Occupied

Photo by me. This post sat in drafts for ages, which is why it's a bit behind the times.

When Paternoster Row, adjacent to St Paul's Cathedral in the city of London, was destroyed by fire during the Blitz, 6 million books were consumed by the flames. For centuries, the area was the centre of London's bookselling and publishing trades - before Fleet Street, before the Charing Cross Road, before Bloomsbury. Robinson Crusoe was published there [1]. Its destruction was the terminus of that part of the site's history; the area was rebuilt as Paternoster Square, which was first a modernist office complex, and since the 1990s has been a deadly historicist Carolingian showpiece. It is home to the London Stock Exchange, now targeted by our local representatives of the Occupy movement. Unable to camp in the square outside the stock exchange - this so-called public space is privately owned, and was promptly sealed off by the police - the Occupiers have set up in St Paul's churchyard, prompting a continuing crisis at the cathedral and much public debate, which I won't recap here.

The one incursion the Occupiers have been able to make into the Paternoster complex is to stick posters and other ephemera on the pillars of its external colonnade - as shown in the photo above. I have fairly mixed feelings about the occupiers[2], so took the opportunity one evening a week or two ago to go down to the site and look around for myself. I found an orderly, friendly and essentially unobstructive protest. But I was most charmed by the informal poster-pillars, which immediately reminded me of the area's publishing history - nearby, the Occupiers have also set up a "library", and those book-covered tables seemed another connection to that past.

Recently I was at the Architectural Association, attending Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, a conference of speculation. There, Kevin Slavin gave a fascinting talking about the rise of "algo-trading" - the use of algorithms to trade stocks. You can't just buy or sell a million shares of something without undesirable market effects, so algorithms are used to break up that one big trade into many small, seemingly random trades. More algorithms are used to try and detect those programmes. So much trading on stock exchanges is now automated, and that in turn is changing where trading occurs. Microseconds can make the difference between profit and loss, so the banks of computers running these automated trades are increasingly locating themselves around switch hubs, the "telephone exchanges" of the internet. This reduces the lightspeed travel time of their commands to the market - and also moves them away from traditional financial districts. Increasing auomation, and the migration of this automation, means fewer and fewer actual people working on Wall Street and in the City - and thus Slavin compares the Occupiers to hermit crabs, taking over an abandoned shell after its previous inhabitant moved on.

What I think is most striking about the Occupation is the reoccupation of public space in the city with visible ideas. Of course the powers that preside over the City have ideas, they have an ideology. But it serves their purposes to not really advertise those ideas, so that we almost forget that they have ideology at all, and believe that they are mere innocents, "entrepreneurs" frolicking wealth-creatively in a benign state of nature, a fragile state at that, one which must not be disturbed for fear that they might just take off like deer. The City is a very strange place indeed, and has been for decades. For most Londoners, the ones who don't work there, it's just a kind of lacuna, mostly only regarded from a distance. And the City I think favours this semi-visible status, which is why it has happily driven other uses (such as the publishing industry) from its bounds, and would like to do unto Smithfield as it did unto Spitalfields. Its penetration by visible dissent isn't threatening to it as an obstruction or as a way of stopping its work - the Occupation really doesn't obstruct anything significant. The threat is connected to the possibility that is might have to explain or justify itself. We might have to think about what is done there, and how it is done. Which is, in a democratic society, a generous public service by the Occupiers.

[1] These facts from the Encyclopedia of London.
[2] Which aren't important. There has been much griping from the Do Nothings about Occupy, I don't intend to join in.

British Paradoxes

"London, where the streets are paved with gold, and the gardens with cement", leads a Guardian article on the loss of wildlife habitats resulting from people paving over their front gardens.

The biggest survey ever conducted of private space in the capital, taken by the London Wildlife Trust, shows it is getting greyer – threatening its reputation of being one of the world's greenest cities because of its extensive public parks and gardens.

The city is losing the equivalent of two-and-a-half Hyde Parks of greenery a year from its private, domestic gardens – about 3,000 ha (7,410 acres), says the report.

Lamentable. So what is to be done? Legislation, perhaps, or biodiversity conversation areas to go with the existing system of conservation areas? But what about the Briton's inalienable right to do whatever he pleases to his home? But of course we are in the fork of a defining British paradox. We have this generalised sense of a shared patrimony that must be protected, which we sum up as our "heritage". And yet we also have this pugnacious sense of private property and natural justice, of rights and entitlements. So the very person who might complain about the loss of butterfly habitats and deterioration of streetscape caused by his neighbour's concreting of his front garden might be apoplectic at rage if the council stopped him putting up a shed in his back garden. Both sides of this paradox are of course "common sense", and reason buckles under the distorting pressure of its internal contradictions.

Similarly, everyone wants a home with a garden - surveys repeatedly show that this is the national preference. If this is what people want, then it must be right, that's just common sense. And everyone wants total protection of the green belt, and indeed all undeveloped green space. Where are these homes going to go? So we end up with absurd, cramped brick boxes on ludicrous coasters of turf - an attempt to meet a typological requirement in defiance of all reason. We very obviously share many things - our cities, our countryside, our past. And yet we despise the idea of dealing with them in a communal manner.

These paradoxes - and there are dozens like them, on everything from the "nanny state" to the BBC - are the logical outcome of 30 years of government according to the vindictive petty jealousies of the Daily Mail. They are rooted in that poisonous discourse, in which it seems every politician talks to you, personally, as an individual - you are of course responsible, hard-working, ordinary - in order to warn you about the others, the ones who are taking advantage and ruining everything. It is a mean, small-minded pattern of thought, the politics of Gollum. It has stacked this country with lose-lose paradoxes and zero-sum games, and at times it feels as if these paradoxes are about to block out all light from above and hope of change. Like when a Labour leader stands up and - instead of announcing a national programme of housebuilding, which would allow thousands more to share in the benefits of a council home - announces that "hardworking, responsible" people (like you!) would be given preference for the existing tiny number of council homes, over the "shirkers" (you know, the others).

