Unbuilding Britain

"There's a revolution going on in our cities."

By now, I would expect that you’ve all seen ‘On the Brandwagon’, a programme by Jonathan Meades from 2007. In it, he decries the ‘pseudomodern’ architecture that took over our inner cities in the 00s boom, both on the level of its pandering jollity, and also on the basically more dangerous level of what he described as “the soufflĂ© economy”. The film is curmudgeonly negative about pretty much all the developments in built environment culture over the whole of that decade, which is perhaps why so many of us like it so much.

But I’ve dug out perhaps an even more damning document from the boom, one which is more incriminating because of the obliviousness of some of the protagonists. It’s a television programme called ‘Building Britain’. Also broadcast in 2007 (so presumably made before the first cracks appeared in the subsequently shattered world economy), it is an investigation into the differing fortunes of the neighbouring cities of Leeds and Bradford. At this point in time, Leeds was in the middle of a high rise building frenzy, with luxury flats popping up all over town, while Bradford was only just getting used to the gigantic hole that Westfield had left after demolishing a large patch of the city centre, and before building a new shopping centre for the city.



Building Britain was a vehicle for Linda Barker, herself a Bradfordian, who at that time was best known for her work on the BBC’s long running ‘home makeover’ show Changing Rooms, which did much to open the doors to the flood of ‘property porn’ programmes that would clog up the schedules for most of the 00s. Indeed, Building Britain is at least partially interesting for being a reminder of a certain mood in pre-crash television, with shots of her purposefully striding down streets accompanied by obnoxious shuffle-y 90s trip hop music, which even by that stage hadn’t been properly killed off. Thankfully she’s not asking us to “join me on a journey”, and actually, over the course of the show she comes off rather well in the hindsight stakes, being rather more critical than you might expect from a presenter of fluffy daytime television.

On the Brandwagon concludes with footage of the Paris Banlieu riots of 2005, expressing the belief (partially borne out) that the regeneration industry and its massive investment in inner cities would lead to a similarly disastrous neglect of the peripherique. Building Britain, on the other hand, begins with footage of the 2001 Bradford riots, suggesting that a nadir had already been reached, and that upward was about the only direction it could go. As a further sign of things not being able to get much worse, Barker passes the Westfield site, which, half-way through 2013, is still a gigantic hole in the ground. From here on in, the pathos just gets heavier.

"From a ruin to a regeneration icon"

Barker’s next port of call is Lister Mills, perhaps one of the most significant landmarks in the history of Britain’s 21st century regeneration. It’s the project that made the name of Urban Splash, the ultimate Blairite property developer, rescuers of post-industrial and -in Park Hill’s case- post-social housing structures, reconstructors of relics of bygone social organisations as chic design conscious yuppie flats. Unlike some, I’m not sure you can consider them MORE insidious than so many other property types, but there’s something about their modus operandi, their rise from the 1980s Manchester scene, their gentrifying panache and closeness to ‘cool Britannia’ that just does it for some people. In the shadow of Lister Mills, Barker meets Amjad Pervez, of Asian Trade Link, who, with a shit-eating grin on his face dishes out some choice nuggets of regeneration patter:

“You go to Paris, and you’ve got the Eiffel Tower, you go to Egypt and you’ve got the pyramids, and if you go to London it’s the clock, but in Bradford... it’s Lister Mills!”.

This particular trope was actually quite common back then - it reminds me of being in Dubai before the crash, where we visited the show flat for the Burj Dubai as it was then called, wherein upon a wall we found a sequence of panels depicting the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, then Neil Armstrong on the moon, before a rendered image of the tower. Sheer hubris.

Oh, and by the way, Amjad Pervez is currently opening a Michael Gove endorsed free school in Bradford.


SuperCity | Picture A City: Bradford from Scott Burnham on Vimeo.

"We really do think we got value out of it"

Next stop is the masterplan, the VISION. We’re off to see the wizard, although in this case the invisible wizard is Will Alsop, and all that he’s left for us is a big perspex model and a video made by his son, Ollie. Alsop senior came in for quite a lot of flack for his Bradford masterplan (which we are reliably told cost £500,000 - my GOD how fees have plummeted since 2008), for its flimsiness, its triteness and its general implausibility. It proposed demolishing as much 1960s architecture as possible (a suggestion which hopefully now, thanks to the efforts of various critical voices, looks as clearly odious and obnoxious as it was) and replacing it with parks and new wobbly Alsop-style buildings, all accompanied by music from Icarus, one of the archetypes of mid-00’s folktronica, whose glitched up acoustic futurism is actually going through a bit of a revival. There’s obviously an irony to Alsop’s proposal to dig a giant hole in the middle of the city, but overall however it’s clear that the masterplan was intended as a massive confidence booster, not necessarily to be implemented literally but as a certain kick up the arse of the animal spirits of those who might potentially invest in Bradford.

