, the waterfront of the broad Calder Navigation, with its grand locks to bypass the weir and the Hepworth, is impressive. The new development, which incorporates the renovation of the stone Navigation Warehouse, is a fairly standard mix of offices and apartments in brick, render, wood and assorted cladding. It’s not bad by waterfront regeneration standards, but evidently not the destination it was hoped to be as, like Burgage Square, none of the restaurant and bar units are let. The problem here is that the complex is just too isolated from the city centre, cut off by horrendously over-engineered roads. Pedestrians don’t stand a chance. Which is a pity as this is an interesting area, including the original medieval Calder bridge with its magnificent Bridge Chapel, one of the finest of the few survivals of such medieval chapels, albeit very heavily restored. The bridge alas leads nowhere except to a light industrial estate, beyond which you can pick your way to Kirkgate Station to ponder on the wasted opportunity whilst you wait for your train. Surely there is the potential to create a new urban park here which could draw together these important elements of Wakefield’s infrastructure, history and character in an environment of which the city could be proud?


Glimmers of hope beside the Calder


Better than the Shard

From its urban centre Wakefield surveys its green contrada. You can see the stupendous, listed, Emley Moor TV tower built in 1971 and, at 330m taller than the Shard, more iconic and much more useful. The West Riding moors are glorious countryside and here below Emley Moor you find the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the grounds of Bretton Hall. The YSP is genius, the interface of grazing sheep with Hepworth, Moore, Goldsworthy etc. It has rightly been voted Museum of the Year. The discreet visitor centre by Fielden Clegg Bradley leads to the striking Underground Gallery, not exactly underground but built into the slope with great south facing windows and a green roof (with robotic lawnmowers). This stages excellent exhibitions and there are smaller converted galleries nearby. Exhibitions are also held in the sober stone chapel of 1744 – currently a thoughtful Ai Weiwei collection of Chinese chairs. A mile or so across the valley is the Longside gallery, modern barns simply converted by Bauman Lyons, a masterstroke. The walk to them is through superb countryside.


After visiting Hepworth why not see The Yorkshire Sculpture Park?


Discreet Visitor Centre
Bretton Hall was built in 1720 but its present character with Greek Doric porch reflects major rebuilding in 1815. The beautiful classical Gatehouse is of a similar date. In 1947 Bretton Hall became a teacher training college and new buildings were provided on the wooded slope behind the hall. Pevsner says ‘they are lightly and freshly handled …. Any dependence on the style of the house has been avoided. Yet there is emphatically no clash …. The style of the C20 marries happily with (the Hall)’. More buildings in a similar vein were constructed in 1960-3. The campus was designed by the West Riding County Architect's department, the architect Derek Linstrum who later wrote West Yorkshire Architects and Architecture. His sensitive designs are good examples of the skill and dedication of municipal architecture of that period; well considered and proportioned with excellent, imaginative landscaping so that they fit well into the wider structure of the park. More recently the college was acquired by Leeds University and summarily closed down, so the complex is now empty. Of course the listed Bretton Hall will find a new use but the future of the light, small scale campus buildings, now apparently owned by Wakefield Council, seems very precarious. I was told I needed a permit to photograph them. Well somebody needs to take notice of their qualities before it's too late. One for the new C20 Yorkshire Group perhaps?


Erm, excuse me, don't you think this is really good?


Get on the Bretton Hall College case C20!

Thanks to Patrick Nixon for photos of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Bretton Hall College

 Hamburger treat - Landungsbrücken Station

If you want to see waterside regeneration done well, go to Hamburg. If you want a masterclass in sustained and sustainable long term strategic planning, go to Hamburg. If you want to enjoy a really great city, go to Hamburg. There is so much to admire and delight in Germany’s second city, which likes to style itself Green and Blue because of its environmental credentials and since nearly half its area is water or green space. It could also be termed Red in recognition of its wonderful tradition of brick building. Hamburg has lots of lessons for Blighty but, because our economies and political systems are so very different, translating these lessons for Britain’s timid, obtuse, sclerotic planning and regeneration processes is going to be difficult.


Free and Hanseatic

Hamburg with a population of 1.7 million is broadly equivalent to Greater Glasgow or Liverpool. But unlike the politically emasculated and financially strapped British conurbations, Hamburg is a ‘Free and Hanseatic City’, incorporating its old rivals Altona and Harburg. It is actually a City State, one of the Federal Republic’s 16 states, so it has freedoms that British cities can’t even imagine any more.


The early C20 heyday – city centre

Like Glasgow and Liverpool, Hamburg’s heyday was the early C20, as can be seen in its magnificently grand architecture and engineering swagger. This was made possible by ruthless destruction of the old city, much of which had already been lost in the great fire of 1842. A century ago it was mocked as the ‘Free and Demolition City of Hamburg’, where merchants’ profit were all. Then in 1943 the city suffered catastrophic bombing and firestorms. So it is certainly not an ‘historic’ city but it has reinvented itself as a great city, although not avoiding the mistakes of so much post war reconstruction, especially massive roads and a fairly boring ‘downtown’. However it is an immensely liveable, lively and dynamic place which, like Berlin, confounds stereotypical ideas of German order.


Port employs over 100,000 people – can you imagine!?

Hamburg, after Rotterdam and possibly Antwerp, is the largest port in Europe and the port area is vast – allegedly 30 times greater that Liverpool. Somewhat surprisingly it is 100 km from the sea along the immensely broad but relatively shallow Elbe. The development of super-large container ships is a threat to its supremacy, so there are controversial plans to dredge the river and yet more container berths are being constructed. But while planning a long term future for the port, which still accounts for 10% of employment, Hamburg is also diversifying its economy. And, as in so many cities, the redundant port next to old town (Aldstadt) would seem an obvious candidate for regeneration. But Hamburg planned this quietly, so that the city could assemble the land at industrial values and only then announced the regeneration masterplan in 2000. So instead of, as in Britain, the plan being essentially marketing and promotion which, together with publically funded infrastructure, raises the value of private sector land, Hamburg captured the uplift in land values and can reinvest this in both infrastructure and quality of outcomes. Easy if you have a long term civic plan and the freedoms and finance to take this sort of initiative – if only.


On the 'Hamburg must see' list - the Speicherstadt warehouses  


The sheer scale of German engineering and commerce


Lifeless waters though – what to do?

Between Aldstadt and the new HafenCity is the extraordinary Speicherstadt warehouse area, dating from the 1880s and quite amazing townscape. The tall, brick, Gothic warehouses line the canals forming a deliberate enclosure against the town, like, the Albert Dock but in a way more like Nottingham’s Lace Market with water. I particularly liked the last of the warehouses built around 1910, all stripped down and proto-modern. One warehouse has been converted to an excellent maritime museum and another houses a mind-blowingly extensive model train exhibition, but surprisingly most are still in use as warehouses, this being the epicentre of the Persian carpet trade. So they are not all ponced up as apartments, bars and restaurants as you might expect, which I liked, but they are now serviced by road, not water, and so the canals are lifeless except for the tourist boats, which is a pity.


Am Sandtorkai lifeless too – cycle lanes would be a start

Juggernauts serving the warehouses apparently provide the justification for hideously wide roads: Am Sandtorkai and Brooktorkai, which divide Speicherstadt from HafenCity proper, although over-scaled roads are a ubiquitous Hamburg vice. This spoils your initial impression of HafenCity, especially as some of the earliest and more bombastic new buildings line these streets, like the Der Spiegel offices. Another issue is that, because of flood risk, the road is raised higher than the Speicherstadt warehouses, which tends to diminish them. The flood level also requires an upper network of walkways that bridge across the street.


Not Cardiff Bay, not Salford Quays, not Southampton Marina...

The HafenCity masterplan is certainly big, allegedly the largest waterside development in Europe and will represent a 40% increase in the CBD area with 2.3 million sq.m. of gross floorspace and an anticipated 45,000 jobs and 6,000 homes by 2025. The masterplan is based on a competition winning concept by the Dutch and German team Kees Christiaanse/ASTOC. It is being delivered by a company wholly owned by the City and 80% of the development cost is funded by land sales. The old port itself was pretty much a tabula rasa – Hamburg does not have enclosed docks but there are a number of internal quays which have been retained. The mix of uses, volumes, density etc. for each plot is closely regulated by the plan and the design is chosen through competitions. There will be 10km of waterside promenades and more than a third of HafenCity will be public open space.


System and variation – cantilevered apartments


Preventing a windswept waterside 

Since Hamburg owns the land it is able to choose developers based on the quality of their schemes and how well they fit with the masterplan, rather than accepting the highest offer. In the early phases of development land was disposed of in relatively small plots to a variety of developers, with strict enforceable timetables for development. From a British perspective it is surprising, given these restrictions, that so much has been built out so quickly – the western part of the site is largely complete. The regeneration company says the system gives certainty and confidence to developers, and it does avoid the posturing and brinkmanship of so much planning and regeneration in Britain. However there remain big issues. The central shopping complex and cruise liner terminal was contracted to one large developer, ING, and thus became a victim of the financial crisis. This key site remains vacant, and begs the question: was building a glitzy typical shopping centre only 800m from the city centre ever the right model? Another big issue is that although lots of flats have been built, none are for social housing and many are investment properties on the London model. There are big question marks too over plans for a high rise office quarter at Elbbrücken.


Northern spires, commerce and restraint

In Hamburg building heights are strictly controlled – nothing is allowed to compete with the church spires which dominate the skyline of the Aldstadt, a prospect similar to those familiar shots of Copenhagen in ‘The Killing’ – low blocks, Hanseatic church spires, sombre northern light, industrial chimneys and cranes in the distance. HafenCity is high density but the dominant block height is around 6 to 8 storeys. There are a few towers twice that height, like the expensive and largely empty apartments on the Elbe which look like a pile of concrete waffles. These are part of the signature Unilever HQ built around a public atrium. Designed by Behnisch Architekten it is has a wonky irregular shape with the elevations behind a sort bubblewrap. You can’t help but like it.


Uniliver Hamburg under wraps

The masterplan is big on mixed use, seeking to integrate offices and housing, retail and services, as in the Unilever complex. There is a new primary school with rooftop playground. Ground floor uses are specified but the plan avoids the unrealistic mantra of always having ‘active ground floor uses’. Because buildings are raised against floods the quayside is often fronted by a basement car park. However interest is created by cantilevering buildings over the quayside walks, which can be quite dramatic. There is lots of hard landscaping and big flights of steps down to quays, named after famous navigators – Magellan, Vasco da Gama etc. An imaginative idea is to take a boardwalk through the middle of the inlet leading to the new concert hall, with exciting results. Soft landscaped areas and playgrounds provide relief from the sometimes relentless and exposed paved quaysides.


Where the Bundesliga footballers live

The quality of design in the new build is undoubtedly good – far, far better than in British waterside equivalents. Many are thoughtful and inventive, like the white apartments by Love Architects with curved balconies and windows, evoking the sleekness of liners, or the adjacent block with continuous balconies and subtle variations of façade elements. Building heights feel right for the scale of the streets, spaces and water, except along Am Sandtorkai and Brooktorkai where the offices are too big, too bland and anonymous. But there is no real relationship between the new development and the traditions of port architecture – these buildings could be anywhere. In places the traditional street blocks dissolve into freestanding and competing pavilions. The masterplan has been criticised for its lack of ‘emotional input’, especially in the public spaces, which can seem clinical and bleak. It feels like HafenCity lacks an overall character; the whole is less than the sum of the parts.


You can have a station without loads of advertising; HafenCity U-Bahn


Liverpool should have looked like this

What could have animated HafenCity is the new U Bahn (U4). This being Germany, a metro link was planned from the start, despite HafenCity’s close proximity to the CBD. Hamburg’s architects argued for this to be an elevated line, like the U3 line which runs west along the harbour giving fabulous views. Or indeed Liverpool’s Overhead Railway, the ‘dockers’ umbrella’, sadly destroyed in the 50s. Unfortunately this imaginative idea was not taken up as a viaduct was considered ugly, wasteful of land and to impact negatively on values. Well actually the U3 engineering structures are magnificent, the land beneath is used very efficiently for parking and cycle lanes. Elevated trains run through some of the most desirable fin-de-siècle housing areas in Hamburg, like Isestrasse, so I’m with the Hamburger Architekten. However you will arrive in HafenCity underground, to an admittedly fine station, but your approach will lack views, excitement and drama.


The Elbphilharmonie changing the Hamburg skyline

What does add drama is Hertzog and De Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie. This crazy but wonderful project adds a glass concert hall with dramatic sails (or possibly wings) on top of a massive clinker brick Hamburg warehouse which stands on the apex of HafenCity facing the busy harbour. Still under wraps, the new concert hall rears out of the water like Lohengrin’s swan, as if pulling the warehouse along. It is staggering – staggering too in the costs (560m Euros) and delays and not mentioned much by official Hamburg. And, yes, there are arguments against such conspicuous cultural consumption, but it is a truly exceptional building and will become the symbol of the city, like Sydney Opera House. This is based on the impact it has from the ferry; imagine what it will be like inside.


Efficient, well designed but a little lifeless; too much planning?

HafenCity has certainly got quite a lot of things right but you have to question how far it is really meeting its objectives like the promised fine grain and mixed communities. These seem to be ebbing away in a more difficult financial climate and the as yet undeveloped eastern districts are going to be harder to develop – further from the city centre and with a more hostile industrial context. The lack of social housing is a real failure but the plan for the next phases  is for more social and student housing  and to try and attract creative industries, which seems sensible. HafenCity really needs to develop a more complex morphology, a more particular identity and a genuine community and vitality. At night there are lots of visitors, but they are looking, not participating. This does not yet feel like a real city.