Lost

Detail of a photograph from Britain's Lost Cities.

This post has been sitting in Drafts, half-finished, for some months, occasionally pricking me with guilt. The book in question has been out for ages. The post also suffers from a focus problem; ostensibly reviewing the book, I often broaden focus to talk about the heritage brigade (Jenkins, Scruton, Charles, etc) in general, and unpicking the two strands of thought in this rambling post was too horrible to contemplate.

"Encase your legs with nylons*, / Bestride your hills with pylons / O age without a soul" wrote John Betjeman in the poem Inexpensive Progress. It continues, in a later stanza: "And if there is some scenery, / Some unpretentious greenery, / Surviving anywhere, / It does not need protecting / For soon we'll be erecting / A Power Station there." Betjeman's arch sarcasm set the tone for a whole generation of sneering critics of modernisation, sending it down a path towards a prose style now hopelessly mired in cliche and I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Betjeman pastiche (much like their preferred manner of architecture). But Betjeman's view of architecture was a lot more sophisticated than the narrowly dogmatic approach taken by, say, Simon Jenkins or the Prince of Wales. He had opinions that would make Roger Scruton's head spin - for instance writing to Denys Lasdun to praise his design for the National Theatre on the South Bank, that particular bugbear of the trads.

Gavin Stamp is similarly sophisticated. He's among the most articulate and forceful critics of modernist redevelopment and advocates of conservation and traditional "townscape"; these positions are usually expressed through his permanently disappointed "Nooks and Corners" column in Private Eye. But Britain's Lost Cities, his blistering assault on the path of 20th-century British urbanism (now in paperback), is full of nuance and surprises. Stamp's praise for Festival Hall perhaps isn't all that much of a shock; it is now hard to find critics of it. But Stamp is generous to other unlikely buildings: Basil Spence's university library in Edinburgh and John Madin's central library in Birmingham to give just two examples. And he ranges far off the usual rhetorical template, blaming the 1930s as much as the 1960s, and patricians and developers as much as modernist central planners.

Blaming for what? For the destruction of British cities, of course - 20 of them, from London to Glasgow via less familiar places as Worcester and Exeter. Lost Cities is larded with photographs of these cities in their former glory, like the graduation photographs of murder victims that are shown on the news. It's a grim read and appeals strongly to that odd pleasure: tombside melancholy. To look at photographs of places we cannot, can never, see for real is to feel a prisoner in one's time, locked in the bow of a ship while loved ones are thrown off the stern. The photograph keeps grief fresher longer than any other form of image. This is because it was (and is) a vast advance in the technology of memory - and as such it is probably the photograph, not modernism or the Blitz, that gave us the building conservation movement. Without the camera, the heritage movement would never have risen to its present ascendance, and would have remained the fringe pursuit of antiquarianism. It is the product of essentially modern information technology**.

Back to the Lost Cities. I should make it clear that I have nothing against conservation of existing buildings in principle, as a matter of economy and ecology if nothing else. But Britain's Lost Cities isn't intended as a collection of curiosities, it's polemical; it has a point to make, and the point is to horrify us at this wanton destruction (in the hands of SAVE et al, destruction is nearly always "wanton", the two words have been shacked up together since the 1970s and look inseparable now) and to warn us to change our ways, shake our heads at the follies of the past, treat the older parts of towns and cities with renewed respect and treat the no-longer-new-but-not-quite-so-old bits that replaced them with fresh contempt. Central to this heritage-militancy is a national loss of nerve about the New. In the minds of the likes of Jenkins, the New was a modernist invention, but in fact centuries of British architects and city-builders had faith in the New over the Old. The Georgians swept away medieval cities and the Victorians swept away Georgian cities, and hundreds of good and tens of thousands of indifferent buildings were destroyed and places changed their character for better and worse long before the modernists appeared on the scene. The idea - often repeated by the Prince of Wales and others - that previous generations tended their cities bonsai-like, with nailclippers and tweezers, is a myth. And because there aren't photographs of those pre-existing eras, just unfamiliar paintings and drawings, we don't grieve all that much. And Stamp, to his credit, sees this, acknowledging in his introduction that the railways (for instance) were terrifically destructive.

(In other places, he's less sensitive. The laziest and ugliest line that gets trotted out by the heritage tendency and trad architects is that planners and modern architects "did more damage than the Luftwaffe", and variants on this slur do make an appearance; beyond the conflation of well-meaning public policy with area bombing inflicted by a hostile power, this line whitewashes the desperate state that British cities were in before the war. And they get annoyed when the vernacular tastes of the Nazis are brought into the frame.)

But what makes the losses of the 20th century too much for Stamp to bear is the guiding idea that what replaced the eradicated buildings was inferior. Not always - I've already cited where Stamp finds room in his heart for the modernists. But throughout the book the basic assumption that the replacement townscape was inferior is so deeply ingrained that it literally goes without saying. Stamp is a hugely valuable historian and critic, and a good writer, but Britain's Lost Cities sadly falls into line with a general effort to comprehensively malign post-War urban planning. This is to forget the nightmarish challenge that Britain's cities faced in the 20th century: the urgent need to modernise housing, offices, factories, hospitals, schools, everything in fact that the pre-War laissez-faire Big Society had neglected for decades. The militant heritage tendency has made a concerted effort to make modernisation a dirty word (a work that the Blair government colluded in, by applying it to neoliberal "reform" of public services). Since the 1940s some terrible mistakes have been made in British towns and cities, particularly in the name of traffic planning, but it seems at times as if the heritage tendency wants all British post-War planning, whether well-intentioned or dim-witted, to look like a kind of baffling tantrum. Its concerns, the social woes it sought to correct (with much success - the dramatic improvement in public health after the War is down to the council house as well as the NHS), the crises is sought to forestall - these are all to be forgotten. The supposed guardians of the British past really want a dramatic fit of amnesia.