Barker meets Maude Marshall, head of Bradford Centre Regeneration, a private company taking fees to do a job that should really have been the local authority’s. As the camera pans lovingly over the masterplan model as if it were an M&S oven-ready meal, Marshall does her very best to sound convinced that she has a chance of making it all work, spinning out deliriously naff strands of cant and gibberish: “People think Alsop’s wacky, and sure, some of the images you see are a bit organic, they are a bit mushroomy, but what they’re really saying is ‘think out the box, think what Bradford could be.’” when pushed by Barker, we get the following exquisite dribble: “It’s already going for it [...] urban village, residential market, tipping point, it’s happening.”

Oh, and by the way, Bradford Centre Regeneration was wound up in 2009 and the Alsop masterplan was dropped.

"Does that mean smaller apartments, and more of them?"

Soon, we’re in Leeds, where Barker notes, “controlling development is the problem, not encouraging it.” Barker hangs around underneath City Island, shockingly bad lumps of cynical regeneration tat, and it’s good to see that even before the crash mainstream voices were making alarmed noises about this kind of thing. But even that’s nothing compared to Bridgewater Place, a residential tower around the same height as the Barbican, a shockingly ugly building designed by everyone’s least favourite architectural hacks, Aedas. There’s a great scene though, when Michael Gardner, the project architect, is asked about the increase in units from Aedas’ initial design of 156 residential units to the developer’s in-house layout of 201. Mumbling and obviously uncomfortable at Barker’s implications of penny pinching, Gardner euphemises that “they’re able to deliver a … a more refined product to the market.” This of course was the story about the boom - developers were so unchecked, so cynical, that so many of these inner city developments are spatially far, far worse than the detested social housing of old. Sure, the construction is generally better, they don’t tend to rain on the inside, but let’s just wait till their cladding needs replaced in a few decades and we’ll see how much love people still have for them. In Bridgewater Place’s case, it’s not gone well. Nominated for the carbuncle cup, apparently nicknamed ‘The Dalek’, it also apparently killed someone when high winds at the foot of the tower lifted a lorry up and crushed a pedestrian - an accident for which liability has still not been settled.

The depressing peak of the programme has to be the next scene, a visit to the property developer Kevin Linfoot, whose firm were the ones who managed to shoe-horn 30% more flats into the Bridgewater Place development. In a scene of almost poetic quality, with shades of The Fountainhead, William Golding’s The Spire or perhaps Bigas Lunas’ Goldenballs, we meet Linfoot in a penthouse office, dominated by a 1:100 model of his dream project, The Lumiere, 170m tall, over 50 storeys high, nearly 1000 apartments, but absolutely NOT to be referred to as a ‘tower block’. Agonisingly uncomfortable on the camera, Linfoot comes across as very different to what you think property developers are supposed to be like - dominant, brash, testosterone-sodden minotaurs. He barely speaks in fact, being basically drowned out by Barker, but when he does it’s amazing: “the profit levels on this building are about half of what we usually work on” he admits, before confessing “I just think somebody’s got to do it, I know how difficult these things are to do, and I want to do it [...] I suppose really it’s something that I wanted to do for myself.”

Oh, and by the way, the Lumiere never got built, and Linfoot’s property company went into liquidation in 2009.

"It's gonna make the Gherkin look normal"