The Fish Auction Hall, St Pauli,  for early morning fun


Waterside regeneration is everywhere


String of pearls? Maybe

In addition to HafenCity there is much more waterside regeneration to see, stretching westwards along the Elbe from Baumwall past St Pauli with its famous Fish Auction Hall to the former fishing port at Altona. These are often striking new object buildings and sometimes dramatic conversions and extensions of old maritime kit. Together they provide a thin veneer to the lively older districts behind, so avoid the problem of having to create whole new quarters, character and identity. A good way to see them is from the No. 62 ferry. This takes you right around the harbour giving fabulous views of the port - an amazing assembly of cranes and containers stacked to the horizon. You also see well heeled riverside (almost seaside-like) suburbs like Neumühlen where the sea captains used to live. The ferries are part of Hamburg’s excellent public transport network, the first fully integrated system in the world when set up in 1965. Makes you very envious.


The old Harwich ferry terminus - WOW


Twinned with Bristol's M Shed


Where the Elbe gets wider


Bürohaus Dockland bling

The concept behind the new development of the fishing port was to create a ‘string of pearls’, and if not quite that they are mostly interesting and accomplished architecture. The Bürohaus Dockland by local firm Bothe Richter Teherani is the show-off building which definitely does get noticed, a trapezium sticking out into the water. You can walk up its sloping end elevation to a roof-top viewing terrace. The ‘string of pearls’ is impressive but the bulk of some of the new offices seems too much for the riverside context. Chipperfield’s new Empire Riverside Hotel by contrast is a well judged tall block with a well mannered narrow elevation to the river. Some of the most interesting stuff is conversions like the old cold storage plant stripped back to its essentials. There are grand C19th Hanseatic-style warehouses stacked high with additional glass storeys, such as English Heritage would baulk at. The old Harwich ferry terminal looks particularly wonderful, as does the Fish Auction Hall, but we did not partake of the famous 6am breakfast there. Landungsbrücken, the ferry and train station, in a Nordic Neo-Renaissance style is a fantastic location with all the bustle of the harbour and the elevated railway. The composition has unfortunately been compromised by crude  additions.


Gruner + Jahr AG Publishers’ headquarters - truly stunning

Near Baumwall station a new anti-flood promenade is under construction designed by Zaha Hadid with characteristic swooshes but unexpected restraint. Behind this is one of the earliest and most remarkable regeneration waterside schemes – the Gruner + Jahr AG Publishers’ headquarters; publishing is one of Hamburg’s big industries. The (very successful) concept for this large complex designed by Kiessler and Partners in 1983-90 was to evoke the spirit of the old harbour infrastructure. The results are both appropriate and excitingly high-tech – you can’t help seeing the influence of Richard Rogers, otherwise unrepresented in the city.


Dissertation Proposal: High Tech architecture and The Crystal Maze  

The German planning system is unlike Britain’s, with a very different dynamic between developers and planners. The basis is a sort of three dimensional ‘Town Map’ or zoning plan, with detailed specifications for new building initiatives, so it is the city taking the lead, not reacting to developer proposals. At times this can seem inflexible but it allows for a long term perspective. However planning does have to respond to public opinion, which in Hamburg has a distinctly green tinge that has frustrated various politically led developments. Unlike many German cities, Hamburg’s population is growing, and the present plan is to build 8,000 new houses a year, a third social housing, a third ‘affordable’ (definition unclear) and a third free market. 75% of houses are rented and, although there are rent controls, rents have increased significantly for new tenants. Because it is so difficult to build on green space, virtually all the new housing will be on brownfield land – what they call ‘more city within the city’, which is a nice way of explaining densification. This partly explains the strategy to ‘Leap across the Elbe’. Hamburg proper is on the north bank of the Elbe, with the vast port area on a large island between river channels. Here too is Wilhelmsberg, a port workers’ community that became an immigrant area with lots of problems. Hamburg is very stratified socially – the first question people ask apparently is ‘what is your address’? The strategy is focused on community empowerment and greening the area rather than physical regeneration.


A good idea, let's steal it – the Energy Bunker

Hamburg has big green pretentions and was European Green Capital in 2011. An ambitious green energy strategy is being developed and voters recently decided to re-municipalise the energy grid, privatised in the 90s. One of the most extraordinary sights is the Energy Bunker, one of several massive war time constructions around the port, where you can really appreciate Jonathan Meades’s thesis about the origins of Brutalism. It is now cloaked in photovoltaic panels and has a viewing gallery with a fine panorama across the city, from which you might see a new coal fired power station  required by the Federal Government apparently, a reality behind the well intentioned rhetoric.


IBA Hamburg


We are Hamburg and we can do this ...


... and we can do that (not sure about the blue though)

To test innovative, low energy housing an International Building Exhibition, IBA Hamburg, has been held in Wilhelmsberg, together with a Garden Festival. This includes slightly wacky stuff like BIQ House by Splitterwerk and Arup, with a bio-adaptive façade of algae tubes which provide solar shading and generate electricity. The algae can be harvested for biofuel. There are a dozen or so blocks of flats demonstrating different low energy technologies, including an attractive completely wooden construction. The city has now transformed the building exhibition into an urban development company.


High Tech, Green Tech

The ambition of Hamburg’s strategic planning is really impressive. Three kilometres of national autobahn leading from the Elbe Tunnel is to be decked over and made into allotments to tackle noise and severance (and partly to replace allotments being lost to housing). And in Wilhemsberg a major road is to be realigned along the railway corridor for similar reasons. New S and U Bahn lines are planned, new parks, wind farms and port expansion. However some policies in the Hamburg equivalent of a Core Strategy are as vague as the British variety - ‘zone for promoting dynamic development’ means what exactly?


Expressionist tenements make excellent streets...


... and thrilling details


New social housing to be proud of

In older working class areas like Reiherstieg Viertel the official strategy is ‘gentle gentrification’. A lot of the housing from Jugendstil-influenced apartments and shops to Expressionist social housing is really very attractive and the area is genuinely ‘vibrant’ but the community is still mixed. What is really good too is the quality of new housing, simple and unassuming, not trying to be noticed (like some of the IBA examples), just well designed and well proportioned with generously laid out open space.


Former Bus Garage becomes a London mews


Tidy landcaping 


Convincing balconies (rare in Britain)

Across the city in the Hoheluft district is a very interesting redevelopment of a former bus garage. Like most redevelopment schemes in Hamburg it is resolutely mixed use. If you approach via the new shops and apartments with shiny cheap cladding fronting Hoheluftchausee, you will not be initially impressed. The new 13 storey offices with the top four rotated to create effect are meant to be the focus and are indeed effective in a clinical way. But what makes this development great for me is the retention and conversion of much of the former bus garage – nothing special as a building but giving character to the area. It has been converted to media studios and lofts, but maybe more importantly inspires attractive mews-type terraces and courts reflecting this light industrial ethic. This is an excellent example of ‘more city within the city’.


They wouldn't do that today – elevated U Bahn in leafy suburb



Could be Knightsbridge


An urban middle class

The inner suburbs of Hamburg are full of interest. From Hoheluftbrücken U Bahn station follow Isestrasse, which could be Knightsbridge apart from the U Bahn viaduct up the middle of the street. Next to the station is the Kunker Building, a random example of the quality of design from the Weimar period with lovely brickwork and sweeping, curved balconies. It incorporates shops and a cinema.


Metropolitan expressionism


Fun at the University

Down Grindelberg are the remarkable modernist Grindelhochhäuser: 12 blocks of flats each 200m long and with majestic brick end elevations, all set in parkland. They were built in the early 50s and subsequently substantially refurbished, but with some nice period details surviving. Nearby is the extensive University campus, which we did not have time to explore apart from the original 1919 building with its expressive detail like the concrete staircase balustrades.


Great stuff – Dammtor station  

Across the road is the beautiful Jugendstil Dammtor station of 1903, a glass and steel palace. It is overshadowed by a towering Radisson hotel. Some mistake surely? The vast 1906 Hauptbahnhof is much more masculine with a magnificently engineered train shed roof. Its frontage is in a chunky Neo-Renaissance style. What disappoints is the crass advertising everywhere which humiliates the public spaces – so it’s not just Britain’s privatised railway companies who are guilty.


Calmer waters - Alster Lake


Glasgow/Stockholm turn of the century confidence - City Centre


An acceptable shopping centre - Europapassage

What makes Hamburg so ‘blue’ is not just the Elbe with its many channels, the canals and extensive quaysides but the Alster lake right next to the city. This is reminiscent of Copenhagen, a relatively close neighbour and of course there are strong, not always entirely friendly, historic links between Hamburg and Denmark. The Binnen Alster and much larger Aussen Alster give style and elegance to a city centre which otherwise rather lacks this. The buildings are big in scale, not undistinguished but the busy shopping streets lack individuality. Quirkiness has largely been squeezed out by successive rebuildings, although there are more interesting streets, like Colonnaden. Most British cities would be delighted to have a shopping centre of the quality of Europapassage, designed by Bothe, Richter and Teherani, which is quietly understated and allows views out to the surrounding streets. The best bit of the city centre is the Alster Arcades, survivals from the post 1842 rebuilding and Jungfergstieg with some beautiful Nouveau buildings. Jungfernstieg is right next to the Binnen Alster – except it isn’t. It is separated by a wide highway clogged by traffic. Why should this be in a city with such an excellent public transport system? Hamburg still seems to be in love with cars in a way that its peer, Copenhagen, is not. Surely Jungfernstieg should be pedestrianised and reunited with the water. That would be really something.


Excuse me, more cycling/pedestrian provision please

Hamburg really needs to learn about the ‘happy city’ from Copenhagen. At present traffic is very dominant and the city centre is cut up with monstrous roads and speeding traffic, like Willy Brandt Strasse – not something he would have been proud of, surely. Cycling seems to follow the British model rather than the Dutch or Danish. It is growing in popularity and there are quite comprehensive cycle lanes but they have mostly been carved out of pedestrian space, not road space, setting up conflicts with pedestrians. I was nearly wiped out (literally) whilst admiring the Dammtor Station by a testosterone-fuelled cyclist jumping a red light London style. And the irony is that with all these wide roads there is masses of room for wide, civilised cycle lanes and pedestrian boulevards to calm the damned traffic Danish style.


Can't beat it - Chilehaus

From HafenCity you have to cross Willy Brandt Strasse by subway to reach the very best thing in Hamburg, the Chilehaus. This is a truly knock-out Expressionist office and warehouse completed in 1924 and regarded as one of the architectural wonders of the world. As Eric Parry wrote in a BD article: ‘Chilehaus captures an extraordinary vital moment in German culture (and) has a terrific sense of the optimism and renewal of the time that proved all too brief …. (it) has a potent sense of the spirit of mercantile voyaging. Chilehaus was designed by Fritz Höger, who came from a building craftsman’s background steeped in the Hanseatic tradition of brickwork.’ And that brickwork is utterly superb. That wonderful curved prow illustrated in so many books does not disappoint, although my photos of it do. The building is a vast complex, far bigger than I had expected and is part of a bigger district of superb brick offices and warehouses including later examples like the Sprinkenhof.


Chilehaus texture


Chilehaus movement


Nearby - Sprinkenhof  

The Chilehaus alone makes a trip to Hamburg worthwhile but there is so much to see and to learn, far more than could be accomplished in a few days. What I took from the trip was how cities are about far more than the buildings. In HafenCity a lot of effort has gone into the quality of the architecture and public spaces, but as yet it lacks the spark of city life. Schanzenviertel where we stayed was overflowing with urban vitality, although the architecture while friendly was of no consequence. But the streets really worked, the buildings were evidently cheap and flexible, mixed use was not a problem. Like Shoreditch this just happened, a happy conjunction of opportunities. You can’t make it to order. And cities need both ambitious regeneration as well as creative, alternative quarters. But maybe HafenCity is too planned and needs more opportunities for individualism, experimentation and the unexpected?


Go to Hamburg

Thanks to Jennifer Wesche of Hamburg City, Dipl.Ing. Uwe Carstensen from HafenCity GMBH and Dipl.Ing. Michael Holtmann, former City Planner and now of Hamburg University for their invaluable help and information. A very useful and interesting presentation on HafenCity by Prof Dr Dirk Schubert of HafenCity University can be seen here

Post Office glamour - City Square 

City Square shows the civic ambition Leeds once had. It was laid out from 1893 in grand style to celebrate the granting of city status. Around it today is an awkward collection of statement buildings: a characteristic Tanner GPO (converted to a swanky bar); the LMS Queens Hotel in classical Portland stone (which Pevsner calls rather dull but I find stylish); a relatively successful 12 storey post modern office block in expensive black granite and white limestone, replacing and apologising for a reviled 60s predecessor; a 1965 tower with curved podium which Pevsner liked, now unfortunately re-clad as the Park Plaza Hotel. The Victorian layout of the square was swept away by the traffic engineers in the 1960s but remodelled by John Thorp in 2002. The new design is carefully considered and restores something of the original character and elegance, but the swirling traffic still isolates the station, typical of Leeds’ cowardice about traffic management.


