Fabric was always disappointing after viewing this

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


An impressive race track for white vans and taxis


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

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


The Poultry Market - twinned with Coventry Market


Could easily be restored - The General Market

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


A grand procession

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


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


Charterhouse Square


Austerity Britain - College Hall

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


Future historians will point to Arthur Scargill's flat

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


The birth of the post-modern?

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


Getting lost is part of the fun

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


Light and space


A more reasonable design idiom than the Barbican

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


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


A bigger splash - contemporary municipal design

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


Reading the landscape: the Fleet valley descends on Wharton St


Sober and understated - Amwell Street

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


Looking for Albert Angelo - Percy Circus


Sleeping policemen - Charles Ronan House

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



An essay in social housing and Anglo-Soviet relations


Peabody takes over council housing at Priory Green

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


More grown up than the Walkie Talkie - Rosoman Place

--

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

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

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

To be just another dormitory of London

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


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

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


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

The strength and weakness of the HS2 project is that it is a completely new network. You can’t build it incrementally and it doesn’t connect with the ‘classic’ network (although hybrid trains will run north of Manchester and Leeds). It really only serves Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds and  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/

Modernism & road engineering

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


Twinned with Old Street, Birmingham and Croydon

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


East Berlin, or something like that

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


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


In vogue - at  last! Austerity modernism by Maccrenor Lavington

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


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


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

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


Traffic free (for a split second)

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


Would you like to walk this way...

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


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

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


This is what authority looks like from here

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


Strata looms over the lively Walworth Rd

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


Fugly - which ever way you look

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


Architect speak on Arch Street

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


Screwball Scramble - Heygate walkways

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


Absolutely flipping massive - Aylesbury

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


Aylesbury: old walkways, making way ...

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


... for Mr Sensible

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


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

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


Depleted social housing & container box retail

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


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

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


Packed - East Street Market

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


Gentrification & the destruction of social housing

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

Cities alien to one another can share similar circumstances

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


On the street where we lived, scooter eye view

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


Santa Chiara(like Coventry)

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


Archaeology comes to life at the Museo

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


Nottingham alabaster has pride of place in Capodimonte

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


One hell of an explosion

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


Democratic Space

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


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


... to the justice of the 1946 republic

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


Circumvesuviana station makes no compromises

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


One day Leeds may get one of these

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

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


OK I admit it, these are my holiday snaps

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

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


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


Shred this

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


Suspense


Crumbling back into the cliff


A huge architectural inheritance (perfect for Made in Chelsea)


Traffic wardens kowtow to Clarkson

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


The Communist Council of Catholic Clifton


Fact: Pope John Paul II loved Star Trek




Relax, we're in the south-west

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


The neo-liberal era

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


Something positive to build on: a cycling culture

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


Massive Attack this - with municipal transport

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

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

The industrial spirit, not the financial  – Parson's Polygon

Superlative Newcastle – that’s what Ian Nairn called it and he was right. No English city evinces the anticipation and excitement of arrival quite like Newcastle upon Tyne. The view of the river, those spectacular bridges and the old town clinging to a 30 metre gorge is literally staggering. I suspect that the East Coast drivers and signalmen proudly halt your train on the bridge, ostensibly waiting for a platform, but really just to show off this wonderful panorama, worth Richard Branson’s ransom fares. Newcastle is the most dramatic of the big northern cities with all this topography and engineering bravado, but it is also a city of restrained, masculine elegance. It has a confidence and pride rooted in exceptionalism, its character, like its accent, so very different from commercial Leeds or Manchester, or maritime Liverpool or Hull. Looking more like Edinburgh or Glasgow, it has a strong whiff of the Baltic too; as Nairn says ‘Lubeck seems nearer than London’. What makes Newcastle so special, apart from the topography, is its bold and often extremely successful town planning over two centuries. This was often ruthless towards Newcastle’s very evident long history, the results of which can be spectacular, but are sometimes crass and cruel.


Can't beat it – the bridges


A different view – The New Tyne Bridge

Newcastle had two great eras of town planning. The first was in the 1820s to the 1840s, when Grainger Town was laid out, one of the most urbane estate developments in England, inspired by Edinburgh’s New Town and Nash’s London. At roughly the same time Stephenson’s stunning High Level Bridge, with its double decks for rail and road, crashed into the old town, splintering the Castle in a thrilling expression of raw engineering power – the complete opposite of Grainger Town’s sophistication and carefully planned vistas. The Edwardian high water mark of commercial prosperity had a big impact on architecture if less so on the city’s form. In the 1920s the New Tyne Bridge, prototype of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, had an impact as dramatic as the High Level bridge. Then in the 1960s the American style City Boss T. Dan Smith, the sort of leader Osborne wants to impose on our cities today, attempted to transform Newcastle into the ‘Brasilia of the North’, a plan now almost universally reviled but with some interesting outcomes. ‘Regeneration’ has largely been focused on the Quayside where, icon-wise, Newcastle is upstaged by Gateshead. Wilkinson Eyre’s ‘Blinking Eye’ is the seventh glorious bridge linking Newcastle to its lesser cousin in only 800 metres.


Chimney pots and Crown Steeple off Mosley Street


The Roman coal miner 

That Newcastle should now have to share equal billing with Gateshead is fairly silly, but local rivalries are deep seated. The Tyneside conurbation extends to the Coast, including North and South Shields and resorts like Whitley Bay. The short lived Tyne and Wear Metropolitan County also included Sunderland on the Wear. Antipathy between the two cities goes much deeper than football, but in architectural and townscape terms Newcastle is in a league of its own. Indeed Nairn thought it one of the finest cities of Europe.


Welcome


A mixed reception: the refurbished porte-cochère


The station: still has a powerful grip on the city


Tony Blair

Newcastle Station certainly provides as fine an arrival as you could wish. The three great curving train sheds are reminiscent of York but more restrained, the severe classical detailing beautifully complements the engineering chutzpa. Designed in 1847 by Dobson, the architect of Grainger Town, there is more than a hint of German neo-classical, possibly derived via the superb Belsay Hall in Northumberland on which he worked. The portico and Station Hotel were added later, basically to Dobson’s designs. Recent refurbishment has generally been handled well, but the glazing in of the portico, whilst attempting to respect the integrity of the openings, ends up looking a tad crude, and is unnecessary given the spaciousness of the platform concourse. The copper cubes for Caffè Nero et al however shame more standard designs. Outside Central Station there is an initial sense of disappointment, not so much the buildings, which are mostly fine and dignified, but in the lack of an arrival ‘square’, the street although being nicely paved is dominated by milling taxis and traffic. The space bleeds away towards Pugin’s Cathedral and Farrell’s Millennium turkey, the ‘Life Centre’ around an arid, lifeless, ‘Times Square’.


High Level and Swing Bridge

Nairn advised always to begin your exploration at the Quayside but we couldn’t resist the temptation to walk the High Level Bridge first. Down Westgate, alongside the powerful viaducts leading towards the mutilated Castle, note Sleeperz hotel, like the one in Cardiff on a difficult narrow site next to the railway and again turning this to intelligent advantage, proving that budget hotels don’t have to be crap. Unfortunately this is a chain of just two hotels against Travelodge’s five hundred or so, for example. Stephenson’s bridge is 40 metres above the water on massive piers with cast iron boxes between. The road deck is suspended from the railway above by wrought iron hangers creating a cat’s cradle of ironwork that has a sensational impact. The views along the gorge are sensational too, and much more could be made of this bridge as an attraction if the narrow roadway were closed to traffic – there are three other road crossings nearby. Initially the Gateshead bank looks encouraging, quite left bank in fact with interesting uses in the viaduct arches and some good stone buildings. But this good impression quickly dissipates into wasteland and roaring roads, ironically feeding the New Tyne Bridge. This bridge structure with its great parabolic arch and monumental piers is intensely dramatic and the views from it are amazing too. You look right down on the roofs of the very fine, restored, C17th timber houses of Sandhill, and on the classical Guildhall and Queen Street. The Side, an extraordinary street, careers down the hill under the railway viaducts towards Quayside. It is all fantastic but unfortunately Cale Cross House, a 1970s office tower, muscles in on the scene. What could have been a bold C20th addition to the ensemble is ignorantly bulky and terminally bland.


55 Degrees North


Mosley St


Underneath Victoria's throne

RMJM’s 1961 block, now ‘55 Degrees North’, spanning the roundabout between New Tyne Bridge and the Central Motorway, is much more impressive. Like the bridges, it crashes into the cityscape, terminating dignified, patrician, commercial Mosley Street in a dramatic but satisfying way. The clean modernist silhouette has however been traduced by tat chucked into the void under the slab to jazz up the groundscape as part of its ‘regeneration’.


Milburn House: Austin Donohue's office

Mosley Street leads back from the roundabout towards the Cathedral and Central Station, with a very fine collection of mostly classical commercial buildings but including some well judged modernist redevelopments. Dean Street provides a short route down to the Quayside under the dramatic railway arches and in the shadow of New Tyne Bridge. It is lined with fascinating buildings, most strikingly Cathedral Buildings of 1901 in a free Jacobean style and the slightly later Milburn House in free Baroque style, both by Oliver, Leeson and Wood.


Northern Europe


The Sandhill ensemble 

The Sandhill ensemble continues west beyond the High Level Bridge, here called The Close, with the low level Swing Bridge added for extra excitement. The famous chares (stairs) ascend the cliff, as Nairn says producing ‘a kind of topographical ecstasy as you go up and down perpetually seeing the same object in a different way’. Piled up above is the classical Moot Hall and gigantic warehouses. Heseltine’s UDC provided a new riverside promenade and some cheap and nasty offices, like Riverview. Arup’s Copthorne Hotel is a strange beast – a well articulated façade to the promenade but completely blank towards The Close. How could that ever have been acceptable?


You couldn't make it up


Glasgow?

The excitement of the Quayside and bridges is palpable. Right below the New Tyne Bridge and the perfect foil to its gigantism is a brilliant set piece of townscape; an axial view along King Street of the C18th All Saint’s Church up the ravine, seen above one of the ‘chares’. The beautifully proportioned sandstone buildings look almost miniature, all fenestration and incredibly narrow elevations to Quayside. However this classic Quayside townscape quickly gives way to much larger scale regeneration. The Law Courts of 1990, faced in red sandstone, are imposing to the river but jarringly horizontal, aloof and isolated. The rear elevations in brick look very authoritarian. Most of the other UDC sponsored developments seem awkward and uncomfortable in this location, neither industrial quayside ethic nor vivacious fun, but rather pompous and overscaled. Even Piers Gough’s striking U plan St Ann’s Court offices could do with a bit of his trademark wit. This new Quayside doesn’t seem dressed right for a traditional Newcastle night out, although Panter Hudspith’s Pitcher and Piano pavilion, opposite the Millennium Bridge, does rise to the occasion and Malmaison, in a converted Hennebique reinforced concrete CWS warehouse of 1900, is very stylish. Behind these Quayside buildings is a monumental po-mo car park, indicative of a fundamentally wrong approach to regeneration. It gets worse up the hill on City Road with utterly depressing budget hotels and student flats, although back towards the centre you find the very humane asymmetrical brick Salvation Army men’s hostel by Ryder and Yates, 1975, respecting both its older neighbours and its former clients, as sadly it is now empty.


Regeneration tat


Baltic framed by the Millennium Bridge and those bloody flats

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Quayside urban renaissance is the poor relationship of the new buildings to the water, and the dull paving and landscaping of the promenade compromised by traffic and at times frankly bleak. A design competition for new public realm here would be an awfully good idea. Wilkinson Eyre’s Gateshead Millennium Bridge for pedestrians and cyclists is one of the few truly worthwhile souvenirs of that great non-event. Echoing the form of the Tyne Bridge, its tilting mechanism is unique. Seeing the ‘Blinking Eye’ opening against the sunset is a truly great experience. The new bridge links Quayside to the Baltic Contemporary Arts Centre, another ballsy, imaginative Millennium initiative of Newcastle’s other half. What was once a Rank Flour Mill, only built in1950 and in a bricky quasi Deco style has become massive gallery space. It makes a huge, positive and confident statement for Tyneside.


The public space between two major cultural attractions. Strewth. 

The third element of Gateshead’s design and arts led regeneration is the vast, amorphous, silvery Sage Music Centre, designed by Lord Foster, sitting high up on the bank. This strongly divides opinion, including mine. Gavin Stamp in Private Eye savaged it as ‘a gigantic metal cliché which wrecks the scale and drama of the Tyne gorge …. looking like a giant slug or a big shiny condom. …. This big, bulbous steel sheath looms over everything, not least the Baltic Centre; its crude, tinselly form screams for attention and diminishes even the great high level bridges’. Which is a bit harsh. The Tyne gorge can take big scale and the Sage is after all one of the country’s leading concert halls, so surely has some right to draw attention to itself. The gross Hilton Hotel spilling out over the riverbank between the High Level and Tyne bridges is far more of an affront to civilization. For me what is more disappointing than the Sage’s external impact is the mall-like concourse and the poor quality of the overall roof at close quarters. The other big disappointment is the external spaces – well there aren’t any, and pedestrians find their way up from the Millennium Bridge through a series of car parks. The Baltic too is degraded by a crush of Cardiff Bay style apartments which crowd in around the great mill, crudely aping its characteristics and diminishing its presence. These are matched in banality on the Newcastle bank.


Things to savour in Gateshead: the old Town Hall ...


... and the old Co-Op ...


...  but what do you care? 

The Gateshead icons certainly add to the critical mass of Newcastle’s quayside, but do nothing for Gateshead town centre, up the hill and cut of by a no-man’s-land of traffic and dereliction. The town centre was always going to play second fiddle to Newcastle’s city centre and was fatally undermined by the vast Metrocentre megamall off the A1 bypass. Gateshead does however have a somewhat isolated clutch of dignified stone Victorian civic buildings. The present Civic Centre, designed in-house in 1978, lacks gravitas being deliberately cosy vernacular. There are some good commercial buildings in Jackson Street but High Street was pretty much zapped by Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder’s Trinity Square shopping centre, with its celebrated ‘Get Carter’ car park, the ultimate Brutalist chic.


The pits


Tesco Town

This in turn was flattened to enable the construction of an execrable mega-Tesco with piled-high student flats, designed by 3D Reed. It was pipped at the post for the 2014 Carbuncle Cup by a similar Tescotown in Woolwich. Oh come on! That is clearly Metropolitan chauvinism: this is worse even than Woolwich, towering over High Street, with tacky camouflage cladding occasionally breaking out into desperate attempts at jollity. But the worst thing of all is the gormlessly crude ‘pavilions’, like Godzilla’s spawn, rearing up over the Tyne skyline with cheap wrap-over roofs, no doubt ‘inspired’ by the enveloping skin of the Sage. Strangely there are hardly any windows taking advantage of what must be genuinely ‘stunning views’. The only element of the whole abortion showing any sense of design is the escape stair towers of the student barracks on West Street. As Owen Luder commented ‘the first principle of demolition should be to put up something better than was there before. Whatever you think of the car park, this project is much worse.’ Thoughtfully a plaque records the Get Carter heritage. You can escape back to Newcastle via the Metro Interchange. This is a lesson in 70s introversion,  recently duffed up with lots of art works which you are enjoined not to climb on.


Subtlety and restraint


Grainger Town

The great thing about Grainger Town is its subtlety and restraint. This was speculative development but is a wonderful example of town planning, not creating a new town but superimposing new streets which continue and link together the structures of the old town. Nairn says ‘because it is so unobtrusive it comes over the visitor gradually, then with a feeling of tremendous homogeneity; this is not an architecture of a few set pieces, but the spirit of a whole city.’ Grainger Street is the formal axis, leading from Central Station to the grand Monument (to Lord Grey, instrumental in the 1832 Reform Act which paved the way for civic liberties subsequently stripped away by Westminster’s paranoid centralisers of recent decades). Grey Street forms a continuation of steep Dean Street, and leads gently uphill and in an elliptical curve to the Monument, providing a wonderful sequence of vistas. Nairn compares it to Nash’s Regent Street ‘with the added dimension of better workmanship, one of the great planned streets of Britain …. Half way up the Grey Memorial comes into view, and then at the same time the projecting portico of the Theatre Royal. This is a stroke of genius, for the end of the view is now not one object but a composite made up of a constantly changing balance of tensions; point and counterpoint, speared space and netted space’. However the local buff sandstone, now all cleaned, can look pallid, and it may have been better to heed Nairn’s strictures against removing the characterful soot. The view of the street southwards from the Monument is utterly wonderful, if in your mind you can screen out the pitiful dross of Trinity Square which now terminates the vista. Deck chairs are lined up in front of the Monument for Geordies to enjoy the prospect, or more likely the (hopefully temporary) idiot big screen that has been erected here.


The Northern Enlightenment

Dobson, whose name is usually twinned with the speculative developer Grainger, was apparently not the main architect, just the most accomplished. The Theatre Royal wasn’t designed by him, nor the Central Exchange Buildings at the apex of the two main streets, subsequently remodeled in the 1900s as the Central Arcade in riotous Burmantofts faience, just like the Leeds arcades. What a contrast with Dobson’s superbly austere Grainger Market.


Grey Street


Emerson Chambers: a break from the classical

By the 1990s Grainger Town was in serious decline, but the renovation of the area to a masterplan drawn up by EDAW in 1996 has been a remarkable achievement of the enterprise of City Council and English Heritage, not least in getting funding out of jobsworth quangos. Today the area looks well cared for, if not as lively as it deserves to be, with many of Grey Street’s handsome buildings now chain restaurants and bars. The public realm improvements, designed by Gillespies, are particularly good, using high quality materials complementing the stone of the buildings.


Weimer Co-op


What's left of Eldon Square - dispiriting 

The earliest part of Grainger Town, Eldon Square, was lost to a 1970s shopping centre which stole its name. Fragments of the buildings survive, as do the gardens of the square. The design of the shopping centre was rather more carefully considered than most of that era, possibly because Wilfred Burns, T. Dan Smith’s Planning Officer, was instrumental in influencing Chapman Taylor’s design. The bulk of the shops is in part disguised behind retained façades and the height reflects the surrounding buildings. Monumental blank brick façades to the square were rather more impressive than the apologetic glassy additions. Burn’s successors have been less careful with the various extensions and accretions of the centre which are stereotypically uncouth, brash and crude. The prospect of Eldon Square from Percy Street is of unbelievable urban excrescence, your very worst nightmare about what is happening to our cities come true. There could not be a more telling contrast with Grainger Town; what a city of contrasts Newcastle is. On Newgate Street, almost lost behind all this tat, is the great Art Deco Co-operative department store, built in 1931 and inspired by Weimar store design. Once the pride of Newcastle it is now being converted into a budget hotel. Up Gallowgate is the interesting former General Electric Co. building of 1933 with metal cast figure reliefs that were also used in Battersea Power Station.


Glasgow again?


St James' Park – a little bit Pompidou

Nearby at St James is another startling Newcastle contrast. Leazes Terrace, really a rectangle and in part facing Leazes Park, was built in 1829 for Grainger. It is the grandest development of its period, built in fine ashlar stone with great Corinthian columns and pediments. In Nairn’s day almost derelict, it is now handsomely restored by Newcastle University. The amazing bit is that the terrace faces directly onto St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s massive stadium, originally built in 1973 but with great mast-hung tiers added more recently. The relationship could not be more daring and the result is great townscape theatre. On the other side of the vast stadium, across Barrack Road, great cliffs of student flats in screaming Trespa make an altogether less satisfactory contrast and a dismal urban experience.


A design ethic


Effort

So important is St James’s Park to Geordies that it has its own Metro station. How civilized is that? That Newcastle has a real Metro is fairly amazing and speaks volumes about the city’s former confidence and ambition. It also underscores quite how desperately poor public transport is in the other Northern Powerhouse cities, where Manchester pretends its trams are a metro and Leeds can’t even get a tram. The Tyne and Wear Metro is essentially five suburban rail lines linked together with two underground lines across the city centre. One of these breaks out to bridge the Tyne before diving back under Gateshead. The system was designed as an entity and has a distinctive design ethic and identity. The underground stations are expansive and have a strong 1970s vibe, all platform heels and big hair. The yellow and black trains are fast, efficient and fun, especially if you get to sit in the front seats next to the driver’s cab and so get the driver’s view. The only downside of the Metro experience is being told not to take photographs for ‘security reasons’.


You can sit next to the driver!

The Metro was designed as an integrated system with interchanges for local buses, but deregulation means that the privatised bus companies now compete, resulting in far too many buses swirling around the city centre. Meanwhile the Metro system is relatively under-used, with trains at much lower frequency than on the London Underground. It would surely be sensible to make better use of the investment in the Metro’s underground lines and stations by building more suburban extensions. At the same time the buses which clog the centre should be regulated.


Whitley Bay, awesome coastline but where is everyone?

The aboveground stations built along the older rail lines are quite basic but there are some fantastic survivals of grand railway architecture, like Tynemouth and Whitley Bay, great cathedrals of glass canopies designed for the holiday crowds which are now just a memory. Whitley Bay, like so many seaside resorts, is a sad place. The sands, rocks and sea look fine and with the curve of the bay to the lighthouse it still looks like a faded version of one of those fifties British Railways posters. But even in August the place is almost deserted; we couldn’t even find an ice cream. Where has everybody gone?


Scandinavian dreams


The integrated bird box


More imaginative than most new housing today


Learn from Byker and build council housing. Now.

A few stops along the Metro from St James is Byker, one of the most unusual and impressive housing developments of the last half century. Built in the 1970s it was, extraordinarily, commissioned by a Conservative Council in those last swan-song days before Thatcherite deconstructionism. The architect Ralph Erskine, who practised in Sweden, was appointed because of the way he involved communities in the design process and this is a seminal feature of Byker. The estate is most famous for the ‘Byker Wall’, which shields the estate from the noise and pollution of the unnecessary, sunken Shields Road expressway. The Wall is really striking, the entrance from the Metro being under an eight storey brick section in a sort of abstract, almost Aztec pattern. Once through the Wall the south facing elevations are largely white rendered, hung with wooden balconies in primary colours and what look like blue tin roofs with abstract pinnacles. But most of the estate is low rise, laid out in a very informal way, not with conventional streets but actually surprisingly legible as the terraces work with the levels of the site which falls away towards the Tyne. There are generous open spaces acting very much like urban squares. The terraces again have lots of timber, often in red, green and blue, sometimes black and white. The terraces’ metal roofs and porches look almost ramshackle and rural, especially with the ample and mature landscaping. It recalls Alvar Aalto and indeed the Scandinavian roots of the design are very evident. The estate feels comfortably scruffy and adaptable, almost hippy and definitely not in an architectural straight jacket. It reminded us of the best parts of the more recent and acclaimed Västra Hammen development in Malmö. Although scruffy it is not run down, and indeed major repairs are currently underway. Byker is a tour de force and a success story, but it was never completed because of ideological politics, more’s the pity.


A Miesian Metro station – Jesmond


The quality of Jesmond


Could be North London

Jesmond Dene


Metropolitan suburbia

Jesmond has the most stylish of the Metro stations, a black Miesian box set in gardens and serving this highly desirable suburb right next to the city centre. Jesmond is not as picturesque as Clifton, as leafy as Edgbaston or as gentrified as Didsbury. It is an unassuming and highly liveable places with villas and terraces from the early C19th through high Victoriana, exceptionally good fin de siècle terraces and mansion blocks of the thirties to modern infill. It does do spectacular too: along Jesmond Road past a striking concrete classical bus garage and Dobson’s solemn cemetery gates you find the Armstrong Bridge promenade high up above Jesmond Dene, the extensive woodland and parkland following the Ouseburn valley. What is striking is that Jesmond has quietly retained its attractive residential qualities right through the post war years. It is not full of students like Headingley, nor has it suffered the sad decline and neglect of Manningham; it just works as a good place to live. However, despite its proximity the city centre it is cut off by maniacal urban motorways.


This is a bit of a problem isn't it?


Crikey!


I'm lost!


MEA House

The Central Motorway running from the New Tyne Bridge to Jedburgh Road at Town Moor, and spewing out equally devastating spurs to other major roads, was a centrepiece of T. Dan Smith’s vision for reshaping the city centre. It is still an excitingly futuristic drive and the sculptural high level walkways, all part of the imagined multi-level city centre, are interesting. But they don’t compensate much for the inconvenience, dislocation, loss of legibility and the great damage done to the inherited fabric of the city. It could be argued that the way the motorway slams into the C17th Holy Jesus Hospital is only a more recent reinterpretation of a great Newcastle tradition, like the railway scything through the Castle, but the results are dismal. And the attempt at a multi level city doesn’t really work. Try following the walkways from the new City Library and Laing Art Gallery, outside which Heatherwick’s ‘blue carpet’ artwork is looking very frayed and threadbare, to the recently listed MEA House. You negotiate steps and spirals and walk nervously through an abandoned walkway shopping arcade, abandoned that is by everyone except junkies. Surprisingly the walkways are used by quite a few cyclists; despite their drawbacks they are no doubt safer than the traffic dominated alternative. MEA House was designed by Ryder and Yates and completed in 1974. It gives a tantalising glimpse of what was envisioned in those heady days. The structure spans the road and links directly to the upper level walkway system. Low and horizontal it is a powerfully expressed building. Adjacent terraces are reflected in the glass walls. Northumbria University stretches north of MEA House, a collection of buildings with not much coherence as a campus. A cable-stay pedestrian bridge across the Central Motorway links to the recent glass and steel clad City Campus East.