After that pathos there’s a brief lull where Barker talks to John Thorpe, literally the last civic architect in the UK, who recently retired. However, we’re nowhere near the bottom yet, as we are about to encounter the full idiocy of Ken Shuttleworth. “If the economy suddenly fails, Leeds will have a LOT of empty flats.” says Barker, before instantly spoiling her insight by adding, “but one way to be recession proof, is to get the best in design.” Barker introduces Shuttleworth as “the top architect in the world”, a statement almost criminally false, when it describes the architect of the ASPIRE sculpture, the Nottingham Jubilee Campus, the forthcoming UBS behemoth at Broadgate, the Cube in Birmingham, and arguably of course the Gherkin. In the years since leaving Foster, Shuttleworth has been doing his best to make even the most boring buildings by his old boss look accomplished, as he sets out to have a firm whose usp is that they can design buildings which are both vacuously commercial and inanely flamboyant at the same time. He’s known for making some utterly ridiculous statements too (recently claiming that the Gherkin required viewing corridors of its own, the silly bollock), and in this programme I think I’ve found the motherlode. Barker interviews him in the company of some unnamed black-clad minion from the MAKE studio, stood on a bridge over the motorway looking over at the Leeds International Pool, which is to be demolished to make way for the - wait for it - ‘Spiracle’. Now, apparently a spiracle is a vestigal gill opening behind the eye of a cartilaginous fish, and admittedly it is a respiratory opening, which is ever so slightly appropriate, considering the development is one of those ones from around that time which had wind turbines stuck on the top as an oh-so-bloody-green sop, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a worse name for a development in my life, and there are a lot of offensively stupid and obnoxious developments out there. Spiracle. Spiracle. SPIRACLE. SPI-RA-CLE. It’s a spire + a miracle. A miraculous spire! ARGH WHAT’S THE POINT?

But I think what’s best here is if we just let Shuttleworth use his own rope to hang himself, for what he gives us is perhaps the worst possible justification for silly architecture that I’ve ever heard:

“The idea is to try and make a building which actually stands out from any other building that’s ever been built, so it’s like a circular building, but all the floor plates are expressed as wavy lines, so you get this series of poppadoms on top of the other. I think now with the Spiracle we can make a new ICONIC architecture, and people then rise to the challenge of that on other buildings - I think that’ll be great. In a way the Gherkin London is a marker that says the next building has to be better than the Gherkin, it puts its mark down, it pushes everybody up to the next level. And hopefully the Spiracle will do the same in Leeds, that’d be the challenge.”

My god, so architecture is basically just an excuse for each architect to wave their dick (or occasionally, tits) around in ever more flamboyant loops and shapes, in the hope that that somehow lifts the tide of all design? When people like that are described as the best architects in the world then no wonder the field is in so much trouble. (it should be noted that Shuttleworth, since the crash, has been keen to suggest that he’s against the whole ‘iconic’ building method, but this little clip is just too damning.)

As if to add insult to idiocy, as Barker waves over at the Pool building, saying “I don’t think I’ll be sorry to see it go, you obviously won’t feel sorry for it.” Shuttleworth laughs: “The sooner the better!”

Oh, and by the way, the Leeds International Pool, an excellent if -shall we say- tainted building, was soon afterwards demolished. The Spiracle never occurred, and the site is now a surface car park.

"I think it's the renaissance of Bradford"

A visit to Irena Bauman is included as an example of a practitioner offering sustainable (in the social sense) development. Not particularly interesting, it at least gives us the following interesting fence-sitting: “I think that it’s largely to do with human vanity, and greed. I don’t really want to knock developers, because they are extraordinary people, they are risk takers, they fuel the economy, they are exciting, they create possibilities, but at the moment nobody is actually looking - I can’t hear the voice of the city.” Bauman’s model is that of a responsible capitalism, which is of course fair enough, it’s a very mittel-european attitude to have, that social democratic sense of ‘diverting’ the processes of the markets and doing your best to feed them back into something like a civic sphere. It’s certainly not a very British idea though.

Commercial firm Carey Jones get a visit too, to discuss their plans for the redevelopment of the Bradford Odeon, a project that many felt was utterly necessary for the regeneration of the city, as a sort of kickstarting project. As commercial architects go, there’s not actually so much to complain about - they’re office specialists, and everything is as boring as you’d expect in that world, but at least it’s not MAKE, if you know what I mean. One choice morsel of bullshit is when partner Gordon Carey shares his spiel with Barker, trying to sell her the replacement scheme, which at that stage looks like your typically generic yawn-worthy bollocks. As far as he’s concerned, “These louvres which will be multicoloured, are reflecting the multicultural nature of Bradford”. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Carey Jones got hammered in the crash, but are still active, although at a staff level of perhaps just over half what was shown in the project. In 2012 George Galloway managed to take the Bradford West seat in a by-election, with one of his main election pledges to support a local campaign to retain and renovate the Bradford Odeon, which still sits derelict.

"I think we need to ensure you are wowed and surprised."