"extravagant expenditure ... owed to the rest of the community and posterity"– Dr J. D. Heaton


A study in civic pride 

The Town Hall epitomises Leeds and its profile is used nationally as a symbol of municipal pride and enterprise. Pevsner says ‘Leeds can be proud of its Town Hall …. of the classical buildings of its date no doubt the most successful’. It was designed by the then unknown Cuthbert Brodrick in 1852. Today it is primarily a concert hall, where I recently sat on uncomfortable chairs through the whole of Opera North’s superb Ring Cycle: two magnificently grand C19th achievements brought together. There are imposing steps up to the Town Hall but it faces a wide street (the continuation of Headrow), not a square as you might expect. Across Calverley Street are the richly detailed Municipal Buildings of 1878, built for the municipal gas, water and sanitary companies together with a library, and later extended to provide the City Art Gallery - a telling case study in the sort of civic pride, initiative and independence from Whitehall that Leeds needs today. What is now the café of the Art Gallery has polished granite columns and vaults with the most magnificent, sparkling multi coloured glazed octagonal bricks, recently re-exposed and restored after being hidden behind a utilitarian false ceiling. The Henry Moore Gallery has a dramatic new entrance from Headrow, a bold polished black granite façade attached to a blank terrace gable end with a single very vertical opening. Although modest it is one of most stylish additions to modern Leeds, designed by Dixon Jones in 1980. Across Cookridge Street St Anne’s Cathedral is a wonderful essay in Arts and Crafts Gothic, completed in 1904.


Town Hall and Art Gallery deserve a better civic space 


Chic Henry Moore Institute

The Town Hall and Municipal Buildings are in an awkward relationship with the Civic Hall and the Leeds Institute to the rear. The Institute, again by Cuthbert Brodrick, 1865, now houses the Leeds Museum. The Civic Hall by Vincent Harris, 1931, followed on from Sheffield’s City Hall. ‘As ambitious as the Town Hall but not quite as self confident’ said Pevsner. Lindstrum thought its Portland rather than traditional Yorkshire stone ‘responds to its bland smooth classicism’ but this is relieved by the immensely thin symmetrical spires surmounted with gilded owls, symbol of Leeds.


Vincent Harris and the North 

Leeds has few squares and public spaces. The new Millennium Square between the civic buildings should have been an opportunity for a new civic centrepiece such as Sheffield achieved with the ‘Heart of the City’. However unfortunately the brief was distorted by the lottery’ funding criteria, yet another example of centrist dabbling. This required priority be given to performance space and thus massive underground servicing with John Thorp’s resultant design an unsatisfactory compromise. And, as with other new civic squares like Nottingham’s Old Market Square, the pressure for ever more events, markets etc. means it is difficult to ever see the design as intended. South of the square the conversion and extensions of the Electric Press and Carriage Works by Panter Hudspith to form a new civic theatre is a very considerable success, its subtly curved Portland stone façade a fine compliment to the Civic Hall.


Cars and crass PoMo: the "Leeds Look" 

West of the square is the streamlined moderne Brotherton Wing of Leeds General Infirmary with its tiers of south facing sun balconies. The original buildings on Great George Street from the 1860s are by George Gilbert Scott, very fine, very Gothic and now largely unused, awaiting a new use. Nearby on Westgate is an interesting juxtaposition of confident modelling and brickwork in the pre Leeds Look Combined Courts Centre of 1977, designed by the PSA, with the post modern nervous breakdown of the 1994 Magistrates Courts. Westgate Point, 1987, by David Lyons and which exemplifies the Leeds Look, closes the vista.


Still feels like the future - Chamberlin, Powell and Bon


That Barbican feeling


In vogue: brutalism and allotment gardening

The vast LGI campus stretches above the inner ring motorway towards the attractive suburbs of Little Woodhouse and Hyde Park. However the campus itself creates as much of a barrier as the sunken motorway that divides Millennium Square from that other great civic enterprise, Leeds University. Lanchester and Lodge’s great Portland stone Parkinson Building, completed in 1950, dominates Woodhouse Lane and has tremendous presence, with the magnificent Brotherton Library behind. But the unifying factor of the sprawling campus is the grid of structures by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. These are quite thrilling, like walking though a sculpture, a wonderful futuristic epic, at times almost a modernist factory - easily the best post war buildings in Leeds. Later alterations, like painting the concrete and jolly landscaping demean but don’t diminish their impact. What is unforgivable is the partial demolition of their striking Accrington brick Charles Morris Halls, especially given the utter worthlessness of the innumerable barrack towers by Unite et al. However the University’s new ‘Central Village Residences’ next to the motorway bridge are actually quite good, well proportioned with quality materials and a general clarity and sobriety. Undoubtedly the best new building in Leeds is Broadcasting Place by Fielden Clegg Bradley, for the other university, which has confusingly changed its name to Leeds Beckett. Here is a tower whose shape and proportions really are interesting, not contrived, and one clad in weathering Corten steel, not cheap shiny stuff. You just want to keep looking at it.


Broadcasting Place: impressive context 


Leeds can build tall buildings well (if it really wants to)

The two campuses are divided by the motorway in a cutting that, in theory, retains the connectivity of the traditional streets above. But you are crossing a chasm of traffic noise, dodging convoluted slip roads and counter-intuitive traffic systems. And the scale of the demolitions, not just for the motorway but of the inner city streets themselves, in reality creates a total disconnect. In Hamburg long sections of the urban motorway are being decked over to reconnect the dislocated city and transform the local environment. This could be done here too, with the road system simplified to create an urban grain of city streets and squares, releasing development sites and enabling new green spaces. This would transform the stunted, mean cityscape of today, helping to make Leeds ‘the best city in the UK’. It is possible, just needs vision … and money and quality design and determination…. but the vision comes first.


The best part of Quarry Hill

The failure to realise the Farrell masterplan for Quarry Hill seems to have resulted in a reluctance to have any real vision or over-arching plan for the city at all. In the revealing 2007 TV programme ‘Building Britain’ Linda Barker interviews the then City Architect, John Thorp. He says ‘Leeds is growing too fast for a masterplan’. Ironically the walls of his office were plastered with plans allegedly intended to guide developers towards producing ‘beautiful buildings’. Well we have seen the results. Leeds with its commercial attractiveness and all its assets and potential should have done a hell of a lot better than it did. And to do better the city needs to shake off its smug complacency and develop an ambitious new plan for the city centre.


Very retro: Leeds needs to visit Sheffield

The key thing that Leeds needs in order realise its ambitions to be a ‘northern powerhouse’ is a radically different transport strategy. At present its potential for a more sustainable future, a high quality of environment and vibrant city life, is massively constrained by the legacy of the ‘motorway city of the 70s’. It is hugely reliant on the car – nearly 60% of city centre workers are car commuters clogging up the motorways and the approach roads and ruining the environment of the city streets. It should be focusing on public transport, pedestrians, cycling, the quality of its streetscape and promoting real connectivity and attractive environments. To do this it needs to redesign and reduce the capacity on its absurdly over dominant roads.


New coffee table book coming soon: Pedestrian Guardrails of Leeds

Leeds desperately lacks an integrated public transport system such as you would find in virtually all of its European regional city peers. A really positive component of ‘DevoManc’ is the commitment to TfL style regulation and integration, which could finally give England’s second city the sort of public transport system Germany’s second city (Hamburg) has had since 1965. But, whereas Manchester has an expanding Metrolink tram and will eventually have the Northern Hub (which could be as good as the S Bahn), the government rejected the ‘economic case’ for Leeds’ modest plans for a tram system. Which must be crazy as Sheffield and Nottingham, both smaller cities, managed to tick the mandarins’ boxes. And while this debacle of Whitehall’s micro-management and centralised control has been going on, bus commuting into the city centre has fallen by 30%. Leeds is pushing ahead with a trolley bus line instead, a defiant political statement. Quiet and pollution-free, trolleybuses are certainly a lot better than anything Firstbus has to offer, but are clearly not enough by themselves for a city like Leeds. In Lyon, for example, trolleybuses are part of a high quality public transport network alongside metros, trams and integrated low emission buses. This is the sort of public transport infrastructure Leeds should be empowered to achieve. No point in HS3 if it takes you longer to get to City station than it does to get from there to Manchester.


Compact city, full of life


Smart move: the arena is not in a retail park

The thing that makes Leeds work so well as a place is its very compact city centre. This urban concentration makes for an exciting city with lots of people, lots of activities and facilities all mixed up together. It makes it a potentially sustainable place too, easily served by public transport, and it could be easy to walk and cycle. The concept of the dense city surely points the right direction for its future development. In this context, plans for a major extension of the commercial centre as a ‘South Bank New Town’ seem like a fatal distraction. This risks undermining the very qualities that make the city special. Rather than Edinburgh New Town it is much more likely to end up as another Cardiff Bay; vast anonymous, lacking city life – in fact more of what has been delivered already along Victoria Road and around Clarence Dock. Leeds got it right with the location of its new Arena behind the Merrion Centre. The light green circular design is a bit like a spaceship, or a Chartreuse cake, but the venue and the location work well; this is definitely the right place – not out at Elland Road. Similarly a conference and exhibition centre and the proposed new concert hall need to be fitted into the fabric of the city centre, not shifted out to some regeneration wilderness, as happened in Glasgow and Cardiff, for example.


Just imagine the city you could build


So why does Leeds look like this?

When the domination of roads and traffic in Leeds is tackled there are plenty of opportunities for development that will expand the central core and help stitch the city centre and the fractured inner city back together. This can help build on distinctiveness and diversity rather than just adding more and more of the same, which is the danger with the current laissez faire market driven ‘non-plan’. And there is opportunity to create a network of public spaces and parks to make Leeds more than just a commercial city. The catalyst for the new approach to transport planning, city planning and making Leeds the ‘happy city’ that it so desperately needs to be could be the Arup/Jan Gehl study of the options around City station but the cynic in me fears that Gehl’s name will be used as window dressing and radical thinking will be quietly dropped. I hope Leeds proves me wrong.


Build on your strengths – Crown St

--

Thanks to Ken Powell, Chris Hammond, Robin Machell and Kevin Grady, Chief Executive of the Leeds Civic Trust, for sharing their knowledge and insights of Leeds.

The Leeds Pevsner Architectural Guide by Susan Wrathmell is invaluable and I have quoted freely from it.

Owen Hatherley’s ‘Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’ is a must-read on Leeds and West Yorkshire.

Douglas Murphy’s blog on Leeds and Bradford ‘Unbuilding Britain’ is also essential reading

Achitects’ Journal special issues on Leeds edited by Ken Powell dated 25 April 1990 and 22 May 1997 provide excellent background.

Derek Lindstrum’s West Yorkshire – Architects and Architecture has a wonderful feel for the place.

Elain Harwood’s Twentieth Century Architects series book on Chamberlin, Powell and Bon is invaluable.

The Alchemist’s Elements, Hans Tisdall  

Manchester invented the industrial city and in a sense invented the English post-industrial city. Its business today is much about lifestyle and ‘creative industries’, fostered by its once genuinely radical music scene, but the action mostly happens in coolly designed interiors. The impression Manchester gives is of being a hard place, ironically at once hedonistic – the fun capital of the north – but also uptight. The streets are about bustle and traffic, and, with few exceptions, not places to linger. The buildings still have the look and feel of its dignified, patrician, commercial past which was about style rather than enjoyment. Manchester has come down in the world since the glory days of Cottonopolis but in its straitened circumstances it is still enterprising and self-confident, a down to earth city which ‘gets things done’. Unfortunately this is often at the expense of the quality of the city as a place.


Can do

Manchester’s ‘can do’ pragmatism and its quiet long term strategic thinking has borne fruit in the devoManc deal with Osborne, which holds out the promise that it will finally get back some of its municipal independence stolen by Whitehall. Of course parochial rivalries are almost as much of a threat to the future of our great cities as is Whitehall, but Manchester alone (apart from London) has managed to assert its greater city identity. Today, as Owen Hatherley observes, nobody except the most foolhardy of Brum’s civic boosters would dare tell Manchester it isn’t England’s second city.


Pzazz


Pzizz

Manchester has the scale, the critical mass, the dynamism, the institutions, galleries, theatres, the style, pzazz, excitement that a second city needs. It offers the best hope for rebalancing the economy somewhat away from overweening London. But it doesn’t have some elements of a great city. Its topography in the Lancashire plain is unmemorable and it lacks grand spaces or parks in its centre. There is no great river, and the rivers it has are largely ignored. Nairn called the Irwell ‘black and viscous (which) by a quirk of fate forms the boundary to the recalcitrant City of Salford’. So a hundred metres or so from Manchester Cathedral lurid pink signs tell you that you are ‘IN Salford’. Despite the repopulation of (Manchester) city centre with loft living and the shiny camp-follower apartment towers, the city does not have a ‘west end’ or the equivalent of say Clifton or Edgbaston. Nairn thought Manchester had bad luck in being ‘choked by a ring of warehouses’, many now converted to chic uses, which prevented a more conventional expansion of the old town. The commercial centre was also encircled by exceptionally grim slums, their unlamented redevelopment resulting in the since demolished Hulme Crescents and Cardroom Estate amongst some more successful housing schemes. But the zone of transition between the centre and sometimes very des-res inner city suburbs like Didsbury is an edgy place, often low density, cut up by speeding roads and lots of left-over space, with here and there hubristic urban splashes of glitzy regeneration.


Mancunian Way barriers, literal, psychological and metaphorical


Fifty shades of private bus livery 

After decades of disempowerment and under-investment in the public realm there is a lot that needs sorting out if Manchester is really to play in the Premier league of European cities. This is perhaps most obvious in its disjointed public transport system. Over 30 bus companies provide a rag bag of competing services, jostling at times chaotically along main roads and in the city centre with TfGM trying to fill in the gaps. If you want to buy a day ticket you have to choose between a dozen competing options, only one of which will allow you travel on all buses, tram and train. It is the Dark Ages but Manchester has, amazingly, persuaded Osborne to agree to a regulated, integrated TfL style system despite the over-mighty bus companies and the DfT’s ‘theological objection’ to cities having anything to do with the quality of their public transport. But this will need to be funded, which will be a problem given the disparity between public spending on transport in England’s capital and its second city – nearly 12 times greater per capita in London than Manchester, which is staggering. Welcome improvements are underway to Manchester’s run down rail network, like electrification and the Northern Hub linking the lines north and south of the city and increasing capacity at city centre stations. HS3 is promised too, although nobody knows what that really means yet.