Impressive brutalism – The King's Road Centre


Campus townscape


The Old Library

Newcastle University’s campus on the west side of the centre, towards Town Moor and Leazes Park, is also enfolded within the tentacles of the urban motorway. Towards the city centre it faces Percy Street and the horror show of Eldon Square’s extensions. Like Northumbria, the campus lacks coherence but apparently a masterplan by the ubiquitous Terry Farrell will provide ‘a new southern aspect facing and welcoming the town’, although this is not yet apparent. Basil Spence’s physics block (the Herschel Building), which Nairn thought the best modern building in Newcastle, is immured somewhere in furious building works. The plan is to open up vistas of the late C19th exuberant Jubilee Tower leading to the Quad of the Armstrong Building. The King George V1 Building of 1938 is anything but exuberant but rather fine in its pomposity. Of the many post war buildings, what stood out for us was the Kings Road Centre of 1960, described by the Pevsner City Guide as ‘strong shapes in exposed aggregates, granite, bronze mesh, assertively interesting among historicist neighbours’. The brick clad Claremont Tower and Daysh Building by Sheppard Robson, 1968, have impressive scale and sharp, clean lines.


Municipal Dreams


River God Tyne  

Between the two university campuses sits the Civic Centre. This was designed by the City Architect, G.W.Kenyon, in 1958 and opened a decade later. Clearly influenced by pre-war examples such as Hilversum and Swansea amongst others, it is not original but extremely satisfying. The buildings are arranged around a quad, low on three sides with a slab block to the north. What is particularly lovely is that the block towards Barras Bridge is raised above low brick vaults and so open to both the quad the entrance gardens. The circular Council Chamber thrusting into the gardens is also raised above a ground level forest of columns. The campanile has an open crown, like the Cathedral. Metalwork and artwork are carefully integrated into the whole ensemble, and the use of brick, stone facing and concrete is very successful. We could not see the interiors but, glimpsed through the windows, the civic spaces look extremely handsome. The lavish artworks by Victor Pasmore and others we owe particularly to T. Dan Smith’s personal visions of the city and of art. Today the City Council is one of the hardest hit by Osborne’s cuts and will struggle just to survive financially. The Civic Centre reminds us of the sort of civic vision and initiative that cities like Newcastle used to have.


The spirit of Nairn

In 1967, Nairn revisited Newcastle and was less than impressed by the Civic Centre - ‘the City Hall, now complete, is not heartening at all; literal nullity without virtues or vices’ he said. For once the great man was wrong. But he was not wrong in his admiration and affection for Newcastle. In ‘Words in Place’ Gillian Darley and David McKie note that on his death certificate Nairn’s place of birth is recorded as Newcastle. He was actually born in Bedford, but his heart was in Newcastle.


Imagine not being dependent on the City of London

--

Thanks to Nick Sanders for his company and insights.

Although written over 50 years ago, Ian Nairn’s essay on Newcastle, republished in ‘Nairn’s Towns’ by Notting Hill Editions, 2013, gives superb insights and analysis of the town. An afterword by Owen Hatherley reflects on subsequent developments.

Owen Hatherley’s chapter on Tyneside in ‘A guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’, Verso, 2010 is also a must-read.

The Pevsner Architectural Guide to Newcastle and Gateshead by Grace McCombie, Yale, 2009 is invaluable. The revised Buildings of England for Northumberland, Yale, 2001, provides additional detail.

Those infamous Pathfinder clearances


But hope on Granby Street

Nearby, the community renovation project around Granby St, facilitated by the young team of Assemble Architects, is truly heartening and has been nominated for the Turner Prize. As local resident Erika Rushton explained to Olly Wainwright in the Guardian,  ‘Toxteth suffered from decades of ‘managed decline’, with life inexorably drained from its streets. An invisible red line was drawn around the area with an unspoken policy of no maintenance and no investment. Once houses start to be boarded up, it sends a signal. Bins weren’t collected, streets weren’t swept and Granby became a no-go area. Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders was only one of the most recent of such schemes that have systematically eviscerated the communities here to make way for promised visions that never arrive. Everyone just offered a total solution: every house would be done, with no recognition of what people had crafted into their individual homes, or the value that people had invested in the street with planting and building furniture. Regeneration is always this blunt, abstract, over-professionalised, but Assemble have shown how it can be done differently, by making things that people can see, touch, understand and put together for themselves.’



Not the most impressive campus


What Manchester doesn't have – a huge Georgian inheritance

Toxteth is just a short walk from Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter. It is probably the most extensive and impressive concentration of Georgian terraces outside London, Bath or Edinburgh. This gives the city an important added dimension, lacking in say Manchester. Percy St and Gambier Terrace are probably the finest of the Georgian streets. The expansion of Liverpool University campus unfortunately resulted in much demolition of Georgian terraces and the quality of most of the new university buildings is not that great, the most notable being the Sports Centre where Denis Lasdun deliberately stuck two fingers up to everyone, even managing to annoy Pevsner. Nevertheless the University campus is a pleasant and lively part of the city centre.


I don't think the car park does it justice


Deceptively massive


Elizabeth Frink and twentieth century Gothic

Hope St is a great street. It forms the axis between Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and the Metropolitan Cathedral. Giles Gilbert Scott’s immense Gothic enterprise was begun in 1904 when, as Joseph Sharples points out, the city was at the height of its prosperity, but it was not completed until 1978, at the city’s nadir. The cathedral sits on a ridge and dominates the view from the river. However it is fairly inaccessible from both the Waterfront and the city centre, and seems almost deliberately set apart from the life of the city. Its interior spaces are awe inspiring and have immense power. Goodhart-Rendel wrote ‘it stands aloof from architectural reality ….. it is a great engine of emotion or nothing’.


Like nothing else in the country


Fibreglass doors by William Mitchell


Impressive but not intriguing 

Frederick Gibberd’s Metropolitan Cathedral, built in the 1960s, was the most important Roman Catholic commission of the post war era and ground-breaking in its circular plan and in being constructed in concrete. Its cylindrical tower with pinnacles responds to the Anglican cathedral’s tower and is the most striking aspect of the building. The interior however lacks subtlety, and the abstract windows and artworks feel too overpowering. The great flight of steps up to the entrance was added relatively recently.


Bang on


Herbert James Rowse: one of the best British architects of the interwar period?


Everyman - file under metropolitan world class etc

Hope St contains other great buildings too. The Philharmonic PH is the most lavish of those lavish pubs from the turn of the C20th, especially notable for its urinals. The cubic Philharmonic Hall, designed by Rowse in 1936, draws heavily on Dudok. The foyers and concert hall are purely delightful, with lovely etched glass, incised Art Deco reliefs and other works of the period. The Hall is currently being refurbished and upgraded by Caruso St John. At the top of the street is the rebuilt Everyman Theatre, designed by Haworth Tomkins and Stirling Prize winner in 2014. The RIBA citation says ‘this is a building that breathes quality in its choice of materials, in its lighting and its signage. …. The tour de force is the first floor bar, a piano nobile stretching across the front of the building’. This is a really attractive and democratic building where the care taken in every aspect of design is a joy.


File under provincial, lowest common denominator etc

Liverpool has other interesting theatres too, like the Playhouse with its futuristic extensions at Williamson Square and the Royal Court nearby at Queens Square, which is really a dreadful bus station. Both are in the shadow of the execrable St John’s Centre. The huge challenge for Liverpool is how to reimagine and reshape this area to create a fitting entrance to the city. Given the Lime St story it is difficult to be optimistic that this will ever happen.



Princes Dock - a has-been before it has even begun 

It is hard to understand or justify many of the planning and regeneration decisions made by Liverpool in recent decades. The official rationale is always that it is about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and it is the case that the city, neglected and distrusted by an absurdly London-centric Government and economic establishment, has had some success in strengthening its economy. But a ‘World city’ has too often been willing to accept the lowest common denominator in its regeneration schemes and so has degraded its unique assets in the process. Why would you want Liverpool Waters to repeat all the mistakes of Princes Dock on a grand scale? Gavin Stamp in ‘Lost Cities’ says ‘the sad conclusion of an architectural history of the city since the second world war can only be that Liverpool is its own worst enemy’. Well with apologies to Ernest Bevin on Aneurin Bevan, ‘not while Whitehall is around it ain’t’.


Such history

Liverpool’s assets are enormous – the river front, Albert Dock, Stanley Dock, the magnificent commercial buildings, the city centre shops and buzz, its theatres and music venues, its fantastic museums and galleries, St George’s Hall, the cathedrals, the Georgian architecture, universities, parks, football clubs. This is a great city. But, unlike arch-rival Manchester, Liverpool doesn’t have a holistic vision of its future. The Mayor sees shiny new development as an end in itself. Liverpool Vision, the Urban Development quango does have some vision  beyond counting tower cranes, but it is not very well articulated and its plans are effectively sidelined.



Erm, where's the tram, cycle lane, tree-lined boulevard etc?

What Liverpool desperately needs is not more cheap ‘icons’ but a strategy for creating a high quality public realm and an efficient and effective public transport system. It needs a long term green strategy, like its erstwhile peer Hamburg. The quality of Liverpool’s public realm in most key areas is lamentable. Strand St is unbelievable, Lime St a shambles and about to get worse. By contrast George Ferguson, the elected mayor in Liverpool’s old rival Bristol, is taking a real lead in raising an environmental vision, as is Peter Soulsby in Leicester. His ‘Connecting Leicester’ strategy serves as a model for what Liverpool should be doing.


This is not world class public transport

But then Liverpool, with actually low car ownership, is dominated by the culture of the car, like its sister city Glasgow. This is a difficult psychosis to change because it is all about the aspirations of decision makers. Like all provincial cities deregulation and Whitehall micro-control of capital investment means that public transport is uncoordinated and fragmented. Merseytravel, the ‘Integrated Transport Authority’ is piss poor. There are no maps or timetables at bus stops; even the bus numbers aren’t displayed at stops. Buses are a complicated mystery but I solved one - there are no buses to ‘Liverpool Waters’. Liverpool dismantled its Overhead Railway but it does have two railway lines across the city centre, the Wirral line and the Northern line with four underground stations. But compared with Newcastle’s Metro stations these are mean and cramped, hidden beneath commercial redevelopments, except for Lime St. Trains only run every 15 minutes. In Marseille, the Liverpool of France, super efficient metros run every couple of minutes, and of course are co-ordinated with buses as well as cool new tram lines. This really adds to the quality of your urban experience and the ability to navigate a big city. But Merseyside’s tram project was vetoed by the government in 2009, somewhat ironically by Labour’s present candidate for London Mayor. Divisions between the Merseyside authorities didn’t help.


Think about it

A big part of the problem of Liverpool's failure of vision is the failure to create a Greater Liverpool, leaving Merseyside politically fractured and fractious, a persistent source of political and economic weakness. Bootle would rather be joined with Southport 20 miles away than with Liverpool, which is on its doorstep. New York, with which Liverpool used to compare itself, was consolidated as a powerful political entity in 1898. Imagine if it had remained a disunited ‘Hudsonside’. Liverpool meanwhile cannot give its name to its conurbation.

It's all about surfaces now

It’s a few years since we explored Birmingham for Towns in Britain. More recently we have been concentrating on the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ for our forthcoming book Cities of the North, but lots is happening in the ‘Midland Engine’ too, or at least in Birmingham. Indeed the scale of change at times looks like a frenzy of self-harm, the City having lost its memory but still holding to its psyche of naïve optimism about the value of newness, thereby condemned to a perpetual cycle of destruction.


An impressive new space ...


... but not very welcoming

But we had come principally to look at the new New Street, which opened last year to mixed reviews. Nothing good could be said about the old New Street, so comparison with that sets the bar pretty damned low indeed. And certainly by that comparison the new New Street is massively better. True the platforms (where work is not yet completed) are as grim as ever, although improved circulation is promised. But once you have struggled up to the concourse, there is a certain wow factor. Wow, there is a lot of space! It is not completely heaving. I can almost see where I want to go. The exits, which previously you could never ever find, are now pretty obvious. But unfortunately you can’t get directly to where you want to go because the concourse is cut up by a series of pens, which are the waiting areas for the dingy platforms below. You have to find the ticket barriers to escape and then, rather than emerge directly into the grand concourse, you skirt around the periphery which is actually quite gloomy and grey, with wavy baffles half hiding the service ducts above.


Wow.... no, hold on a sec ...


... very flimsy 

The new concourse if unobstructed would be the equivalent size of a football pitch and the scale of the dome too is impressive. Thirty metre arched trusses frame vast curving roof lights, creating something of the feel of an enormous spaceship from the War of the Worlds. But after a frisson of excitement disappointment sets in. The space does not have the sheer energy of a Calatrava or a Grimshaw on a good day. The finishes look cheap, with a tensile PVC fabric structure draped like a net curtain, dowdy and saggy in places. The original concept has been dumbed down and value engineering can be seen everywhere, especially in the jointing.


Grand Central – Bull Ring: the never-ending shopping centre

The other big problem for me is that the station has effectively become a shopping centre. Yes, I know it was buried beneath one before but this was meant to be a grand statement about the city and an exciting entry for visitors. But unfortunately the arrival experience is very secondary to the mall experience. So instead of the thrill of the grandeur of space in, say New York’s Grand Central or Milan’s Centrale you are offered a Westfield experience instead. The central space, as well as being divided by barriers, is cluttered up by a ginormous Pret a Manger. Why? All around you on two levels is a mind boggling array of eateries. This is the Grand Central shopping centre, which has effectively eaten the station. Tellingly the signage for the visitor points you to Grand Central – a marketing invention – not New Street station. There seems to be a (perhaps unconscious) design ethic which makes everything that is public and about the station very downbeat – the shy, inconspicuous ticket office makes this point very obviously – with the many shops and eateries dazzling and very loud in every sense.


This should be one big public space

The logo for Grand Central is (presumably) a stylized transit map of dots joined by lines but interestingly none of them connect. Of course New Street station is not alone in being taken over by shopping and eating – look at St Pancras or McAslan’s King’s Cross extension, both swamped with retailing – but at least Barlow’s shed and Cubitt’s austerity more than hold their own against this, as does Stanton Williams’ new King’s Cross square. Milan Centrale is now approached through a shopping arcade but even the vast Armani ads impertinently defiling the great staircases can’t compete with the grandeur of this station itself. New Street however does not counterbalance Grand Central.


Screens and mirrors – the age of the selfie 

The new New Street is actually not so much new but a massive, and very cleverly conceived, reimagining of the old structures. The platforms haven’t changed and through the atrium you can see the 60s offices and multi storey car park. From the streets these have been hidden behind wrapping of over 5,000 glittering stainless steel panels. This creates a funfair distorting-mirrors effect. You see the sky and the activities of the streets and also the disjointed reflections of Virgin, London Midland or Cross Country trains – an apt metaphor for the fragmentation of our railways. The panels are very bright and dominating, but dynamic and fun. They express the glitzy character that Birmingham seems to aspire to. The video ‘eyes’ at the three main entrances however are horribly alien and assertive. Instead of providing train information, as in the artist’s impressions, they now show shitty advertising videos and occasionally welcome you to GRAND CENTRAL. New Street station doesn’t get a look in, which visitors might find bewildering.


New tramlines on Corporation Street towards the station 

New Street station has always lacked a formal relationship to the principal city streets, being literally buried behind New Street itself. The revamp has little opportunity to change that. An attempt has been made to create a square between the station and the Bull Ring, but the abysmal quality of the buildings around it negates this effort. This underlines the problems of creating a half decent pedestrian connection between New Street and the planned HS2 station on the other side of the Bull Ring shopping centre. The approach from New Street itself takes you to the upper level of Grand Central and via a circuitous route to the platforms, although it is fairly easy to navigate. Outside the Midland Metro, Birmingham’s single tram line, is being extended to Stephenson Street. The new south entrance from Station Street is the most impressive approach, with a grand flight of steps up, surrounded by reflective panels with the sober drum of the new John Lewis building above. This is bolted onto the south of the Grand Central complex, very staid next to all the glitter – its form expressing the store’s ethos and clientele.


Townscape reflections

Birmingham is immensely proud of its new station and you can understand why. It has replaced an albatross around the city’s reputation with something much more impressive and which works immeasurably better. So it seems churlish to criticize, but really this is because of the poverty of aspiration that provincial England has been reduced to. Birmingham needed a much more ambitious railway station, not another shopping centre. It requires more platforms, and should accommodate HS2 integrated with the regional network, not a separate station half a mile away. And rather than a token tram on Stephenson Street, Birmingham needs a real Metro system – it is the largest city in Europe not to have one.

Of course in London vast rail projects are de rigueur: Euston, Old Oak Common, Thameslink, Crossrail, Crossrail 2. Elsewhere in Europe the deficiencies of the rail network in major cities have been comprehensively addressed, in Vienna, Stuttgart or Malmö for example. But not in Britain’s second largest city. It is not Birmingham’s fault – we need to look to the other end of HS2 for the culprits.


Texture and structure – New Street's signal box

Along Navigation Street, past the sublime Brutalist signal box – the best thing about New Street – is the Mailbox. This was a gargantuan postal sorting office, built in 1970 and converted in 2000 to upmarket retail (Harvey Nicks et al), Malmaison, offices and flats. This was 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 the Pevsner Architectural Guide says. A narrow internal arcade was cut through the structure leading to the Worcester and Birmingham Canal basin, with shops on three levels. Recently the Mailbox has been revamped by Stanton Williams in a cool, elegant understated way. The arcade, previously open to the skies, has been glazed in and a multi-functional ‘urban room’ created. This looks very inviting except for the threatening presence of security, although I managed to take one photograph without the normal ritual confrontation.


Mailbox has class interior but heavy security – so no pictures

The Mailbox in its confident restraint is very different from the assertive, blingy character of so many other Birmingham developments, like the Bull Ring, Grand Central and Make’s ridiculous Cube. It has an aloofness which gives additional poignancy to the juxtaposition of affluence and desperation you see in all city centres today. Outside Malmaison a mentally ill rough sleeper hurls abuse at her fellow dispossessed and passers-by in general, a shocking indictment of mental health care, social policy and housing policy in Tory Britain. I passed by on the other side of the road like a Pharisee, of course.


Alpha Tower – in the shadow of cranes 

Along Suffolk Street and facing Centenary Square is another of Birmingham’s really class buildings – the Alpha Tower, designed by Richard Seifert and Partners in 1969-73 and recently listed. As English Heritage noted it is ‘one of the most aesthetically successful office buildings in Birmingham with a shaped outline and careful detailing giving it a dynamic forcefulness’.


Give it forty years – the Mecanoo library

Across the vast space that is Centenary Square is Mecanoo’s new library, the biggest in Europe. The scale is certainly enormous and it is brash. You can’t miss it, and that is the point in Birmingham. But its scale is handled carefully as a series of volumes, and the massing works well against the vast square and with the buildings to either side. The main design motif is the filigree façade of overlapping aluminum rings which cover the library from the first to the eighth floors. The architect says these were inspired by the gasometers, tunnels, canals and viaducts which fuelled the city’s industrial growth. I don’t buy that, but it works well as a delicate foil to the scale of the building.

The gardens and the sunken amphitheatre which project into the plaza also provide mediation between the brashness of the surroundings and the more reflective atmosphere of the library. The entrance itself is underwhelming and the foyer is filled with too much ephemeral tat, but beyond that you are soon in impressive volumes which continue to surprise as you rise up through the building. At times the experience almost tips into mall-dom but the central rotunda, recalling the British Museum Reading Room, or Asplund, is a masterstroke. It includes nice details like painted panels. The rotunda would be more impressive without the awkward travelator bridge, but the overall generosity of space astounds. The balcony and roof gardens are similarly generous gestures and appear to be very much enjoyed. It is great to see the way people use and appreciate the library as a public good, a civic enterprise in the grand Birmingham tradition.


A sad spectacle ...

Unfortunately, the destruction of John Madin’s ziggurat library is also very much in the Birmingham tradition. There is little more that can be said about this tragedy but it is still really upsetting to see the rubble. The hoardings around the site proclaim the new development to be ‘History in the Making’, presumably without intended irony. The illustrations of Glenn Howells’ scheme show restrained, somewhat over-scaled stripped-down neo-classicism, similar to his One St Peter’s Square in Manchester. Birmingham could do – has done – much worse, but it is fairly dull and clinical.  Given the number of ‘icons’ in Birmingham screaming for attention maybe this is not such a bad thing.


... and again! The Nat West Tower. 

What is undisputedly a bad thing, the destruction of Birmingham’s modernist heritage, does not stop with the sacrifice of Madin’s library to the Prince of Wales’ bloodless incomprehension of architectural quality. Up Colmore Row his National Westminster tower is being demolished. The Pevsner Architectural Guide says this is the most important Brutalist commercial building in the city ‘disastrous in its context but with its own tremendous integrity’. The next Madin masterpiece to be destroyed will be the Chamber of Commerce building, denied listing protection. Who cares in Birmingham? Well a lot of people as the spirited campaign to Save the Ziggurat showed, but not the City Council obsessed with the vacuities of the Big City Plan.


The Smallbrook Queensway next to go?


Imagine if the concrete was restored like Park Hill – could be tasty

Across town the much admired Smallbrook Queensway building, designed by the architect of the Rotunda, James Roberts, is also under threat. Developers want to part-demolish it for another tower with the remainder being completely buggered. As Joe Holyoak says ‘Roberts' Queensway building is a grand and elegant urban gesture. Its curvature, rhythm of vertical fins, together with its characteristic projecting concrete uplighters, make it still the most impressive piece of modern streetscape in the city, even 54 years after its completion. It is directly comparable with the work of John Nash’s … curving new boulevard of Regent Street. The architecture of the new proposal is typically bland and unexceptional, lacking the distinctiveness of the existing building.’ Given the Council's previous form it is difficult to be optimistic about the future of something special and distinctive to Birmingham.


Snow Hill (heading for Canary Wharf)


Still Motor City

Birmingham’s frenzy of rebuilding is of course not something imposed on the city but a deliberate strategy promoted, invited and actively supported by the Council often, as in the case of Paradise Circus, with large public subsidies. It is all set out in the ‘Big City Plan’. The latest masterplan is for the Snow Hill area. Although there are good things in this, about improving the public realm and public transport, the main engine of change is seen as massive redevelopment rather than any real attempt at place-making, character, distinctiveness, diversity and small scale interest. The model shows a lumpen new ‘gateway’ tower lowering over Pugin’s St Chad’s Cathedral. It all looks the same.


Heritage going to waste on Constitution Hill 

The really bad news is that within the political world and the planning profession itself Birmingham’s market savvy regeneration-led planning is seen as a big success story. Brum has all this shiny stuff going up as other cities struggle to get any development underway given lack of public funds, market indifference, ignorance and arrogance.


Not keen on the jewellery bit but I do like the Quarter

After the banalities of so much new development in central Birmingham the Jewellery Quarter is refreshingly distinctive. I had previously not explored much of it other than the area around St Paul’s Square, but a surprising amount of industry survives here, often in Georgian and early Victorian premises. On Great Hampton Street there are some very grand commercial buildings but the street degenerates into an expressway leading to West Brom and Wolverhampton. Beneath the viaduct at Hockley Circus in an impressive pedestrian plaza you find a wonderful set of abstract murals in concrete by William Mitchell, who features large in the current (and not to be missed) exhibition of post war public art at Somerset House.


Somewhere underneath this is a modernist masterpiece ... 


... impressive but in sad state. The William Mitchell murals at Hockley Circus.

This is a good place to contemplate the optimism and hubris of the post war era. When I was there the grand plaza was almost entirely unused except for one lone drinker. The subways are choked by litter like a snow-drift, graffiti everywhere. Obviously it is not an environment that is working as intended. The politicians, planners, architects and engineers got it wrong. They did not resolve the contradictions in what they were trying to achieve and, despite idealism and determination, their certainties did not result in the creation of a place people wanted.

Which is why Birmingham needs to give pause for thought now. Is a Big City Plan, with all its emphasis on scale, speed, boastfulness and commerciality, really what the city needs? And what will Birmingham be like as a place to live, work or visit in 50 years time? Only asking.

Warszawa Powiśle

Warsaw is definitely not on the tourists’ agenda: even Poles will tell you to go to Kraków instead. Neither Stanford’s nor the RIBA Bookshop could provide me with an architectural guide. But in the event that didn’t really matter as our guide was Owen Hatherley, whose knowledge of the history, politics, architecture and popular culture of Poland and Eastern Europe seems limitless. Inspired by his seminal Landscapes of Communism we took Wizzair to explore Poland’s capital.