And what are we conserving? The built stock of British cities cannot be completely separated from its use. In those marvellous pictures in Britian's Lost Cities, we see town-centre foundries, Don Cossack Temperance Hotels, socialist debating halls, small factories, family grocers. The visual apparatus, signs and ads, of those places makes for much of what is charming and lively about the street scene. Bringing back those buildings would not bring back those uses. The places that have been "saved" by the heritage movement - Covent Garden and Spitalfields, for instance - have been lost in other ways, taken over by chains and corporations and reduced to prissy, security-patrolled shopping plazas. Why do we no longer have microindustry, small independent shops, public-subscription reading rooms and debating halls? How can we foster those things, and should we? These are vital economic and social questions, and the heritage industry has no answer to them; it is only concerned with artificially preserving remains. And what should we do about server farms and distribution sheds? Pre-1939 townscape could not just carry on; even Pevsner saw that, pointing to the Alton Estate as the way of the future in his recently published "lost" book on visual planning. The idea, peddled by Leon Krier in particular, that modernist planning was a sudden disastrous abandonment of a secure evolutionary path is absurd. The severity of the modernisation programmes of the 1950s to 1970s was largely the result of the fact that they had been held back for decades by the forces of stasis masquerading as "gentle evolution".

So a polemical fixation on heritage alone does not help us understand and nurture the cityscape. Take, for instance, painted advertisements. Painted advertisements and signage on buildings is a crucial element of the lost streetscapes that Stamp mourns. There are repeated calls from the heritage movement to take more care to preserve those examples of painted advertisement that survive. But the reason these paintings are so old, and dwindling, is that advertising and signage were targeted by planners and conservationists in previous decades. If we changed planning law, we could probably restart the production of painted advertisements and incite a festive riot of new neon while we're at it. The ads would be for Toshiba and Viagra rather than Marconi and Beechams pills, for the unignorable economic and social reasons that I mentioned earlier, but they would be painted and perhaps subject to Royal Fine Arts Commission approval. That way, the dwindling supply of older adverts would be less of a pressing concern.

What I'm saying is this: The best way to ensure a steady supply of the Past is to continue to manufacture the Present and the Future. The wholesale rejection of the New has completely failed, giving us only amnesia and routine philistinism. In distrusting development we have, as a country, not stopped development but ceded our ability to shape it and even plan it. In the same month that Stamp accused me of "card-carrying neophilia", my then-boss, former Icon editor Justin McGuirk, was called a neophile by Roger Scruton - and Scruton, like Stamp, believed he was pointing out a character flaw rather than drawing attention to an admirable trait, a telling fact in itself. Commenting on the coincidence on Icon's Scene page, we wrote: "[We] wonderered how [we] could be neophiliacs when so many of the new buildings [we] see are crap." The most vital question in British urban policy is how to build, and what to build; get that right and the question of heritage will be far less important, because it will no longer be a question of preserving a dwindling supply of good buildings, the supply will be kept healthy. The heritage movement has performed many good deeds, preserving some superb buildings that might have been unnecessarily destroyed. But its only contribution to a broader debate about what cities should look like is to foster the attitude that if it's Old, it's Good, if it looks Old, it's Good, and if it has to be New, then it has to look Old. That is a dead end; it is aesthetic decadence, and the stance of a deeply unhealthy, perhaps dying, culture.

Stamp's book is a visual treat and a treasury of interest, though, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.


* Betjeman has a curious kink about female beauty aids, and an even stranger suspicion of life becoming easier. From the famous Slough: "In labour-saving homes, with care / Their wives frizz out peroxide hair / And dry it in synthetic air / And paint their nails."

** SAVE Britain's Heritage grew out of an exhibition of photography.

Saint Jane

The Pelican edition of Death and Life, with cover by Germano Facetti.

A spectre is haunting urbanism - the spectre of Jane Jacobs. The American-Canadian writer and activist died in 2006, but she continues to exert influence over the urban debate, primarily via that dreary federacy of messianic dovecote enthusiasts, the "New Urbanists", who have taken her up as a kind of guiding prophet. Outside the ranks of the Kunstlers and Kriers, there is a great swath of architects, thinkers and writers on the city who have read Jacobs and hold her in high regard. With a touch of embarrassment, I should include myself in this latter category. Not being an architect, I was an auto-didact in urban theory. When I came across a Pelican edition of Jacobs' best-known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a second-hand bookshop almost a decade ago, I had never heard of her. But I loved the Germano Facetti cover design, the back sounded interesting enough, and the price was right, so I took it home.

At that point, my reading on urban theory had been scattershot, based entirely in what I found in 2nd-hand bookshops: Corbu, Lewis Mumford, Thomas Sharp, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, an odd band who had given me all sorts of interesting ideas and imagery, but nothing very coherent. What they had in common, more or less, was that I didn't really enjoy reading them all that much, and had mostly got through to the end in a spirit of patient self-improvement. I picked up Jacobs, expecting more of the same, and instead ploughed through it in a matter of days. If nothing else, she taught me that book-length urban theory could be hugely entertaining, and since then I have sought out books about the city with enthusiasm, as opposed to a worthy sense of I-really-should-know-more-about-this. (I haven't read The Economy of Cities which I understand unwisely broadens some of Jacobs' microcosmic conclusions, which is probably why its profile has declined in recent years while that of Death and Life has done little but improve.)