Nice trams - shame about the street kit


Is this Piccadilly Gardens, mate? Yes, unfortunately

Manchester sees its Metrolink tram system as a big success story. It is perhaps surprising that a city with the foresight and energy of Manchester did not build a metro system in the early C20th and later plans for an underground were ditched in the 1970s. But in the 80s Manchester pressed ahead with pioneering (for Britain) trams linking suburban rail lines across the city centre on the street. Now, with a network of 7 lines, a second cross city centre route is being constructed via Exchange Square. Metrolink is a triumph over Whitehall’s indifference to the public transport needs of a great conurbation. But the problem is the extent to which the trams, or more particularly their poorly designed street kit, dominate and detract from the main public spaces in the city. It is not just the infamous ‘mounting blocks’ in the middle of the streets, required as these are really tram-trains, but the crudity and abandon with which the streets are littered with tracks, poles, catenary, signs, the expanse and monotony of concrete surfaces. It is all horribly over engineered. In Nice the new tram is carefully designed into public spaces and floorscapes. Trams run without wires across the central plaza and it looks great. Compare and contrast St Peter’s Square, soon to have two extra tram platforms fucked into it, ruining this crucial space. It is surely time for Manchester to follow Karlsruhe, that exemplar for expanding tram systems, in putting its trams underground in the city centre.


Not competing with Sheffield, never mind Barcelona

The negative impact of tram paraphernalia on the cityscape is particularly unfortunate given Manchester’s dearth of central squares and green spaces. Nairn lamented that Piccadilly Gardens, as he saw it the vital green space in a sometimes ‘grim’ city, had all the elements of a successful city space but was not ‘plugged in’. My God if he could see it today – it is ground zero. In addition to the 60s bus station he wanted to deck over, the tram has spewed tracks and platforms all over the place in a visual chaos. Then Manchester decided to revamp the gardens for the Commonwealth Games, partly paid for by selling off  part of them for a totally dismal block of offices and shops. A stark concrete wall now separates the remaining green space from the tooting trams and revving buses. Designed by Tadao Ando it was sold as a Japanese pavilion, but it is known locally as the Berlin Wall.


This is not working – Piccadilly Gardens


Poor attention to detail

The problem is that Piccadilly Gardens is trying to do too much and doing it all badly. You can’t enjoy the relatively small gardens because all sorts of activities are piled in - events, a street market, tourist information, even a police contact point. EDAW’s inept landscaping can’t take the crowds and the result is a miserable slum. Wellington, Peel and Queen Victoria, incongruously retained in the melee, turn their backs on this downfall of civic dignity. Yet amazingly, despite the huge unpopularity of the Berlin Wall it turns out that the Council can’t get rid of it, because this too was sold to a developer. So welcome to the heart of the Northern Powerhouse. Would Lyon, Munich, Milan, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Gothenburg or Cracow tolerate this?


Debenhams

In Manchester there is a particularly stark contrast between the cheap, shabby ordinariness of Piccadilly and the main shopping streets like Market Street with the elegant chic of the Georgian area around St Ann’s Square which extends to the grand banks of King Street. Market Street does have the wonderfully grand 1932 stripped classical Debenhams, originally built as a warehouse, but also fronts the cancerous Arndale Centre which has eaten away 8 city centre blocks. Again there is such a contrast between the utter boringness of the Arndale Centre and the exuberant ‘Northern Quarter’ beyond, unsanitised, run down even, full of interesting buildings and uses, ripe with possibilities. This is the sort of creative, anarchic area great cities need, like Shoreditch as it used to be.


Those New York loft apartments as imagined by Tony Wilson


Creativity without Media City


Impressive townscape – The Northern Quarter


Infinitely preferable to Salford Quays

The obvious place for the BBC to relocate to would have been the edge of the lively Northern Quarter rather than Salford Quays, 25 minutes on the tram from Piccadilly. Why would anyone want to be there? You get a view of the lifeless docks of the Manchester Ship Canal and a Nandos - hardly city life. Salford Quays is a dead weight on Manchester, a third rate Cardiff Bay; lumpen mirror glass offices plonked at random, Macdonald’s drive-thru et al, Travelodge barracks, apartment fortresses, lots of left over space and hard landscaped quays that no-one uses and no one maintains, derelict land bleeding out into the distance.


Media without creativity is like North Korea


More powerful than local democracy


Nobody really wants to be here

There is little that can be added to Ellis Woodman’s devastating critique of ‘Media City-Your City’, awarded the Carbuncle Cup in 2011. As he says ‘there is an emptiness here which the architects have desperately tried to compensate for’ – and failed. The buildings, bad enough individually, are a truly terrible ensemble, huddled together against the bleakness of the surrounding industrial steppe. The most satisfying element of its architecture is the rear service elevation, with its subtle curve and honest expression of purpose - an extraordinary indictment. What is particularly hateful is the pervasive security - high-vis jackets twitching all around at the sight of your camera. Media City is profoundly insecure in every sense and I’m surprised Sean Rafferty can sound so jolly on ‘In Tune’, although Radio 3 does occupy the least offensive part of the complex.


Natural planting? Boat mooring? Floating docks?


Expressive – Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum of the North

Wilkinson Eyre’s curved, stay-cabled opening footbridge is the best thing about Media City. This leads to Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum of the North. The symbolism here may be crushing but I find it very effective. It is built Shostakovich. The viewing tower, accessed across a mesh bridge spanning a chasm below, really evokes the terror of war, or what I imagine it to be. The desolate location is suitably like a post-apocalyptic world. The Lowry Arts Centre is on a peninsula in the docks and reached via an arched footbridge which can lift wholesale to let shipping through, if there were any. Lowry’s matchstick men in the eponymous gallery are often thought of as cosy nostalgia, but his pictures express loneliness, alienation and urban decay, so in that sense the Salford Quays setting is very appropriate. Wilford and Partner's's Lowry Centre completed in 2000 is attempting nautical and industrial themes with its steel cladding, funnel and clanking canopy. It is certainly striking, but why doesn’t it relate to the water, surely the point of this location? The entrance faces away towards the ‘Lowry Outlet’ mall, flanked by a few chain restaurants and cafes. The quayside is given over to servicing and a multi-storey car park. Which makes rather a nonsense of the whole regeneration rationale for Salford Quays.


Better than Media City anyway


This has all been a huge mistake hasn't it? 

Putting hugely important cultural and creative facilities – the Lowry gallery, theatre, opera, the BBC (and Coronation Street) – here in the middle of nowhere was so obviously a stupid thing to do. This is not like the Sage, the Baltic and the Blinking Eye, which enhance Newcastle’s attractions, albeit in Gateshead. Here Manchester is diminished by the perverse rivalry of Salford and the only beneficiaries are the landowners, developers also of the Trafford Centre in the middle of the nearby industrial estate, which equally undermines the city centre.


The first industrial city


Calling all architectural photographers


Castlefield: on the 'must see in Manchester' list

The tram trip to Salford Quays however is worthwhile partly because around Cornbrook you see some much better new development; well considered, confident and unfussy blocks of flats that you might find in Rotterdam. But the best bit is the ride over the magnificent viaducts of Castlefield, one of the must-see sights of Manchester. There are four viaducts high above the Bridgewater Canal and River Medlock, two of brick with elaborate skewed iron bridges across the water. The others are massive latticed bridges of steel on tremendous circular columns. The space beneath the trains and trams rattling overhead is further enhanced by Whitby Bird’s curving Merchant’s pedestrian bridge. Old warehouses have been cleverly renovated and attractive new bars and restaurants created, like Quay Bar and Barca. Despite some very ordinary new build and badly maintained public space this is cutting edge regeneration, much done nearly 20 years ago, which demonstrates the truth of the adage ‘what Manchester thinks today, the world does tomorrow’.


The post-industrial party has been here for years

Many of the good schemes at Castlefield were designed by local practices, Stephenson Bell and Ian Simpson. Ian Simpson’s Beetham Tower is a genuine icon for Manchester, its lean, un-gimmicky outline satisfying from all directions. It may not be great architecture but is much, much better than most of what is emerging on London’s beleaguered skyline.


The Museum of Science & Industry

Castlefield was the site of a Roman fort, fancifully reconstructed near Liverpool Road station, the oldest in the world and now the focus of the extensive Museum of Science and Industry. This important museum looks tired and could do with a share of the public largesse pumped into London’s museums. The Air and Space gallery in a former cast iron market building looks particularly run down. Deansgate is the spine running north from Castlefield to the Cathedral and could be a great street but for the domination of traffic, rather limiting its opportunities for passeggiata. The hugely impressive Great Northern Warehouse of 1898, with shops at street level, dominates southern Deansgate. Unfortunately its conversion to a leisure complex in 1999 has robbed it of what Clare Hartwell in the Pevsner City Guide calls its ‘monumental isolation’. The entrance at Great Northern Square is festooned with ephemeral jolly tat, the square itself inhospitable with a 25 storey glass tower of the International Convention Centre towering over it. West along Quay Street is the delightful 1932 Sunlight House, then the tallest building in the city, the Edwardian Opera House, and Granada House of 1960, an unpretentious curtain wall HQ for a hugely important creative force in Manchester.


City scale development at Spinningfields


Coherent and anodyne

Further along Deansgate is the John Rylands Library, completed in 1899 by Basil Champneys. Nairn didn’t like it; ‘a froth of late Gothic, full of expertise but without spark. Compare it with a design…which has the spark…the Victorian pub front of the Sawyer’s Arms four doors away. The give-away at the Library is the ironwork, which is as up to date as can be and essays the Art Nouveau which was all the rage in London. It is no good; the flame will not come, the details will not twist and writhe’. Now you enter the library through a rather anodyne new visitor centre, part of the Spinningfields development. This is big, muscular – even muscle bound - in its explicit engineering ethic, impressive in scale with cranes rearing up all around. But although coherent in a way Media City is not, and with far more activity, vitality, restaurants, bars and people about, 'cos this is actually part of the city, it still remains fairly anonymous. The dramatic form of the Civil Justice Centre by Denton Corker and Marshall is certainly memorable but we liked the quieter Crown Courts facing Crown Square, designed by the City Architect L.C. Howitt in 1957.


Another good department store - Kendals


Deansgate

A highlight of Deansgate is the striking Modernist Kendal’s department store, after Mendelsohn, with spectacular sheer window slits of glass blocks, confirmation if it were needed of how metropolitan and stylish Manchester could be. Behind the store one of the few central green spaces, Parsonage Gardens, enclosed with buildings of impressive monumentality and self-assurance. St Mary’s Parsonage leads to Calatrava’s sculptural 1996 bridge to Salford.


An amazing heritage, but not without its challenges

King Street, still Georgian in scale, is handsome and upmarket shopping. Its continuation beyond Cross Street contains a fine collection of banks and commercial buildings, mostly now designer shops and posh chain restaurants. Lutyens’ Midland Bank at the brow of the street is, as Clare Hartwell says, the King of King Street. Occupying a square block it is beautifully proportioned and modelled to look fantastic from all directions. It is now Jamie’s Italian. The re-use of these fine commercial buildings for post-industrial consumerism is one of the great assets of the city centre over, say the Trafford Centre or John Lewis’s prissy caution stuck out on the A34 bypass at Cheadle Royal. Cockerell’s Bank of England is now effectively a foyer for a 15 storey po-mo office block with a broken pediment that skulks behind. Much more interesting are Casson, Conder’s 1966 octagonal District Bank and Pall Mall Court of the same era, also strongly modelled. Opposite is Ship Canal House, 1924, immensely grand befitting Manchester City’s entrepreneurial role in the venture.


St Ann's


The first post industrial city

St Ann’s Square is an attractive, quiet (unusual for Manchester) space, with the jewel-like church of 1710, highly original in its exterior design whose ‘controlled elegance is indeed patrician, and is the perfect match for the surrounding area, which is Manchester’s Mayfair’ (Nairn). The Square becomes Exchange Street with an immensely grand elevation of the Royal Exchange, completed in 1921. The trading hall is VAST, with three domes and giant columns. The cotton prices on the last day of trading in 1968 are still displayed, but the hall now accommodates a ‘Lunar module’ tubular steel theatre in the round, designed by Levitt Bernstein. Bars and restaurants enjoy the quite spectacular hall and there is at times a quite surreal relationship of the two structures, in itself a theatrical experience. The Royal Exchange is something very special. On the other side of the square is another must-see building, the Barton Arcade – as the Manchester Architectural guide says ‘the epitome of commercial architecture in C19th Manchester. Glimpses of cast iron and glass domes set a high standard for urban and architectural design which few subsequent commercial spaces in the city have emulated’.


Another poor public space – Exchange Square

Manchester seized the opportunity for rebuilding the area devastated by the 1996 IRA bomb with a bold masterplan, making a new street between Exchange Street and the Cathedral, and creating Exchange Square and Cathedral Gardens. Although the plan is good, New Cathedral Street is a disappointment, its intended life suffocated because the big stores along it, M&S, Selfridges and Harvey Nicks essentially ignore it. The architecture too is very ordinary - all glass, terracotta, tile and stone cladding, what has subsequently become the default Benoy standard for new retail. A hyperbolic paraboloid translucent spiraling hourglass bridge across Corporation Street adds interest. However the sloping glass tower rearing up above Deansgate with expressed pylons (both overused devices in Manchester) really diminishes this important view northwards to the Cathedral. Despite these disappointments, the broader masterplan aims of visual integration are achieved.