Modernism finds a way in Old Town

What everyone knows about Warsaw is that it was razed by the Nazis after the doomed 1943 and 1944 uprisings, and then rebuilt by the Communists with monotonous and alienating grey tower blocks, its desolation captured in David Bowie’s 1977 ‘Warszawa’ and the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski. But wait; the painstaking reconstruction of the city centre is also held up by Simon Jenkins, Gavin Stamp and Dan Cruikshank as a model of what should have happened after the war in Coventry, Liverpool, Exeter and Britain’s other blitzed cities, if it had not been for the wicked Modernists and Planners. Needless to say, the story is a bit more complicated than that.


Completely rebuilt – Old Town

It is impossible to understand Warsaw’s reconstruction without some context of Polish history. From the C14th to the C18th the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a great power covering the vast landmass between the Russian, Ottoman, and Hapsburg empires and Prussia. It was multi-ethnic, incorporating much of modern day Ukraine and Belarus, with a significant minority of Germans and, following their expulsion from much of Western Europe, the largest Jewish population in Europe. The C18th was a golden age of enlightenment but Poland was an oligarchical republic with an elective king and, although constitutionally advanced, it was politically weak. Between 1772 and 1794 the Commonwealth was cynically partitioned between Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia, which took the largest share including Warsaw. Revolts in 1830 and 1863 resulted in heavy repression and Russification, so the C19th was a dark period for Polish nationhood. The collapse of the Tsarist empire in 1917 and the disintegration of the Kaiser’s in 1918 allowed Poland to regain its independence.. The new Polish republic, initially a chaotic democracy became a thinly veiled military dictatorship after 1926 but was relatively tolerant at least compared with its neighbours. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was the prelude to brutal invasion, with the explicit intention on the part of both invaders of destroying Poland as a nation and a people. Nearly 40% of Poland’s infrastructure was destroyed in the war and 20% of the entire population were killed. Post ‘liberation’ by the Red Army, Britain and America acquiesced to Poland becoming a Soviet satellite. Stalin seized the ethnically mixed eastern provinces and the Polish population was deported to be resettled in Warsaw and the new western provinces from which the German population had been brutally expelled.


A city history with a staggering death-toll 

Something like 700,000 Varsovians were killed during the war, including over 300,000 Jews of the ghetto. Hitler ordered the city to be razed and 85% of the buildings were destroyed. The ghetto area was systematically obliterated so that new development is literally built on the rubble of the old city. Elsewhere destruction was less absolute and the ruins of many buildings remained, along with much of the street pattern. Concrete constructions generally survived Armageddon. Praga and other areas east of the Vistula, already controlled by the Red Army at the time of the uprising, were not completely destroyed and here in places you can get an authentic feel for late C19th and early C20th Warsaw, like say Oranienburger in East Berlin and now similarly hipster.


Memorial to the Warsaw Uprising

In 1944 Warsaw was not only ruined but largely depopulated. The rebuilding and repopulating of the nation’s capital was a hugely symbolic act; the Nazis had tried to obliterate Poland entirely and the defiant rebuilding of Warsaw from the ashes was crucial to restoring national and cultural identity. All over the city there are monuments to the fallen and to the liberation. Some, like the monument to those deported to Siberia, could only be erected after 1989. Even commemorating the 1944 rising was politically risky in the Communist era. Many plaques mark the sites of atrocities and executions; the most touching are those to individuals, often with a photograph of the deceased.


Socialist Realism, neither socialist nor realistic 

The form of the rebuilt Warsaw reflects political ideologies, nationalism and economic exigencies more than town planning or architectural theories. Initially the assumption was that there should be a new, rational plan to address the many deficiencies of the overcrowded slums of old Warsaw with their congestion, squalor and reminders of Tsarist tyranny. In the event the rebuilding largely followed the old street plan. Architectural style was dictated by the paranoid, murderous and stylistically conservative Stalin, so Modernism was not an option – it had to be authoritarian Baroque.


Winnie the Pooh Street 

One of the earliest redevelopments was right in the centre behind Nowy Świat. Winnie the Pooh Street (yes really, the name was chosen by the public) is a handsome street of classical proportions and orders, a little stodgy maybe but with nice touches like the colonnades, sundial on the campanile which closes the vista and the whimsical name plate. Behind the classical frontage buildings are spacious courtyards of housing and greenery – very different from the crowded slums of pre-war Warsaw.


The Stalinist vision – MDM overlooked by the Palace of Culture


Metropolitan scale

The show piece of Stalinist housing is MDM, south of the centre. Plac Konstytucji, completed in 1952, is a grand Baroque set piece, an austerity version of Nancy maybe. Around the square are bombastic reliefs of the approved orders of society – miner, steel worker, female textile worker, a working mother with her child etc. The cutest relief is a group of workers and their families celebrating the opening of the square, executed before the actual event. Note the little girl with pigtails and her dog. Note too the neon signs introduced in the 1950s to liven up the often drab street scene and give an impression of modernity and consumerism. They are quite a feature of Warsaw. MDM includes shops and entertainments as well as flats and workplaces as it was intended as a model mixed development, although the flats would have been reserved for apparatchiks and Stakhanovites. MDM today is very trendy and you can see why, although it is a pity that the grand colonnaded square is so dominated by traffic and parking – fairly typical of Warsaw unfortunately. Plac Zbawiciela nearby is a circus, even more given over to traffic. It has a nice colonnade but you can’t use it as, outrageously, this pedestrian space has been plundered by adjacent restaurants. The circus is not complete here because a grand church and commercial buildings survived the war, at least well enough to be repaired. Al. Wyzwolenia is an extremely grand street, the terraces apparently based on the Place des Vosges in Paris, and remarkably the rear elevations are as grand as the fronts. Nearby was the late, lamented ‘Supersam’, Warsaw’s first and futuristic supermarket of 1959, too delicate to survive the crudity of Poland’s post 1989 retail boom.


Muranów flats

At Muranów, on the site of the ghetto, there are slightly later blocks of Stalinist flats. The long grey blocks lining the main roads are fairly grim but behind these, through the grand archway with a blank inscription, presumably intended for Stalin but omitted after his denunciation, you enter a more human scale of squares and circuses. Estate agents will have no difficulty in gentrifying this area where some of the stucco terraces look remarkably like Regent’s Park.


A huge rebuttal to the Nazi Pabst Plan


Picturesque


Urbane

The decision to recreate the old walled town (Stare Miasto) was taken early on, in parallel with plans for the showpiece Stalinist estates of the new Warsaw. Here popular will bent ideology, but the project had to be justified as the recreation of a workers’ district, which the merchant’s houses had become in the city’s C19th industrial expansion. The reconstruction was meticulous, as chronicled in Dan Cruickshank’s recent fascinating TV programme. Buildings were rebuilt from miraculously preserved architectural studies of the 1930s and old photographs. More questionable was the influence of the many prospects by Bellotto, a nephew of Canaletto. What was created is not exactly what the Nazis had destroyed but an idealized and sanitized evocation of Warsaw in the C18th. This townscape-in-aspic conveniently expunges the unwelcome history of nearly 200 years, and like much else in the rebuilding of Warsaw is freighted with symbolism and unspoken meaning.


Like a manicured Gamla Stan


Attention to detail


Warsaw Barbican, twentieth century but could have fooled me

Stare Miasto is delightful, all done with immense care and craftsmanship, often incorporating carefully preserved fragments of the original. The graffito is a special feature, extended to some of the few explicitly modern buildings. Sixty years of weathering has produced a realistic patina of ageing but the place is still like a stage set, with little of the normal street life you normally find in an historic city centre. The restaurant and bar touts in make believe Sarmatian costume add to the unreality. The area is not, however, overwhelmed by tourists and stag parties as in Prague or Riga. Plac Zamkowy is fairly surreal as running below the rather too perfectly reconstructed Royal Palace is an expressway roaring into a tunnel under the old town, a sensible piece of planning which allows for the Stare Miasto to be a pedestrian zone. Warsaw’s first escalator takes you from the imagined C18th down to the C20th road, which tellingly is not shown in the tourists' guides.


Krakowskie Przedmieście and a touch of the Baroque  

Krakowskie Przedmieście runs south from Royal Palace, lined with the palaces of aristocrats and grand buildings including the University (where Copernicus taught). There are fine ranges of stucco buildings on Nowy Świat in a gentle curve reminiscent of Grey Street, or possibly Regent Street. All are reconstructed, or very largely reconstructed. Only the Bristol Hotel and a few concrete buildings of the early C20th had survived. Nearby is the reconstructed National Theatre with classical pediment and portico trying to contain and give form to this sprawling leviathan, cruelly exposed by a vast formless space. Lord Foster has been roped in to provide what is, by Warsaw standards, a well mannered but uninteresting office block meant to provide some enclosure. North of the theatre the C18th Pałac Jabłonowskich, destroyed after the uprisings in 1863 and 1944 was reconstructed in 1996 with Citibank behind the façade.


Catching up with western capitalism and banality 


Crowding the view from the Palace  – the post-Soviet financial centre


The Eastern Wall – culture after the Palace of Culture

Post Communist Warsaw is the largest financial centre between Frankfurt and Shanghai and this is reflected in a rash of priapic towers north of Centralna Station. These are fairly indistinguishable from what is now acceptable in London, but in ensemble more reminiscent of the skyline of any medium sized American city. The most interesting scheme, actually apartments, is by Liebskind in a show-off Deconstructivist style. The new capitalist economy has also brought brash new shopping malls, mostly in the suburbs but with a particularly gruesome one next to Centralna Station – the sort of thing that Westfield and Peel (Intu) would like to get away with. The cluster of capitalist towers is deliberate in order to crowd the Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s infamous gift to a resentful city. Already in the 60s the city tried to screen this with the residential towers of the Eastern Wall development. This with its clean lines, pedestrian street and jokey circular pavilion would be quite attractive today if not for the fucking adverts covering everything in sight. Advertisements are the curse of modern Warsaw. But at least the Eastern Wall is still there and of course the adverts could be removed, whereas the admired Modernist CDD Smyk store, although listed, has been demolished, allegedly to be rebuilt.


Imperialism and neo-liberalism, from one clique to another


A welcome relief  from all that glass and steel

The Palace of Culture and Science is one of Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers, an icon of derision. It is the companion of the famous seven towers in Moscow, built to celebrate that city’s 700th birthday. But it was the present that Poland definitely didn’t want. Still the tallest structure, it visually dominated the city, a symbol of subjugation. As a skyscraper it seems quaint, lacking the streamlined modernity of the Empire State or Rockefeller Buildings on which it must have been modelled. The Baroque crenellations, to represent the ‘Polishness’ of the building, are endearingly absurd. Glimpsed views of the spire from surrounding streets look positively Hanseatic and there are some interesting juxtapositions with the new towers of capitalism.


Thumping scale and weight


Beaux-arts

Many older people would like to expunge this symbol of Russian domination, as the pre war republic destroyed the huge Orthodox Cathedral that the Tsar had imposed on the city. But it is a genuine ‘People’s Palace’ with theatres, cinema, museums, restaurants, bars and even a swimming pool. Younger people have a more relaxed view and happily inhabit its facilities; indeed it has become quite cool. You can appreciate the high quality of the fixtures and finishes while the views from the cloister-like viewing platform are superb. The ride to the top is worth it as much for the elevator operator, who looks straight out of Soviet central casting, as for the views.


The parade ground towards Eastern Wall 

What is a complete mess is the parade ground facing the main eastern elevation (towards Eastern Wall). This huge space is given over to rough car parking and littered with various crumbling barriers, hardly an appropriate setting for a major cultural centre, but then perhaps that is intentional. What is needed is an imaginative new concept for this space and new uses to animate it, which could be symbiotic with the genuinely creative uses within the Palace. And get rid of the gross advertising, for God’s sake.


Plac Powstanćow, aka 'car park and road'

Warsaw is generally not good with its public realm. There is some good paving on Krakowskie Przedmieście including art work celebrating Copernicus outside the university. This street and Nowy Świat are mercifully traffic-free at weekends. Świetockrzyska has been redesigned after being dug up for the new metro, and now even boasts some neat cycle tracks. Plac Grzybowski has been given a designer makeover with water feature and decking which could be pleasant in the summer. But most squares, like Plac Powstanćow Warszawy where we stayed in the Modernist former ‘House of the Peasants’ seem like left over spaces.


As good as anything in Scandinavia


The Khrushchev era

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin precipitated a new government led by Gomułka, who had himself been imprisoned on the orders of the despot. The city needed new housing quickly and cheaply. The painstaking reconstruction of the Old Town was expensive and slow. Gomułka switched resources away from this and from Stalinist Baroque set pieces and a new Modernist phase of construction began. The northern part of the ghetto has been rebuilt on the rubble as a group of remarkable attractive and peaceful estates of landscaped high rise blocks , with schools, crèches, ‘Houses of Culture’ (community centres) and other facilities. It is close in feel to many of the rebuilt estates of blitzed South London. (Before Lord Adonis and the Policy Exchange get their hands on them, anyway). There are powerful monuments to the murdered Jews. A new Jewish Museum designed by Finnish architects Rainer Mahlamäki and Ilmari Lahdelma opened 2013, the seventieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising. Its minimalist exterior is clad with glass fins and copper mesh. A vast opening leads you in, with cavernous exhibitions below, which we didn’t see but are reputedly excellent.


Iron Gate


Housing as billboards 

The ‘Iron Gate’ development close to the surviving C19th market halls is more monolithic. Stark 18 storey Corbusian blocks line up along a linear park, no doubt bleak in the winter as the cold wind whips in from the Urals. Much of the open space between the blocks has been infilled with newer blocks, destroying the original integrity. And of course you get huge adverts on the ends of the blocks to finally bury the Corbusian dream. Nearby is the seventies House of Polish-Soviet Friendship, cruelly converted to a casino. Communist imagery survives however, including the very likely intentionally ironic sculpture of two water nymphs representing the entwining of the Vistula and Moscow rivers.


Extravagant expressways

Most of the stereotypical blocks of workers’ flats are found a Metro ride from the centre. Warsaw is a city about the size of the Birmingham conurbation and they have some similarities, in that the public transport system is underdeveloped, at least by the standards of continental cities, and both are in love with the car. Despite low car ownership Communist era Warsaw built an extravagantly extensive network of expressways, which have since helped promote a decentralized economy of shopping centres and commercial complexes. In the city centre roads were widened not so much for traffic but for the grand parades which were such a feature of Communist ritual. Now they are just for speeding traffic, making navigating the city centre very challenging at times – at least Birmingham is getting rid of its ‘concrete collar’.


The Warsaw Metro


So many good neon signs


Must get one of these for the Nottingham tram system

Meanwhile Gomułka cancelled plans for a Metro as a ‘vanity project’. Line One of the Metro, originally planned in the 30s and designed in 1982, was not opened until 1995. It serves the huge new estates south of the city and beyond the excellent network of trams. The designer was a woman architect Jasna Strzalkowska-Ryska and her stations have very stylish tiling and fittings in the De Stijl tradition. A second line has recently been opened, but despite some interesting art work it lacks the quality of line one, the street entrances especially have been heavily criticized. There is also a suburban train network and an Overground cross-city railway was built in the 1950s to link up the previously separate train termini. Warszawa Stadion and Warszawa Powiśle were built at this time and both have a lightness of touch, playfulness and optimistic feel characteristic of the Thaw era. At Powiśle the super circular ticket office has been transformed into a trendy bar, well worth a visit. Warszawa Centralna was built in the 1970s and is considered a great example of functionalism although strangely not connected to the nearby Metro. Its pedestrian access is also choked with car parking.. The concourse is particularly arresting with its sci-fi lighting and almost Zaha-esque white curves and it is a masterpiece of Polish Modernism. But there are plans to demolish it – Warsaw like Brum is very insouciant about its recent architectural heritage.


Is this Stockholm?


Utopia, found it.

We had challenged Owen to show us some really bleak housing. He took us to vast, contiguous Ursynów, Stegny and Słuzew estates, built in the 1970s. These have the reputation of being the worst in Warsaw and certainly look it in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s searing films like A Short Film about Killing which were shot there. But they were never ‘sink estates’ in a British sense as they housed a genuinely mixed community. When we emerged from Stokłosy Metro it was a lovely spring day, the previously grey blocks had recently been renovated and tastefully re-painted with EU money. The extensive landscaping had matured, so that the overall impression was more Scandinavian Modern than disintegrating Iron Curtain. The varied heights of the blocks, with some low terraces and lots of balconies laid out along pedestrian walkways with generous landscaping and open space was, we thought, very successful. The price that is paid is a ruthless grid of fast roads. However these do have Metro stations and shopping parades, even flower kiosks.


Well placed and good landscaping. 


This doesn't fit the stereotype


Solid stuff

What is interesting is that along the main roads you see block after block of the same basic prefabricated design, but because the heights and layouts are varied, if not imaginative, it does not feel oppressive. The redecoration of the previously grey blocks has been done simply so as to respect their basic structural elements. There are no lurid colour schemes or silly Po-Mo accretions such as you find in similar estate improvement schemes in Britain. Słuzew is laid out along a linear park following a river valley and here we found a super new community centre, wood-built (very appropriate for its location) around a very cleverly designed sheltered area of tiered wooden steps - great for sunbathing, or for shelter from the Siberian winter winds. Nearby however was racist and xenophobic graffiti, suggesting something rotten in the state of Poland. Having once been the most diverse and tolerant country in Europe, following Stalin’s ethnic cleansing it is now the most homogenous and, it seems, one of the most intolerant.


A parallel structure

One of the great features of these vast housing complexes is the Expressionist churches, evidence of the very special role of the Catholic church in Poland. As in pre-1922 Ireland, the church provided a parallel structure of authority and belief for those who saw the state as illegitimate. After initial persecution the Communist government and the Church reached a modus vivendi which benefitted both. Its somewhat belated support for Solidarity gave it great influence with post 1989 governments, reinforcing their generally socially conservative agendas. The churches we wanted to see were unfortunately closed the day we visited, which coincided with a big rally supporting the right wing government’s anti abortion policy. The Ursynów church hasn a stunning almost Rococo window opening in the form of a cross piercing its massive brick façade. Stegny is a sort of industrial Brutalism in  brick, with a monumental detached bell tower. Both speak of a confidence and assertion which is somewhat unsettling.


Muranów cinema

Another powerful means of expression in the repressive Communist era was the cinema. Polish directors like Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieślowski were at the forefront of the international avant garde and ‘Kino’ are found in many housing projects. The Kino at the entrance to the Muranów development has particularly fine decoration and has a marble inscription in the foyer of Lenin’s quote ‘for us cinema is the most important art’. For Poles maybe cinema was important for different reasons.


Władysława Niegolewskiego, near Plac Wilsona




The architect's house, 1928 by Barbara Brukalska & Stanislaw Brukalski


As good as any housing scheme the Bauhaus did – trade union housing 

The most attractive housing we visited was at Zoliborz, near Plac Wilsona metro station, opened in 2005. This is a stylish introduction to the area with its dramatic concrete and glass rotunda and its wavy platform roof. Zoliborz was built before the war, and largely survived it. Initial phases were garden city in inspiration but in the 1920s a trade union housing co-operative began building Modernist housing along the lines of Bruno Taut’s Britz estate in Berlin. The architects were the husband and wife Barbara Brukalska and Stanislaw Brukalski, who built their own house here in 1928 and continued building well into the post war era. The crescents of terraces with communal gardens between are particularly delightful. The ubiquitous use of white contrasts with ‘colour blind’ Bruno Taut’s housing in Britz. What is notable however is that, whereas in Britz or De Dageraad in Amsterdam for example you can walk around freely, in Zoliborz, as in Britain, the estates are now firmly gated and privatized. You can however wander around the local ‘Palace of Culture’ - actually post war but in repro style so looking older than the housing.


The Zoliborz Palace of Culture


One of the original Milk Bars


The traditional Warsaw café – a dying breed

Visiting Warsaw you can’t help being struck by the similarities between post 1989 Poland and post 1979 Britain. Their histories could not be more different, Britain smugly secure on its little island having ‘won’ the war and Poland in the cockpit of European rivalries and sacrificed to expediency by the west. But both have emphatically and uncritically embraced neo-liberalism and reject their respective post war experiences. This is very evident in the built environment and in the public realm, almost more brutally in Poland than in Britain. In its embrace of global capitalism however Warsaw is losing a lot of its unique identity as Starbucks ousts the traditional cafés and McDonalds trumps the characterful ‘Milk Bar’, the still functioning Communist era public canteens, actually in danger of becoming hip.


On the to-do list – Warsaw's public realm


Although this one's been ticked off already


You might call it a public square or a shopping precinct  

The character of Warsaw is hard to pin down. The city turns its back on the wide Vistuala and, apart from the hill of the Old Town, it is flat but the great bridges are a powerful element. Warsaw has a raw energy - lots of it. It is a matter-of–fact city without airs and graces, purposeful, workaday, unpretentious. But there is also a sense of restlessness and lack of continuity and not just in the architecture, possibly as established communities were eviscerated in the war. Nearly all families are newcomers resettled to the city. It is not a crowded city, there is lots of green space and residential areas, even in the city centre, seem preternaturally quiet. Surprisingly given that so much of Warsaw was reconstructed it does not have a feeling of being a new city. Its streets exhibit a wide range of building types and styles, many presumably largely reconstructed in their pre-war styles but not in the slightly cloying, prissy way of the Old Town.


The Poniatowski Bridge


Murals incorporating rubble of old Warsaw in 'House of the Peasants', now Hotel Gromada

Despite its quality, it is difficult to get away from the feeling that the Stare Miasto is a stage set. But that is what people seem to want. Gomułka refused to sanction the rebuilding of the Royal Palace, symbol of past injustices, famously declaring it would be reconstructed over his dead body. And it was, by popular demand in the 1970s. Warsaw has still to fully come to terms with its more recent history. And so has Britain. There is no doubt that the rebuilding of Coventry’s city centre, destroyed in the war, or indeed Leicester’s ancient core, blitzed by highway engineers in the sixties, in the style of Stare Miasto or Nowy Świat would be hugely popular. Of course this tells us as much about our fear of the future as it does about our past; indeed it suggests our need to re-invent the past. Warsaw needed what Owen Hatherley calls the ‘simulcra’ of replica reconstruction to cope with the hideousness of its immediate past history. But history did not stop in 1794 or 1944.


The Bank of Cooperative societies, built 1917, re-built 1948


New development – working with the Palace of Culture

Warsaw has rebuilt itself as a complex metropolis, full of architectural, political and cultural interest, not just a palimpsest of its former self. It is an extraordinarily rewarding place to visit if you look beyond your initial expectations.


‘Adrian loves all women’ – the first Polish transgender MP endorsing the clothing brand Adrian

Thanks to Owen Hatherley for leading this trip and for his expert knowledge and insights. His Landscapes of Communism, published by Allen Lane in 2015, is an absolute must-read. Thanks also to Agata Pyzik for her guidance. Her book Poor but Sexy; Culture Clashes in Europe East and West published by Zero in 2014 gives an insightful analysis of conflicts of identity.

David Crowley’s Warsaw, Reaktion Books 2003 provides a very valuable account of how the city has been shaped since the 1940s. Adam Zamoyski’s Poland, A History published by Collins 2015 provides a good short introduction to a complex subject.

Finally thanks to Grant Butterworth, Nick Ebbs, Toby Ebbs and Nick Sanders for their enthusiastic participation on this trip.

Cities of the North takes an irreverent and often amusing look at the changing townscape, special character, architecture and planning of the great Northern English cities. Lavishly illustrated, it is a companion to Towns in Britain published by Five Leaves in 2014 and it builds on the popular Jones the Planner blog. It explores the process and politics of development and ‘regeneration’ which is reshaping Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Hull and Newcastle amongst others, always focusing on the intrinsic character of place.

Cities of the North reviews both the successes and lost opportunities of recent years and considers the implications of the emerging Northern Powerhouse plans for the conurbations.  The book is inspired by and follows in the footsteps of Ian Nairn who opened so many people’s eyes to an appreciation of cities, their often unexpected delights, qualities, possibilitis and potential. Like Nairn, Cities of the North shows a passion and affection for these places and an appreciation of their all too often undervalued qualities.

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. Chris Matthews is a local historian and lecturer in graphic design at Lincoln University

Five Leaves Publications £13.99

Book Launch
7pm, 30th June
Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham
Refreshments Provided
RSVP: Adrian, Chris or bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk
Map: www.fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk


Book Cover 


Inside Pages

The proud municipal livery of the former Birmingham City Transport

Train spotting is now officially cool. Who could resist Tim Dunn’s enthusiasm for that magnificent Black Five steaming alongside a Highland loch as seen in the strangely addictive ‘Trainspotting Live’. It is true that many of the anoraks have yet to catch up with Tim’s snappy dress sense and it is difficult to really get excited about a 40 year old IC125 belching out diesel as it judders you down to London. But I was a train spotter when I was about 11 or 12 and you never forget the magic.