At the time, I lived in a basement flat in Pimlico. I worked from home. From the desk where I read and worked, I could see feet passing on the pavement outside. I could stroll out during the day and visit the market on Tachbrook street, which had a book stall. I knew the names of local shopkeepers. It was, when I had money, all very comfortable. Westminster council was on its never-ending crusade to fuck up everything with vast shiny office buildings. Jacobs had an obvious appeal in this context. Since then, I've learned a lot more, but much of what she says about the folly of monolithic single-use zoning and the importance of mixed activity on the street, still seems to me to be self-evident.

She has remained on my mind since, popping up from time to time in both expected and unexpected places. I recently read Joe Flood's account of New York's 1970s organisational meltdown, The Fires (review scheduled in Icon 088). Flood has a criticism of some form for nearly everyone in 1970s New York - except Jacobs, who floats, omniscient and benign, above the crumbling city. This kind of veneration obviously grates with some people. In an essay in The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz complains that the writers Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin are hopelessly in thrall to Jacobs in their recent accounts of NYC, and that Jacobs' description of the city was a mirage - if it ever existed, it was only for a split-second in the city's life.

Jacobs, Schwarz complains, presented a "transitional and unsustainable, if golden, moment" in the life of a certain neighbourhood as an ideal, and in doing so distorted our whole idea of the urban good life. This critique was picked up by Kosmograd: ever since Death and Life, urbanists have been attempting to conjure a steady-state Jacobs Moment in neighbourhoods globally, and always end up with a runaway reaction on their hands: gentrification. Working-class communities and affordable housing are swept away, and the district ends up as a "bo-ho theme park". Jacobs' "sentimental ... matronising" opinions have precious little to offer a world that is throwing up such terrifying urban environments as the FoxConn complex in Shenzhen.

When I first read Schwarz and Kosmograd's essays, my first instinct was to spring to Jacobs' defence. She was a lone voice raised in defence of a certain kind of community. That community was worth defending - the contemporary notion of what constituted a slum was a nonsense, a nonsense that was being used as a tool for massive and wholly un-progressive urban clearance and social engineering. This clearance was not the comprehensive redevelopment and state planning that took place in the UK - Moses-manner planning was an unlikely and grotesque, wholly corrupt, public-private aberration, one that sadly proved repeatable within the USA; imagine PFI joint ventures crossed with the LDDC and given untrammelled power, and you get a rough idea. At the time Jacobs wrote, gentrification and yuppification were inconceivable: New York would continue to experience the flight of the middle classes for 20 years after the publication of Death and Life. Industrial New York might not have been pleasant, but its destruction was a man-made disaster: the city deliberately dismantled its blue-collar manufacturing base in pursuit of white-collar employers, and almost killed itself in the process. (Flood details this insane policy in The Fires.) So Jacobs has nothing to offer the inhabitants of FoxConnopolis - she didn't have much to say about the Gaza Strip or Dubai, either, because she was writing about local issues in the 1960s. Jacobs could not be held responsible for what has been committed in her name by the New Urbanists and their insipid watercolour view of the city. Also, wasn't a lot of the disdain for Jane a distaste for her (American, rather twee) literary style? And the book has this great Germano Facetti cover. Don't you see?

In other words, Leave Britney Alone.

That was my first instinct, but thought better of it. For a start, I didn't particularly want to write an ode to Jacobs and place myself in the company of the Nurbanists. Secondly, it wasn't long after the ArcelorMittal Space Tangle controversy, and I didn't want to get into an argument with Kosmograd again, given that he's one of the most interesting and perceptive architecture bloggers in the UK, and I'm generally behind him 100%.

Anyway, the cult of Saint Jane is developing into a menace. It's worth mentioning that Death and Life is not really (or not wholly) an attack on modernism. Besides the Moses approach to planning, Jacobs is primarily arguing against decentralisation, "decentrists" such as Mumford, suburbanisation, Howard's "Garden City", monolithic zoning, and residential monoculture. Although the organic, dense, city seemed chaotic, Jacobs argued, it could be understood; it had hugely complex systems, and the systems worked. In suggesting this, she was making the case that the technocratic city-as-diagram planners in the Moses mold were not replacing a chaotic lack of system with a working system - they were replacing a working system with a dysfunctional system. Many of Jacobs' ideas (particularly to do with mixed uses) can and should be safely integrated into modernist planning. Indeed, they have been - compare the mixed housing and culture of the Barbican with the Lincoln Center, a Moses project that Jacobs complains about.

However, in deposing the Moses planning priesthood, Jacobs cut the vestments for a new priesthood. "You have misunderstood the city," she says, "and I understand it" - as Kosmograd says, this equation meant that by bearing the relics of Saint Jane, the Nurbanists can set themselves up as the only people who understand the city, and swaddle their agenda in authenticity and legitimacy. They claim to be the people who understand the city, who tend the guttering pilot light of "vibrancy" that keeps it alive.

They are wrong. I am not going to presume to have a deeper understanding of Jane Jacobs than the Nurbanists, and attempt to snatch the relics back - they are, frankly, welcome to them. We are never going to move forward if we get bogged down into a recondite dispute about "what she really meant". But Jacobs appealed to me because it chimed with what I saw in cities and what I liked about them - and the Nurbanists have no idea what this quality is. Their agenda for "neighbourhoods", "contextuality", "walkability", is fundamentally anti-urban. These qualities aren't necessarily bad in themselves - but combined in pursuit of the singular Nurbanist vision, they mean the vivisection of the city into un-urban cells. Taken to its conclusion, "walk-to-work" ideology means cottages clustered around the mill. While a short commute is desirable, in a neoliberal world this would severely limit social mobility and the overall broadening of horizons that is the best the city has to offer. If people wish to live within walking distance of their workplace, they of course should be able to. But basing a housing system on proximity to workplace is not progressive - or at least it is not as progressive as cheap, plentiful public transport and cheap, plentiful rented accommodation. The FoxxConn workers live in and around their workplace.