Learning from Sheffield, almost – Cathedral Gardens

Exchange Square was designed by Martha Schwartz. This has the advantage of fronting the very grand if undisciplined Edwardian Corn Exchange, converted to galleries of shops and restaurants after bomb damage in 1996, but already being remodelled as a themed restaurant quarter. The triangular shape adds interest and the square is very well used, but the design with its stepped seating terraces blocks pedestrian routes, which is annoying. Cathedral Gardens certainly provide a better context for the impressive medieval collegiate church that is the Cathedral. The new gardens may mature in time but the design lacks the flair, interest and intimacy of, say Sheffield’s Peace Gardens. Their starkness is perhaps a function of the relationship with Urbis, which encloses towards Corporation Street. Ian Simpson’s glass ski slope is interesting but is so cool as to be cold and lifeless. Built primarily for the sake of being an icon, it eschews practicality. When first opened I walked around it twice before finding the minimalist entrance and, appropriately, there was nothing much inside. Now it is the National Football Museum and covered with crude signage which rubbishes the design ethic.


High quality contemporary architecture – Chetham's Music School

Chetham’s Music School and Library complex faces Cathedral Gardens, occupying the miraculously almost intact C15th domestic premises of the collegiate church, the best preserved buildings of their type and date in the country (Clare Hartwell). The new Chetham’s building, behind the medieval-to-Waterhouse assemblage and designed by locally based Roger Stephenson, has raised a few hackles about the relationship. It is certainly uncompromising but entirely convincing, gracefully soaring above Walker’s Croft whilst holding its own against the big scale of Victoria Station and the Manchester Arena. It resembles ‘a brick grand piano with its lid up’. And what beautiful buff brickwork. It has strong Dudok features, possibly influenced by the fine Dutch modernist CWS warehouse nearby. Buildings (and institutions) like this make Manchester a great city; it's just a pity that the public don’t get to fully appreciate the drama of the building as Walker’s Croft is now privatised space within the campus.


Victoria Station

The redoubtable and terribly neglected Victoria Station is finally being renovated as part of the Northern Hub, which will make it a main line station once again. A new overall roof is under construction with other facilities. The long, grand frontage is having a make-over including the Edwardian nouveauish canopy with its list of destinations along the lines of Accrington, Berlin, Bolton …. Southport, St Petersburg …. currently being refurbished. The tile map of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway shows why Goole was then the gateway to Europe.


Greengate Embankment

Major developments are under way to both sides of this revitalised transport hub. Across the Irwell ‘where two cities meet’ the Greengate Embankment development is emerging on the site of the old Manchester Exchange station. Two lumpen office blocks will sit above the listed sandstone viaducts like a pair of circus elephants. There is a new riverside plaza, with fountains and fluttering flags, and a new bridge down from Deansgate. This seems unlikely to be the ‘vibrant destination’ promised by Salford and its developer partners.


The decline of laissez faire and the rise of the co-operative


Chart the ages of Co-op city – the CIS Tower


But is it organic?

NOMA ‘where the modern world begins’ is far more promising despite its ridiculous acronym, apparently aping San Francisco’s South of the Market Neighbourhood. Well, I don’t suppose the ‘Co-operative Neighbourhood’ would play too well these days, but that is what it is – the superb collection of buildings from the Victorian, Edwardian and Thirties periods between Corporation Street and Dantzig Street, culminating in the knock-out CIS tower. The Co-op now has a new HQ opposite the much admired 1959 tower which was inspired by the Inland Steel building in Chicago. The magnificent but redundant palaces of commerce are being renovated for new uses. There will be a small new square which, being well plugged into real city streets and enclosed with handsome buildings, actually stands a chance of being ‘vibrant’. The new HQ designed by 3D Reid is allegedly super-environmentally friendly, an ‘arc’ around an impressively vast atrium with a serrated glass roof, locally compared to a sliced egg. The problem is its ‘noli me tangere’ relationship to this city. Landscaped gardens and traffic calming of Miller St help a little, but it really shuts down the relationship with Angel Meadows and the residential community beyond. Standardised blocks of offices and apartments projected between Angel Road and Miller Street look like they will be much less interesting.


Why is this empty? The Daily Express Building


Media City – makes you mad

Owen Williams’ 1939 Daily Express Building on Great Ancoats Street is another must-see. With its sexy black glass and sinuous curves it is completely seductive, except apparently to tenants despite excellent renovation as offices. The location on what is effectively a six lane inner ring road is a problem that needs tackling. Redesigning the road as a tree-lined, traffic calmed boulevard would help bring Ancoats from the Dakotas into the city centre.


The Mills of Ancoats

The mills of Ancoats were one of the wonders of the world in the early C19th. Visitors were staggered by their scale, concentration and energy. They are some of the most historically important industrial buildings in England and still thrill in their post-industrial guise, rising above the Rochdale Canal and crowding along canyons like Murray Street. Much effort has gone into rescuing this heritage and some are converted to apartments and offices. But the recession has set back progress and, whilst some others have been cleaned but moth-balled, others await rescue, which is a terrible waste. St Peter’s church has been nicely restored, now used by the Halle. There is a new square next to it, whose design is a bit over prescriptive for the anticipated vibrant uses.


Say what you see  

New Islington Millennium Village is south of the Ancoats conservation area and the Rochdale Canal, on the site of the largely demolished Cardroom Estate. Alsop’s Chips building is next to the Ashton Canal and I suppose you have to admire the insane confidence of doing something like this, so typical of the hubris of the Blair era, and even more of Alsop himself. It certainly raises a smile where the aridity and solemnity of the similarly scaled Milliners Wharf on the other side of the canal doesn’t. The relationship of both to adjacent derelict factories and the Ancoats Dispensary, also derelict, is telling. The latter is wrapped in vacuous Urban Splash life style hoardings. Could this be post modern irony? Local people have fought a spirited and successful campaign to save this landmark from the hip capitalists and to convert it to a community hub. The idea of traffic calming busy Old Mill Road, with a pedestrian promenade up the middle, designed in a tough industrial ethic, is more interesting than practical, but it is a nice touch to have delicately patterned metal roundels let into the paving.


The Michel de Klerk approach has legs in Britain

The several low rise housing developments built so far are all interesting in their way. New ‘back to back’ social housing by Mae is cleverly designed to give each house a parking space and garden at a non-suburban density. This allows families the flexibility to adapt the house, compared to the constraints of terraces, and may well end up looking cheerfully scruffy. The most spectacular new houses are FAT’s terraces with elaborate Dutch gables and striking brickwork. They evoke the beauty of the Amsterdam school and the social commitment summed up by de Klerk ‘nothing is too good for the workers’. Amazing really that this could happen in England so recently. However, interesting as the completed phases are, they sit in a large uncompleted wasteland. This is a problem of nearly all large scale development, not just inner city regeneration, as seen for example in the self build exemplar of Almere . Both the Millennium Village and the renovation of Ancoats show just how hard it is to translate good intentions into successful conclusions.


Modernism, marterials and personalisation – Islington Wharf Mews


Potential

New Islington is only a kilometre away from Piccadilly but it doesn’t feel like that. In between is the run down Central Retail Park, a legacy of the Ridley vision for the future of cities which desperately needs erasing as part of a new future for Great Ancoats Street. This really must become a real street; surely if Birmingham can tackle its inner ring road Manchester can too. The streets leading back to Piccadilly are full of big, often swaggering but run down late C19th and early C20th commercial buildings. There are restored Georgian warehouses on the canal basins. Although the many new flats are of variable quality and, as everywhere in central Manchester there are far too may open car parks, overall this zone exudes potential.


Breathtaking commercial hubris from the Edwardian era ...


... with a touch of art-nouveau – Whitworth St

Manchester’s scale is impressive and many of the turn of the C20th warehouses and commercial buildings are quite overpowering, especially along Oxford Street and Whitworth Street. It has a skewed grid which, with the scale of the buildings, almost gives it the power of Glasgow but without that city’s consistency or technical and architectural innovation. Nairn thought the warehouses overpraised. He was also dismissive of Manchester’s modernist Piccadilly Plaza, but this assemblage of futuristic sculptural forms, although dumbed down, has become emblematic of the city. It is best seen from the York Street side where you can appreciate the incised abstract patterning in concrete of City Tower (apparently based on a circuit board) and the swirling ramps up to the car park. Opposite on George Street is The Exchange, a very elegant telephone exchange of 1967, nicely renovated.


Gateway House stands in the way of a HS2 'world city' nightmare

Manchester’s exceptional heritage of modernist buildings is celebrated by the enterprising Manchester Modernist Society but less so by a City Council, keen to ‘get things done’. The next casualty seems likely to be Seifert’s 1967 Gateway House at the approach to Piccadilly Station. Clare Hartwell says is ‘a very impressive long, sweeping, undulating façade, the horizontals stressed throughout. One of the best of the 60s office blocks in Manchester, its glistening serpentine shape well suited to the sloping site’. But despite plans for its renovation the City Council wants to sweep it away as part of its ‘vision for the transformation of 140 acres of Manchester city centre and Piccadilly station (which) captures the regeneration potential of HS2’s arrival and envisages a major transport hub at its heart, befitting Manchester’s status as a world class city’. What is illustrated is a clone city, random shapes in glass all thrown together, which unfortunately is what ‘world city’ now seems to mean. After 30 years of this stuff, after Nairn, Meades; after Owen Hatherley’s ‘Ruins’, does anyone really believe in this shit? Is the aspiration of a great city like Manchester so low? Oh God!


The Chinese Quarter – feels like a world city


Canal Street - sober by day,  fun by night

At least the City is doing the right thing with the magnificent Edwardian Police and Fire Station next to Piccadilly Station on London Road, which has gone to rack and ruin after a credulous Planning Inspectorate turned down an earlier CPO. Up Minshull Street is another magnificent building, the Crown Courts designed by Thomas Worthington (1867) on Ruskinian principles with a wonderfully asymmetrical tower. The original buildings were sympathetically extended in 1997. The Courts face yet another open car park; in a town with so few green spaces surely this should be public gardens. Across Minshull Street is all the fun of Canal Street. The Chinese Quarter north of Portland Street is similarly full on, as is ‘Curry Mile’ south of the university precinct.


Oxford Road, calm down


Impressive scale but a hostile environment

Manchester has one of the largest university precincts in Europe with something like 80,000 students. The 1967 Wilson and Womersley plan aimed to bring the disparate higher education buildings of Manchester University, UMIST (now merged), the colleges which became Manchester Metropolitan University and the prestigious Royal Northern College of Music together. The precinct covers a sprawling zone south of the Oxford Road railway viaduct and to either side of the infamous Mancunian Way. But it does not feel like a campus, having little coherence or sense of identity being dominated by roads, creating isolated blocks and buildings. There is a distinct lack of public spaces, apart from the quad behind Waterhouse’s magnificent original Victoria University building and Grosvenor Square. Original plans to close Oxford Road were dropped in favour of upper level walkways. The Precinct Centre spanning Oxford Road shows clearly what a very bad idea that was. Few of the post war buildings are noteworthy and the best one, the Maths Tower by Scheerer and Hicks (1967), has recently been demolished. As Urban Realm commented, this was an architecturally bright building in a dreary campus: ‘what you will mainly see are university buildings totally lacking imagination and style. Of almost all the university buildings of the last forty years, only the Maths Tower has grace and scale’.


Impressive forms ...


... but poor town-planning

The university precinct replicates the failure of central Manchester to design social spaces, convivial places, reflective corners. It is all traffic, bustle and buildings turned in on themselves. Yet the traffic on Oxford Road could be reassigned to parallel streets and the street reimagined as a green spine for the campus. A tram could replace the endless procession of competing buses and give the university both legibility and the connectivity it currently lacks. This would also help put two of Manchester’s big cultural institutions on the map; the quirky Manchester Museum, with its mummies (part of an important Egyptian collection) and the Whitworth Gallery.


Intimacy and detail, what a relief! The Whitworth Gallery

The Whitworth, tucked away in a park between the University and Moss Side, has an amazing collection of watercolours, textiles and paintings from the pre-Raphaelites to modernists. In the 60s it was one of the exciting places in Britain for new art. Yet the building itself, 1908 in a Jacobean style, has always seemed underwhelming, not helped by extensive alterations in the 60s. Now it has been very cleverly and beautifully renovated and extended by MUMA. Much of the change has been to reinstate original galleries and features, lost in earlier alterations, and to create new relationships between the gallery and the park, mostly in a subtle way but the projecting oblong glass box of the café is startling. Highly praised by Rowan Moore it was too crowded to really appreciate on the opening day when we visited. The landscaping has yet to be completed.


Manchester Modernism – something to savour and learn from

Some way south of Whitworth Park is Owen’s Park, a place of pilgrimage for modernists as here you find the Toast Rack, a college building designed by the City Architect L.C. Howitt in 1960. It was described by Pevsner as ‘the perfect piece of pop architecture’ and is a hugely popular icon of Manchester, but was sold recently by MMU, its future uncertain.


UMIST – A lesson in imaginative townscape: levels


Enclosure


Bridge


Rhythm and form

The best part of the University precinct is the former UMIST, which actually feels like a campus. The white concrete Renold Building (1962) was one of the earliest tower and podium buildings in Britain and has a strikingly faceted east façade. It faces a very pleasant sunken quad, with graceful curving steps down to it – the sort of design consciousness conspicuously missing in the greater precinct. The concrete Faraday building (1967) has fascinating abstract patterning and textured mosaics entitled 'The Alchemist’s Elements', this being the chemistry building. North of the railway viaduct the splendid original Municipal School of Technology, completed in 1902, shows what municipal pride was all about.