The heritage Routemaster, a design classic

Bus spotters however are seriously unfashionable. There are surprisingly large numbers of the species about and whole sections of bookshops are given over to their esoteric picture books. I share the nostalgia for the old municipal liveries like Glasgow’s jazzy olive and orange or Hull's deep blue with futuristic white flashes. They gave specific identities to cities, and companies such as Midland Red or Crosville defined provincial fiefdoms unknown in earlier historical geography. I hate the bland uniformity of the big companies like Stagecoach and First with their shit liveries, the same everywhere in the country, from Aberdeen to Cornwall. But I have never been much interested in the vehicles per se. I am unmoved by a heritage Routemaster even if Nairn loved them although I seeth with anger at the sight of a Heatherwick ‘Roastmaster’, which perfectly captures Boris Johnson’s vainglorious, flash vacuity. What I am interested in is bus systems and their part in urban design and development.


Boris Johnson's hubris and Heatherwick's Roastmaster

Buses lack the dynamic excitement and raw, sexy, power of trains but they are important. For a start they carry many more passengers than trains. But trains are mostly used by the affluent, and particularly men, so naturally get much more political attention and a lot more public subsidy. Buses are predominantly used by women, poorer people and the old. So providing good bus services should be an important element of policies to improve social inclusion and equality. Yes – well there’s the problem – we haven’t got any. Attitudes to buses are a classic example of class prejudice, as captured in Mrs Thatcher’s pronouncement that ‘for a man to be seen on a bus after the age of 20 is a sign of failure’.


Glasgow's public transport policy still stuck in the Thatcher era

Of course this is absurd, especially as car use by young men is far less common in cities today than it was 30 years ago. Buses are used by a wide cross section of society in big cities like London, Edinburgh and many other places, especially those like Oxford and Nottingham with good networks and large student populations. Buses can and should provide the basis of high quality public transport, complementing metro and tram systems in larger cities. This is a fundamental of sustainable urban planning.


New housing at Upton, Northampton - all about the car

But unfortunately there is a huge disconnect between town planning and public transport planning and of course between public transport planning and privatized-bus-world. Town planning is essentially about physical development so planners like new trophy infrastructure like trams, new rail stations or possibly guided bus, all of which are good but rarely deliverable. In reality, for nearly all new developments, public transport is going to equal bus. Local plan vision statements always include fine words about the importance of public transport and transport consultants write reams of self serving bollocks in Design and Access statements supporting crap planning applications. The  promised improvements however are usually tokenistic. What is really needed is to design estates with road layouts that allow for simple bus routes at high frequencies and for good pedestrian access to bus stops. Most volume builders’ estate layouts are the obverse of this with winding distributor roads and cul-de-sacs, hopeless for buses to serve effectively. There are hardly any good examples of new developments designed around good public transport, at least outside London. Even urban design exemplars like Upton in Northampton are almost entirely car centric. And good public transport also requires improving bus systems as a whole, not just the bit within the estate. This is partly about bus lanes and bus priorities but essentially about more intangible things like ticketing, marketing and information, attractive frequencies and accessible buses. Planners mostly don’t get this.


Heroic London Transport - East Finchley, image courtesy Owen Hatherley


Arnos Grove, image courtesy Owen Hatherley

Buses used to be important to cities. In the early 1900s nearly all sizeable towns enterprisingly invested in electric trams. From the 1920s to the 1950s municipal buses replaced trams and their networks expanded into the inter- and post-war suburbs. Small rural and inter-urban bus companies were mostly consolidated into big groups and nationalized after the war. There was a period of chaotic competition to municipal trams from ‘cowboy’ bus companies but in 1930 the government regulated bus services. In 1933 a Conservative government set up London Transport which integrated tubes, trams and buses in a single public transport system and this became a model for the world.


Heroic London Transport - Stockwell Garage, courtesy socarra 

However 50 years later a dogmatic Tory government swept away bus regulation. Some ideologues had been to Jakarta and saw there a classic free market competition paradigm in the melée of minibuses, vans, bajajs and motorcycles all vying for passengers on the congested and polluted city streets. The Thatcher government saw this as the ideal way forward for public transport in Britain and particularly a way of slashing public spending on buses. Buses had been profitable in Britain but by the 70s, with increasing car ownership and congestion, patronage was going down and subsidies going up. Of course this was the case in all developed countries including American cities where public transport is heavily subsidized. Britain’s deregulation of bus services was unique and typically ideological and reckless.


London: an integrated, comprehensive and coherent bus service

Of course if the loony theory really held good then the greatest benefits would have accrued to London but Mrs Thatcher was too canny to experiment on the capital where free market chaos would inconvenience our rulers and the establishment. So regulation and integration of services and ticketing was retained for London Transport. That is why the plight and poverty of public transport in provincial cities is just not understood by the metropolitan-dominated political and intellectual elites.


Ubiquitous First (Worst) bus liveries, here in Bradford

The Thatcher government quickly sold off the publically owned National Bus Company subsidiaries, along with those of the Public Transport Authorities, set up in the bigger conurbations after 1968 on London Transport lines. Often sold as management buyouts at knock down prices, bus companies were quickly consolidated into three big groups – Stagecoach, Arriva and First (Private Eye’s Worstbus) that dominate the industry today.


Such a waste: the closed Northampton Corporation Transport Offices

The effects of deregulation have been catastrophic. The number of bus passengers has declined by 50% since 1985 across the big conurbations like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, West and South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear. Over the same period  bus passengers on London Transport have doubled. The reason is obvious - Transport for London specifies the routes, service levels and fares and the system is fully integrated and adequately funded. The differing performance however does partly reflect the increasing economic dominance of London over the last 30 years and also the car centric policies of many of the big cities with fast motorway access and cheap parking lure drivers away from public transport. An ironic example is the huge open car park opposite Centro’s HQ in central Birmingham where you can park all day for £4.


A bus station with design effort – Southampton University

In the Shires the decline in bus usage began in the 50s with the advent of mass car ownership, so that the networks were already pretty threadbare and the decline in patronage since 1985 has been less dramatic. Some medium sized cities like Edinburgh, Nottingham, Oxford and Brighton have managed to buck the trend of bus decline through strong planning policies favouring buses. And, importantly, Edinburgh and Nottingham still own their own bus companies.


Stagecoach to Lincoln's Ermine Estate; no local identity, no evening buses either

The huge problem of deregulation, competition and privatization is the loss of integrated planning, comprehensive route networks and ticketing. The split between public transport planning, which is done by transport authorities, and the operations of the commercial bus service providers resembles the internal market in the NHS. Under arcane competition rules bus companies can only operate ‘commercial’ routes which are profitable and they should not cross-subsidize less profitable services, such as to local shops, hospitals, schools or work places off the main bus routes. Transport authorities must fill in these socially necessary routes with tendered services. Since councils are strapped for revenue they usually specify a very infrequent and basic service and tenders are mostly given to low cost, low quality small operators. So the tendered services are excluded from the publicity and ticketing of the main companies, greatly reducing their usefulness.


A sad joke: Weston Favell, Northampton

The fragmentation of services is so chronic that often the privatized companies don’t even run less profitable evening or Sunday journeys on their main routes. Some cities like Bristol pay them to run later buses to get you home whilst Greater Manchester tenders separate evening services, usually from different companies which won’t accept your return ticket. First provides even a big city like Leicester with a pitiful skeleton evening service whilst in Swansea, amazingly, there are no buses at all on Sunday evenings.


Swansea Bus Station is good but you'll have a long wait on a Sunday night

Deregulation and selling off publically owned bus companies resulted in huge changes in the bus industry, but did not usher in the perfect world of competition that the free marketeers had anticipated. New small competitors did enter the market but, rather than establishing new routes and innovative services, they usually attempted to cherry pick the most profitable routes of the big companies. Often using old, polluting vehicles and employing part time drivers on low wages they could undercut the established companies, but the big boys fought back, becoming more ‘efficient’ by cutting out marginal services to focus on the main ones and forcing down drivers’ wages and conditions. Their main weapon was to use their bigger resources and financial muscle to flood routes with buses, far more than patronage could possibly sustain, and hence to drive out the interlopers. Usually after a period of turbulence the big companies reestablished effective local monopolies and the small companies eked out a business by taking over services abandoned by the big boys, together with low quality tendered and school contracts.


World class Manchester University - third world bus service

The big companies have been successful in some places like Cambridge which had very poor bus services before. By investing in new buses and introducing new simplified high frequency networks with good marketing and publicity they have managed to grow the market. And there are some very successful and innovative companies, like Brighton and Hove, which have extremely high patronage and satisfaction rates. But in the big Northern cities, where integrated public transport should be providing the basis for urban planning and sustainable development, bus services have been decimated (in the figurative sense – the numerical decline is much, much worse). Here competition between the big companies as well as with many smaller competitors was fiercer and longer lasting. Dirty, empty buses clogging the streets was especially a problem, most spectacularly in Manchester where the city centre was brought to a standstill by bus wars during a Conservative party conference. The previously integrated Greater Manchester network is now fragmented with First dominant in the north, Stagecoach in the south and 30 or so other smaller operators all vying for passengers. There is a bewildering array of tickets, only one of which is valid on all buses, trains and the trams. You can see why getting a London-style franchise system is high on Manchester’s Northern Powerhouse wish list. Rural areas too have seen a catastrophic decline in their bus services. And since they rely so heavily on Council tendered services, rural communities are particularly at risk from austerity spending cuts.


Tom Eckersley's Poster for the National Bus Company

The deregulation and privatization of buses was of course part of a much broader assault on public control of local services, and of government centralization. The impoverishment of local democracy, the loss of local accountability, initiative and public enterprise was just the norm. The Labour government of 1997 could hardly conceal its lack of interest but pressure from the cities did result in a new Transport Act in 2000. This sought to deal with the worst excesses of deregulation and privatization through ‘Partnership Working’, but without fundamentally changing anything. The problem was that, whereas councils sought real improvements and control over rocketing fares, the bus companies wanted to maintain their near total control and large profits. And the bus companies held all the cards. So, for example, transport authorities now had the power to require joint ticketing between operators, but they could not specify the fare levels. So bus companies simply sabotaged joint ticketing by insisting that joint tickets cost more than their own tickets.

A further Act in 2008 for the first time opened up the possibility of Councils franchising buses London-Transport-style, but this had to be a last resort where ‘partnership’ could be demonstrated to have failed. The process requires all sorts of complicated ‘tests’ to make it difficult to succeed and specifically transport authorities would have to prove that the potential disbenefits to the bus companies were outweighed by benefits to the public. In other words this was writing a blank cheque for the big bus companies to claim for loss of profits if franchising was introduced. It was clearly intended to make re-regulation a dead letter.


Nexus at least trying to make a difference; Gateshead Bus Station

Despite this, Nexus, the combined transport authorities of Tyne and Wear, pursued the case for regulation. This political commitment was heavily influenced by the fact that the big bus companies were making huge profits of 18-20% on what are effectively monopolies. Clearly competition was not working. In the northern conurbations bus fares had gone up 59% since 1995, compared with 36% in regulated London. This effectively represents a regressive tax on the poorest in society who depend on buses. Also bus companies are raking in public subsidies through fuel rebates, public contracts and concessionary fare payments. Nexus argued that a franchised network would be cheaper and fares lower. But the bus companies refused to provide the financial information required for a detailed business case so a government Tribunal turned down the Nexus bid in 2015. Embarrassingly this decision came only a few months after Osborne had signed the DevoManc deal which included his commitment to introducing bus franchising in Greater Manchester. The DfT was told to change the rules, so there is now no longer a requirement to compensate bus companies for lost profits. However the route to effective local control over bus services and fares is still fraught with huge difficulty and endless delay.


Hull's bus station is part of grand Paragon Station

It is no coincidence that probably the most successful city bus networks in Britain are municipally owned. Although Mrs Thatcher sold off the PTA bus operations, non-metropolitan authorities were allowed to retain their buses. Most councils, including big places like Leicester, Hull and Southampton subsequently sold their bus companies and no doubt regret it today. But there are still a dozen municipal bus operators, the largest being in Edinburgh (Lothian Buses), Nottingham, Cardiff and Reading. Counter-intuitively, they have the advantage of not being part of a bureaucratic inter-council ‘Combined Authority’ but rather have a strong political relationship with a unitary city. Hence they are much more able to take a corporate approach to wider transportation, planning and economic development strategies. Their boards still have a public sector ethos and as far as possible try to deliver a comprehensive service for their citizens, not just a profitable one. However they have to be run commercially as ‘arms length’ companies. This is a problem when it comes to plans for integration and joint ticketing since they act in the company interest, seeking primarily to protect market share and profits, rather than the passengers’ interest or the wider public interest.


Lothian Buses, Edinburgh and the magnificent Museum of Scotland

Edinburgh, with nearly 750 buses, is by far the biggest municipal. It runs an extremely comprehensive network of routes serving all parts of what is a polycentric city, with big business parks, shopping centres, hospitals and universities on the periphery. Lothian, having successfully beaten off Worstbus in the face of aggressive and protracted ‘bus wars’, has now extended the network into adjacent Midlothian and East Lothian towns. It runs an impressive network of night buses and Edinburgh is the only city in the UK where buses run every day, even on Christmas Day – suck that London. Real time information is provided at most stops and Lothian has a very good phone app. The contrast between the bus service in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, where it is provided by First and a multitude of small operators, is very striking, although Glasgow does of course have a large suburban train network and its famous circular Subway.


New buses and new tram kit on Princes Street

Edinburgh’s public transport strategy has been focused on building a new tram - highly contentious as it was years late and horribly over budget, although now is exceeding its patronage forecasts. The tram is a political football and hated by the Edinburgh bourgeoisie. The general consensus is that it wasn’t needed because Edinburgh’s buses are so good. Well yes – up to a point. But the Edinburgh bus system does have significant weaknesses. Firstly the City Council is unwilling to give buses and pedestrians the priority they deserve. Edinburgh, like London, is a capital city where the establishment and elites are feted and appeased, so cars and taxis are allowed to dominate. Yes there are bus lanes and some bus-only streets, but congestion makes bus journeys slow and unreliable, most especially in the Festival. Lothian’s smartcard system is pretty clunky too and because you can buy your ticket from the driver, who spends a lot of time answering queries as bus stop information is very poor, buses take ages to load. So bus journeys can be very time-consuming and frustrating. There are other frustrations too. For example Edinburgh City Council tenders some socially necessary routes, like the number 13 bus which serves the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, but as this is not run by Lothian Buses you cannot use your day ticket or smartcard, which is pretty silly.


Nottingham City Transport: amongst the best public transport services outside of London


The largest fleet of electric buses in Europe


It's all connected: trams, trains, buses and cycle paths

Nottingham is an example of a more holistic transport and development strategy. In addition to running the municipally owned Nottingham City Transport (NCT), Nottingham has developed a tram network (NET), recently extended with two new lines. This is partly funded by a Workplace Parking Levy (WPL), the only one in the country. Despite the opposition of much of the business community and the instinctive hostility of the Tory government, the introduction of the WPL was approved because it had gone through all the steps required by Cameron's short-lived Localism agenda, so ministers were hoist by their own petard. The WPL and other innovative funding mechanisms also pay for the Link bus network which complements the commercial network of NCT, serving local communities, workplaces, hospitals and colleges. And the really impressive thing is that these routes are all operated by electric minibuses – the biggest fleet of electric buses in Europe. By January 2017 electric single deckers will take over the P&R services too.


So why is Nottingham City Transport competing with the tram? 

Nottingham undoubtedly has one of the best public transport services outside London but deregulation and competition law still cast dark shadows. They conspire against integrated networks and ticketing and the best, most convenient service for passengers. The most absurd outcome is that the City, having procured and significantly underwritten the NET tram system, finds its own bus company NCT is directly competing with the new tram. The NET tram route does not even appear on the NCT map, which is beyond ridiculous.


The bus wars are still ongoing. This is not Yourbus, it is privately owned

Then there are still, periodically, bus wars. At present ‘Yourbus’ (sic) runs a number of routes that simply duplicate pre-existing bus services, so there are far more buses than passenger demand. The established companies take a defensive and preemptive approach to such competition, often stuffing timetables with unnecessary buses to keep rivals off stops. The upshot is that city centre streets are often choking with too many buses, which is self defeating as it makes services slow, inefficient and expensive and so less attractive to passengers.


At last! An Oyster Card outside London, but could be better

But Nottingham is the only city to have a travel card like London’s Oyster card – one that can be used on all buses and trams and which has a daily cap on fares. Getting the agreement of the operators to the Nottingham Oyster (inevitably called the Robin Hood card) is a triumph. But it is still something of a compromise and undermined by lack of co-operation from the bus companies. Although the main operators NCT and Trent Barton are innovative, run high quality services with new accessible buses, frequently win awards and don’t go in for bus wars, they still compete. NCT runs the great majority of the buses in the City and immediate suburbs, whilst Trent Barton provide services to adjoining towns and commuter villages. So they compete along the main roads into the city where Trent Barton can be the more frequent service. Both companies offer their own tickets and smartcards and aggressively promote these exclusive tickets rather than the integrated Robin Hood card, which they insist must have a more expensive daily cap if more than one bus company is used. So, for example, interchange with the NET tram is penalized. And because, unlike TfL, the City does not control the on-bus ticket systems there are constraints on how effectively the Robin Hood card can operate. You can’t for example top up on-line, although there will soon be a mobile phone top up.


Realtime display ✓ , Timetables & Maps ✓ , Maintained Shelter ✓

Although the City provides comprehensive information about the bus network at stops, including good real time information, this is fighting against the different publicity of the bus companies. Each company has separate web sites, timetable leaflets, maps and mobile phone apps. The separate apps only show real time information for the single operator, so you frequently have to consult two apps to check the next bus from your stop.


All Nottingham City Transport services, but why the different colours?


This bus is green but not Green Line. Confused? I'm not surprised

And strangely a preoccupation with branding makes the bus network even more complicated and difficult to understand. Trent Barton, confusingly, give their routes names rather than numbers, like Mainline or Pronto and each has its own branding and distinctive livery. NCT buses have numbers but are also colour branded by the main roads they serve, so those going to West Bridgford, where I live, are ‘Green Line’ and painted green. But their competitor ‘Mainline’ also has a green livery. The punters are not surprisingly confused to be told they can’t use their tickets on different green buses serving the same stops. You even get the same number bus on similar routes but run by different companies with non- interchangeable tickets, as Owen Hatherley was bemused and angry to find in Leicester.


A unified visual communication system was axiomatic

This focus on the individual route not the network and over-busy branding is of course completely at odds with the philosophy which made London Transport the model for the world. Holden and Beck deliberately used a standardized suite of high quality designs for infrastructure, liveries, typefaces, publicity – all the elements of the public transport system – in order to create the image of a comprehensive, unified whole. Even when London buses were franchised, so actually operated by private companies, they were forced to retain the famous red livery and logo. In Nottingham and elsewhere the cacophony of branding, marketing and different tickets creates the opposite – a fractured system. A regulated, franchised bus system would do away with such nonsense and allow the City to concentrate on developing its public transport strategy more effectively and enable better forward planning to increase public transport use and promote sustainability.


Fun with the system: Abram Games's Poster for London Transport

But at a time when this country appears to have pressed the self destruct button it may seem quaint to suggest that providing high quality, integrated and efficient public transport for cities should be a priority. It is even sadder that we may come to see Osborne’s city devolution prospectus as a brief ray of sunlight through the thick dark clouds of Whitehall indifference and centralization. With a new government that seems to have no economic or transport ideas whatsoever the future looks very bleak indeed. So it turns out that the bus spotters, with their anoraks, Ian Allen lists, cameras and rallies of old buses are far more realistic and down to earth than me. Alas.

Vienna loves council housing

You may be surprised that Vienna, one of the greatest of European cities, is of a similar size to the Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow conurbations. Of course it is the capital of a small country, but the huge difference is that Vienna was capital of a vast multi-national empire which endured for centuries until its collapse in 1918. The legacy of the Habsburgs still shapes the city today.


Vienna loves art & architecture

It is tempting to draw comparison between the Austro-Hungarian empire in the early 1900s and the United Kingdom today. There are great differences but many similarities too. Both live(d) on past glories with a massive sense of entitlement and that fin-de-siècle feel of corruption and decay. Their aged and ultra long-serving monarchs provide(d) a flimsy fiction of unity for a country that is deeply divided in every sense. The rising consciousness of long subsumed nations threatens the break up of the supra-national state. Irresponsible oligarchic elites excite the country towards disastrous foreign policy whilst populist politicians play on insecurity and the fear of ‘otherness’: in Vienna the Jews, in England anyone who sounds or looks different. The pampered cosmopolitan capital cities are increasingly detached from, and distrusted by, the rest of the country. Both societies failed to solve their housing crises, Vienna before 1918, as London today, prioritizing luxury apartments rather than social housing.


Where Alexandra Road meets the Victoria Centre

Well, ok, we can’t push this too far. Austria-Hungary was atomized by war, not its internal contradictions, although these were in part responsible for the war. There is little of the far sighted late Habsburg investment in urban infrastructure in Britain today. I don’t see today’s London architecture, arts and music scene as quite competing with Vienna 1900. But Vienna does have lots of lessons for us, if only we were not quite so determined not to learn them. It consistently comes in the top two or three cities in the world for ‘quality of life’ and however sceptical one may be about aggregating a potpourri of data rankings to determine ‘best and worst cities’, Vienna is self evidently an extremely pleasant, self assured, welcoming and relaxed city.


The forces of darkness in Mittel Europa – The Beethoven Frieze

Vienna is quintessential Mittel Europa, the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, as is obvious from the departures screen of its airport. It is so very different from the rectitude of north Germany with all that Austrian Baroque and fluffy stucco, the onion domes of the Counter-Reformation and that very Imperial heritage. The medieval core of the city is at the confluence of the Wien river with a braid of the Danube, now the Danube Canal; to the west the mountains and to the east the great plain. Today the mighty Danube flowing eastward to the Black Sea is here tamed and straightened with railways and motorways along its banks. It is not very blue.



Hope, suffering, ambition

In the C18 the built up area expanded beyond the tight walls of the medieval city which had withstood Ottoman and other invaders. The walls were demolished in the 1850s and this broad swathe was redeveloped with the creation of the famous ring boulevards. These are lined with vast palaces, parks, the parliament building, city hall, museums, galleries, opera house – Westminster meets South Ken. It is all a bit pompous, overpowering and indigestible, a bit like those rich and over decorated café cakes. However many of the interiors are splendid like the Opera salons, partly rebuilt after war damage, and MAK – Vienna’s V&A. The art collections are superb. The very grand, brick, City Hall looks Hanseatic rather than Imperial, possibly deliberate symbolism.


Wagner's  culverted Wien and Stadtpark

In the 1890s the Wien river was culverted as part of a vast programme of infrastructure improvements for the rapidly expanding town. New urban railways were constructed including one alongside the newly tamed Wien, together with boulevards and new parks. The Stadtbahn linked the railway termini, which were inconveniently built beyond the outer ring of bastions, later demolished and replaced by the Gürtel (girdle) boulevards.


Otto Wagner

The key architect of these improvements was Otto Wagner, who became a leading figure of the Secession movement, the Viennese version of Jugendstil. His standard design for the stations of the Stadtbahn is a classic – simple, functional, elegant and very beautiful. More spectacularly decorated station pavilions built at Karlsplatz, and the Emperor’s own station at Hietzing, are now museums. Wagner also designed much other infrastructure including viaducts and the locks and embankments of the Danube Canal. Along the Wienzeile boulevard you find some of his extraordinary apartment buildings, like the Majolica House (the floral ornamentation actually designed by Ludwig) and the equally spectacular building next door with gilded façade and cornice by Moser, a key figure of the Secession. Later Wagner developed a more austere, functional (if beautifully executed) model for apartment buildings, as at Neustiftgasse 40. He still built elaborate villas for wealthy patrons in the suburbs; his own at Hütteldorf is now a museum. I was unable to see his much admired Church of St Leopold nearby which is only open on Saturday afternoons.


Not exactly the Manchester Metro is it? - Karlsplatz


And we use Trespa - Majolica House


Wagner gave Emperor Franz Joseph his own Stadtbahn station

Wagner’s most spectacular building is the Postsparkasse savings bank (1903-12), a key buildings of modernism. Externally it has a simple clarity, faced with marble mounted with aluminum capped bolts. Aluminum is also used on the canopy supports and for the amazing statues which crown the building. Yet more spectacular is the bank’s cash hall with its vast glass, iron and aluminum roof. This is complemented by the most beautifully and functionally detailed furniture and fittings. There is a small museum display of the building.