The Nurbanist vision of carving up the city in this way is as diagrammatic and retrograde as Moses' planning - and, similarly, it's an assault on the complexity of the city, the city's ability to generate its own fabulously complicated internal patterns that defy cursory inspection. The emphasis on little neighbourhoods, the stoop, local shops and walking distances, the "human scale" only tells part of the story of the city - after all, these things can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole. Elevated highways, crowds, tall buildings, interconnection and confusion - these things can be to some people dismaying and unpleasant, but the awe they strike is the overture of accepting the condition of living in a city. The Tube roundel is vaguely holy to Londoners - intensely reassuring - because it is a sign of connection with a system of vast complexity and importance. (The religious meaning of the Tube is a subject I keep meaning to write about at some point.) Nurbanism stems from a fear and hatred of the modern city as it is - a hatred that is ideological, that cannot and will not be shown that there are reasons to like the neon snarl of the cities we have, and their inner flows and surges. This is a terrible frame of mind for a group concerned with urban planning. Jacobs, at least, liked the city, and liked it for factors that cannot be found in small towns.

Death and Life is parochial and highly idiosyncratic, a product of particular times and specific circumstances; as its critics say, a poor basis for general policy. Jacobs herself, though, can't really be blamed for making broad recommendations on the basis of her own experiences and beliefs. The trouble is that there are not more Jane Jacobs, more voices in the urban debate, giving different views of city planning from their own experience. It is mysterious to me that Jonathan Raban's Soft City - a book written out of love for and interest in the city, hugely perceptive about how cities work, without policy recommendations, simply a plea for what is valuable about the city as a huge civilising machine - is not venerated in this country. Anna Minton's Ground Control is the only really outstanding contribution to the urban genre in recent years, although of course I have high hopes for Owen Hatherley's New Ruins when it comes out. The mutations of cities around us, from Shenzhen to London, certainly do need new narratives.

The Ruins of Oxford Street

Old advert revealed by Crossrail works on Oxford Street. Image taken from the Flickr stream of John O'Shea and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Like space, London is curved. It sits in a bowl-shaped valley, curving it one way, and the river adds its own magnificent curves. This curvature throws up unexpected views - you find yourself in west London looking at the City with south London somehow in the way. These surprise alignments are probably the reason the city is such a super-locus for the psychogeographers. They are also an essential element of the city's guile. Even familiar places can suddenly look at you with a new face. Wait, you can see the Telecom Tower from here? But ...

On Saturday, I went for a long stroll, walking an indirect route from the Royal Academy (where I had been attending a symposium on JG Ballard and architecture) to Centre Point. Nearing Oxford Street, I remembered a DVD I wanted to buy, and decided to pop into HMV.

I was surprised to find that it no longer exists - it's among the shops being demolished to make way for Crossrail. I've been through the area on numerous occasions recently, but never really took in the extent of the works; so surprising was the removal of HMV that I took a walk around the nearby streets to see how the city had changed. The entrance to Tottenham Court Road Tube station on the south side of Oxford street is now a faintly absurd toy - I never before appreciated what a bad match the 1980s perspex-looking porte cochere was with the decorative stonework around it. Now the surrounding building has been removed, leaving just the stone arch and the porch, it's a outstanding architectural oddity. An old painted advert, for Veglio's restaurant, has been revealed (more on old adverts, "ghost signs") in a forthcoming post about Gavin Stamp's Lost Cities). Standing just off the Charing Cross Road, I saw a striking brutalist building that was completely new to me - except that it wasn't new to me, it was the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, seen for the first time from the south, and at an unaccustomed distance.

My grandmother was in London during the Blitz. She remember how strange it was to have the city transformed nightly, with new views opened up. I'm struck by how much of our image of the city is made up not of the buildings that we can see, but what they obscure - they city behind the city.

Updated 25 May to add:

The Festival of Britain opens new views of London. "This chaos made a vantage point for London to admire her finest profile; visible before to few, seen by fewer, the 'North bank from the South' is now a sightseer's dream." Image from www.fulltable.com, via Things.

The Exoderm of the Edifice

Image taken from the Flickr photostream of Simon & Vicki and used under a Creative Commons licence.

Graham Robb has written a fascinating article (subscribers only, sadly) in the new LRB on the subject of Michael Camille's new(ish) book The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity. Robb writes:

As Michael Camille points out, gargoyles bear the brunt of the weather: they are part of ‘the exoderm of the edifice’, eroded by the water they channel away from the building. They were never intended to last, which might account for their flippancy or irreverence: they were temporary, decorative items; like court jesters, they could express unpleasant truths. The other projecting sculptures, known as chimeras, have no such excuse, and no one knows for certain in what spirit those fish-lipped mutants, flesh-tearing ghouls and masturbating demons were produced. Camille supposes that the medieval artist, ‘in order not to be unnerved by the evil eyes of the devils he was called upon to carve, often ridiculed them’. If so, the devils had the last word: was it really a fearful, superstitious artist who carved the little imp in the central portal (one of Viollet-le-Duc’s favourites), whose tongue protrudes in concentration as he buggers a king with a stick?

"The exoderm of the edifice" is a great phrase, perfectly capturing Camille's meaning: the outer skin, which flakes away. It is fascinating to consider that medieval masons might have been farsighted enough to consider parts of their structures essentially disposable; that they considered the long-term decline and ruination and restoration of the buildings they worked on. One thinks of the (sadly apocryphal, as discussed in this Quiet Babylon post) tale of the New College trees. Entire lines of masons, passing on the same skills in an unbroken chain of apprenticeship to maintain the same buildings, which in a state of permanent renewal - looking at the ancient cathedrals as things that are continually restored rather than subject to periodic total restoration, one can see the masons' scaffolding as being part of the structure itself, like the window-cleaning cranes on top of modern office blocks.