A mastery of dissimilar forms  


Fibonacci sequence ruined

Manchester Town Hall is usually regarded as an ultimate expression, almost an orgy, of municipal pride. But to put it in context it is one of three magnificent town halls in Greater Manchester, along with Rochdale and Bolton. Nairn says ‘the outside is harsh, symmetrical and does not tempt; but go inside. Here Waterhouse indulged his fancy as nowhere else’. The Town Hall faces Albert Square but Nairn recommends the best way to come on it is from the south, because that way is the climax of a lesson in abstract geometry. You see the tower of the Town Hall, the gable-end of the Town Hall extension and the cylinder of the Central Library. The neo-Classical library (1930) and the neo-Gothic extension (1937) are both by Vincent Harris; ‘whatever you think about the architecture you have to concede an absolute mastery of dissimilar forms’. These days we are not sniffy about Vincent Harris, so it is no surprise that the Council’s crass and ignorant new ’pavilion’, joining the two buildings in order to effectively privatise the walkway between them, met with a storm of protest. The gentle curve of Library Walk is not a bit of dangerous left over-space, as the council portrayed it, but rather as the C20 Society contended, one of the most brilliant pieces of urban planning anywhere creating an enticing sense of space with rewarding vistas at both ends. Unfortunately the Planning Inspectorate has again shown its lack of judgment in allowing the closure of the walkway. A visit to the Central Library is highly recommended. Beyond the gimmicky revamp intended to make the library ‘relevant’, innit, the reading rooms remain in all their glory.


Breathing space, at least until more tram platforms arrive

Across the way is the sumptuous Midland Hotel and next to this the fine façade of the former YMCA, again luscious terracotta. These buildings act as a sort of equivalent of G.G. Scott’s St Pancras Hotel vis-a-vis the Barlow train sheds behind. Manchester Central’s span is only slightly less than St Pancras but unfortunately Betjeman did not save Central for trains. It is now a conference and exhibition centre with quite a well considered new entrance pavilion.


Barbaric Square

South of Manchester Central is Barbirolli Square, a non-place named after the famous Halle conductor. Here Bridgewater Hall timidly looks onto the space, upstaged by a Michelin-man-like office block opposite which bankrolled its development. The Free Trade Hall, which Bridgewater Hall superseded, was described by Pevsner as ‘perhaps the noblest monument in the Cinquecento style in England’. It is now a Radisson Blu with a 15 storey tower behind. Bridgewater Hall is a superb auditorium for concerts. But it just doesn’t cut it as an architectural statement for a great city. This is the problem with Manchester; in its eagerness to ‘get things done’ it is often over pragmatic and settling for second best.


Wanted: landscape architects

It  is most obviously the case with Manchester’s public realm. Central Station, the Midland Hotel, Bridgewater Hall, Central Library, the Town Hall and City Art Gallery are all hugely significant for the city. They cluster together and they should be in a 'world class' setting, but instead the spaces between are non-places - voids where tram infrastructure and traffic is king. New paving and seating around St Peter's Square is well considered but the square itself is being sacrificed as a tram interchange. This sort of expediency is just not good enough. What Manchester should be thinking today is what Copenhagen thought decades ago. There too is a city with a northern climate and a tradition of grand buildings not engaging with the streets. But there streets have been rethought as civilised, attractive social spaces where the pedestrian and cyclists are given priority. Yes some busy shopping streets in Manchester are pedestrian but the place just does not get the concept of the civilised street. Paradoxically, whilst never attempting to re-shape itself for the car like Birmingham, this has allowed the motorist to retain dominance over the streets and spaces; Manchester is still in thrall to the car.


Pavement widening and good street furniture – this is a start

Manchester, the Northern Powerhouse, is potentially on the cusp of a new era of municipal independence and enterprise. But it also needs to re-engender that municipal pride which made the city great in the past. This must extend to the  public realm. The city is full of activity and great buildings but its many elements need to be plugged in to a greater whole, as Nairn was saying 50 years ago. It is not enough to ‘get things done’; the quality of city life depends on small scale details, fostering human interaction, attractive public spaces.  Manchester needs to be building for a sustainable future, a green future in every sense. It needs the sort of overall environmental thinking of a Bristol or Leicester, let alone the vision of a Copenhagen or a Helsinki.

Let's hope that Manchester, which has reinvented itself many times in the past, can reinterpret municipal pride for a post neo-con future.

--

The definitive guide to Manchester's architecture is Clare Hartnell's Pevsner Architectural Guide published by Penguin 2001.

Owen Hatherley's Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso 2010, is a powerful critique of the cultural and political underpinning of Manchester's urban regeneration.

Nairn's Town's, reprinted with an introduction and postscripts by Owen Hatherley, Notting Hill Editions 2013, is a wonderfully incisive analysis to  the city.

The Manchester Architectural Guide, by Eanmon Canniffe and Tom Jeffries 1998 provides a concise and very useful overview of the architecture and planning of Manchester.

The Manchester Modernist Society

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  bypasses other important places such as Milton Keynes, Coventry, Stoke on Trent, 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



Further References
Christian Wolmar on HS2
http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/News/HS2-and-how-it-will-affect-you/

A classical civilisation

Bradford impresses. Here, unexpectedly and nestling in the most glorious countryside, is one of the grandest and most distinctive of English cities, a city of fine honey coloured sandstone buildings, thrilling views and exciting juxtapositions. This may not be the usual take on a city coruscated for economic decline and social problems, one of Gavin Stamp’s ‘Lost Cities’ willfully vandalised by planning, but prepare to be surprised.


Bradford: good at corners and chimneys – Kirkgate

Bradford is a Victorian city, indeed a Victorian phenomenon and arguably it was already in decline before she died. Now in the shadow of Leeds, in its heyday it was very much the equal of its larger neighbour, if always very distinct from it. It is a Pennine town, an out of the way place off main transport routes, but became the centre of the huge worsted woollen industry. This trade was massively developed by an influx of entrepreneurial German Jews in the mid C19th. The results of these two factors, as the Bradfordian J.B Priestley noted in English Journey, were very curious - Bradford became at once one of the most provincial and yet one of the most cosmopolitan of English cities. Its huge enterprise and prosperity for a time eclipsed Leeds, but Bradford relied on one industry whereas its rival’s economy was always more broadly based.


Rise and fall – Dale St


Bradford Metropolitan District Council – Britannia House

A fundamental characteristic of the West Riding towns is their jealously guarded separateness and their strong relationship to the countryside. Bradford lies in a bowl between the hills with a saddleback ridge at its centre, steep valleys to either side that make for superb townscape and great views. Priestley (unfairly and disloyally) thought Bradford ‘a city entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly … but has the good fortune to be on the edge of some of the most enchanting countryside in England. A sharp walk ….. will bring you to the moors, wild virgin highland …. and the whole city forgotten’. Maybe less so today. Asa Briggs in Victorian Cities comments ‘the Pennine towns are not at one with their surrounding country, they are one with it’.


The Story of Wool by William Mitchell (1968), Ilkley


It's as if the station had just been ripped out – Forster Square

The strong relationship of town and country is expressed today in the boundaries of the City of Bradford which extend over the moors and dales to include towns like Shipley, Bingley, Keighley, even Ilkley and the Bronté’s Haworth. With a population of about half a million it can claim to be the fifth largest city in England but the economic reality is different. Not one of the ‘core cities’, it has instead been dragooned into the ‘Leeds City Region’. That the fortunes of these cities have continued to diverge is evident from a train journey. As you approach Leeds Station, one of the busiest, most crowded stations on the rail network, you get a salutary view of the scale of development in recent decades (much of it horribly bad it is true, but note Bauman Lyon’s excellent extension to Tower Works near the tracks). The local train from here to Bradford ends in the pathetically truncated Forster Square terminus. There is hardly anyone about. The real station was destroyed in the 1960s, leaving Trubshaw’s grand Midland Hotel at the front with a gaping townscape void of car parks, retail parks and blankly gormless new offices behind. Same happened to Exchange Station, which had double train sheds almost as wide as King’s Cross, now replaced by the Crown Courts, in ashlar sandstone that the Buildings of England calls expensive-looking and facetiously detailed. Fragments of the massive station walls survive but the Great Victoria station hotel is horribly exposed. Trains now arrive at Interchange, effectively a large bus station, the more impressive 1970s original concept reduced in scale and dumbed down for our century.


Bradford – Paris (The Midland Hotel)


Bradford – Glasgow (Upper Piccadilly) 


City scale on Manor Road

However our arrival at Forster Square was fortuitous. We emerged from what now passes as a station into a space defined by vast arches and retaining walls, above which rears a great stone warehouse. Eight storeys high and dated 1892, derelict, it is nothing special by Bradford standards but somehow encapsulating what we were going to see, a great city fallen on hard times. Instinctively we turned north up the hill of Cheapside towards the derelict colossus rather than going directly to the city centre, so had a very different introduction to Bradford. Cheapside is impressive in its scale and the consistent use of local sandstone, but the buildings are restrained, workaday, somewhat dour at times. There is an echo of Presbyterian Glasgow. The earlier wool warehouses on the parallel Piccadilly are smaller in scale, plain but accomplished. The vista along Upper Piccadilly is terminated by the refined Italianate Register Office of 1877, a superb piece of townscape.


Friendly and informal


Does anyone still do this? Fun on North Parade. 


The Yorkshire Penny Bank (not penny pinching bankers)

North Parade has a laid back fin-de-siècle vibe, an interesting street of shops and cafes with some fabulous architectural flourishes. This includes some really striking Art Nouveau iron and glass. At its apex is the 1895 Yorkshire Penny Bank, where paradoxically sobriety and caution are thrown to the winds in what the Buildings of England calls ‘gorgeously exuberant Free Renaissance’, the best of many fine banks in the city. North of this fun masterpiece the townscape is eviscerated by the inner ring road, reinforced by a monstrous retail park that raises two fingers to everything, including the topography and some lovely if run down stone terraces behind. That’s how Thatcher put the Great back in Britain. Along the ring road the imposing lead-domed Central Mosque could do with a more dignified setting.


Building Societies (not HSBC) – Highpoint


On the foothills of the Pennines  


Sunny Sunbridge Road

The townscape of Goitside, on the other edge of the saddleback ridge, is more industrial and if anything even more stunning. Along Sunbridge Road you see muscular steel-framed Edwardian warehouses with great round arched windows and stone banding like La Plata House, and many other buildings with names evoking the extent of Bradford’s trade. Views down the steep side streets across the Goit valley are magnificent, especially looking towards the university, but you also see the utterly witless Bradford College with its silly crumpled roof line aping Zaha, and a big ‘B’ logo. Actually I would say it was a fail. Some of the warehouses are still in marginal use and others have been converted to flats but sadly many are derelict and open car parks now seem to be the biggest industry around here. Above, on Grattan Road, is more dramatic townscape like the Woolston Warehouse. Opposite this are early council house tenements from the 1900s, two storey in brick and render, recently renovated and with some new infill trying hard (and quite successfully) to be a good neighbour. You could not say that of Highpoint, a beyond-Brutalist office block sitting atop the ridge. Owen Hatherley (approvingly I think) says it is ‘utterly freakish, the severed head of some Japanese giant robot clad in a West Riding stone aggregate, glaring out at the city through blood red windows, the strangest urban artifact in a city which does not lack for architectural interest’.


The impressive Wool Exchange


Where civic elders meet


Hustlergate – ancient and lively

Bradford’s more conventional architectural interest cascades down the ridge from Highpoint towards the Town Hall, a tight and confusing pattern of streets which is the commercial heart of the city. Apart from Ivegate, which is one of the oldest streets and a market town muddle, and the obligatory Waterhouse terracotta Prudential together with  mid C20th chain store typologies, the architecture is consistently restrained sandstone commercial buildings of the second half of the C19th and early years of the C20th. They are generally three to six storeys, sometimes higher and nearly all have been cleaned to reveal their warm honey colour and articulate detailing. A few remain in the soot blackened state which no doubt had much to do with their lack of appreciation in the mid C20th. These buildings are confident but unshowy, mostly Italianate but sometimes exploding into Gothic extravagance. The often acute angles of the streets add a lot to townscape opportunities with good corners to exploit, some almost of Flatiron slenderness. This is undoubtedly one of the finest and most extensive architectural ensembles in the country. The piece-de-resistance is the Wool Exchange of 1867, symbol of Bradford’s great trade and built in Venetian Gothic, ‘freely treated’ according to Pevsner: maybe not original but suitably sumptuous for a boom town. The Exchange is on a triangular site and part of the elevation to Hustlergate has been rebuilt in glass, fairly savage surgery to facilitate the conversion of its central hall to Waterstone’s. This was probably a price worth paying allowing you to enjoy the interior as well as the gorgeous facades. On adjacent streets, including appropriately Bank Street, are a great number of splendid banks, the Art Deco classical Lloyds of 1920 being the grandest.


Very metropolitan – Lloyds Bank

Kirkgate: the previous shopping centre mistake ... 


... but it's not without external form and texture

Given this superfluity of fine buildings you may wonder where the ‘Lost Cities’ bit comes in, but I have glossed over the Kirkgate Centre. Whereas the destruction of Bradford’s fine stations was something done to it, the demolition of Kirkgate Market, an early glass and iron market hall by the city’s ubiquitous architects, Lockwood and Mawson, was a self inflicted wound and one which will never heal for older Bradfordians. The Kirkgate Centre which replaced it was designed by John Brunton and Partners, also responsible for Highpoint, but whereas that is dramatic, if hated, the 1975 shopping centre is just depressing with a deadening impact on the streets. ‘Brutally out of scale in dingily Brutalist pre-cast concrete’ is what the Buildings of England says. The Rawson Market to the north was also destroyed although the façade remains. Another cause célèbre was the destruction of the Swan Arcade opposite the Exchange, replaced by John Graham’s 1965 Arndale House, which at least has quite a lot to commend it as architecture of its time. An empty shop below the office tower is called ‘The Emporium of Dreams’. The exciting International Modern style former Co-operative department store on Godwin Street is also empty – the sad denouement of other dreams.