Postsparkasse savings bank


Very early, and very swish, modernism

The most famous building of the Secession is its exhibition hall designed by Olbrich in 1897, a series of chaste white cubes topped by a fantastical ‘golden cabbage’. It caused a scandal, as it was meant to. Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibited there and was much admired. (Margaret MacDonald is on display at MAK). Klimt’s famous frieze, an interpretation of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, was displayed too and now restored is on permanent exhibition. It is a disturbing piece, not at all like those somewhat kitsch Klimt posters that used to adorn every student flat. His actual works appear much more nuanced than reproductions and are a real eye opener. But for me the stand out Viennese artists are Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl, who sock you in the eye with their raw emotional power. Both died in their 20s – Gerstl killed himself when Schoenberg’s wife ended their affair and Schiele was a victim of the 1918 flu epidemic. Visits to the Leopold and Belvedere galleries are an absolute must. The Architecture museum is very good too.


Gesamtkunstwerk


Fulfilment

Adolf Loos famously rejected the Secession and declared ‘ornament is crime’. This is not entirely apparent at his American Bar, which incorporates marble, onyx, mahogany, brass and very cleverly used mirrors to transform a tiny space into a deeply satisfying and comfortable experience. It is a pity that the exterior, with its angular canopy featuring a stylized American flag, is compromised by a dreadful awning and crappy advertising. Vienna is not quite so respectful of its icons as you might expect – his Café Museum opposite the Secession has been buggered too. The famous ‘house without eyebrows’ opposite the Hofburg Palace, which so annoyed Emperor Franz Joseph, offended not so much by being proto-modern with its flat elevation having no sills or lintels as by its revival of classical forms which were anathema to the bourgeoisies. It is somewhat insensitive that the façade today is adorned with window boxes. You can wander into Loos’s Knize menswear shop on Graben, like a Tardis, and marvel at his manipulation of space (as well as the prices). Nearby are the Loos loos, a model of elegant simplicity. Loos’s capacity for provocation is also very evident with his villas in the swanky Hietzing district. Whilst Wagner’s students were designing amazing extravagances like the Schokoladehaus, with shiny brown glazed majolica reliefs, Loos’s nearby 1910 Steiner house presents a metal barrel roof to the street. His Scheu house of 1912 caused outrage with its unadorned façade and stepped flat roofs.


Loos House has no eyebrows, so why window boxes?


Ornamental restraint and similarities with Rennie Mackintosh


The Loos loos


Schokoladehaus, dark 70% cocoa 


Steiner house upset the neighbours

Scheu was a Social Democrat and the influential public housing movement met at his house. Vienna’s working class tenements were notoriously cramped and squalid and when democracy came with defeat in 1918 the new Social Democratic city administration put Scheu in charge of housing. ‘Red Vienna’ was responsible for a remarkable programme of council house building. In the decade before the Clerico-Fascist putsch of 1934 the city built more than 60,000 flats, re-housing about 10% of the city’s population. This was made possible by the Wohnbausteuer, a radical tax on more expensive houses and luxury goods specifically to fund social housing. I did say Vienna had a lot to teach us.


Karl Marx Hof

The success of the housing programme was partly because the Social Democrats pursued a pragmatic approach to design and construction, building on Viennese traditions rather than following radical theories like those of Corbusier or the Bauhaus. The construction is conventional brick and render, partly because Vienna had no tradition of new building techniques and anyway the objective was to provide work for as many of the unemployed as possible. The flats were small, based on model tenements derived from English example. They lacked bathrooms and central heating – these were too expensive at the time. The City bought land cheap and it benefitted from earlier municipal investment in the Stadtbahn, trams, gas, electricity, water, flood prevention and the magnificent sewers, a backdrop to Carol Reed’s late-expressionist masterpiece ‘The Third Man’.


No 'poor doors' here

The most famous icon of Red Vienna is the Karl Marx Hof, built on a vast scale and over a kilometre long. The name and its dominant, fortress-like presence are a deliberate and defiant statement of working class and Social Democrat power. The design by Karl Ehn was completed in 1930. At first impression it looks not so much Modernist as Post-Modern in its scale, bright colours and employment of large scale, simplified motifs like the arches. The arches are not structural but symbolic and give permeability; the grand arches opposite Heiligenstadt U bahn station were apparently provided to cater for football crowds heading for the nearby stadium. But they also present a real sense of grandeur for what was conceived of as a palace for the people. The Karl Marx Hof was very influential and its grand arch motif is imitated in many of George Lansbury’s LCC estates.


The neighbouring, more intimate courtyard blocks

The central courtyard blocks are nine stories high. Above the arches are displayed secular icons to freedom, knowledge, health and the community. Other courtyard groups are lower and more intimate but all are grouped around large gardens with playgrounds, schools, crèches, surgery, shops, restaurants, laundries and public baths (as the flats had no bathrooms). There was an agency to help residents furnish their small flats; Viennese furniture was too big and heavy, like that crammed into Goldfinger’s Willow Road terrace by his Austrian mother-in-law. The Karl Marx Hof was the scene of a battle in the brief civil war of 1934 and prior to recent improvements, including new insulation, you could apparently still see the bullet holes.


The Reuman Hof



Matteotti Hof


Akin to the Amsterdam School – Matteotti Hof

The other major concentration of Red Vienna council housing is along the Margareten Gürtel, the ‘Boulevard of the Proletariat’. These flats are less monumental and fit into a pre-existing block structure but are nevertheless very impressive. They were built slightly earlier in the 1920s, in different styles by a variety of architects; Loos had been appointed as chief architect but his schemes were not accepted. The more purist German Social Democrats called the resultant lack of a unifying style ‘chaos’. The Reuman Hof, named after the first Social Democrat mayor, is fairly typical, built around a large garden courtyard with his statue in the middle. Like most of the Margaretan Gürtel flats it looks like the sort of mansion blocks you might easily find in Marylebone, possibly Nice or even Miami. This was deliberate – they were meant to be as impressive as the housing of the bourgeoisie. The Matteotti Hof, named after the assassinated anti-fascist Italian, is strictly modernist. What distinguishes the buildings as council flats is the proud lettering on their main façades, noting that they were commissioned by the City Council and paid for by the Wohnbausteuer tax. Today they have not been sold off and are generally fairly well maintained, although with some signs of stress around the edges. Some of the courtyard gardens are now gated, but fortunately most can still be visited.


This is not 70s sci-fi art, this is actually real, Alterlaa


Well maintained 

The Social Democrats regained power after World War II and continued a programme of building council house blocks, opportunistically on various sites across the city. In the late 1960s a grander building programme was deemed necessary which resulted in vast estates like Alterlaa. The scale of this is fairly mind blowing, as if Alexandra Road meets the Victoria Centre flats in Nottingham, but on steroids. The three gargantuan blocks designed by Harry Glück are remarkable with their stepped profile and stacked-up green balconies, but what is more remarkable is their beautiful and well maintained parkland setting – eat your heart out Alice Coleman. In fact the only part of the complex which is not well maintained is the crummy shopping centre between the U bahn station and the flats.


Courtyard enclosure ... 


... and impressive scale, Am Schöpfwerk

Next stop on the U bahn is Am Schöpfwerk – another massive estate but on a grid system around landscaped courtyards with mostly medium rise blocks. This is a more familiar example to British eyes, the difference being that it is far, far better maintained and has fantastic public transport connectivity. The design has an admirable simplicity of form and a clarity of organization. However despite the huge success of Vienna’s council house programme, in Austria today social housing has to be delivered by private developers. It is subsidized by the federal government but still ends up being much more expensive to rent than the city’s own council housing – which in theory at least is still open to all EU citizens.


Tram spotters' paradise

A striking thing about Vienna is the excellence of its public transport system, one of the best in the world according to UTIP. The foundations were laid before the first World War with the building of the Stadtbahn, originally steam like the Metropolitan line and electrified in 1924. Orbital railways provided the basis for the extensive S bahn network and a very comprehensive tram system was constructed. But extensions to the system had to wait until the 70s, since the Social Democrats prioritized the building of housing in the inter and post war years. In 1969 three new lines were constructed (U1, U2 and U3), which tunnel under the heart of the city.


The old platforms, restored ... 


...  and the modern, remodeled

The generously scaled city centre stations have expansive underground concourses and the platforms are spacious with wide exits at either end (which can lead to some confusion – you are signposted to your line in two different directions!). The platforms of the new lines are all to a very elegant standard design with a simple plastic form, I imagine conceived as a modern reinterpretation of Wagner’s work. At the same time the Stadtbahn was upgraded as lines U4 and U6. Wagner’s entrance pavilions were mostly retained and additional entrances with escalators or lifts provided at the opposite ends of the platforms, the platforms themselves often remodeled in the new corporate plastic style. Although retained, many of Wagner’s structures have been carelessly treated with inappropriate kit, tat and advertising but some such as Stadtpark are now being fully restored to the original designs.


The Vienna U bahn and TRON. Courtesy Marcin Skrzątek

The U bahn is frequent, very fast and uber convenient. It provides seamless integration with the S bahn and mainline train services (although there is a long walk at the new Hauptbahnhof). The tram system is amazingly extensive, frequent and a lot of fun but can be slow because the trams have little priority over general traffic. Buses mostly run as outer suburban extensions to the U bahn and tram lines, or as orbital routes. They are remarkably frequent, running every five or ten minutes. Needless to say ticketing is completely integrated and what is really civilized is that there are no barriers at stations, you just validate your ticket and the general presumption is that you are not a fare dodger, unlike authoritarian Britain. It is worth emphasizing that Vienna is a relatively small city – no London or Paris or even Berlin, more the size of Manchester or Birmingham. Of course it is pointless to speculate how investment in public transport on the Viennese model would transform those cities as this is simply inconceivable, but it would of course shoot them up the ‘quality of life’ and productivity league tables.


New Central station - the bit that is not all about shopping and eating

Vienna had various terminal stations like London, but main line trains now all go from the new Hauptbahnhof. This is part of a big regeneration plan which aims to overcome the great barrier between the inner and outer suburbs created by the tangle of railway lines into the old East and South stations. Early evidence for the success of this plan is not too encouraging. The Hauptbahnhof, designed by Wimmer, Hoffmann and Hotz, is like an inverted Birmingham New Street. You approach by long, wide subways like a shopping centre mall, all glitzy shops and eateries and nothing to do with trains. Eventually you find the platforms at the upper level, so somewhat better than New Street. The platform canopies are quite stylish, especially seen from a distance. The entrance from the (un-crossable) Wiedner Gürtel is glass and projecting canopies; simple, even sparse but a dignified refuge from the chaos of traffic and mall-dom. New development around the station is fairly dreary, all chain hotels and glass offices on windswept streets. However the new campus for the Erste group on the old South Station site, designed by Henke Schreieck Architects, is more promising: an arrangement of relatively low rise, curving glass blocks in subtle relationship to each other, possibly inspired by Vienna’s UN buildings. It is not great architecture but it is competent and confident, the height respecting the Belvedere Schloss nearby, a World Heritage Site. How very different from the approach at Liverpool Waters.


Erste group campus, very Sir Owen Williams

If you get the train from the airport you will arrive at the more central Mitte Station. (Don’t get the rip-off CAT express – the S7 is much cheaper and hardly takes any longer). Mitte was redeveloped in the 90s and is just like New Street, trains in the bowels of the earth and you emerge into a torrid and disorientating shopping centre. However it does have good U and S bahn connections and, if you can find your way out to the street, the building structure devoid of advertising junk looks quite impressive. The peaceful Stadtpark nearby is a welcome relief.


This Secessionist stuff is everywhere – Cafe Rudigerhof

Given the delights of Secession Vienna and the relevance of Red Vienna, we had little time to explore more recent architecture. We did not get to see the sculptor Fritz Wotruba’s extraordinary concrete church on the outskirts. We did see the Wittgenstein House, designed by Paul Englemann in 1926 for the famous philosopher and his sister. It is a modernist paradigm expressing ‘a vision of form perfection outside styles and times’ but like the Villa Savoye, it was not really a place to live in. Hermine Wittgenstein said ‘it seemed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than a small mortal like me’, and it is now a cultural institute. Relatively nearby is the eccentric Gaudi-lite Kunsthaus by Hundertwasser, which seems rather trite, like the Po-Mo which Vienna seems fond of, for example the 1990 Haas-Haus on Stephansplatz, opposite the very wonderful cathedral. Hmmmm.


All forethought and no play – Wittgenstein House


All play and no forethought – Kunsthaus by Hundertwasser

The Wien Museum on Karlsplatz, designed by Oswald Heartl in 1959, is beautifully detailed with fine internal spaces. The central courtyard has been roofed over recently. Amongst other displays is a modernist living room designed by Loos, and a small but exquisite collection of Vienna 1900 art. A major revamp and extension is planned. In the park between the Belvedere and the Hauptbahnhof you find the 21er Haus, a reconstruction of the Austrian pavilion for the 1958 Brussels Expo, which, when we saw it, was housing a beautiful wooden temple reclaimed by Ai Wei-Wei. The simple geometry of the 2002 temporary Kunsthalle at Karlsplatz also seems set to remain as permanent exhibition space. Rachel Whiteread’s ‘nameless library’ Holocaust-Denkmal memorial in Judenplatz to the 65,000 Viennese Jews murdered by the Nazis is very moving.


The Wien Museum - a study in time and space 


Austrian pavilion from the 1958 Brussels Expo

In 1955 Khrushchev agreed to Russian withdrawal from Austria on condition of its permanent neutrality. Vienna has used this neutral status very effectively to revive its position as a great international city. The United Nations has one of its largest headquarters there in the Vienna International Centre, established on the east bank of the Danube in the 1970s. This has its own station on the U1 but it is worth getting off at Donauinsel station on the immensely long, thin island park in the middle of the mighty river, largely populated by very polite punks and goths. From here you get a good view of the conurbation and the hills beyond. The UN is now subsumed into Vienna’s version of Canary Wharf, including its tallest building at 60 stories, the slightly wonky DC Tower of 2013 by Dominique Perrault with a shorter sibling under construction. The rest of the ensemble doesn’t merit much attention. The really awful thing is that there is no urban structure or public realm, although the covered way leading to the Austria Centre is quite elegant. Overall it is a non-place, but note the small church opposite the VIC U bahn station, trying to tell a very different story from the surrounding towers of Mammon.


Gary Neville would love this – commerce towers over United Nations

The UN complex is literally international – you need a passport to get past the gun-toting guards, so we only saw it from outside. The Lonely Planet guide says ‘ this complex was a picture of modernism way back in 1979; today it looks less than fab’. Designed by Johann Staber, the semi-circular towers with their powerfully solid ‘bookends’, arranged around an arena as a symbolic way of expressing international relations, are very dignified and appropriate. They still seem pretty fab to me.


At the centre of Europe and the World

Thanks to Owen Hatherley and Anne Lloyd-Thomas for their advice.

Dr. Christa Veigl gave us an excellent tour of Red Vienna www.wien-architektur-tour.at

Jannon Stein’s article ‘The Propaganda of Construction’ in Jacobin Magazine is very useful on Red Vienna. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/the-propaganda-of-construction/

Falter Verlag’s City Walks 1 on Viennese Jugendstil provides very useful itineraries covering most of the best Secession architecture and has good, short expositions on the movement.

Contrast & reflection

Of all our continental neighbours the Dutch seem most like the English, or at least what we thought the English were like until recent events. Countries on the periphery, the national identities of both were forged in opposition to Latin and Catholic Europe, and imperial Spain and France. From their seafaring traditions both developed formidable commerce and extensive maritime empires. Both evolved early bourgeois societies characterized by traditions of pragmatism, restraint, understatement and toleration; a bit stolid and dull.


Historical theme: the Dutch lead the way

There are big differences of course. The Netherlands is much smaller than Britain, although with a population of 17 million it has a larger economy than most Brits realize. There seems to be more of a sense of societal cohesion which may result from centuries fighting together to keep the sea at bay, much of the Netherlands being below sea level. The industrial revolution came late to Holland – a century after England, and so in the C20 its industrial structure was relatively modern.


Can we revive the Amsterdam school please? It's amazing. No questions necessary.
De Bijenkorf store, Den Haag

But for urbanists the most obvious difference between the two countries is that in Holland the tradition of modernism is everywhere predominant. Britain was notoriously backward between the wars in every aspect of modernism. Even today outside city centres most new housing is attempted cosy nostalgia. The Dutch too toyed with garden city ideas and in the early C20 the Amsterdam School of Michael de Klerk, Piet Kramer and others produced the most marvellous terraces of workers’ housing. This drew on the traditional Dutch excellence in brickwork and the design invention of the housing fronting its many canals. It was inspired by Jugendstil and the Arts and Crafts movement. But in the late C19 Berlage was already radically re-thinking space and form in architecture, drawing on an eclectic range of influences from Viollet-le-Duc to Frank Lloyd Wright. His most famous building is the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, a celebration of brick craftsmanship with its load bearing and explicitly bare walls. In London he built Holland House (1916) behind the Gherkin on Bury Street, here employing a steel frame and clad with greenish tiles above a black granite plinth – a truly stylish building.


Berlage discovers visual hierarchy and controls ornamentation


Gemeentemuseum, hmmm... not that impressed

Berlage’s last building was the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, completed after his death in 1934. It reflects new ideas about the purpose and accessibility of the art gallery and museum. It expresses itself as a series of low, modest, almost random cubes and lanterns and is clad in quite lurid yellow brick - the structure is concrete. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is very obvious. It is viewed across a reflecting lake and you enter the building via a long, low key corridor isthmus into the much more expansive reception hall which employs brightly coloured tiles, marble, bronze and oak paneling. The layout of the galleries is deliberately complex, intended to slow down visitors and help them ‘lose themselves in art’. This ethos may explain the hopeless signing today. The galleries are all naturally lit and arranged round a central courtyard, now glazed in a low key way. The Gemeentemuseum is a strange, unsettling, almost shocking building. It is arresting but its massing seems confused, no doubt reflecting Berlage’s focus on the interior dynamics rather than creating a sculptural composition. It is building which refuses to conform to expectation.


Local government is cool


An essay in visual language: form, proportion, movement, detail ... 

This cannot be said of Dudok’s magnificent Hilversum Town Hall, the ikon of Dutch modernism. His design was presented in 1924 but the city was not ready for such a radical project, and it was only because of pressure from Berlage and the architectural establishment that it was eventually approved and completed in 1930. The building is in a park like setting and its key south elevation is viewed across a lake. The monumentality and cubic form is awe inspiring - it looks as if could be a turbine hall rather than a Town Hall. The magnificent tower and other vertical emphasis is beautifully balanced by long vertical pavilions with strip windows and by covered walkways. The load bearing yellow brickwork is staggeringly crisp but its sobriety is leavened by beautiful detailing, especially the projecting flat roofs. Then there are carefully rationed glimpses of colour, mostly blue tiles and beds of red geraniums.


.... grid, angle, texture, rhythm ...


.... alignment, symmetry, material ...

Dudok insisted on designing everything in the building including the furniture, typography and upholstery; it is the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk. The integration of natural and electric lighting is a brilliant touch. One of the very few things he did not design himself is the symbolic chairs in the Wedding Room, which are by Mackintosh. A touching aspect of the scheme is the extent to which this was seen as a ‘citizens’ building, with many groups across social classes donating gifts to the Town Hall; Dudok of course insisted on designing these himself. How different from the suspicious and parsimonious attitude towards local government today.


... contrast, light and colour ... 


... have we forgotten the joy of looking?

Hilversum Town Hall had a huge international impact, even in Britain, and was the inspiration for town halls like Hornsey and Greenwich, amongst others. The bastardised influence of its bricky simplicity can also be noted in the ubiquitous ‘Odeon’ style found across Britain. Dudock became the city architect of Hilversum and built many schools and other civic buildings, as well as residential areas on garden city lines. His major department store in Rotterdam was destroyed in the war, although a later office building survives, now the Café Dudok. The ingenuity of Dutch architecture between the wars can be seen in the city centre of Den Haag, most extraordinarily in the multistory car park designed in 1928 by Jan Greve on Torenstraat, one of the main streets, based around elliptical ramps providing five floors of parking circling a wedge shaped light. The De Bijenkorf department store, designed in 1923, is a Piet Kramer masterpiece with a façade of curved bricks and faceted strips of glass. But perhaps the most interesting is the De Volharding Socialist Co-operative store of 1927, designed by Buijs and Lürsen. This has a five storey reinforced concrete skeleton covered in black granite, aluminium edged frosted glass and prism black tiles. The light boxes on the façades were designed for advertising, transforming the building into a luminous billboard at night. The design is heavily influenced by Cubism, Russian Constructivism and of course De Stijl.



The De Volharding Socialist Co-operative store of 1927


The joy of looking is endemic in Dutch culture

The De Stijl movement, founded in Holland one hundred years ago, involved architects and artists (including Mondrian). Heavily influenced by Cubism it advocated the abstraction of design to the universal elements of form and colour. Naturalistic forms were eschewed for straight horizontal or vertical lines. Planes were separated so that each element is seen independently. Colour was restricted to black, white, grey and primary colours.


Nearly 100 years old

The De Stijl movement had an influence way beyond the relatively few works it produced. Indeed the only building which fully illustrates the principles of the movement is the famous Rietveld Schröder house in Utrecht. Rietveld was a furniture and interior designer but was commissioned by Mrs Schröder to design a house for herself and her children. She was very closely involved in the evolution of the concept and detail of its design. The tiny house is at the end of a conventional terrace and overlooked open polders (until a motorway and urban expansion in the 60s). The exterior is composed of horizontal and vertical lines and planes in black, white and grey with a few bars of primary colour and it looks jewel-like. The inside is more magical yet. Everything is carefully designed to maximize space and flexibility. This is best seen on the upper floor where the living room and bedrooms all have sliding or revolving doors allowing the space to be fully opened up or divided into private space as required. The space has a strong sense of the Japanese. The lack of division between inside and out is emphasized by an ingenious fully opening corner window. Rietveld’s skill as a cabinet maker is shown in the clever built in furniture, and also his famous chair.


Dear big British house builders, you are all morons 

Although a one-off, the Rietveld Schröder house had a huge influence on housing design in the Netherlands, which is apparent from any train journey across this densely built up country. There seems to be an inherent sense of order and design expressed in Modernism but also reflecting older societal and architectural traditions. (Of course there is another side to the Dutch character too – hedonism and vulgarity, which we explored in our blog on self build in the Netherlands.)


See caption above

In the port area of Rotterdam you find an early modernist estate for the working class designed by Oud, a key architect of the De Stijl movement, in 1925. The Kiefhoek estate plan is long rows of two storey terraces rendered in white with a base of yellow bricks, red doors and grey ground floor window frames with a continuous band of yellow window frames at the first floor. The tiny front gardens have yellow walls and blue steel railings. The houses were meant for big families but seem small, still lacking bathrooms or running hot water – tenants carried this from a special boiler house. But there was a church, playgrounds and two shops strikingly at the angle where terraces join. The original estate was demolished in the 90s because of poor foundations, but meticulously rebuilt. The De Stijl principles continue to inform Dutch housing design, like the estate of low rise terraces at Ringvaartplas Rotterdam, designed by Mecanoo in 1989. The value of long term planning is clearly seen here too with the Metro which efficiently links this peripheral estate to the city centre.


Match of the Day: Van Nelle v Boots

The train from Schiphol to Rotterdam speeds past the Van Nelle factory on the city’s northern outskirts. This is one of the most thrilling examples of modernist industrial architecture, designed by Van der Vlugt in 1925 and completed in 1931. Le Corbusier said ‘the visit to this factory has been one of the most beautiful days of my life’. It was clearly the inspiration for Owen Williams’ awe inspiring Boots D10 factory in Nottingham, built in 1932. The Van Nelle complex was designed for optimum functioning and the completely integrated flow of production from the arrival of raw materials to the dispatch of finished product. It was also intended to provide much improved working conditions for employees.


Concrete mushroom columns: 1 - 1

The building has concrete floor slabs with mushroom columns, leaving the façade free for continuous metal framed windows, so the building is flooded with light. With commendable pragmatism the architect specified cheap standard glazing used extensively in Holland for greenhouses. The structure is divided into main three sections; eight floors for tobacco, five with a double height mezzanine for coffee and three for tea. These are linked to storage and dispatch areas by exquisitely angled glazed bridges making the complex look like something out of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. This was in fact a happy accident; the introduction of larger canal barges and development of road transport meant the original plan for delivering raw materials had to be changed. Freestanding offices at the entrance follow the curve of the road.


Curtain walling: 2 - 2


Overhead walkways: 3 - 2, Van Nelle wins in extra time!

The nature of the work required high standards of cleanliness and facilities for the staff were outstanding for the time including the first sick pay in Holland. Men and women were however segregated into different jobs – the women left when they got married. The workers’ entrance leads to a double staircase, one for each sex, leading to showers and other facilities. The Van Nelle company excelled at advertising and promotion and were particularly good at brand recognition with distinctive typography and design. The Van Nelle signs on the roof are iconic. Closed as a factory in 1995, it has been refurbished as space for exhibitions and conferences and offices for architects.