My own theory about pre-modern architecture (which I've nursed privately for years safely away from malign influences such as evidence or research) is that its standards of craftsmanship were partly a response to the longevity of building projects against the short lifespans of their workers. Many of the workers would never live to see a great building finished; if they were going to spend all their life toiling over one particular flying buttress then, by golly, that buttress was going to be the finest thing you ever saw.

Returning to the Robb piece, it's a real shame it's behind the LRB subscriber wall because it really is a splendid read, covering Viollet-le-Duc's "restoration" of Notre Dame and the pathological relationship of that church's gargoyles with the city of Paris. Pick up a print copy while you still can, or order one. Robb ends with a sad look at a more recent restoration which eliminated much of the threat from Notre-Dame's stone animals, giving them playful expressions and smirks in line with the Disneyfication of the gargoyle.

The piece has some personal meaning to me. I grew up in Oxford, home to one of the finest collections of gothic architecture outside Germany. Gothic was my first architectural love - and I mean proper medieval perpendicular gothic, not the prettified gingerbread version beloved by the Victorians. (I'm not writing off all Victorian gothic, some of it is very fine, but much is frankly regrettable.) My childhood memories are populated by blackened walls, spiky skylines and gargoyles, which my parent delighted in pointing out. Oxford has its drawbacks as a place to live, but it was a magnificent laboratory for a child's imagination, and in retrospect its clear why I fell upon the work of Mervyn Peake, MR James, Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft when I did.

But something terrible happened to this crumbling, mysterious Oxford. It was cleaned. In the 1980s and early 1990s a tide of restoration swept the city and college after college disappeared under scaffolding only to re-emerge gleaming and transformed. University College and Magdalen were particular shocks. They no longer looked particularly old. Oxford today looks, bizarrely, a far younger place than it did in the middle of the 1980s.

Pocket Utopias

Kanakee Ward, Kanakee State Hospital, Illinois, from Christopher Payne's book Asylum. (Via)

Ruins are seemingly inescapable nowadays - here I am reviewing a beautiful book of photographs of America's decaying mental hospitals. Here, and here, are the details of the book itself.

I was given a pleasingly generous word limit for the piece, which of course I used to the full, and I'm not surprised that an unlucky sub has had to cut it quite a bit. That's all for the best, but here's a paragraph from the original with some interesting details:

These hospitals were built at an extraordinary pace from the middle of the 19th century until into the 20th century. At the time, alternative treatment for mental illness was non-existent – madness was a route to destitution, imprisonment and early death. Reformers campaigned for the construction of homes for the mentally ill, and American states – frothing with prosperity and neophyte civic pride – competed to build them bigger and better. The clamour, crowds, pollution and disorder of urban life were thought to contribute to insanity, so the new hospitals were built outside towns and cities on open land. The designs were utopian – they included gardens for rest and pleasure, and agricultural land so that the patients could work. Many hospitals were self-sufficient. The buildings were, for the time, high-tech, with central heating and gaslight – in period photographs, they could be mistaken for resort hotels. Hospitals were, after the 1850s, generally laid out according the “Kirkbride” plan, with a central block for administration and staff quarters, from which stretched two long wings, one for each sex. Self-sufficient, highly centralised and controlled, removed from the depredations of industrial civilisation and minutely organised according to sex, class and condition, the Kirkbride hospitals were 19th-century pocket utopias.

(Some very repetitive writing there, and the rhythm isn't great. Drat.)

There were two striking elements to this part of the story for me: first, that cities and urban life were thought to cause or exacerbate madness, and second the conscious utopianism of asylum design. The anti-urban taint to the philosphy behind the hospitals is interesting. And as the asylums are total environments – in contrast to other 19th-century institutional buildings, such as prisons, schools and workhouses, they provide for every aspect and stage of a person's life – there is unparalleled scope for turning them into little models of a perfect world, a “pocket utopia”. With that in mind, it's possible to see in greater detail their appeal to 19th-century social reformers.

A hospital on the Kirkbride plan.

Those two strands, then, connect in my mind these giant asylums with the Garden City Movement. There's that same hygienic concern with separating people from the malign influence of the big bad city and reconnecting them with the healing powers of the rural landscape. And there's also that stifling clerkish utopianism: the winged Kirkbride plans of mental hospitals have the same organisational impulse in them as Ebenezer Howard's compass-drawn plans for garden conurbations, orderly orbiting planets in a universe set right.

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept.

In between the suburb-planets of Howard's garden cosmos, what do we see? Insane asylums, homes for waifs, epileptic farms, homes for inebriates. The social debris of the 19th century, and the casualties of industrial society, being looked after – but also out of the way. It's a mistake to write off these reforming instincts as pure anti-urban prejudice, as the 19th-century city was undoubtedly an unhealthy place to live. But the 19th-century concern was social contagion as much as poor housing or air pollution. Mentally ill people were seen as a potentially destabilising force while in the cities – their removal was for the health of society as much as for their own good. The Garden City is the world run as a Victorian hospital.

Inevitably, Poundbury

Ye Budgennes.

Charles Holland says that Poundbury is irresistable to a certain breed of architecture-oriented writer - eventually the urge to snark at it becomes overwhelming and out pours a few hundred (or thousand) words of comfortable metropolitan bile. This is all very predictable and tedious, Charles wrote, continuing:

It is possible to write about Poundbury, even to write about it critically, and say something interesting, but the kind of literal, narrowly ideologial criticism of Bayley's article seems simply derivative and hopelessly myopic. And, apart from anything else, it's just too easy. Wouldn't it be more interesting to talk about Poundbury without this ideological baggage? To actually look at it and leave aside the hollow moralism? For a change. As a way of keeping things interesting.