Global capitalism affronts Little Germany

Bradford’s latest dream is the Westfield shopping centre, much delayed but currently under construction on what was for years the huge ‘Wastefield’ hole in the heart of the city. It is difficult to share the enthusiasm of the Council for this project, intended to re-boot Bradford as a shopping destination. The problem is that all it offers is the usual malls and the standard range of retailers many of whom, like M&S, will relocate from the existing shopping streets hastening their decline. The development is deliberately inward looking, not wanting a relationship to the outside world and looks set to become another sort of hole; an urban black hole. The elevations are piss poor, so puny and desperate to be inoffensive as to be really offensive. And this matters as their backsides are right up against the Cathedral and Little Germany, effectively barricading real Bradford off. The contrast between the architecture to either side of Well Street and what was Forster Square is truly shocking. And Bradford has promoted this scheme - but the outcomes are an expression of relative power of the developer and the city. In their formulaic, cynical and exploitative ethos, shopping centres like this diminish rather than regenerate cities, which have little option but to acquiesce to the tyranny of global developers like Westfield.


Bet Westfield don't do this – Bradford Cathedral


The provincial village which became an industrial city

Bradford Cathedral is essentially a C15th parish church and even pre-Westfield somewhat isolated. Unfortunately plans to create a museum in the former Tanner GPO on Forster Square with a new connection to the churchyard behind were shortsightedly dropped. Across Church Bank is Little Germany, the finest concentration of warehouses in the city and possibly England, as spectacular and specific to Bradford as Westfield is banal and anonymous. The tall sandstone buildings crowd narrow hilly streets like Vicar Lane, great canyons of architectural invention and detail - skylines, chimneys, turrets, corners, angles, curves, metalwork, arches, doorcases, windows surrounds, astragals – a townscape of delight. Relative isolation probably saved Little Germany from the iconoclasm of the 1950s which destroyed the similarly grand warehouses nearer the city centre. Much has been done to conserve and renovate the area in recent decades and with a fair amount of success. Buildings have been cleaned and repaired, new uses found including creative industries and apartments. There are few gap sites and few dilapidated buildings but lots of empty and ‘To Let’ buildings. The area is hardly buzzing with life - few people on the streets, little evidence of the hip cafés, trendy shops and restaurants that might signal gentrification. Like the similar if smaller and brick-built Lace Market in Nottingham, the conservation of Little Germany looks like a Forth Bridge job.


Still has international quality – Little Germany


Among the best townscape experiences in the country


Thrilling details


In good nick but ... 

A more animated part of Little Germany is approached along Leeds Road, in itself just about the vilest street in Bradford, urbanity and townscape blown away by the City Engineer and the deadliest new buildings. But on the north side, between the terminal blandness of Westfield and the comparative interest of the strange curved black glass po-mo effort in the distance, the real city re-asserts itself with the Well Street warehouses, the superb Eastbrook House. At the corner of Chapel Street is the Bradford Playhouse and Film Theatre. With its strong Priestley associations this is a Bradford institution but seems to lack the financial support it needs, which is short-sighted as it is clearly injecting some much needed life into the area.


.... lacking in activity


Well there is an election on – Leeds Road


Crikey, there's loads of this stuff – Eastbrook Hall

Of course Leeds Road doesn’t have to be this dreadful. What on earth is the expressway for anyway? It should be redesigned as an urban promenade linking Little Germany to City Park. City Park is a bit of a misnomer, but is what actually emerged from the eccentric Alsop masterplan for the city centre. It is an extraordinary indictment of the state of the provincial political economy that a city like Bradford should be so lacking in self confidence as to pursue such headline-making fantasies. But Alsop’s analysis was not altogether wrong. Bradford had suffered little wartime damage but was determined to reshape itself with an ambitious redevelopment in Portland stone and dual carriageways of a large zone south of the Town Hall. This fragmented, impersonal townscape of large, mostly pompous and public buildings set in a labyrinth of traffic and subways could not be more different form the tight streets and (at the time soot blackened) Victorian sandstone buildings which previously characterised the town. By the 70s Bradford’s relative decline had become absolute, and it got worse. The Alsop masterplan was an expression of desperation for change, for investment and recognition. He was right to reimagine post war Bradford without all the bloody roads,and to see the potential for green space instead. But knock down all the 'concrete monstrosities' (hiss, boo) for a lake surrounded by a liquorish allsorts collection of wacky shapes and garish cladding??? Well it attracted attention which was really the point.


Great pool, but lacking in greenery and pleasant enclosure


Northern civic pride – Town Hall & St George's Hall


Town Hall – fantastic which ever way you look at it

The problem is what happens after that, a dumbed down, cost engineered palimpsest of the wild imaginings of the auteur. That is City Park. The lake has become a mirror pool, quite an impressive paddling pool and fun fountains with a causeway up the middle. On a sunny school holiday afternoon it is heaving with young kids and smiling parents, very popular and democratic and must be rated a success. But April is the cruellest month and in the biting wind of a sullen schoolday its deficiencies are obvious. The Town Hall is exceptional by any standards, the original 1870 building, again by Lockwood and Mawson, in a C13th Gothic style with ideas ‘borrowed’ from Burges’s design for the London Law Courts. The 1905 extension by Norman Shaw is in a clever mixture of styles. The great feature, and symbol of Bradford, is the tall, slim, Tuscan campanile. The Town Hall is a spectacular building but its relationships are awkward and its qualities are not best served by the open spaces created around it. City Park now engulfs it and it is not so much a park as an entertainments plaza. Curving around the mirror pool is a horribly misconceived parade of eateries and bars surprisingly designed by Panter Hudspith. Although there is a whisper of good design in the colonnade, it ends up low, mean and boorish. An idiot screen pours out the inanities of daytime television. If you look hard you will notice that the new structure also incorporates a library and art gallery, but these have no presence and are overwhelmed by the food and drink ‘offer’ which spills out into the ‘park’. Horrible. And there is hardly any greenery – City Park is a very hard space.


The Magistrates Court – designed by the city architect


This is not Trespa – The Magistrates Court 

If only Alsop’s green cartoon had come to pass, sweeping away the idiotic dual carriageways, the Police HQ et al to create an urban forest. But no – in the small print of his plan Alsop came up with the concept of an ‘Office Forest’. So the creepy Police HQ is coming down not for a park but for prestige offices. Bradford has something of an obsession with prestige offices. For years the HCA pursued the redevelopment of the Odeon, across the dual carriageway, for iconic (sic) Carey Jones designed offices. That scheme has been abandoned because of public resistance, a rare success against the property-led regeneration juggernaut. The 1930 Odeon, last of Bradford’s great cinema leviathans, is more an example of public memory and affection than architectural value, its grand interior wholly altered and the main feature being two domes. These echo the adjacent Alhambra Theatre, originally built in 1914 and modified and enlarged by Renton Howard Wood Levine in 1986. Beyond this again is the National Media Museum, originally built as a theatre by Seifert and Partners in 1965 and extended in 1999 by Austin Smith Lord. It is an offshoot of the Science Museum and an important asset for Bradford which ought to have a better setting and a clearer relationship with the city centre. J.B Priestley stands in the shrubbery in front of it. Next to him is the impressive Central Library, again 60s Portland stone, apparently considered too boring for the yoof, so now shorn of its main function which has been transferred to compete with Nando’s and THE Chinese Buffet. At least the original building is being refurbished for other civic functions.


Manchester Road Brutalism, under threat of demolition


Britain 2015: Priestly overlooks an unnecessary inner ring road

The constellation of these important cultural and civic facilities west of Prince’s Way should surely have suggested a different approach to City Park, one which was genuinely about the public realm and the quality of the environment, not gimcrack gimmicks. If Alsop’s original vision had been more honestly followed through there could have been a real park, getting rid of the dual carriageway and the Police Station which blocks both views and desire lines, to create a coherent and dignified relationship between the Town Hall (and the old commercial quarter) and Bradford’s main cultural facilities with the University beyond.


At the university: it's all downhill from here – College Old Building


The Hockney Building


Colours of Bradford


Cladding ruins the integrity of the Richmond Building

Great Horton Road which leads to the University has some good buildings, including the 1880 Bradford College, described by the Buildngs of England as ‘fine and fulsome Italianate’. We had already seen the ginormous new David Hockney building from across the valley but from Great Horton Road it looks somewhat better. There is even one elevation that eschews garish cladding and has a go at fenestration, which is quite a relief on the eye. The University is ‘not one of the more memorable campuses architecturally’, says the Buildings of England, which is something of an understatement. The main 13 storey block dating from 1965, originally faced with sandstone has been most horribly over-clad in blue and white panels in the most ignorant way. At least the ceramics decorating the protruding lecture theatre have been retained. There is not much else to say about this lacklustre campus. Bradford University is a disappointment, not just architecturally but in its lack of impact on the city. Whereas in Sheffield, a similar sized city, the universities have a very obvious and very profound impact on the economy and city life, in Bradford you just don’t get that impression at all. Which is a pity, given the many underused assets of the place which a vibrant university could exploit and enhance.


Perfect planning and the social ruins of Thatcherism


Aspley Crescent – if this was in London etc etc

The extensive prospects towards the northern hills are dominated by Lister’s Manningham Mill and that amazing chimney. Manningham was the premier suburb of the city and is stuffed full of what should be delightful stone villas and terraces. The problem is that it is fractured from the centre, although some very fine buildings do remain along Manningham Lane. When you reach more coherent Victorian suburbia what initially looks very picturesque often turns out to be run down and badly cared for, like Aspley Crescent with its subtle enclosure or the set piece views towards St Paul’s, reminiscent of Blackheath. There is litter and rubbish everywhere, walls broken down, period details crudely altered. Local authority cutbacks seem too glib an excuse for neglect which is squandering the city’s assets.


Manningham Mills


Disconnected from the neighbourhood 

Manningham Mills dating from 1873 are vast in scale and ambition, an integrated silk mill in ‘robust if slightly impure Italianate style’ covering an astonishing 6.5 hectares. That chimney is 75m high, ‘the most direct Italianate reference, an industrialized sandstone version of the campanile of St Mark’s in Venice’ (Buildings of England). It has partly been converted to residential by Urban Splash, with penthouse pods protruding above Heaton Road. Overall the external impact of conversion is minimal, just a few splashes of colour at side entrances. And there is little activity, the community centre says it is closing down. The yard between the two converted wing is open to the public but highly uninviting with deterrent paving, although there is a boardwalk promenade above basement car parking. No one is about; it is all kind of eerie. The rear wings of the complex remain pretty damn derelict. Although obviously great that parts of the mill have renovated, this regeneration scheme has not had the impact on the locale that might have been hoped for.


Chimney and obelisk


Conscientious philanthropists: visiting Saltaire since 1850


Says it all really

Saltaire is a similarly grand project, here not just the great mills but a utopian industrial settlement based on Robert Owen’s New Lanark. Titus Salt located this vast integrated worsted works away from Bradford in the rural Aire valley although now engulfed by Shipley. Begun in 1850 and designed by Lockwood and Mawson it is ‘ground breaking in its emphatic architectural presence …. and the clarity and logic of its plan’ (Buildings of England). The 165m spinning mill is situated on a narrow site between the railway and the canal and you approach from the west side, so don’t always fully appreciate the scale. Textile production stopped in 1986 and the mill has subsequently found an impressive range of new uses, largely through an inspired and unconventional 'developer', Jonathan Silver. This has been done generally with minimal adaption to the buildings, and none of the standard regeneration tat of ‘enabling uses’. New uses include an electronics manufacturer, some excellent specialist retailing, the 1853 Gallery with a large Hockney collection and even a Health Centre as well as flats.


Lessons in townscape


Lessons in housing

The successful reuse of the mills has got quite a lot to do with Saltaire itself. The planned town of well designed largely terraced stone houses on a grid which rises up the side of the valley is remarkably well preserved. The neat planning recalls the urban qualities of small Scottish towns, no doubt the New Lanark influence. The United Reformed Church with its semi circular and Corinthian columns and circular tower above is very fine but somehow un-English. Saltaire could teach house builders and planners today a lot about place-making, economy of layout, how to handle corner buildings, and provide social and cultural facilities, although originally no pubs or pawn shops were allowed. Now the streets have a laid back feel, almost like Hebden Bridge, a sort of old hippy, U3A demographic, always alive to the opportunities of an interesting day out. What is noticeable is how well maintained everything is here compared to the conservation areas of Manningham. Saltaire is undoubtedly a big success story.


An impressive city centre ... 


...  full of streets like this

The problem for Bradford is how to reinvent itself like Saltaire, but on a much, much bigger scale. But if Saltaire’s success is based on its architectural quality and its environmental ambience, well at least Bradford has the former. Bradford impresses, but it also disappoints in how it is dealing with the latter. Long economic decline, and slipping out of the big league of English cities inevitably makes it difficult to be confident and ambitious about the future. But the sort of Alsop gimmickry is a real distraction from what it should be doing, which is capitalizing on its exceptional architectural assets within a new green, sustainable framework. To hell with icons – you’ve got them already but UK plc needs to use them.


Alsop can't compete with Little Germany

Stockport, Cheshire. Well actually Greater Manchester for the last 40 years, although to historians, estate agents and most of its inhabitants it will always be Cheshire. But the town is not situated on the verdant, pastoral Cheshire plain with its winding lanes, white painted metal fences and sudden valleys of bubbling brooks that you see from your ‘awesomely’ expensive Virgin train to Manchester. It is not Cranford, where Miss Matty’s successors enthusiastically vote for George Osborne and the new workhouse. Rather it is the edge of the Peak District. Lyme Park, where Mr Darcy thrilled part of the nation with his televisual wet shirt dip in the lake, is just beyond the boundaries of the borough. Stockport’s hills and dramatic changes of level as it tumbles down to the Mersey are the essence of the special character of the town.