It’s all rather sad really, this story, at least in terms of how the crash has stretched Bradford’s low point into a plateau of destitution, with really no end in sight. There’s also the temptation to feel a little schadenfreude at the just deserts dished out to the clueless regeneration hack, the property developer brought low, the second-rate architect spinning rubbish about a project that would never happen. But gloating is simply not appropriate when over five years later everything is still getting worse for almost everyone. In fact, since the crash the housing market has become even more desperate than it ever was before, with rental misery increasing, and a swiftly rising drawbridge separating those who can afford/inherit property and those who can’t. Significantly, one theme that runs through the whole programme is a total disdain for the architecture of the 1960s/70s, with everyone remarking how pleased they are to be removing the concrete buildings, and Barker at one point commenting on how new buildings really need to be ‘iconic’ and avoid the ugliness of the post war developments. But actually what everyone seems to be missing is the civic purpose and social aims that fed much of the development at that time, and despite all the failures, what we genuinely need now is a programme of quality mass housing, otherwise this island will continue to strangle itself, will continue to allow the rentier class to dominate, extracting wealth without investing it back in at all. If Britain’s ever going to recover properly it needs to realise that housing does not work as a free market, and never ever will.

At the end of the day, perhaps the most depressing aspect of watching this programme today is the fact that it was obvious even back then that this way of building cities wasn’t working, but 30 years of neoliberalism had removed almost all of the ways to fight back against the ‘property owning democracy’ model, and anyway, it was all too easy to just take the money that was sloshing around and go along with everything. Now what though?

The Ally Pally

I've been busy lately. One job, two jobs, three jobs at certain times. The book is now 'launched': thanks to all who came out to see me, either in London or in Oxford, they were both great nights with some lovely people there.

The last few months have been a maelstrom of stresses and various worries of one kind or another, some pointlessly conjured out of thin air but also some of them genuine concerns, not least of which was a prolonged period of quasi-homelessness which began at Christmas and will only be properly over by April. My return from Oxford recently was a strange experience in that I had nowhere to go until much later I was due to stay on the couch of a friend. With me I had a large, ugly purple rucksack filled with clothes that I had recently washed, my hard-worked leather satchel (manbag!) and a black canvas bag containing my battered old laptop and a bottle of whisky which had been given to me the previous night in Oxford after my lecture.

From Paddington, London's rail gateway to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, it's only a short walk to St. George's Fields, perhaps the most exclusive of all the London modernist estates. Gated away and hidden behind various terraces, it's very easy to not even notice that these buildings exist. 

Sitting literally across the road from Hyde Park, St George's Fields were, according to wikpedia, designed by Patrick Hodgkinson (of the Brunswick Centre fame) although it's not clear that this is actually the case. Nevertheless, the buildings share an obvious similarity to the Brunswick Centre and also Stoneleigh Terrace, although in this example they are set in a deconsecrated graveyard which is verdant and introverted, rather than having a public shopping space or pedestrian street in between them.

It's a really rather strange situation - modernist housing like this is routinely decried as being inhumane, 'brutal' etc etc, and yet people are more than willing to pay ridiculous sums to live in them, when someone like me or perhaps you, who genuinely appreciates architecture like this, hasn't a hope in hell of ever being able to afford it. It's an infuriatingly tantalising problem, in that London's modernist housing is simultaneously reviled and desired, degenerate and luxurious. Standing there in the mews lane that you see above, carrying all the possessions that I required to get by for another week or so, I saw a father pushing a pram into the gate which he then shut behind him, and felt utterly crushed by London's mute resistance to special pleading. 

But one shouldn't write these things just to moan about silly problems.

Eventually, after a quick lunch in one of those identikit Australian-style coffee shops seemingly everywhere now, all flat-whites and butternut squash, I boarded a bus, one of the very first that came along. I had the vague urge to travel north, but for what reason I wasn't sure, perhaps something to do with achieving some altitude and looking back down. The lack of terrain in London can sometimes feel oppressive - not only because of the inability to see further than the next set of buildings, but also in the very monotony of its flood plain - London can seem like an artificial environment, without topography. Eventually after maybe half an hour's motorised drift I began to pass through streets I didn't immediately recognise (always a privilege when you've lived in London for years and haven't frequent opportunities to wander like you used to), before emerging in Muswell Hill.

And then a tiny glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye suddenly made perfect sense, so I disembarked and headed towards the Alexandra Palace. 

A guilty feeling - I've may have written a book about iron & glass architecture but until that day I had never visited Alexandra Palace, one of the last surviving beasts of that era. It'll be up to others to judge whether this is a terrible omission on my part, however the actual visit felt like a complete vindication of  the arguments from the book. Strangely, it also reminded me of another visit to another building I'd made and written about, at what now feels like a remarkably different time in my life, of which more later.