These words are ringing in my ears as I type. Poundbury has of late flounced its way back into the press, thanks to a damning piece in the Guardian about its multiple flaws, and its connection to Prince Charles' recent conniptions about things modern. It has also loomed large in my personal life - my boss, Icon editor Justin McGuirk, visiting the place earlier this month to be cross-examined by Roger Scruton about the nature of beauty. I visited the place myself, earlier in the summer, as I was in the area and was curious to see it. The photos that accompany this blog post are mine, taken on 3 July. When the Guardian published its attack, I was minded to post, but Owen beat me to it with a thoughtful piece that shot my fox.

Poundbury, then. Inevitably. He are some related and unrelated thoughts from my visit and later ponderings.

In the Guardian's hatchet-job, it's the instances where aesthetics trump practicality that really capture the imagination - particularly the fake chimney causing a very real flood, and the absolutely baffling choice of gravel as a street surface. I noticed the gravel everywhere during my visit, and wondering how many tonnes of aggregate were swept into the district's drains every day. (Why? I suspect that it's purely an aesthetic status-signifier, with that high-class crunch. And why do gravel paths signify status? Because they are difficult and expensive to maintain.)


The gravel.

But the real meat of the Guardian piece, the truly damning bit, is that Poundbury suffers the same problems of antisocial behaviour as anywhere else. This is very important. The Prince's complaints about modern buildings have gained much traction from the way he associates modernist architecture with crime, fear, and social breakdown. Different architecture, he suggests, would have different outcomes. The Guardian piece tells us that Poundbury suffers from exactly the same problems as any housing estate, be it Wimpy vernacular or the sort of cheap quasi-modernism we get in this country. I value experiments like Poundbury because they are helping demonstrate that the social problems of the UK are not solely the result of the high-rise, modernist social housing built in the period 1950-1980. As an aside, I've been reading reports from Edlington, scene of a horrific recent case of youth violence that has prompted handwringing about "Broken Britain". It's as vernacular as you get, brick with pitched roofs and timber features - "some way from a stereotypical sink estate" wrote the Guardian, baffled. Maybe other factors are in play.

But I'm not just relying on the Guardian here. While I was in Poundbury I picked up a copy of the Poundbury Residents [sic] Association Newsletter. It's much like the newsletter of any residents' association:

Secret poo bag slinger!
From resident - name supplied
Someone in Poundbury puts dog poo in small plastic bag, ties them up and leaves it on the grass verges along the pathway bordering the new link road and on building sites. Can all dog owners please put their rubbish in the bins or take it home?

... Obsessed with dog poo, road safety and crime. It has the same problems of antisocial behaviour and petty vandalism as anywhere else, making it the #2 priority of the incoming RA chairman. His #1 priority is:

Engender a sense of belonging for ALL residents so they share a common value system about Poundbury which incorporates a feeling of pride for the area in which they live.

Unless I misunderstood the Prince's intention, I thought this sense of pride and community would kick in as soon as people were freed from their anonymous modernist deathmaze and placed under a proper pitched roof with proper dovecotes and a nice fake chimney. What Poundbury does instead, according to the Guardian, is create a sense of us-and-them between the new town and the rest of Dorchester. You can see why when you visit the place. The vernacular milieu has changed in the past 60 years. Rather than blend in with the rest of Dorchester, which is a largely intact English town not known for its brutalist megastructures, Poundbury sticks out. It's visibly out of place in a dozen different ways - for instance, you can tell where it ends because that's where satellite dishes appear on the side of houses.


You can hardly see the join.

Scrunching classily about in Poundbury, a number of things quickly become clear. Firstly, it's very windy. The place was built on top of a hill, and frankly it shows. So much for the gentle, organic interaction of Mr Leon Krier's town planning with the English landscape. Responding to landscape challenges is supposed to be one of the things that vernacular architecture is good at, and Poundbury is no good at it.

Secondly, parts of it kind of work. By work, I mean attractively approximate an English town that has been in place for centuries. Pummery Square (the placenames generally have a Hobbit-y feeling to them) is twee and pretty, much as it should be as it's epicentre of the place, a showpiece for a showpiece. The place it reminded me of most is Woodstock in Oxfordshire - a telling similarity as that's the home of Vanbrugh's Blenheim Palace, and the village was the plaything of the Duke of Marlborough for centuries.


Pummery Square. Behind me is Ye Budgennes.

It almost works, but not quite. What is the quality that makes the place subtly "off", not quite there? I've been chewing on that question for a while, and here are some suggestions.

Vernacular architecture, of course, isn't really a style at all - it just means local, traditional architecture. England has a vernacular that is completely different to Spain's vernacular. Greece has a vernacular. China and Mexico have vernaculars. They're all different, and the idea is that they evolved in response to local conditions, making them perfectly suited to their environment - more suited than universal modernism, which is "inappropriate". Poundbury is vernacular alright (and classical, which apparently is universal, without being inappropriate, but we won't get into all that) - but what vernacular? This is "The Brownsword" in Pummery Square, designed by John Simpson:


It's vernacular, but whose vernacular is it? Hobbiton, yes, but really it's curiously Germanic, with those high pitches and tubby columns. Or this building:


That's the distinctive Mitteleuropan elephant. And there's this:


Where are we? A new-build suburb in the Moselle valley? The only explanation for all this that I can think of is that Krier is originally German. I'm not a believer in some form of racial determinism in architecture, but it's baffling that this Germanic tendency couldn't be kept under control. It appears to be a kind of tic, like Dr Strangelove's spasmodic Hitler-salute. Speaking of which, Krier - an admirer of Albert Speer - has filled Poundbury with pairs of columns that are just crying out to be topped by lovely eagles.




Columns missing their eagles.