A sanatorium designed for TB patients 



Now visited by suffering design enthusiasts from Britain

Sanatorium Zonnestraal (by Duiker and Bijvoet 1926-31) is another seminal Dutch modernist building. It was part of an idealistic social programme rather than a statement of style and was commissioned by the General Union of Dutch Diamond Workers. The sanatorium was intended as a temporary expedient awaiting the development of a cure for tuberculosis, which was (rightly) expected within 30 years, and this pushed economy in construction. The buildings are located in extensive woodland and were designed around principles of maximum access to sunshine and fresh air, and with complex separate circulation systems to avoid cross infection. Patients arrived beneath the main block by car and were symbolically led up into a light filled upper floor social centre and restaurant with sun terrace. There were flanking pavilions for the wards and medical facilities. The buildings have concrete frames and columns but the walls are plaster on a wire mesh with an outer layer of (originally unpainted) cement. Fenestration is maximized. The 3 metre module was for cheapness and speed of production. Zonnestraal was very much admired and strongly influenced Aalto in his later and possibly more famous Paimio Sanatorium. Zonnestraal became neglected and unused but the main building was restored in 2001 and the other blocks are also being restored.


Rational and creative – Delft station

Rotterdam, with a population of about 650,000, is only slightly smaller than Amsterdam. Den Haag, the seat of the Dutch government is almost part of the urban area and is linked to Rotterdam’s Metro system. Rotterdam is also the largest port in Europe, its docks occupying a vast area along the Maas to the North Sea. So Rotterdam is very much a rival to Amsterdam but its character and function is entirely different. It is a much harder place. Rotterdam was insignificant compared to nearby towns like Delft until the industrial port was developed in the C19. In 1940 the city was bombed in a devastating Blitzkrieg which took only 15 minutes to flatten the city centre. The ‘fire line’ of total destruction can be followed today in a thin red line in the pavements, devised by Adriaan Geuze in 2010. The monument to the Destroyed City by Zadkine, unveiled in 1953, is a figure without a heart. It is at least arguable that the ‘Basic Plan’ for rebuilding, drawn up by the City Architect van Traa, created a city without a heart.


Het Steiger Church 


Coventry Cathedral vibes

The city’s rebuilding was as radical, symbolic and celebrated as that of Coventry but there was no emblematic building like Coventry Cathedral, unless it is the Euromast of 1958, but that was erected for fun, not commemoration. Some churches were restored or rebuilt, like the impressively austere Het Steiger Church (1959 by Kraaijvanger Architects). Here in a side chapel the Virgin Mary shelters the City of Rotterdam beneath her cloak, an odd icon in the circumstances.

Van Traa abandoned the idea of reconstructing the old centre and instead designed a completely new spatial layout with radical separation of functions. The new centre was dominated by commercial buildings and shopping. Housing was mostly, but not entirely, pushed to the outskirts in a radical shift in the city’s structure. The dominant feature of the new city centre is its massively wide new roads which, now mostly flanked by tall buildings, create Rotterdam’s reputation as ‘the windy city’.


Lijnbaan, twinned with Coventry & Stevenage


Rotterdam Kunsthal (Rem Koolhas 1987)

The architecture of the post war rebuilding seems very familiar from British experience. It is mostly decent, modest and cheaply done. The set pieces like Lijnbaan, the first pedestrian shopping precinct in Europe designed by Van den Broek and Bakema in 1951, still impress. There are attractive flats and gardens behind. The Huf Shoe Store by the same architects (1952) represented modernity but the Bijenkorf Department Store of 1955 by Marcel Breuer, an almost sealed box with a honeycomb cladding of hexagonal travertine panels with only narrow slit windows predicted our retail futures. Many of the offices of the 50s and 60s were traditional brick buildings with careful detailing, that provide a foil and visual relief to the very many shouty new buildings of today. And such has been the scale of development in the last decades that Rotterdam does not really seem like a post war city but a very modern one. Whereas Amsterdam is like a sunflower, as our waiter explained, with a compact centre and the suburbs spreading out like petals, Rotterdam is more like a constellation. It has many of the right components but they are disjointed. There are lovely parks and a whole district of excellent museums like Boijmans van Beuningen, completed in 1935 and designed by the municipal architect in the Scandinavian style. Nearby is the Kunsthal (Rem Koolhas 1987), a bit lost fronting a busy dual carriageway. It is deceptively simple, divided off centre by a ramp down to the Museumpark. He jokily employs expensive travertine next to corrugated plastic.


Didn't see that coming


An imaginative cityscape 

Rotterdam is often eccentric. Oud’s de Stijl façade for the Café de Unie, which enraged opinion in 1925 and was destroyed in 1940 was reconstructed in 1986 although in a different place. Next to the neo-renaissance City Hall and in front of the main Post Office on Coolsingel, both imposing from the early C20 and which survived the Blitz, a ‘pavilion’ for MacDonald has recently been rebuilt to make the street 'more convivial'. Piet Blom’s yellow cube houses from 1984 form an intended ‘Ponte Vecchio’ bridge across a dual carriageway to link the market area to Oudehaven and, if not functional, have become a tourist attraction. The strange stubby 'pencil' tower is also part of the scheme. The spectacular new Markthal by MVRDV has only recently opened. It is a horseshoe structure with great glazed ends. It includes 200 apartments within the skin of the horseshoe structure and all have a view of the market hall. The great hall is filled with stalls, often with cafes above where you can admire the vast artwork ‘Horn of Plenty’ covering the entire roof.


What's going on? – Markthal


Better than flats overlooking a Tesco (see Gateshead, Woolwich)

Rotterdam is today known for its adventurous new architecture like the Markthal. The skyline too has been transformed and whilst many of the new buildings seem to be trying too hard, desperate to stand out with silly motifs and lurid materials, there is overall a sense of confidence which is infectious. A good example is the ‘Red Apple’ apartments towering above the inner harbour at Wijnbrugstraat. The fenestration looks crazy at first, but there is a clear logic. Office buildings cantilever for no obvious reason but look cool, especially ‘The Bridge’ seen across the harbour hovering over a Unilever factory.


The Red Apple, image by Przemysław Turlej (Creative Commons)


The Harbour 

In a sense the harbour is the heart of the city, its raison d’être and most dramatic feature. A ferry trip in the grey light of dusk is extraordinarily evocative with its skyline of cranes, bridges, silos, towers and vast hulks of shipping. The scale of the dock operation is amazing, and we saw only the inner docks, not Europoort. The cluster of tall buildings around the waterside is impressive even if some are pretty ordinary in themselves. In the old red light district of Katendrecht, Maccreanor Lavington have added two elegant blocks of flats alongside the water. A walk to the old dock workers area through the streamlined Maas tunnel is highly recommended. It was completed in 1940 (separate tunnels for cars, cycles and pedestrians). In the working class district of Charlois there are interesting examples of ‘homesteading’ in the run down terraced streets, like the ‘Black Pearl’ on Pompstraat.


More appealing than their essays

The absolute star of the waterside is OMA’s De Rotterdam, a mixed use 'vertical city' designed in the late 90s but not completed until 2013.  Above a massive plinth three interconnected towers rise, but about half way up they are displaced in different directions. This excitingly articulates the building mass. Otherwise the building is very serious and restrained, beautifully detailed and entirely satisfying. What is so brilliant about it is the relationship to the Erasmus Bridge (Van Berkel and Boss 1996) with its diagonal stays and expressively angled pylon.


Bit like Birmingham Station, but less shallow and more thorough

The scale of new infrastructure in Rotterdam astounds. New road bridges and railway tunnels span the Maas. A vast new Centraal Station was completed in 2013. The concourse is a triangular structure with a dramatically cantilevered and angled roof – and it is not entirely given over to shops and eateries either. Other new stations like Blaak stagger in their scale and style. Rotterdam has 5 Metro lines and innumerable tram lines. This in a city with a smaller population than Leeds, a telling- really quite horrifying - comparison.


Integrated design thinking: how the parts relate to the whole


Where design education is integral  – Delft Technical University

This being in the Netherlands cycles, cycle lanes and stacked up cycle parks are everywhere. However there is still a sense that traffic is far too dominant. This is the legacy of the Basic Plan with its network of dual carriageways which traffic engineers made into expressways. Pedestrians are fourth class citizens after trams, cars and cycles, all with their segregated tracks and traffic lights. So walking about the city centre is a bit of a pain, waiting endlessly for the green man to let you cross the road. The pavements often seem quite empty with little street life. It is sometimes difficult to find even a cup of coffee or a sandwich as neither the post war rebuilding or the big new new developments cater much for small shops..

Rotterdam is impressive, lively, dynamic, confident. It is a great city but one which needs more fine grain, human scale attention. Maybe it needs to emulate Hamburg, its nearest rival as a port, with an ambitious new green agenda. This could start by redesigning its city centre expressways as green boulevards.

This blog is largely based on the C20 Society guided tour ‘100 Years of De Stijl’ led by Susannah Charlton. I have relied heavily on her expositions and quote from her notes. Check out the website https://c20society.org.uk for forthcoming trips.

‘Rotterdam Architecture City’ by Paul Groenendijk et al and recently published is an indispensible guide to recent architecture in the city.

Whoa, Jan Gehl signs for Leeds ...

Leeds is a great city. I say this since it undoubtedly is, but also because as I am now almost a resident – well I have a Leeds postcode - it would be churlish of me not to. But as we explored in Cities of the North Leeds, despite its rich inheritance of Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist buildings, and its broadly based economy making it one of the most successful cities in Britain, is often complacent about the quality of its new buildings and especially its public realm. The civic psyche still seems stuck in the ‘Motorway City of the 70s’ mind set and outside the pedestrianised central core the highway kit dominates; the car is king. But despite its urban motorways and insanely over-engineered expressways, peak hour in Leeds is always gridlock. As I write First Leeds has tweeted that congestion is delaying buses by up to 1 hour 25 minutes. No wonder they now carry only a fifth of Leeds city centre commuters as against nearly half who drive, an astonishingly high percentage compared to other big cities. Leeds is locked into an extremely vicious circle of worsening congestion making its already poor public transport ever worse.


...  but so far it looks like Cloughie's 44 days; Bridgewater baffles

For a long time Leeds has been timid in tackling car dependency and the dominance of highway infrastructure over the public realm. Yes I know that the city tried to get a tram and was thwarted by central government. But there hasn’t really been the vision or the political will for change seen in other cities like Manchester, Birmingham or Nottingham. Nevertheless there are some moves in the right direction, the catalyst being the anticipated arrival of HS2 in 2033. 



Where HS2 meets a deferred HS3

Of course HS2 is hardly a priority for Leeds, or indeed for the rest of the North. Yes, trains to London will be quicker but the service to King’s Cross is already fast, and will be faster still when planned improvements on the East Coast line are completed. HS2 does nothing to speed up the lethargic Trans-Pennine and Northern services through Leeds. New longer trains and a few extra services are promised giving 40% more seats to relieve today's gross overcrowding, but trains will remain pitifully slow. And whilst Leeds gets HS2 as well as King’s Cross expresses, Bradford, a city with a population of 500,000, will still lack main line services. It all falls far short of the expectations for a Northern Powerhouse and aspirations of a trans-Pennine ‘HS3’. Now electrification is casually deferred by Grayling, who says that the North was getting its fair share of transport investment. Actually train services in the North are a national disgrace and a real problem for both productivity and sustainability. Leeds draws its workforce from a wide area. It cannot hope to kick its culture of car dependency unless it has efficient and attractive public transport and a regional rail network such as you would find in its peer cities, like say Lyon. This is where investment should be going, but a Faustian pact between mendacious Tory Westminster and the braggadocio of Labour’s big city leaders has made vanity grands projects the priority. 

 
Bauman Lyons introduce some style and fun to City station

However, rather in the same way that non-stick pans were a useful if accidental outcome of the wasteful space race, the HS2 juggernaut gives Leeds an imperative to develop a more sustainable transport policy. Leeds rightly rejected HS2’s initial plan for a separate terminus out in the Southbank styx. It commissioned a plan by Jan Gehl and Arup of how HS2 could be integrated with City station and help deliver the wider regeneration of Southbank. Gehl, the guru of people-friendly cities, is often used as a ‘green-wash’. Glossy masterplans are full of images of his schemes in Copenhagen, New York and other cities, replete with smiling, happy people cycling, strolling or sipping cappuccino. But after the promotion and planning permission developers usually quietly shelve the promised urban goodies because, well, this is England where planning is emasculated, the public sector skint and developers know they can get away with it. 


The future?

But to Leeds’s credit the Gehl/Arup study has been translated into a ‘Supplementary Planning Document’ (SPD) which means it will have the status of being part of the immensely complicated statutory Development Plan. Of course this does not mean that its recommendations will actually be implemented. And a cynic might point out that, whilst the generic design advice is very good, it is only reiterating the sort of things we thought we had adopted ten or twenty years ago in ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’, ‘By Design’ and the ‘Manual for Streets’. This guidance had little effect on how Leeds dealt with schemes like Bridgewater Place, the Opal Tower or the East Street expressway. Nevertheless the SPD is promising.


The former entrance to the Tetley Brewery and Southbank vernacular

The ‘Southbank Leeds Regeneration Framework’ SPD covers that vast no-man’s land southward of City Station to the M621. The area is billed by regeneration boosters as ‘doubling the size of the city centre, a development area ten times bigger than King’s Cross’. But with the important exception of Holbeck Urban Village, Southbank has thus far singularly failed to produce good architecture, coherent urban form or any sense of place. Separated from the city centre by the huge physical and psychological barriers of railway viaducts and the river Southbank comprises a miscellany of low grade offices, vast open car parks, sheds, depots and dereliction all cut up by motorway slip roads, dual carriageways and racetrack one-way systems. Heseltine set up a UDC for the area which left a pitiful legacy, notably the dreadful ASDA HQ sitting on a prime waterfront site surrounded by an ocean of car parking. The Royal Armouries museum and The Tetley gallery are important assets for Leeds, as are Leeds City College and the College of Building, but they are not part of a coherent city centre. Towering over all this is the execrable Bridgewater Place, a testament to and standing reproach of what went so badly wrong with Leeds’s laissez-faire planning in the noughties. Note the strange new baffles and screens to try and mitigate the tower’s lethal wind tunnel effects. Meanwhile the historic fabric around Bridge End and Crown Point, which should be the starting point for the regeneration of Southbank and its integration with the city centre, remain sadly neglected.


Welcome to Leeds; watch this become a space

The proposals for an integrated station in the Gehl/Arup study, developed further by Atkins as a masterplan, are imaginative. The HS2 terminus is to be grafted onto the existing station at right angles, like the long stem of a T. Given that City Station is built on a labyrinth of arches above the rushing waters of the Aire this is going to be one hell of a difficult engineering project. The integrated station will have a new concourse over the existing platforms and the new HS2 terminus, providing much more space for passengers and hugely improving circulation. An overall glass roof is planned to flood the station with light, replacing the existing Stygian gloom. From the new concourse a new piazza will be created stepping down to Bishopsgate Street, removing the clutter of dismal New Station Street. Traffic is removed from City Square. Neville Street under the arches will be pedestrianised and can be re-imagined as a Leeds arcade leading to shops and restaurants in the underused ‘dark arches’ beneath the station.


Potential in the 'dark arches'

All this is very good, but there are big problems too. The masterplan has to accept the alignment of HS2, which slashes across Southbank on a viaduct. The HS2 platforms will be at a high level and immensely long. The masterplan proposals to mitigate its impact with ‘active’ streets and open spaces beneath the station structure seem optimistic, even fanciful. Look at the impact of St Pancras International on Pancras Road for a more realistic impression than the masterplan sketches. And whilst City station would undoubtedly be massively improved for passengers, the plans do very little to increase the track and platform capacity required for an effective ‘HS3’ and expansion of other services; a couple of additional bay platforms hardly does the business. A further problem is that the plans are predicated on building two new multi-storey car parks, including a giant 1500 space long stay for HS2. This will obviously just worsen the existing traffic congestion. Meanwhile there are no real plans for public transport improvements; the ‘interchanges’ turn out to be bus stops dotted around the periphery and there is ‘passive provision’ for a future tram through Neville Street.


Jan Gehl has got his work cut out

It is the job of consultants to illustrate exciting opportunities but the reality often turns out very differently. The entrances to the new London Bridge station, for example, are based on a similar grand concept to the Leeds plan but are a value-engineered disappointment. The designs for Birmingham New Street too were dumbed down and the station ends up as an adjunct of a shopping mall and food court. Talk in the masterplan of City station becoming not just a station but a ‘destination’ with large scale retail and leisure opportunities fuel fears that the new Leeds will go the same way as Birmingham New Street, sorry Grand Central. And look at the ranks of ticket barriers at London Bridge and New Street which will rather restrict the promised permeability of the new City station too.


Birmingham New Street Station, full of tat ... 


... and tacky details

Notwithstanding these reservations, the imperative of HS2 and the new station gives the potential for radical changes to the highway network and public realm, changes which hitherto Leeds has been too timid to implement. The existing highway network in Southside has to be fundamentally rethought, both to enable construction of HS2, and also to create the major developments that justify building it at all. 


Good ideas

There is much to like in the new SPD based on the Gehl/Arup precepts of ‘Life First … Then Space … Then Buildings’. This is certainly the right philosophy and the preamble uses warm phrases like ‘create streets and public spaces that are attractive for all people’, ‘use heritage as a catalyst’ and ‘stitch disparate parts of the city together’. It says that Leeds needs to position itself as a ‘walkable city’ and proposes the transformation of the existing streets with ‘pedestrian and cycle friendly high quality people-focused design’. 


The seventh circle of hell; Meadow Lane and Dewsbury Road

The SPD envisages a new hierarchy of roads for Southbank. An ‘improved’ M621 and city centre motorway will form an inner ring road. Within this the arterial roads of Southbank will be re-designed as ‘City Boulevards’. Gehl imaged these as people-friendly streets with wide pavements, cycle ways, landscaping and a two-way single carriageway, although illustrations show Meadow Lane and Dewsbury Road still as major highways, not quite the people-friendly places of the design rhetoric. The concept of a ring of ‘City Boulevards’ is also flawed in that it is likely to replicate the problems of the City Centre Loop in attracting through traffic, causing gridlock and delays to public transport. What is required is a system of access only loops from the ring road, something that Nottingham pioneered in the 1970s. 


Ok, get this: Leeds is planning green routes

The SPD also includes plans for a network of ‘green’ pedestrian and cycle routes through Southbank and linking across the barrier of the M621 to inner city Holbeck and Hunslet. This ‘green network’ will be complemented by a ‘blue’ network of waterways, the Aire obviously but also other watercourses which are largely hidden at present. There are plans for new squares and green spaces including ‘Yorkshire Square’ by the river at Neville Street bridge. The proposed City Park looks rather smaller than its star billing implies and has Meadow Lane running through it but there is also an interesting concept for a ‘Southbank Arbour’ on an axis from Temple Works to the Royal Armouries. However talk of a ‘world class’ waterside along the Aire sounds like typical consultants’ hype given the abject failure to deliver in previous regeneration schemes. 


A vision of Leeds from Northern Europe (hiding Bridgewater Place)

Beyond generic design aspirations the SPD is coy about the sort of development to be expected for an area which, as the plan boasts, is ten times bigger than King’s Cross. Within this vast and formless area the key focus must surely be that around the HS2 terminus. Neville Street largely disappears under this new station which will make it very difficult to create the promised attractive new streets. Relatively recent buildings, including presumably the ASDA HQ, will have to be demolished but what will replace them is unclear. Form, massing and uses are all left opaque; the SPD does not want to be prescriptive. This is understandable given the realpolitik of Britain today where developers are (literally) in the driving seat and public agencies have to work ‘in partnership’ with the owners of the land. But given the huge investment of public money here – £500 million for the new City station alone – surely the public sector should have a much bigger role in determining the built environment outcomes.


Good things: Holbeck Urban Village


Attention to detail

However, in design terms things seem to be looking up in Leeds. Holbeck Urban Village is an outstanding example of small scale conservation-based renewal with a real sense of place. Now plans have been submitted for the development on 3.5ha of adjacent land, mostly open car parks and derelict land, to a masterplan by Feilden Clegg Bradley, the architects of Broadcasting Place. This certainly talks a good game with its concepts of modern reinterpretation of mill style buildings using brick, terracotta and industrial metalwork. It promises landscaping to tie together the impressive railway viaducts and watercourses and evokes a network of real streets and squares linking to City Station and the city centre. The architects have an excellent track record and the images are seductive. However whilst the two tall towers proposed, described as ‘modern chimneys’, are infinitely better than Bridgewater Place they don’t so much ‘echo’ the sublime campanile of Tower Works, but eclipse them.


Temple Works, big love

Not far away is Temple Works, a stupendous factory which looks like a Pharaoh’s country house and is one of the greatest structures of the C19th. After decades of neglect by the owners, the infamous Barclay brothers, and Burberry backing out of the hoped for renovation as a factory, Temple Works has now been sold to CEG, the developers of Holbeck. Leeds really needs to be proactive now to avoid a tragedy like Glasgow’s Egyptian Halls. 


Tetley Brewey car park, bigger than the Vatican City

The other big development scheme currently for Southbank is on the vast Tetley Brewey car park site. This is being promoted by the property arm of Ikea and includes 850 residential units, hotels, offices, vibrant everything. The masterplan illustrations suggest a brickier version of the shiny blocks  Leeds already has in profusion, but importantly the plan does deliver two hectares of land for the new City Park.

 
City Square, currently isolated by traffic

There are wider spin-offs from the Southbank SPD too. The remodelling of City Station demands the severing of the crazy one-way ‘City Centre Loop’ traffic system which is either a roaring race track or completely gridlocked. This enables City Square, already partially reinstated to its Edwardian concept, to be redesigned as a handsome and dignified arrival space for the city. 

 
Same with the West Yorkshire Playhouse

Replacing the City Centre Loop with a City Boulevard requires streets to be redesigned as places for people, walking and cycling, not just traffic. This gives the opportunity for much improved settings for many important buildings. Simplifying the ridiculous tangle of highways and slip roads around Quarry Hill along St Peters St, Duke St and Crown Point Road will help connect Leeds’s de-facto cultural quarter with the city centre and complement current plans for a new entrance and public space at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. 

 
The environs of Leeds Minster should be so much better ...


... start here!

And the setting of Leeds Minster can also be radically re-thought. Kirkgate will no longer be part of the City Centre Loop racetrack and this opens up the opportunity to remodel the existing run down park north of the Minster. The park could be greatly enlarged by incorporating redundant carriageways including the north bound branch of Duke St, concentrating two way traffic on the present southbound route. 'Minster Park' would provide a new focus for an area pretty much destroyed by highway and high-rise mania, but one which still retains key elements of Leeds’s townscape, heritage and attractions for visitors. It must be as important a priority as Southbank Park. 

 
Woodhouse Lane crossing the inner motorway

But the biggest priority is to redesign Woodhouse Lane, between those two great icons of Leeds’ municipal pride - the Town Hall and the Leeds University. The universities are of course one of Leeds’s greatest assets. The tower of the Parkinson Building at the top of Woodhouse Lane is a hugely powerful landmark and symbol whilst the Chamberlin, Powell and Bon campus is one of the finest ensembles of post war architecture in Britain. Add to this Broadcasting Place – far and away the best modern building in Leeds. Upper Woodhouse Lane provides an attractive approach to Leeds University, reinforced by some decent new infill in the Laidlaw Library. However Lower Woodhouse Lane is ground zero. The disconnect created by the inner ring motorways is horrendous even though here in a cutting; the noise, the dislocating spaghetti of slip roads, the lack of enclosure and streetscape. In a sense you have to admire the motorway's design; it is such an extravagant, full blooded example of its genre and its time. Maybe it should be listed, but major urban repair is required to re-establish a connected ‘walkable city’.

 
Where success is uglier than failure

Out of this urban chaos Leeds could conjure a new environment to be proud of. By decking over the motorway, new streets and development sites could be created around a major square that would provide a focus for Beckett University. Woodhouse Lane could be transformed into a new green spine between the city and the university for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport. The convoluted motorway slip roads and complex one way systems would need to be simplified and the vast Woodhouse Lane multi-storey car park demolished, an important symbolic act for a new sustainable transport policy. A similar approach of building over the motorway void at the apex of New Briggate and Vicar Lane could give the Grand Theatre the dignified setting it sadly lacks today, creating a new public square as well as development opportunities. Cities like Hamburg are doing this sort of thing already.


Deserves a better street setting

The key thing about these suggestions is that they can all be achieved by re-allocating existing road space. Although developers call nearly all the shots with new buildings, the City controls highway land. Gehl noted that this comprises 80% of public space in the Southbank area and similarly in other fringe areas of the city centre. Transforming highway space into public space - people space - civic space does not really depend on HS2 at all; that just provides the impetus for change. What it does depend on is civic vision and will – and funding of course, but the vision and the will come first. You don’t have to go abroad for examples of how to do it - look at what Sheffield has achieved with the Heart of the City project. 

 
Is Leeds too proud to learn from Sheffield?