The Alexandra Palace was not a particularly original building when it was conceived, not only because iron & glass fever was already well under way, but because it was literally recycled, being built from the remains of the 1862 International Exhibition, held on a site which is now occupied by the Natural History Museum (indeed, the dismantling and recycling of iron & glass buildings was remarkably common and is perhaps something that I should have paid more attention to in the book). The 1862 Exhibition was the inevitable let down after the glory and back slapping of the 1851 Great Exhibition, with the architecture unappreciated, the finances in the red and the establishment still in mourning for the death of Prince Albert. It took ten years to resurrect this exhibition building as a 'Palace for the People' up on Muswell Hill (at that point a number of miles outside of London, to be accessed by a newly built railway), and it wasn't ready until 1873. 

And, like so many other iron and glass buildings, it was brought down by fire, not even two weeks after it was opened. Reconstruction began almost right away however, in a typically Victorian gesture of bravado and arrogance, and it took just around 2 years to complete again, to a modified design.

This rebuilt palace lasted until the turn of the 20th century, when it had to be rescued by the local authority as it was due to be sold for redevelopment. In this it was both typical and atypical of iron & glass buildings, as all but a few of them were lost around the turn of the 20th century, unable to earn their keep, perhaps too utopian in their attempts to entertain, inform and 'improve' their audiences. Instead, the Alexandra Palace would carry on, with its mishmash of entertainments struggling to properly occupy its vast spaces.

But then one thing that makes Alexandra Palace quite so architecturally interesting is the fact that it partially burned down again in 1980, necessitating yet another rebuild. This, combined with various adaptations over the years (including the adding of a BBC transmitter), mean that it has become a smorgasbord of different architectural methods and styles ranging over a 140 year period - something that hasn't really happened much since the middle ages, when cathedrals took over a century to complete and their design was passed from mason to mason across generations.

In the book, and in a recent article for Icon magazine, I make the argument for a notion of 'abstract ruins'. What is meant by that is that many of the aesthetic qualities that are appreciated in the ruined building are to be found in the architecture of iron & glass: fragmentation, disjunction, foliage, fragility and lightness are just some of the associations brought forth by 'the Ruin' that are present in these buildings, with the crucial difference that the iron & glass buildings were built like that, were fully functioning even as they embodied such incomplete formal languages.  

Also in the book I utilise the existing distinction between 'pure' iron & glass, eg the Crystal Palace, where above the foundations the building is entirely ferro-vitreous, and 'mixed' construction, where iron & glass is held back behind more conventional masonry structures. This I understand to show a certain retreat away from the extreme dematerialisation of a Crystal Palace towards an architecture more in tune with Victorian attitudes to monumentalism, and is played out in the fact that 19th century railway stations were invariably stuck behind eclectic classical masonry buildings which integrated their vast transitory spaces back into the existing architectural logic.

According to this conception the Alexandra Palace is a step backward, as it was initially a highly composed ensemble of masonry with a typically ecclesiastical arrangement of iron & glas galleries behind; unlike the Crystal Palace which shocked the public and the critics with its very fragility and lack of monumentality, the Alexandra Palace could be easily compared to the heavyweight confections that were common in the late 19th century despite the lightweight hi-tech environments behind its bricks and stones. But on visiting I was taken aback by just how strange a building it actually is now, a strangeness that one wouldn't find at Kew, to take an example of a surviving 'pure' iron & glass building.

I was fortunate enough to come across the great hall when a door was being held open by workmen, and an event was being set up inside. The shadows that pass diagonally across the translucent surface are those of the actual structure of the main hall, which was rebuilt as a large but simple triangular trussed structure after the 1980 fire. The strange fabric here seems to serve three purposes: it blocks excessive solar gain from the glazed roof, it creates a mimic (a ghost, even!) of the form of the hall that existed before the fire, and it no doubt has acoustic benefits as well - the Crystal Palace Company had to install a large canopy above its orchestra after their first Handel festival because the space was so reverberant as to be near-useless as a concert hall.

And then that emptiness that I've identified again and again and again - being drastically overwhelmed by a space that is too large. As I've said before; ruins generally have it, Crystal Palace Park has it, the vast axiality of its layout highlighting the void where the palace ought to be, and Alexandra Palace has it - the large pub with only two patrons, the empty halls, the huge spaces in front of the building with only a couple of people strolling around: it's as if the 'windswept plazas' that are such a cliche of criticisms of soviet architecture actually present themselves whenever there is an egalitarian spirit guiding construction.