An ancient market town


A varied topography

But the Borough of some 300,000 people also embraces large tracts of another kind of Cheshire, Manchester’s Cheshire suburbs such as Cheadle Hulme and Bramhall, where I was married. These have little relationship with Stockport and, being 10 miles or so from Manchester city centre, were always a largely separate world, a sort of northern Surrey. Today they are ever more like exurbs, with an economy and society revolving around motorway junctions, Manchester Airport and John Lewis and its acolytes on the A34 bypass rather than connected to the vibrant life of the metropolis.


The old view – Hillgate


The view everybody knows – Wellington Road

Stockport is one of the satellite industrial towns to Cottonopolis as much as Lancashirian Bolton, Oldham or Rochdale but in places it also has the feel of an agricultural county town. If you drive through the town centre along the A6 Wellington Road, a C19th turnpike improvement, you miss all this. Stockport looks pretty ordinary and quite Southern with lots of very undistinguished office blocks and run of the mill commercial buildings, relieved by a blustering Edwardian Town Hall and some decent C19th public buildings. But if you follow the old road, Hillgate, you find some of the most unusual and rewarding townscape in England. It is rather like manyItalian towns with the old  town set above on the hill with the modern, less interesting bits down in the valley below.


The 1840s and the 1970s

The M60 thunders along the Mersey valley north of the centre and from it the view of the town’s backside is dismal. The prospect is enlivened by impressive sandstone outcrops and a bizarre pyramidal Co-op office block (originally several were planned). You also get superb views of the famous railway viaduct built in 1840. It strides across the valley on 27 brick arches with that wonderfully satisfying engineering simplicity. The frequent trains add excitement, at least for an ex train spotter, but it is a pity that the catenary gantrys bolted to this elegant structure are so clunkily inelegant. The viaduct straddles the earlier Wear Mill on the bank of the river.


The spectacular and the banal


Stockport Station – the dispiriting welcome

With Stockport you have to persevere beyond initial poor impressions. It is well served by intercity trains and its station has recently been revamped with a glassy circular entrance hall. Unfortunately the approach to the station from Wellington Road must take the prize for the most goddam-awful in the country. You have to run the gauntlet of a tawdry, tenth rate leisure complex where McDonald’s Drive Thru sets the standard. How any town could ever have thought this was an acceptable ‘gateway’ beggars belief. It speaks volumes of the lack of ambition, and power, of planning, which is all terribly depressing. A new public space with offices and an hotel is promised as part of Stockport’s new regeneration masterplan but don’t get your hopes up. The bus station provides an equally unprepossessing entrance to the town, basically rows of bus shelters in the shadow of the magnificent railway viaduct. But the location is convenient for the main shops and a new grander Interchange is to be built which would also accommodate future Metrolink extensions. It also promises to ‘improve’ the (non-existent) links with the railway station but how is not clear, which usually means this is an aspiration rather than a practical plan. Surely extending Metrolink from East Didsbury to Stockport Station is the answer.


The Mersey: could be a more spectacular farewell 


A heritage and community success story

Mersey Square, across Wellington Road from the bus station, continues your underwhelming introduction to the town. But this large space fronting the Merseyway Centre is more interesting than it initially looks. The Mersey actually flows underneath it, culverted in the 1930s, but you can still see it under Wellington Road, which begins to rise on a viaduct making interesting visual play with the magnificent railway viaduct beyond. Across the main road is the Hat Works Museum in an archetypal North Western mill with grand chimney – Stockport vied with Luton for that trade. Then the buildings rise up on the sandstone cliff behind the square, with municipal baroque steps leading upwards. Next to this is the Plaza, actually built into the cliff. It was designed in 1929 by the Manchester architect William Thornley and is one of the best preserved ‘super-cinemas’ of that period, creating a fantastical environment of neo-classical, Egyptian, Moorish and art deco motifs. The stepped art deco grey faience façade scarcely hints at the amazing interior. Closed as a cinema in 1965 it became a bingo hall but since 2000 it has been restored by the Stockport Plaza Trust which provides an enterprising programme of films and entertainments. A visit to the 1932 café-lounge is highly recommended.


Mersey Square...


.... is not really doing it


The Merseyway Centre opens up

Despite these positive elements Mersey Square is a bland place, certainly not helped by the horizontal blankness of the Merseyway Centre facades. The space is fragmented by confusing bus lanes which could surely be removed as part of the new Interchange. The Square desperately needs pulling together with a bold new landscape design, possibly opening up the Mersey again, and certainly introducing lots of greenery to what is a very bleak place. However although the Merseyway Centre is dull towards the Square, Ian Nairn with typical iconoclastic insight admired the way it was ‘plugged in’ to the streets around, and how well the vertical circulation worked. Designed by Bernard Engle in 1965 it has subsequently been extended, partly roofed over and generally dumbed down with superfluous tat supposedly to jolly it up, but you can still see why Nairn appreciated it.


Bridging Stockport – continuing the tradition


A street in the sky (and a nice old department store below)


Form, grid and tessellation 


Plugged in to the old fabric

The precinct was slotted in between the older streets, which largely retain their traditional buildings, and so it seems part of the wider town. Many elements of the original design were handled well: the lift and stair tower is an elegant campanile, the car park façade is interestingly modelled, the car park access bridges evoke the Stockport tradition of bridges and positively enhance the townscape. Even the service entrances are composed to provide interest to the street scene and are not just some yawning hole the architect has given up on. Originally the larger stores had entrances onto both the precinct and the street but many of the street entrances and shop windows have been closed, which would disappoint Nairn. This is especially unfortunate for the inter-war Baroque department store on Chestergate with its terracota, nice iron work and clock tower, now standing forlornly idle. The principles of integrating new with old can also be seen in later retail development along Warren Street, this time in that crude, quasi-industrial vernacular of loud brick, but although the details are poor the overall attempt to recreate a traditional street is reasonably successful, at least until it morphs into a giant ASDA with a brain dead retail park beyond. Some buildings are used to bridge the changes of levels between streets so you can take the escalator through Sports Direct and emerge in the Market Place above.


Urban surprise and anticipation – St Petersgate Bridge


A wonderful jumble


Townscape fun

The relationship between the market and the parish church of St Mary on the hill and the Underbanks area below is one of great townscape drama. The pièce de résistance is the iron bridge in St Peter’s Gate across the roofs of Little Underbank, quite a staggering sight from above and below. What are also spectacular are the stairs and ginnels up and down, which provide real excitement. Chestergate and Great Underbank, at the lower level and parallel to St Peter’s Gate, contain some of the best buildings including the Elizabethan timber framed Underbank Hall together with what Pevsner calls ‘bogus’ black and white buildings. Sadly the lavish Edwardian White Lion on the corner of Deanery Way, which the Buildings of England calls ‘a benevolent monster of a Jacobean pub’, is empty and boarded up. The architecture of Little Underbank is modest three storey Victorian with the odd flamboyant pub. The main event is the bridge and those dramatic flights of steps upwards. The Market Place is largely occupied by the 1861 iron and glass market – ‘nothing special’ said a sniffy Pevsner - well very special to Stockport. There is an earlier Produce Market opposite with a narrow but grand classical frontage. Around the square there is a pleasing variety of the sort of late Georgian and Victorian commercial buildings such as you might find in a prosperous market town. Behind the C19th brick façade of Staircase House are buildings of extensive earlier burgage plot development, all restored as a museum in 2005.


The White Lion – in a sad state


Another street in the sky – been doing it for years


Everything so well placed


Are we in Suffolk?

The exciting interplay of levels continues south of St Mary’s, between Churchgate, Lower Hillgate and High Street (which is a misnomer). The drama is accentuated by the towers and gables of Robinson’s Unicorn Brewery down on Hillgate, seen in wonderful juxtaposition with the tower of the parish church. Alleyways and stairs run up and down the hillside. This is an area of enormous character and potential, but much of it is very run down and clearly needing major intervention. More broadly this applies to Stockport’s shopping centre as a whole. On market day it seems reasonably lively but allegedly it has one of the highest levels of retail vacancy in the country. The Old Town area around the market was chosen as one of Mary Portas’s High Street Pilots with a small scale programme of improvement initiatives funded by Mr Pickles. However vacancy has subsequently gone up, but far from showing that Portas was wrong this rather exposes how dishonest and cynical the government has been about planning and regeneration, and what a disastrous Secretary of State Pickles was, the most damaging since Ridley. The main thrust of the Portas review has been ignored because dealing with declining high streets requires not token but substantive funding; not capitulation to the lowest common denominator of the markets but proactive planning, which is of course anathema. So places like Stockport, in the shadow of Manchester and struggling with competition from the motorway-based Trafford Centre and out of town John Lewis, as well as the internet shopping revolution, are left in a downward spiral.


Little Underbank – more intimate than Manchester


There are many ways ....


...  to climb this town


Civic Stockport continued – St Peter's Square

The Borough is trying to improve the area through some handsome street paving schemes and there is a free bus linking the Old Town with the station and bus station. St Peter’s Square has been intelligently redesigned, using all the standard ingredients – stone, fountains, trees, planting, street furniture and lighting but in a confidently low key way, reflecting the fact that this is always going to be a quiet space, which is just what is needed. The cantilevered seats are particularly elegant.


Municipal pride on Wellington Road


Very Barbican – Stopford House 


When you picked the wrong paint tin – Stockport College


St Thomas's Church – deserves more care

Stockport lacks a civic centre but its main public buildings can be seen on Wellington Road. The white stone Town Hall of 1904, in a somewhat unbalanced ‘free William and Mary’ style (Pevsner) is possibly more interesting internally than externally. The large extension ‘of uncompromisingly Brutalist design in mud coloured concrete’ is impressive, laid out around a grand gesture of open space (above the car park) with massive stairs and lush planters cascading down. Hardly used, the space has a sense of ruined grandeur (although actually well maintained) but for some reason the bureaucracy go to extraordinary lengths to stop skateboards and roller bladers, who might animate the place. Opposite the Town Hall is the Infirmary of 1832 with a long Ashlar front and Greek Doric portico and pediment, which ‘makes the Town Hall look very bumptious’ (Pevsner). Nearby is the ‘very free William and Mary’ Central Library of 1912, which reasserts some dignity against the McDonald golden arches opposite. On the corner of Greek Street is the classical War Memorial Art Gallery of 1925, most notable for its grand flight of steps. Opposite the dull, dolled up blocks of Stockport College is the picturesque St Thomas’s church, designed by George Basevi in 1822. Its west tower ends an attractive vista from Wellington Road but the surprise is the grand portico at the east end with fluted Ionic columns. Further south along the A6 is St George’s, the grandest church in Stockport with an extraordinary spire designed by Austin and Paley in 1896 and ‘even nationally speaking a masterpiece of the latest historicism’.


Nineteenth century suburbs – near Hillgate


Postwar high-rises their architect would no longer recognise, Lancashire Hill

South of St George’s lie the rich Cheshire suburbs, a very different world from industrial Stockport. Here big detached houses hide in larger gardens protected by automatic gates. Of course it is not all like this; we are not yet in the bling of footballers’ Alderley Edge or Prestbury, although George Best started this trend with his modernist pad in Bramhall, now much altered. Mrs Jonestheplanner, brought up in Cheadle Hulme, recalls an almost idyllic childhood of Famous Five adventures where comfortable suburbia quickly gave way to no-man’s-land fringes of countryside. These ragged edges have since been largely filled with standard builders’ estates and some of the grander houses have been replaced with blocks of flats The ‘village’ shops (which included the Bramhall shopping precinct wittily nicknamed ‘Lenin’s Tomb’) are now largely estate agents, café bars or beauticians. It is all very aspirational, smart and prosperous, a model for Tory Britain. But this suburbia is inevitably intensely anti-urban and unsustainable. Everything revolves around the car and there is no real alternative. From Bramhall there is only one train an hour into Manchester. The Stagecoach bus runs every half hour, takes an hour, and get this, in the evening is run by First which won’t accept Stagecoach tickets. There is a Waitrose near Cheadle Hulme station but John Lewis, Sainsbury, Tesco and M&S are all on the A34 bypass with the only public transport an hourly bus from Stockport.


That John Lewis slogan (again)


How we live today

However, instead of learning from these mistakes and planning for a more sustainable future, Stockport (and Manchester) seem determined to promote more decentralisation and suburban sprawl. Manchester’s big thing is the development of ‘Airport City’, an £800m Chinese investment in offices, leisure, warehouses and factories. So the airport, already served by rail from across the north of England, by Metrolink, the M56 and the M60 now apparently requires a new ‘relief road’. This will run through the fragile rural fringe of suburbia linking the M56 to the A6 in the Peak District. The business case is amusing, including creating 5,000 jobs, supporting lower carbon travel and providing shorter journey times for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users! And I’m a Dutchman, but our austerity government has of course funded it as ‘vital infrastructure’.


The belly of the place – To Let

The attraction of the Cheshire suburbs is obvious and development pressures on the rural fringe will become even more intense if the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ materialises. Meanwhile Stockport town centre declines; the market rules OK. What is lacking is a forward looking framework to shape a more sustainable future, the sort of thing Greater Manchester Metropolitan Council used to be quite good at, until Mrs Thatcher abolished it.



My ancient Pevsner is fairly perfunctory about Stockport. The revised Buildings of England for Cheshire by Clare Hartwell  and Matthew Hyde gives much fuller attention to the town and, published in 2011, is pretty up to date.

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.