Leeds desperately needs a city-wide strategy for sustainable transport and within this a serious plan to reduce car use and car parking. But the City is still supporting more road building like the East Leeds Orbital, a 7.5km dual carriageway scheme to 'provide the capacity to support increased traffic’ generated by an urban extension. It will cost £165 million. Leeds and the Highways Agency also want to spend £55 million on constructing extra traffic capacity for the M621. The argument, which sounds reasonable, is that this will allow through traffic to be removed from the city centre but actually it is encouraging more traffic overall in a city which is already far too car dependent. Nearly all the funding in the West Yorkshire ‘Transport Plus’ investment plan is for highway schemes, or dressed up highway schemes. This money needs to be focused on public transport. 


or Nottingham?

Leeds does now have a Public Transport Investment Programme (PTIP) as Whitehall, which turned down the tram and even the proposed trolleybus, has been shamed into giving funding to improve Leeds’s abysmal bus services. Many cities think they have the worst bus service in Britain, but Leeds has to be a serious contender. The problem however is that Leeds is way behind the curve even for British cities in its public transport planning. First Leeds announces that it is trialing an electric bus; big deal. Nottingham already has the biggest fleet of electric buses in Europe as well as lots of new biogas buses and of course a tram network. With smart card ticketing, an ‘Oyster’ card, contactless payment, ubiquitous real time information, Nottingham is a public transport success story achieved in spite of deregulation. But it is the result of more than 20 years of planning and a political focus on public transport that required brave decisions like introducing a Workplace Parking Levy. Leeds with its much bigger commercial base would raise serious money for public transport investment with a WPL. But in Leeds responsibility is divided between the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (Metro) and the City so that public transport just hasn’t been a priority. And with de-regulation the bus companies hold most of the cards – they decide what services to run and the fares and the terms of ‘partnership working’.  Given First Leeds’s previous record you can’t have much confidence that it will deliver the quality of public transport to which the PTIP now aspires. Leeds needs to follow the example of Greater Manchester in going for a London-style franchise system – a big decision but one Leeds needs to take.


Coming Soon, a new HBO Box Set 'Leeds', a dystopian drama set in the 1970s

Indeed, Leeds should be going further. It should be planning for real metro lines like Newcastle. Rotterdam, a smaller city than Leeds,  has 5 metro lines and innumerable tram lines. A great city like Leeds needs to have a big vision for sustainable transport. It needs an ambitious and holistic plan for  public transport in the short and longer term. But is Leeds really up for this, or is it still Motorway City?

Calderdale Borough covers great tracts of wild, rugged moors and dales, often with the savage landscape beauty seen in Francis Lee’s marvellous film ‘God’s Own Country’. However the landscape is also studded with small, characterful industrial towns like Todmorden. This was a cotton manufacturing town, developed by the industrialist and philanthropist John Fielding who commissioned the stunning Town Hall. Designed by John Gibson in 1875, Ruth Harman says it is ‘one of Yorkshire’s grandest - the pedimented temple rising above the little town is one of Calderdale’s most memorable views – and not dissimilar to Birmingham Town Hall’. It is an absolutely extraordinary sight and well worth a visit to Todmorden just to see this building, but this distinctive, unpretentious town in its dramatic Pennine setting is a great overall experience.


A market on the moors


Built upon moorland streams

Much of the townscape character of the place derives from the impressive engineering of the Rochdale Canal (1804) and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (1841). The most striking church is that of the Unitarians up the hill, designed by Gibson in 1865 with a very dramatic steeple, definitely a church, not a chapel. The handsome buildings on the main streets, mostly of the later C19th and many of them quite exuberant, indicate the town’s prosperity at the time. Now its population of 12,000 is only half that of its zenith but it is still a busy place. Between the Town Hall and the railway viaduct is a covered market with outdoor stalls as well. The shops are mostly independent and down to earth and there are plenty of other facilities too: a rather grand ‘Northern Renaissance’ style library and a distinctive 1950s Community College. Todmorden is on the Lancashire border - indeed the boundary used to literally run through its famous Town Hall. It is very much closer to Manchester than to Leeds, so the ‘City Region’ thing is a bit irrelevant here. Perhaps it is not surprising that the locals support nearby Burnley F.C. and the two towns have recently been re-connected by train with the new ‘Todmorden curve’, a modest but useful piece of transport investment for the North.


Hebden Bridge: a wooded valley


Canalside living

Hebden Bridge aka Happy Valley is a few miles further down the Calder valley at its junction with Hebden Water. Tom Dyckhoff says it is 'officially the quirkiest/ kookiest/ koolest/ most LGBTQ-friendly/ least chain store-y small town in the universe .... all co-ops, carrot cake and bunting.' Hebden Bridge is certainly highly picturesque. Here the valleys are steep and heavily wooded, quite unlike moorland Todmorden. The Calder threads through the green valley, crossed by the Rochdale Canal on an impressive aqueduct. Attractive artisan stone cottages and terraces follow the canal and pile up along the valley sides, some actually built one on top of one another, accessed from different streets.


Hebden Bridge Station – a film set


Another dramatic episode – Wesleyan Methodism


Civic pride & utility: Hebden Bridge Town Hall & St George's Bridge

You immediately get the Hebden Bridge vibe on arrival at the station, which seems like a stage set. It is one of England’s best preserved late Victorian stations - thanks to a local trust, not Network Rail. Leaving the station you see the allotments below in the valley. Down New Road is Hope Chapel (1857), the most elegant of the many chapels around, and opposite is the classical-deco Picture Palace (1919). The Little Theatre is next to the canal lock and around here it is full-on alternative lifestyle. Market St across the bridge is quite grand shops, many with original shop fronts and kooky uses. The old centre is further up the Hebden Water valley around a C16th packhorse bridge and some older buildings. But what impresses is the confidence and  quality of the almost miniature late C19th buildings public buildings like the Town Hall, Co-op, Liberal Club, Gas Company offices, banks. It seems a bit like it is playing at being a town. The more workaday town struggles up the steep hillsides of Hedben Brook all piled up together. At root Hebden Bridge is an industrial town, famous for Fustian - it was called 'Trouser Town' -  but today the big business is tourism and whimsy.


Mills and fairy lights


Alternative tat


Good conservation everywhere

Hebden Bridge has successfully reinvented itself as an alternative universe, but how did this happen? Its setting is certainly more picturesque than most small towns in the West Riding. The stone houses are delightful and were once cheap, but no longer. The old mills provided cheap space for galleries, studios, restaurants and lifestyle shops. Maybe it helps that Hebden Bridge is somewhat isolated and self contained, although benefitting from (slow) trains to Leeds and Manchester. But this does not fully explain the phenomena. Does Hebden Bridge provide a blueprint for post-industrial Pennine towns and and an opportunity for Millennials priced out of clone-regenerated cities?


Looking for Bill Brandt 

Halifax too is changing - apparently it is now the 'Shoreditch of the North' according to Radio 6 and the Guardian. That's great and there is certainly a palpable sense of increasing confidence here. But outside Halifax’s lively town centre poverty and deprivation are very evident, as is a racial divide. Calderdale is struggling with the impacts of de-industrialisation and the hammer blows of government austerity, neglect and disempowerment.  The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ concept recognises there is a problem but proposed solutions largely focus on the big cities and particularly big ticket infrastructure schemes. The recent Transport for the North report is all about mega road and HS2/3. The paradigm is that people will then be able to commute longer distances and increase the economic 'agglomeration' of Leeds and Manchester.


Square Chapel Arts – a step-up for Calderdale

But really what the towns of Calderdale need more urgently in order to unlock their full potential is investment in social infrastructure. They are not exurbs of Leeds or Manchester but communities in their own right. The history of the West Riding towns is one of municipal enterprise and municipal pride. This still applies today. Halifax – the borough, its people and entrepreneurs - has been very ambitious and enterprising to achieve the transformation of things like Dean Clough Mills, the development of the Square Chapel Arts Centre and now the Piece Hall for example, but this is not enough. Calderdale, like the rest of Yorkshire, needs more powers, more funding and critically much more financial autonomy to enable it to really tackle the existing problems. Elected mayors may be part of the answer but this is something that should be decided locally, not imposed by Whitehall diktat. Yorkshire is a natural, historic and economic region. Surely regional government should be an option. Comparison with Scotland is not so far fetched.

Ruth Harman’s new Buildings of England volume:‘Yorkshire West Riding; Sheffield and the South’ is absolutely invaluable.

Ian Nairn’s ‘Football Towns – Huddersfield v Halifax’ is brilliantly insightful.

Owen Hatherley’s chapter on the West Riding in ‘A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’ provides uncompromisingly incisive analysis and is very amusing.

Thanks to Chris Hammond for the guided tour

Egotistical railways. Courtesy Train Photos

The Thameslink debacle is just one of the catalogue of disasters of Britain’s privatised rail industry, along with the chaos on Southern and the meltdown of Northern Rail and Transpennine Express. But a bigger scandal is Virgin walking away from its East Coast contract because it couldn’t make enough money. Unbelievably this is the second time this has happened. When National Express crashed out of its franchise in 2009 a publically owned operator took over and ran East Coast successfully and at a profit to the Exchequer. However in 2015 the Government’s ideological obsession with privatisation resulted in the Virgin take over. Now we have a public sector 'operator of last resort' - London North Eastern Railway. They could not even get the atavistic new name right.


The Department for Transport

But however piss poor the private rail companies are the real failures of the rail industry are those of the Government itself. Because in what sense are the railways really privatised ? The Government owns the track and pays for investment in the infrastructure. It dictates the timetables, service specification and even the rolling stock. It sets basic fares and conditions. The rail companies don’t own anything and have no long term interest. Franchises move from one company to another with little more than a change of name, livery and TUPEd staff. But the railways cost the taxpayer £5 billion a year – that’s roughly three times as much as British Rail cost in the 1990s, at present day prices.


What an absolute shower

So the railways have a Potemkin privatisation. There is a cacophony of company liveries, flashy advertising and marketing but actually civil servants and ministers are in charge. It suits the Government to pretend that the railways are privatised because this conveniently blurs accountability. Who for example is responsible for the Thameslink fiasco? Is it the franchisee Govia, partly owned by SNCF? But Govia was only awarded this huge and unwieldy franchise in 2015. It includes the whole Southern network and Great Northern as well as Thameslink. DaFT (as Private Eye rightly calls the government department responsible) dreamt this one up. It also approved all the details in the Govia bid. Or was Network Rail responsible? The engineering complexity of the Thameslink project and lack of in-house skills led to overrunning by contractors. Or was it the ORR (Office of Rail and Road – the ‘independent’ quango responsible for the economic and safety regulation of the railways), which told Network Rail to reduce the costs of preparing timetables. This meant that Network Rail could not finalise the new timetable until far too late and so not enough drivers could be trained on the new routes. But the ORR is now ostentatiously pointing the finger. Possibly the fault might lie with the Transport Minister and his predecessors for presiding over this shambles. Apparently not, according to Chris Grayling as he is 'not an expert in trains'. So there is the answer; no-one has overall responsibility because the railway industry has been deliberately fragmented and deliberately made inscrutable and unaccountable.


An integrated graphic system 



The Design Research Unit – take pride in that

How did this happen? Well, it is the consequence of the triumph of political ideology over experience, evidence, analysis and rational planning and investment – a very British syndrome. Britain of course invented railways but it was always wedded to the principle of private enterprise which resulted in a highly fragmented network. By the twentieth century the early dynamism and invention of the railway companies had atrophied into complacency and a lack of iinvestment. This was masked by the romance of the Flying Scotsman and later sentimental nostalgia for steam and eccentrity, epitomised by Betjeman and Flanders and Swann. The clapped out railways was part of the carnival of pageantry so beloved of the English. Although nationalised in 1947 little changed until the 1960s with the savage Beeching cuts along with the introduction of diesels and some electrification. Whereas other countries like France saw their rail networks as national assets and invested in them (the first TGV line opened as early as 1981) in Britain the railways were regarded as a liability, of little use outside the London commuter belt. Jokes about British Rail sandwiches, which still have currency today, are revealing of political and public attitudes. In reality the latter decades of British Rail were a time of great progress, with huge engineering and technical achievement. With the help of brilliant design and marketing a real national network was finally achieved.


A sticking plaster solution. Courtesy Matt Buck

However the neo-liberal zeitgeist was privatisation. Mrs Thatcher had the sense not to do it, but her successor gave us the 1993 Act which essentially set up the present buggers-muddle. This separated train operations from track and infrastructure, which was sold off as Railtrack. But that companies’ insouciance led to the Hatfield disaster and its collapse, so the infrastructure had to be re-nationalised as Network Rail. However train operations were split up into some 20 ‘franchises’. These resemble PFIs – detailed specifications for providing public services covering many variables over a long period and are horribly complicated and unaccountable. The theory was that competition would drive down costs and private enterprise would give that je ne sais qua which produces innovation and good customer service. However the reality of running the rail network meant there could be very little competition – Hull Trains being the most successful of the few ‘open access’ services.


Layer upon layer, mistake after mistake. Courtesy Hugh Llewelyn

The other great shibboleth was that the private sector would also invest in the railways and take financial risk. Well that was the theory anyway, but it didn’t work out that way. This hopeless attempt to get the private sector to take risk goes to the heart of the problem with the current franchising system. It is also a major reason that rail finance is so inscrutable. Ministers and DaFT pushed for longer franchises where companies would invest in stations and rolling stock, but in reality this was just hiding or deferring government spending, just like PFIs. And Virgin East Coast lays bare the reality of private sector risk, as did National Express and South Eastern beforehand.


This is how we might do it. Courtesy Matt Buck

There are other ways to franchise. For the phenomenally successful Overground network TfL simply specifes the timetable and rolling stock required. TfL sets the fares, takes the risk and the fare income, so profits are re-invested rather than siphoned off by Richard Branson et al. Many European countries follow the same model, but of course that would not be a recommendation to the present Government.


Sheffield: 685,369 people, and 0 electric trains

However the performance of publically-owned Network Rail suggests that re-nationalisation is not by itself going to be the answer to the intractable problems of the railways. It is the chronic failures of Network Rail to deliver infrastructure improvements that have precipitated the current existential crisis of the railways. The catastrophe of Network Rail’s electrification programme has been well rehearsed. Great Western electrification, announced in 2009, has been massively delayed and costs have tripled from £874m to £2.8bn today. Meanwhile DaFT have saddled the railways with expensive to build and operate bi-mode trains, which become the rationale for abandoning much of the planned electrification. So Bristol, Swansea and Oxford will not see electric running for the foreseeable future. Similarly the Midland Main Line electrification will stop at Corby with Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield, three of the ten biggest cities in England, relegated to bi-mode diesel power. So a government which is promoting the phasing out of diesel cars by 2040 is investing in bi-mode trains so it can continue to run diesel trains into our big cities  until, er, after 2040 – mad or what?


Todmorden: a more difficult terrain than Switzerland?

Even more incredible given the hype about the Northern Powerhouse is the Government’s prevarication over completing electrification from Manchester to Leeds – a distance of only about 40 miles. Electrification from Liverpool to York was approved in 2011 and should have been completed by now. Grayling argues that the topography is ‘very difficult’ which sounds pretty thin having just come back from Switzerland where all the railways are electrified. But in Blighty bi-mode trains are the (expensive and unsatisfactory) solution to all problems, according to DaFT.


Newark North Gate: electrified in the 1980s. Courtesy Matt Buck

The reason Network Rail can’t deliver the infrastructure improvements required is that, after two decades of the government messing around with privatisation it lacks the capacity and in-house resources required. The experience of the rail industry has been fragmented and squandered. When the 400km East Coast line was electrified in the 1980s British Rail delivered this on time and on budget. Of course that expertise should have been used for a rolling programme of electrification, but this knowledge, experience, skills and commitment were lost. When Network Rail took over from Railtrack a very different culture obtained.


HS2 – not very well thought through

The failures of Network Rail to modernize the network efficiently are often cited as one of the reasons why we need to go ahead with HS2. It’s too difficult to repair the old network, lets build a new one. The logic of this is terrifying – a slash and burn philosophy totally at odds with sensible use of resources and protection of the natural environment. In any event the argument rings very hollow given the latest report from the Infrastructure and Projects Authority which predicts that HS2 is likely to go 60% over budget from £56bn to £80bn, and that there is ‘no credible plan to gauge or manage progress’.


The metropolis of Toton

As we explored in our 2013 blog ‘High Speed to Nowhere’ the premises and projected benefits of HS2 are highly questionable. But as a grand prestige project it has developed a life of its own free from effective external scrutiny, ‘too big to fail’. Of course the huge cost of HS2 will have a massive impact on investment in the existing rail network as the IPA highlight. This is already happening with HS2 explicitly cited as a reason why there is no need now to electrify the MML.


Nottingham: 729,977 people, 0 electric trains

The main rationale of HS2 is that it will promote economic growth in the Midlands and North, although even the theoretical models show most economic benefits accrue to London, not the provinces. Certainly cities in the Midlands and North require major investment in their railway infrastructure, but HS2 does not address their most pressing issues, poor public transport within conurbations and poor connections between cities. Actually trains to London are already frequent and fairly fast, although they could be improved by much more modest investment.

An alternative strategy would see investment across the network and in cities rather than focused on grands projects. The argument that this would not happen because more modest and incremental improvements are not sexy enough for Government really just underlines the huge problems of transport politics. A grown up approach to investment is required, not one driven by glossy marketing.


To the North, not North East London

An alternative rail improvement to HS2 would involve making the best use of existing capacity. For example, the huge investment in Crossrail and Thameslink takes outer suburban trains out of Paddington and King’s Cross allowing these termini to handle more main line trains. And actually only half of the Crossrail trains will run west of Paddington, so there is an opportunity to divert outer suburban WCML trains onto Crossrail releasing significant capacity at Euston without the massive engineering operation and environmental destruction required for the new station. If planned ECML and MML improvements are actually delivered this will significantly increase capacity on these lines. Then again the Chiltern Line is really the old GWR main line to Birmingham and is actually shorter than the Euston route. With electrification and modest upgrades more and faster trains could operate to Birmingham from Paddington releasing capacity on the WCML.


Too many First Class coaches. Courtesy Matt Buck

Much additional capacity could also be provided if inter-city trains were longer and have fewer First Class coaches, mostly largely empty. For example Thameslink already operates 12 carriage trains but others on the same lines such as East Midlands Trains, Hull Trains, Grand Central often have only 4 or 5 carriages. Prioritising investment in improved signaling would allow more trains to run on existing track.


Manchester Piccadilly platforms

However there remains a major issue of congestion on the approaches to Birmingham and Manchester and platform capacity at New Street,  Piccadilly, Leeds City and other stations. The mix of inter-city trains and local stopping trains on the same track is a problem.   Additional platforms at Manchester could be provided by building the planned ‘HS2’ station adjacent to Piccadilly as well as four-tracking Piccadilly-Oxford Road section, which DaFT told Grayling wasn’t necessary! At Birmingham the problem is more complex. What is really required is an additional low level station at New Street, the sort of thing being done in cities like Antwerp, Stuttgart and Vienna. But a smiling Grayling endorses the cheapskate ‘Midlands Connect’ plan for a ‘One Birmingham’ station which pretends that New St, Moor St and the new HS2 Curzon St are really just different ‘terminals’. Big joke, as explored in our recent Birmingham blog.


Local stopping trains and terrible graphics

A sensible strategy would focus large scale investment on public transport within provincial cities, especially Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds rather than expensive and environmentally damaging new lines to London duplicating existing infrastructure. Manchester and Birmingham desperately need proper underground Metros such as their European counterparts have. This would help release main line capacity currently used by suburban trains. Northern Powerhouse Rail, what was HS3, should also be a priority. The advantages of this strategy is that it would be cheaper overall, improve the wider existing network, be more flexible and incremental in relation to actual demand and other changes and allow the real issues of rail transport needs to be addressed.


Bristol: 617,280 people and 0 electric trains

It will be a challenge to get a sensible rail investment strategy because the problem is not just about HS2 but about the structure, political role and decision making of the industry. In a sense the ‘big bang’ HS2 project is a desperate response to the sclerosis of the industry that can’t manage to electrify 40 miles across the Pennines, or take wires into Bristol Temple Meads, for god’s sake.


So this happened, re-issuing the BR corporate identity manual

The problems of Network Rail are not easily fixed, especially given the political culture of short-termism, mendacity and self-delusion within which it must work. The only real solution is to re-invent a properly resourced, integrated and holistic rail organization like British Rail. Over time this would develop the capacity, experience, memory and pubic service ethos that is currently lacking. It will  need a medium to long term investment plan to allow for sensible planning. This does not mean that BR mk2 would need to run everything directly but it must have the capacity to effectively manage contracted services and it must be able to require co-operation within the currently fragmented industry. Given the current political delusion, deception, incompetence and confusion of responsibility, this outcome is highly unlikely. Is it any wonder the rail industry is in such a mess.?But remember, this did not happen by accident but by deliberate design.

The good news is that on Corporation Street the fine Co-operative Department Store, which looks distinctly moderne, is being renovated as flats. Like so many other post-war buildings it incorporates an arcade whose pillars are etched with delightful, subtle graphics of the goods and services sold in the store. Opposite is the Belgrade Theatre with its superb brickwork and fenestration together with Stanton Williams’s elegantly austere extension. This is civilized architecture but it is on the very frontier of barbarity.


... or maybe it can't. Prefer Street View 2008.


Before & after – over saturated, clunky and dim


The race for student numbers ...


... where will this end?

North towards the ring road there is a frenzy of construction with great galumphing towers rearing skywards. Although the City’s cherished retail and office developments languish there is no stopping the inexorable tide of student living. Coventry is in the midst of a building boom not seen since the 1960s. The new towers are hideous and garish, especially ‘Study Inn’ with its Brutalist kitsch ethic. Others like Bishop’s Gate and CODE are less deliberately offensive but are still quite a poke in the eye - as bad as any student flats in Leeds, which is bad!


Universities aren't all bad – the new Alison Gingell Building

Coventry University is one of the most successful of the ex-Polytechnics and it provides much of the impetus and dynamism for the city’s economy today. Whereas the city struggles to progress its retail and office development plans, as in other ex-industrial cities the universities are in the midst of a huge building boom. The main focus of the campus is around Jordon Well and Gosford Street, close to the cathedral and the Town Hall, but development extends around much of the ring road. Few of the university’s buildings are really notable although the Lanchester Library by Short and Associates with its exotic towers is certainly arresting. However the new Alison Gingell Building on Whitefriar Street caught our eye. Close to the remains of the Whitefriar abbey, it references its context well and its saw-tooth southern fenestration seems both practical and a homage to Basil Spence’s cathedral nave. I was surprised to find it was designed by Broadway Malyan, architects of Liverpool’s infamous Futurist redevelopment.


Still not working – Broadgate Square

So has Coventry changed in the last decade? Well, apart form the University, not much. Broadgate Square has been repaved but in a rather mundane way, a lost opportunity to create a lively space at the heart of Gibson’s city centre. Key buildings around the square like the Leofric Hotel (reduced to a Travelodge) and the curtain wall department store (now Primark) are now listed. The more one sees of the Cathedral Lanes development the more outrageous it seems. It is now a restaurant complex with the usual chain suspects, which is indicative of the failure of Coventry’s retail-led regeneration plans. This has nothing to do with the style of architecture, but with the dynamics of retailing. Coventry cannot compete with Birmingham nor with on-line shopping. It needs to develop more niche markets based on the real character and qualities of the place, not on second rate shopping malls.


The best modernist city in Britain ... 


... but only if it takes this stuff seriously

Despite the increasing national and international recognition of Coventry’s modernist heritage, the city is at best half hearted about it. It sees modernism as a problem to be overcome, not its USP. The Council still seems wedded to the idea of newness, of ‘regeneration’ for its own sake. It is both backward-looking and unrealistic with all those artists' impressions of smiling happy people sipping cappuccino in the foreground masking the crap new buildings in the background. And it doesn’t happen on the City’s terms, but on those of the developer, and is quickly regretted.


A British city did this today – makes you proud

Yet Coventry is a pleasant and quite a lively place to be. This is partly because of the quality of its architecture and the highly unusual and successful relationship between modernity and medieval survivals, rather like the City of London. The Cathedral is truly world class. The parks and small open spaces are attractive, like those created in the Coventry Phoenix initiative. Within the ring road the streets are quite civilized due to ambitious traffic calming, based on Dutch principles although in England drivers are rather often more entitled than in Holland, But broadly speaking it works well and has created a much more attractive environment for the Town Hall and elsewhere.


Design and ideas, not copying

City of Culture 2017 opens up lots of possibilities for Coventry to think outside the ‘regeneration’ box. It was hugely successful in Hull, a very different city to Coventry, but with similarities too. Both suffered dreadful wartime destruction and both have suffered massive loss of confidence in the last 40 years. Both have been ignorantly castigated as ‘crap towns’. But they are not – they are highly distinctive places with extraordinary history and architecture. Hull’s City of Culture 2017 provided a huge boost in every sense but particularly in the city’s view of itself. Hopefully 2021 will do the same for Coventry and its view of its modernist heritage.