Apparently the ongoing financial woes of the Alexandra Palace have much to do with an overspend on the rebuilding after 1980, meaning that even now it has the Damoclesian sword of redevelopment hanging above it,  but it has to be said that the palace was looking in pretty bad state...

... with brickwork spalling, with car parks running up against the building in places and large areas including what should be main entrances gated off and inaccessible.

Large expanses of windowless dingy wall made it seem almost like a medieval fortress, having not been cleaned for a long time, ill-used, unloved.

With windows frequently blocked off, covered over, looking for all the world like a dilapidated country house.

And when I had that thought, I realised something: very soon after I started writing this blog-thing, indeed one of the first serious posts I wrote at all was about a ruined country house in Worcestershire that I had visited named Witley Court. What interested me there were all the different spatial strategies that had been enlisted in the service of making that dangerous and derelict building into a stable, safely enjoyable ruin. I explored these, and wondered about identifying and deploying these strategies in architecture that wasn't in a real sense ruined. What had been unconsciously nagging me as I walked around the Alexandra Palace was that it felt uncannily like walking around Witley Court, a juxtaposition five years and all manner of events later, a memory of a beautiful day seen from the wrong side of time. Having just come to the end of a years-long period of dull anticipation for the launch of the book, the conception of which was born with the initial attempts at writing seriously about architecture of which the Witley Court essay was one of the first, there was something timely about this revelation, something appropriate in its sudden welling up, some kind of symbolic cyclicality which was patently false but was a gentle little phantasm to entertain briefly.

While I don't really have much hope of being able to express how that strange temporal neatness felt, I can briefly explain how it manifested itself through reference to the 'architectural tropes' of creating ruins that I had identified previously. 

What about the use of one type of structure to support another? Seen here is a steel beam holding masonry walls apart after they have lost their roof structure, a disjunctive substitution of structural method, switching materials and structural behaviour seemingly capriciously.

This can also be seen in the rough juxtaposition of the TV tower which seems like some kind of growth out from what used to be a water tower, and makes no real attempt to resolve itself with the existing building. Its strange 30s bay window and its spindly pylon just simply do not belong to the building, yet  have been there since 1936.

Or how about the space frame that covers this one-storey tent-like addition to the building in the area that was most recently burned out? You know how much I enjoy a good space frame.

This image I think is worth a close look - see the steel structure holding up the external wall at this goods yard, and note the awkward way in which the cabin spaces nuzzle up against the wall. This triple structural system both resembles the ruin-space of Witley Court, hold up masonry walls that have lost their lateral support and are in danger of fallling in, but also puts me in mind of the rudimentary futurism of Cedric Price, who in 2007 I wasn't familiar with but who I would later discuss in the book. Price seems to me to be who Richard Rogers would be if Richard Rogers actually behaved according to his own rhetoric. This compelling an-aesthetic that you can see here is akin to the quality in Price's attempts at real architecture that I called 'deliriously dreary'; Frill-less yet exciting.

Then the openings and coverings of various areas that were once perhaps proper openings, now completely out of their original functional contexts...

Not quite inside, not quite outside, industrial-type walkways sneaking in and around the building. 

(I hope Reyner would approve)

And then of course that old mainstay of the ruin aesthetic, the window which frames only sky, which creates screens rather than envelopes, a kind of indefiniteness of where the building ends, a fragmentary condition.

And I suppose that's what it comes down to in the end; fragments. What the stabilised ruin and the overwhelmingly compromised iron & glass palace have in common is this inability to tell a comprehensive architectural statement, this conflict between different elements and methods, this language of incompleteness. But in the fragment is the potential for a different kind of completeness, an alternative. One of the main reasons that the physical language of ruination is interesting is not because of its mournful aesthetic posture, but because it is one of the only ways that architecture is able to express the sense that things could be changed, could be different. Ruins have this sense of fragmentary spark, and I hope that in the book I have convincingly argued that iron & glass buildings have it too. What I found at the Alexandra Palace was that in its current state the palace managed to merge these two different ways of achieving the same aesthetic condition into one massive lonely environment.

And we'll have to wait to see what the next 5 years will bring, I suppose.

A Song for Europe

A Trip to N19

So, I'd like to write about a short jaunt I took the other day, with some pictures attached. This time I went off up to see some Camden 'council brutalism', and take in some of the sights around there. The object of my adventure this time was Stoneleigh Terrace, designed by Peter Tabori in 1972 onwards. It was utterly pissing it down, I might add.