Never forget – the elephant sports hall

Today Coventry doesn’t want its elegant listed swimming pool and needs help in finding a future for it. The threatened ‘Elephant’ sports hall added in the 1970s is not listed but it is extraordinary. It straddles Cox Street on tapering legs, an apparently windowless box clad in grey zinc and formed as a series of abstract prisms. It is shocking, amazing, exciting, possibly threatening and certainly threatened. Although conventional opinion inevitably regards it as an ‘eyesore’ it seems to have captured the affection of many local people. There is a campaign to save it for a new use as an arts complex, which makes perfect sense in the context of ‘City of Culture’. Let's hope the campaign succeeds.


Modernity & originality 

N.B. With thanks to Gareth Jones for his talk earlier this year at Loughborough University titled How to fabricate the ideal city, using the 1976 Habitat Catalogue and the Milton Keynes Infrastructure Pack

The place has form

Although Stoke-on-Trent is right in the centre of England it is one of its least known cities. Frequently termed The Potteries for obvious reasons, Arnold Bennett's epithet for it was the Five Towns, as in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns. But actually there are six towns: Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent and Tunstall. They joined together as a Borough in 1910 and became the City of Stoke-on-Trent in 1925. Stoke has always struggled to be considered a real city. J.B. Priestley wrote in English Journey: ‘There is no city. There are six little towns… you will never be sure which of the six you are in'. Stoke is certainly difficult for outsiders to grasp, a polycentric city more like the Black Country or the Rhondda Valley than other Midland industrial cites of similar size, such as Derby. What is confusing is that Hanley, not Stoke-on-Trent, is the commercial centre and is officially referred to as ‘Stoke-on-Trent City Centre’. The Station and Staffordshire University are in Stoke-on-Trent Town Centre. Got that? And Newcastle-under-Lyme (which includes Keele University), whilst being part of the same conurbation, is defiantly not part of Stoke-on-Trent.


Arnold Bennett's grim smile

The Potteries are used to being slighted. The Minister Richard Crossman after a visit in the 1960s concluded that the city should be evacuated. Pevsner's Buildings of Staffordshire entry starts with 'the Five Towns are an urban tragedy'. Henry Thorold in the Shell Guide was rather more balanced in saying 'architecturally the six towns are disappointing, scenically they are interesting and atmospherically they are compelling'. A sympathetic view of the city is found in Matthew Rice's The Lost City of Stoke-on-Trent which is beautifully illustrated with his watercolours revealing the architectural qualities of the place.


Stoke-on-A500

Priestley was right when he wrote ‘what distinguishes this district … is its universal littleness. Everything there is diminutive. Even the landscape fits in for although there are hills, they are little ones'. The Trent here is just a stream, not the broad river of Nottingham’s Trent Bridge. It scarcely impinges on the topography; the Trent and Mersey and Caldon canals make a much bigger impression. The transport arteries of the canal, railway and the A500 expressway (the infamous ‘D’ road which loops through the city from the M6) all run alongside each other through Stoke Town Centre cutting it in two. This massive road infrastructure together with the A50 expressway running east to the M1 make a daunting impact on the low-key townscape and landscape. The A50 is particularly brutal slicing through Longton and Meir, all dressed up with post-modern motifs to try and make it look jolly.


Look closer


Creativity among the ruins

The older arterial roads linking the six towns make a cat’s cradle for linear development. They are strung out with seemingly endless terraced houses, later semis and, in the now demolished industrial interstices, retail and warehouse sheds. This townscape can be dispiriting but it is more interesting than it initially appears. You can trace the enterprise and civic pride of The Potteries and its decline in this disjointed streetscape of jumbled up terraces, villas, factories, institutes, chapels, pubs, Co-ops, board schools and town halls. There are distinctly villagey places like Middleport and very regimented industrial housing in Fenton, for example. And despite Priestley the towns are not all the same. Burslem has a strong feeling of a hill town, and you are very conscious of the hills of Hanley and Longton too. The Trent and Mersey Canal forms a distinctive corridor and from the D road the conurbation looks very green following reclamation of former pits, claypits and steelworks – not the urban forest of Milton Keynes perhaps but a cheaper approximation.


Bottle kiln factories, ...


... urban decay, ...


... & conservation


Don't forget steel – Liz Lemon's 'Another Gift'

Bottle kilns were the distinctive feature of the Potteries townscape, looking positively exotic and, as Priestley said, almost oriental. But by the 70s these were disappearing rapidly. Pevsner writes ‘this is a great loss; for their odd shapes were one of the distinguishing features of the Five Towns and used to determine their character – kilns bottle shaped, kilns conical, kilns like chimneys with swollen bases. They have a way of turning up in views with parish churches and town halls as their neighbours. As for the surviving offices and warehouses, some are quite handsome’. Priestley was hugely impressed with the pottery and ceramics industry. ‘They are unique in their work, an industry which is still a craft, and one of the oldest in the world.’ Only a representative few of the thousands of bottle kilns survive but many more of the factories, warehouses and offices do. Often these buildings are relatively small and of quite elegant Georgian proportions. Some big structures date from as late as the 1950s. Although the pottery and ceramics industry has declined in the last 40 years, with most production outsourced to low-wage countries, the spirit of the Potteries survives in the many extant buildings. Some are now museums and factory shops which attract large numbers of tourists. But Stoke was also famous for its collieries and steelworks. These have been completely expunged, replaced by bog-standard sheds, retail parks, housing estates and parkland. So the city today is a fusion of the very distinctive and the extremely banal.


1840s rationalism


Welcome to Stoke

Stoke is only 90 minutes from London by Virgin Pendolino. Stoke-on-Trent station will surprise you. It is the original structure of the North Staffordshire Railway built in the 1840s and still with its fine overall roof. The red brick station buildings are in a thorough-going Elizabethan or possibly Jacobean style with black brick diapers, shaped gables, a Tuscan colonnade and eccentric chimneys. Across Winton Square is the North Staffordshire Hotel in a similar style. And with a statue of Wedgwood in front of it. Pevsner says this is ‘the finest piece of axial planning in the county.’ It provides a very picturesque introduction to Stoke, if highly atypical of its architecture and character.


The macho Science Centre


Not Rick Mather but could have fooled me

Staffordshire University Campus is just east of the Station on Station Road and Leek Road. The Uni advertises itself as being in the ‘top 40’ and certainly has a hugely positive impact on the place although the architecture is not much to write home about. The Cadman Building is long, low and competent interwar neo-Georgian. The adjacent Flaxman Building is quite gutsy modernist and has some interesting reliefs and geometry with a triangular film theatre auditorium at the rear. The new Science Centre on Leek Road designed by Sheppard Robson is big, four-square, clad in brown-gold panels and is - o.k. The adjacent Sixth Form College in Isokon or Rik Mather mode is, surprisingly, by Broadway Maylan.


Beautiful Stoke, Brook Street


Stoke Minster


Among the grandest town halls in the Midlands


An impressive set – Kings Hall behind the Town Hall

Stoke Town Centre is to the west of the station but you have to cross the formidable barriers of the railway line and the monstrous D road to get there. Few concessions are made to pedestrians. Stoke Minster, unusually dedicated to St Peter Ad Vincula, is set in a shady churchyard. There are medieval ruins but the Minster is a handsome 1820s Commissioners church. A nice feature is the Minton memorial tiles of the nave. Overlooking the churchyard on Brook Street is an elegant yellow brick early Victorian terrace with Elizabethan motifs. Together with the classical ashlar Town Hall opposite on Glebe St (1834) this makes a fine urban composition. Kings Hall, behind the Town Hall on Kingsway, is Edwardian and bombastic but undeniably grand. The War Memorial is unusual, designed in deco brick work. Tellingly each of the six towns has its own war memorial as well as town hall and many other public buildings.


Stoke-on-Ruhr – Spode


Uplifting – The British Ceramics Biennial


Told you this place had form

Next to the Kings Hall is the former Spode factory, now the ‘China Hall’ exhibition and gallery space. The Spode complex is vast and has only minimally been renovated and opened up for exhibitions, events etc. The main hall is a 50s corrugated concrete affair, very striking and the stripped-out spaces have tremendous character. When we were there the British Ceramics Biennial was on. This was ideal re-use and the exhibits were very lively and engaging. The Biennial extended over other parts of the complex (as well as other venues) and you can wander through the fascinating bleached-out carcass of the vast works to the Spode heritage centre which houses one of many fine collections of ceramic work to be found in Stoke-on-Trent.


The former Stoke market, Church Street


Bargain Zone, Church Street

Stoke town centre is more substantial than expected. Church Street has imposing commercial buildings, some evidently influenced by the Elizabethan style of the station. The Victorian Market has lovely decorative glazed tiles on its façade and has been converted and extended as a library. The 1970s market hall has been relegated to a car park at the rear. The friendly jumble of buildings on the main streets are however very run down. Many are empty and there are few people about. It seems archetypical of the ‘decline of the high street’. That the town centre streets are a one-way race track does not help, but this is symptomatic of a car-centric culture throughout the city.


Where the ring-road has futuristic form ...


... and where it is a pain in the arse for pedestrians


Hanley's disappointing town hall

Hanley, the City Centre, doesn’t feel much like the Potteries. It is far less distinctive, more like many other small Midland towns. And there is less obvious civic pride than in the other five towns where town halls and public buildings tend to be more prominent. Here the old town hall looks like, and was indeed, an hotel. There is not a lot of evidence of the pottery industry either, although a few bottle kilns are still seen at the Dudson Museum. The Emma Bridgewater factory is also found here.


Mini Manchester 


Hanley's former market building


Stately but out of scale – the former Hanley Post Office


Bethesda Chapel – high quality heritage

A dreadful inner ring road sunders Hanley’s residential terraces from the commercial centre. The ring road works better where it is part of a wholesale redevelopment with towers, overpasses and extensive landscaping. Within the ring road the streets are largely pedestrian. The commercial architecture is fairly haphazard and unassuming although not uninteresting. Some buildings are of metropolitan scale, like Manchester House which lives up to its name. The former Post Office looks like Buckingham Palace but this can’t really be appreciated in the narrow street. The classical former market is sadly now a Wetherspoons. On Bethesda Street the magnificent Round Chapel which could accommodate a congregation of 3,000, shows the power of C19th non-conformity. Streets around include a surprising amount of 30s ‘moderne’ including London style mansion flats and offices, as well as usual chain store motifs.


This bit is good – Nat West


This bit is not 


St Johns: integral to the history of Hanley ...


... but abused by its neighbours

There is no obvious centre to the place but the confluence of Town Road, Stafford Street and Piccadilly forms an irregular square. The 70s Nat West here is quite stylish with a good rhythm of narrow brick bays. It certainly shames the abysmal intu Potteries Centre opposite, crouching like a bloated mutant toad above Town Road. Its blank, mechanical brick and fake arch façade is not even trying to engage and is at its most uncouth in relation to the former St John’s Church (1788) which it blanks out completely. St John is now an antique flea market, so has some after-life at least.


Where the old bus station came down

At the southern end of town the Council are demolishing the East West Precinct and the 70s bus station, which Matthew Rice considered a contender for the grimmest building in the Midlands. However he thought the Precinct with its faintly Moorish concrete arches to be poignant and wanly light-hearted, but unloved and desperate. All rubble now as the regeneration plan is to ‘kick-start’ new mixed-use development with a tabula rasa. But the ‘knock it down and start again’ approach suggests little has been learnt from the mistakes of the 60s or from the failures of more recent commercial ‘regeneration’ let alone the need to save embodied energy and retrofit where possible in the face of the Climate Emergency.


The re-generation game

One cannot be optimistic about what may replace the ‘concrete eyesores’ given the Smithfield development currently taking shape nearby. This is a new ‘regeneration quarter’ to a masterplan which apparently involved Jan Gehl. The blurb says it is ‘designed to put people first’. So far this means a series of big blocks around some grass. The development was ‘kick-started’ with new civic offices, One Smithfield, designed by RHWL. This is a much cruder version of what they did in Doncaster, so crude in fact that it was a Carbuncle Cup finalist in 2016. Olly Wainwright in the Guardian wrote ‘It promised a dynamic new civic centre, business and leisure district but Stoke got a miserable box dressed in cheap harlequin costume, a so-bad-it-might-almost-be a fashionable fusion of 80s classic Blockbusters and Connect 4’.


Disjointed thinking


Somebody's been googling 'Hamburg expressionism'

Two Smithfield is much more restrained, well-proportioned with some quite nice a-la-mode sub expressionist brick detail. Amazingly this building is also by RHWL. It provides offices and well-intentioned ground floor shops but unfortunately these are all empty. Other buildings include a Hilton Garden Inn reminiscent of 1970s telephone exchange architecture. More flashy Trespa clad stuff is to come, according to the brochures. So far, so disappointing. Smithfield compares very poorly with, for example, Wakefield’s Merchant Gate which was developed with the English Cities Fund. The problem is that, in promoting town centre redevelopment in depressed places and depressed markets, nearly all the cards are in the hands of the developers not the local authority, especially since the demise of Regional Development Agencies.


Good architecture but poor planning


Ever decreasing seating and plastic barriers

The City Council has however commissioned an ambitious new bus station nearby which has won Civic Trust and RIBA awards. Designed by Grimshaw is has a nice swoosh with a sinuous form and curving roof. However as with Grimshaw’s Newport railway station, planning has let down architecture. Hanley’s bus station is inconveniently located for the main shopping streets. The passenger concourse feels insecure sitting perilously between the inner ring road and a big open bus park. Which is a pity as buses in Stoke-on-Trent certainly need a boost.


Victoria Hall


Form und Zweck – Central Libray

The Victoria Hall of 1888 is also curiously isolated, turning its back on the town. The 1999 extension by Levitt Bernstein does its best to remedy this with a terracotta and glass addition that is very well considered in relation to the rather dour original. Nearby is the Central Library, quite a stylish 60s slab with some nice abstract reliefs.


The Potteries Museum – a must see


Metropolitan quality

The Potteries Museum is certainly Hanley’s pièce-de-resistance. The original 1956 building was extensively remodelled in 1981 by local architects Wood, Goldstraw and Yorath. The projecting upper floor in concrete sits emphatically above lower floors clad in brick. There is a drawbridge-like entrance to the middle level. The main feature is the superb brick mural of Stoke-on-Trent’s industrial history by E.H. Downing, showing miners and a pithead, pottery workers and kilns etc with a large central motif of a half cartwheel and semicircle of hands. This is a brutalist building taking no prisoners. Matthew Rice called it 'perfectly frightful' but it has its admirers today like Owen Hatherley. Inside there is a fantastic collection of ceramics. It also displays part of the Staffordshire Hoard although sadly not to best effect. A definite ‘must see’.


Fenton Town Hall – no mean feat


Fenton municipal 


Sombre


Staffordshire blue brick church – Fenton Christchurch

Fenton is the town that Arnold Bennett forgot with his epithet the ‘Five Towns’. You can see why. It is the smallest and least distinctive town strung out along the road between Stoke and Longton. It initially seems to lack any centre but there is one just off the main road – Albert Square. This was retro fitted in the late C19th. Thorold says somewhat harshly that it is 'both sad and funny'. Fenton seems to have aspired to grandeur late and never quite made the grade.’ Albert Square though is quite handsome with an imposing ensemble of buildings, at least on two sides. There is Christchurch, 1890-9, which Pevsner calls ‘the magnum opus of local architect Charles Lynam, but only in size’. The Gothic Town Hall of 1888 and the William and Mary Courts are of the same date and the same architect, Scrivener. There is a handsome Edwardian library too. In the centre of the square stands a poignant war memorial, as in all the towns, but this looks onto the backs of terraced streets and 60s low rise re-development.


Industrial factories similar to Birmingham & Sheffield


The rear of the Gladstone Pottery Museum

Longton is a real town and feels like a market town. It retains more of a feel of the Potteries than any of the other towns because more of the factories have survived. The Gladstone factory with its prominent bottle kilns was the first to be preserved, becoming a museum in the 1970s. Many other pottery offices and warehouses survive especially on Sutherland Street down the hill from the Gladstone Museum, although often empty and badly neglected. They show enduring Georgian influence in their style and proportions. Anywhere but in The Potteries they would today be renovated as very des-res apartments.


Longton's Town Hall – better than Hanley's


A jolly front ...


... and dignified rear – Longton Market Hall

Even Pevsner concedes that in Longton ‘here is urban pride and a sense of civic dignity’. The grand town Hall (1863 with Edwardian extensions) faces Times Square. It is currently being renovated to provide a local centre for Longton again, a very sensible policy of the Council. Times Square is dramatically slashed by a railway bridge which cuts off the parish church. Behind the town hall is an ambitious Victorian Market Hall but it was not market day when we visited.


A real sense of place (and economic decline)


The very modernist Bennett Centre

Market Street, which runs up the hill towards the Gladstone Museum, retains lots of interesting buildings from various periods but many are empty and in serious disrepair. You can still see the signs and shop fronts of ghosts like Woolworths and Martins Bank. It badly needs a concerted renovation project. The Strand also has some impressive commercial buildings but swathes of it have been blown away by demolition. Between the two streets is the Bennett Centre (1965) rightly praised by Pevsner. The shops are simple, elegant modular buildings around a pedestrian precinct but many are empty and in poor repair. Huge retail sheds behind the shopping centre make a nominal attempt at relating to the town but are a significant part of the problem. It doesn’t help that the bus station is inconveniently sited next to the town centre edge retail park. In any event there were no buses there. Traffic swirls everywhere and the pedestrian barriers are insane. Longton could be a lively and pleasant town but needs major interventions to reverse its downward spiral and preserve its character.


On high ground – Burslem and its Town Hall


An historic layout


Pottery moderne 


Pottery Victoriana – Overhouse 

Queen's Theatre and former post office, Wedgwood Street


A grit bin but no market for Burslem 

Burslem is the oldest of the six towns and is known as the ‘Mother Town’. In many ways it is the most impressive and with the most coherent townscape. There is a pronounced hill-town character, although the church is below in the valley. Burslem’s centre is the triangular market square where you will find not one, but two town halls. The old Town Hall of 1852 is certainly impressive and picturesquely sited at the apex of the triangular space. It displays giant pilasters and a portico with clustered giant columns and a baroque top. Recently renovated and extended it is now a sixth form college. The 1911 Town Hall facing the other side of the Market Place is, severely classical. It includes a concert hall and although no longer a Town Hall was converted as the Queen's Theatre. Today it stands empty, a shocking failure of the City Council. The delightful Neo-Georgian post office next door is disused too.


The Art of Burslem – The Wedgwood Institute


Queen Street: splendid, coherent but empty

The triangular Market Place has been expensively repaved in a rather heavy-handed way. It no longer hosts an open market and the indoor market is closed too. There is little activity in the buildings around the market place but a few green shoots are evident, like the art gallery and café. Queen Street has a wonderful array of buildings but many are empty. The fantastical 1860s Wedgwood Institute with its extraordinary terracotta façade is empty waiting for plans for a Business Enterprise Centre by the UKBPT to be underwritten. Nearby is the 1905 School of Art, one of five established in The Potteries at this time. The saddest sight is the amazing building on the street corner opposite the Wedgwood Institute possibly by Edgar Wood and certainly highly original fin-de-siècle, but just rotting into the street. Every shop on Swan Square is empty despite attractive re-paving. St John Square is also nicely paved and a bit livelier. It includes the Duke William pub of 1929 which was recently listed. All that remains of the Royal Doulton factory is the deco gatehouse. There is a statue to Doulton in the square. Burslem’s other famous son is Robbie Williams, who lived in a now empty 60s pub, the Red Lion.


Glasgow style (and disrepair)


Another good street – St John Square


How I learned to think about Robbie Williams

Burslem is a shadow of its former self. It is shameful that so many of its fine public buildings  are empty. But it still has tremendous potential. The Potteries was built on creativity and art and design skills and here you have an attractive town and abundant fine low-cost premises too. What an opportunity! But transformation will not happen through the market alone; it needs significant public intervention which is presently conspicuously lacking.


Optimism


Middleport Pottery

The nearby Middleport Pottery initiative gives some hope. The Pottery is an attractive Georgian influenced building of modest scale. It is only two storey – not much higher than the terraces around with the Trent and Mersey Canal on the other side. The renovation project was funded by the Prince’s Trust and overseen by Feilden Clegg Bradley. The buildings have been very simply restored and ‘repurposed’ so it retains its strong industrial character. It now provides workshops for craftsmen, small shops, a visitor centre and cafes. It is a real success story, rightly a RIBA award winner. The bucolic Trent and Mersey Canal alongside the Pottery, with its palimpsest of an industrial past, also has a very strong character which should provide an attractive basis for more renovation and small-scale developments to bring the area back to life. The UKBPT has already restored terraced housing nearby and more is in progress.


Probably looking better than they ever did – Middleport Terraces

Although I absolutely reject HRH’s reactionary and dogmatic views on architecture the Prince’s Trust does deserve a lot of credit for its championing of places like Middleport and its empathy and concern for places that are ‘left behind’. This stands in stark contrast to government for the last 40 years, for which places like Stoke-on-Trent mattered little, that is until Brexit. Of course there have been many government planning and regeneration initiatives. Mostly these start from the premise that Stoke needs radical re-planning. This was implicit in the dismissive comments of Priestley, Pevsner and Crossman which underlay 1960s redevelopments which are now coruscated. In the neo-liberal era other regeneration stratagems were employed, like a Garden Festival on the site of the old Shelton Steel Works and Wedgwood’s Etruria. This was partly successful, creating a new park and dense urban woodland. But the price of this was a tacky retail park and lowest-common-denominator commercial development as bad as, say Derby’s deadening, anti-urban Pride Park.


Not bad for a quid

More recently Stoke was the victim of Labour’s insane Pathfinder housing renewal project which proposed to ‘renew failing housing markets’ by essentially knocking down terraced housing to push up the value of the remainder and to build lots of Barratt-type estates to ‘diversify the housing market’. The social and logistical lessons of incremental demolition for communities should have been obvious from the post-war experience of the Durham coalfield ‘D’ towns, let alone urban redevelopment in the 1960s. And inevitably it was a disaster. When Pathfinder was ditched by the Cameron government in 2011 it left whole areas in limbo with the Council trying to pick up the pieces. Stoke City Council pioneered ‘homesteading’ of empty properties, selling abandoned terraces for £1 and offering 15-year loans for purchasers to do-up the houses. This seems to have been a modest success. The targeted streets are now indistinguishable from other terraces. There is a striking contrast between these ‘self-improved’ terraces, which often show scant respect for the architectural qualities of the buildings, creating a friendly visual chaos, and those done up by UKBPT, which meticulously reveal their original detail. In the middle of Staffordshire University surviving terraces off Leek Road have been entirely given over to students and with expensively block paved streets look very attractive.


Christ on a bus – Longton Bus Station


The wrong transport policy

A big problem for Stoke is that traffic dominates everywhere and public transport is dire. Bus use has declined by a third in the last ten years, the second worst rate of decline in the country. 75% of people now travel to work by car and only 5% by bus. No wonder there is so much congestion and pollution. Building even bigger junctions on the expressways will not solve this. First, the main bus operator, blames the new city centre bus station location for the decline in passengers but the real reason is shit services and high fares. Recently it has cut out most evening buses, a devastating blow to community and cultural life. But given de-regulation there is little a cash strapped City Council can do. What Stoke really needs is a new fast tram linking the six towns as a visible expression of a new approach to sustainability, public transport and civic pride. Cities like Bordeaux, Nice and even Nottingham have done this. Why shouldn't Stoke  too?


Impressive ruins – Middleport


A international reputation – the old Minton works

Stoke-on-Trent's problems of de-industrialisation and urban decline are similar to those of many small and medium sized towns of the Midlands and North. But Stoke is unique and needs its own solutions, not the re-heated nostrums of ‘urban regeneration’. Rather it needs to reclaim and restore its distinctive character. This is best expressed in Matthew Rice’s Lost City. His chapter Stoke Right Now (written 10 years ago but still highly relevant) is a powerful and insightful exposition of the city’s problems and the opportunities. He calls for an end to the continuing destruction of the city's past. 'Stoke needs to reconcile itself with its past before it can (successfully) renew ... buildings are all significant, anchors to hold fast to whilst the place rethinks its character'. He is absolutely right. Conservation, re-use and good maintenance of the built environment and public spaces are what is required. And the need for good maintenance does not only apply to buildings and streets but also to communities hammered by austerity and indifference.


Towards a sustainable and creative city – Spode

But Stoke also needs a new vision for sustainability too. Its dispersed form, its reservoir of adaptable buildings and its strong local community identity are real assets. It could be a new model for a carbon neutral city. Fifty years ago Britain had the imagination, energy and resources to build a new city in Milton Keynes, the subject of our last blog. A similar collective effort is needed to unlock the green potential of places like Stoke.