First thing, after leaving Gospel Oak tube is that you are confronted by a long terrace in a very Corbusian manner, almost 'Pessac-ian'. It's also reminiscent of a smaller version of the 'Maiden Lane' estate, and sure enough, a little research shows that it was also the work of Benson & Forsyth, everyone's favourite Corb-worshipping Scottish intellectual architects.



Fairly rudimentary round the front, the rear facade showed more interest, and overall despite a certain weathering to the concrete, the black frames remained to offset the white, with a pleasant covering of plants and ivy.



Setting off under the railway bridge over which I had arrived, this metal lady looked rather threatened by my presence.



And underneath the bridge someone had stuck a landscape onto the brick pier. A fine likeness it is too.



That kissing couple look uncannily like the sort of thing one finds in the work of the Savage Messiah. Perhaps crossed with the sort of thing Thom Yorke draws on his Radiohead album sleeves.




And lo! A premonition of what was to come. I'm a big fan of the stepped-section building, of which this is a very tame example. There are some undoubtedly wonderful buildings in London that utilise the method - the Brunswick Centre for example. Allowing agreeable daylight into the front of the building, and accommodating all sorts of gymnastics and drama in the overhangs behind, the stepped section is a wonderful method of laying out flats. This is by Robert Bailie, 1963, and betrays a certain Scandinavian influence.



It's cliched but nevertheless true about London that one usually begins to experience it primarily through the tube, in which case it is perceived as a series of very small areas perambulated around, and only ever visited atomistically. After a while and you start to take the bus or cycle more, and it begins to link up with itself, becoming more of a territory that is understandable. But after a number of years, and if you are fond of wandering, it starts to become harder and harder to find a territory that is genuinely alien, surprising. So as I walked up the road and passed round the front of this block, I suddenly realised that I was crossing a street I had walked up a number of times. The joy I had been taking in being an 'explorer' was suddenly shattered as I recalled walks in sunshine towards Hampstead Heath with friends years before, or bus trips to picnics on Parliament Hill, or...

I must have been disheartened, as there are no photographs from the next few kilometers I walked, which thankfully took me back into uncharted territory. Living in the flatlands in the area surrounding the river, it is always a joy to find somewhere in London that has TERRAIN of any sort, and I took a certain pleasure in passing up and down the undulating streets that led east around the base of Highgate.



And at the very top of a hill, some humdrum modernism, I would say 1960 or thereabouts. The views from this one must have been tremendous.



How very very British this lot are. deferential, grim, and yet familiar, safe even. The lack of ambition is palpable.



I knew it wouldn't be a wander without encountering some Festival Style. This block, o'er-leapingly entitled 'The Tower' has it all: rounded, gentlemanly columns, tasteful brickwork, including some clever coursing, a cantilevered canopy, a gently pitched roof and a vaguely corbusian treatment of the ground floor. There's really nothing to complain about...



Unlike with this horror. Despite all the years that have passed, despite all the retro-mania in nearly all forms of culture, despite the rehabilitation attempts, I still find myself utterly dismayed by the tastelessness and tack of the 1980s.



I mean, these are nice, if deeply unremarkable examples of turn-of-the-century housing, but they're a million miles more appealing than that bastard to the rear of the photo, even if it does pretend to defer and to mimic.



A pillbox in Highgate. One for Paul Virilio.



Oh Hello! Hiding down a short stump of a street was this little cheeky terrace of five units, executed in a strange grey brick. Similar to the buildings seen at Gospel Oak, it turns out that these are by Neave Brown of Alexandra Road fame.



To be honest these are fairly non-descript. The windows are poky, the bricks are not exactly attractive. They are obviously desirable if the plush car is anything to go by, and they set quite the surreal juxtaposition with their terraced and church neighbours, but I could probably leave these ones.



Oh, and what a shame. It's time for dilapidation worship. These terraces are on their way out, currently undergoing an ignominious strip-out and apparently to be demolished properly soon enough.



An ex-picture framer framed.



For various reasons I was reminded of St Peter's seminary at Cardross. Partly this was due to the empty cells, with their views through the building interrupted only by rubble.



And so here I was. Highgate Newtown. The Whittington Estate, Stoneleigh Terrace. N19



But one last look back at the building to go. The other reason I'm seeing Gillespie Kidd & Coia in this building is the way the revelation of the timber infill panels reminds me of the way that GKC used to articulate theirs, with the ribs and studs clearly articulated on the outside. I must say that the escape staircase canted out to meet the road angle has created some brilliant little complexities, in a scheme which seems to emanate from that strange period when brutalism, hi-tech and kitch were all operative at the same time (exemplified by Stirling's Runcorn housing), which I have previously nicknamed 'Brutalomo'. Alas, these are to be wiped away by an (admittedly high performance) scheme by arch-bore Rick Mather.



We can get an idea here of how the new estate is supposed to work. Matching the scale of a traditional terrace, as well as more or less matching the width of a typical traditional flat, yet with full windows and generous balconies, this building is not Corbusian, is not CIAM in its approach to the urban. This is perfect Team X brutalism; an interpretation and elaboration upon a pre-existing typological arrangement.



But of course there is always architecture - note here the joyous method of terminating the block. It could have stopped at a full wall, it could have stepped down, but no, it appears to step up and out like some weightless honeycomb. This building was designed by Peter Tabori, about whom I knew nothing until recently, but the following is remarkable:

Peter Tábori was born in Hungary in 1942 and studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic. When he was a student, he asked the local authority for a diploma project and was given the brief for Highgate New Town. After working for Ernö Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun, Tábori joined Camden Architects Department - Sydney Cook had been so impressed by Tábori's student work that he was employed to develop it into the final scheme.

My goodness. I can't really imagine the following happening now, for a million different reasons.



One of which is shown here. Apparently the timid blocks on the left are part of the same scheme, albeit a later stage. How pathetic! A thoroughly turned-tide, pointless humility.  



Of course, one project that this should remind you of is the Brunswick Centre in Holborn, and how fortuitous!



You are forbidden from climbing onto a flat fish.



And as we approach, the absolute treat of the varying levels of access, the walkways, the stairs, the three dimensional movement.





Which, as we get into the estate proper, is shown in the entry sequence. What we have here are three routes into a flat. A double staircase up, a single staircase up, or a staircase down. There is free movement at the bottom level.




The estate is arranged across six rows of flats, which are connected by four streets in parallel. Due to the car parking being arranged underneath the estate, all of the paths are pedestrian only, which along with their patio paving gives them a quality somewhere between that of a street and a garden path.



Examplified here by the way that the path meanders around the side of the blocks.



The estate is very leafy at times, a park-like condition that compliments the fact that the estate backs onto Highgate Cemetery.



Walkways! Symbols of hope!




Some of the flats are entered from the side. These stairs lead up an open 'close', giving every single flat on the estate their own 'front door'. They are protected from the elements by transparent canopies, a condition that cannot help but remind me of some of the more exquisite flats in Glasgow, with rooflights casting soft glow down into their twirling stairwells.



And so an end to the estate. What I haven't pictured here are the children that were present while I visited. There were two boys who were playing with those metal scooters, rolling up and down the top street before coasting down the hill towards the bottom. There was a group of about four or five boys around 12 or so, who were running around the entire estate and crossed my path a number of times. Then, as I walked along one of the streets I saw two girls at the door of a flat, the mother inside talking to them, their conversation apparently about whether this lady's son/daughter would be able to come out to hang around. It was this that struck me the most - here was precisely the interaction that the Smithsons spent so much energy trying to study and maintain in their work, this was the 'life of the street' that they eulogised so, basically meaning a comfortable and safe-feeling space where there are plenty of people who know you, or at least know who you are. It's not that difficult to achieve.





The Girdlestone Estate next door is not of such high architectural merit, indeed, it resembles far more the sort of non-descript brick design one finds in the East End, but it seemed to be functioning in a similar fashion to its neighbour...



...and was, in places, equally lush.





And, gosh!



If ever there was a typology for garish pomo, it was a leisure centre. What is the correct classical order for a flume ride? I'm sure they asked themselves. I'd like to know who the architect was, as this is the obviously endearing, sub-Jim Stirling end of pomo, as opposed to the wanton kind shown before.



Can you say CORBU?



It seems that everytime I go on a wander it has to be finished off with some garish nonsense in the Blairite style. Take a bow, Kay Hartmann Architects! Now take them away, guards! What a bloody shocking building - thank god it's for children otherwise it might have made me cry it was so grimly jolly. Oh well.

Note - I wrote this up on the day that the UK government passed their vote on the NHS reform bill, which will effectively pave the way for the continuing destruction of the welfare state. In times as gloomy as these, we ought never to forget the wonderful things that a little bit of social spending can achieve. It's really not that hard.