There's also plenty of English vernacular and mixed into it all are dollops of classical, often in surreal and unexpected places. Let's play "guess the building". What is this?


Temple? Cottage? Bus shelter? Folly? No, it's an electricity substation, obviously. Now, I have on my desk Leon Krier's oddly lovely Drawing for Architecture. He devotes most of a chapter - Forms and Uniforms - to building typologies and "nameable objects". His drawings tell us: A temple should look like a temple. A factory should look like a factory. A palace should look like a palace. A warehouse should look like a warehouse. His point is that modernism has driven these distinctions crazy. Either everything looks the same - a petrol station looks like a church looks like a house - or everything is a pastiche, so that chapels look like warehouses, parliaments look like factories, and pumping stations look like mosques.


And yet here we have an electricity substation that resembles a temple. Elsewhere there's a firestation that looks like a palace. It's pure pastiche. The argument that Charles and Sam at FAT might make at this point is: "Why shouldn't an electricity substation look like a temple?" And that's a very difficult point to answer. Taste aside, it's the lack of imagination that I hate. Why not try to develop a new classical typology for the electricity substations and the fire station, and all the other structures we've developed since Palladio? Why try to disguise them? Why not experiment?

But Poundbury really isn't interested in experimentation. Like the satellite dishes, its responses to most of the inconvenient truths of the 20th and 21st centuries is to ignore them, or to integrate them in a clunking, grudging fashion. The Poundbury Village Stores (actually a Budgens) has a perfectly normal, dreary suspended ceiling - the reason I looked is because suspended ceilings are another Krier bugbear, and I was interested to see if he had a different approach, or left the services exposed. It's the same deal with the main roads. The A35/36 - the main road into Dorchester from the west, which turns into the bypass - is hidden behind a huge berm. Other roads are shielded from houses by enormous green gulfs of public grass and car parking, such as the one that separates Poundbury "village" from Poundbury "town". In theory, I believe these are literal boundaries, carving up and separating Krier's "walkable neighbourhoods". The town avoids the problem of throughroutes by shunning them. And it's not really walkable - Pummery Square, rather than being central, is near the Dorchester edge, and to get from it to where most of the large places of employment are placed is a considerable hike. It's quicker to drive. These are suburban units separated by parkways - it's Robert Moses, or Levitt, with slightly higher densities.

I was very interested to see the larger places of employment. The houses and village squares are comparatively easy for the Charles/Krier school - that's where hundreds of years of experience have built up. I wanted to see the office blocks. There's that fire station, of course, and this:


Mey House.

This is what Albert Speer would have done if he had to design an office park on the M40. Krier might take that as a compliment - it really isn't. This is a hamfisted thrust in the direction of Giles Gilbert Scott that ends up looking exactly like most of the rubbish decreed by timid or philistine planners in the wake of the Prince's outbursts in the 1980s and 1990s - bland sheets of brick, overbearing scale, awkwardness and pomposity. If this is the best they can do, modernism has some hope yet.

Mey House is awful, but it might not be the worst building I saw. It's tied with the horror to the right in this photo:


In the middle of the roundabout is a display of traditional water-filled plastic barriers in seasonal colours.

I feel myself slipping into comfortable metropolitan bile. It's easy to do - it's really a horrible, creepy, place, made all the more surreal and unpleasant by the fact that it's apparently deserted (we saw very few people when we there). But I haven't really addressed the mysterious quality that makes the place so ... off. It's very tempting to use a word like "fake", but that's an empty criticism: the buildings are real enough, people live and work there, an although it's trying to look like it was all built 200 or more years ago, it doesn't claim to have been built 200 years ago.

Nevertheless, the reason "fake" is such a tempting word is because although it all "looks old", it does in fact "look new". Part of the appeal of pretty english villages is the mild decay that comes with age - the lichen on the roof slates, the softened brick, roofs that sag slightly. Some of this will come in time, perhaps, to Poundbury - but I'm not convinced. It has not completely been built according to traditional methods. A lot of it appears to be breeze blocks with decorative brick applied to the surface. The offices are steel frame, the bricks and tiles are of course modern. It won't age in the traditional, picturesque fashion. But it is aging - there's efflorescence, staining from masonry, failing mastic, flaking paint and dodgy woodwork. All the troubles of modern volume housebuilding.

Also militating against Poundbury's graceful aging is the fact that the place is so ruthlessly maintained. I get the strong impression - from things like the lack of satellite dishes - that the local building codes frown upon alterations to homes. These experiments in "new urbanism", like gated communities, are always covered by ruthless building codes, lest actual individuality disrupt the carefully choreographed individuality of the houses. It's as if the whole place was built as a conservation area, or a collection of listed buildings.

And that's the source of its weirdness. That's what makes it - dare I say - so fake. The "English genius for townscape", if such a thing exists or survives, has nothing to do with building entire places out of whole cloth - it is a genius for adaptation, evolution, improvisation and development over time. That is what makes buildings that coexist perfectly with their surroundings and their neighbours, and for the elusive charm of heritage villages. It's a change here, a change there, a few windows bricked up, a porch added. In its attempt to replicate this completed evolution from a blank slate, Poundbury misses the whole story of what it claims to try to preserve. The English vernacular - probably most vernaculars - are created by local people problem-solving and expanding over time, in an unplanned manner, using the materials at hand. That is not how Poundbury was created. Maybe I should give it 200 years, and see how Poundbury looks then - but we don't have 200 years, we have a housing crisis now, one that is worsening every day.

I'm very pleased that Poundbury exists, and is developing with little outside interference. It's good that the Prince Charles tendency is being allowed to experiment, so that we can see how the experiment is failing. Hopefully the Charlesistas will learn that modern architecture wasn't the cause of the social problem they claim it has been; but I doubt they will, and instead will fall back on draconian social legislation. Poundbury is a fabulous curiosity, a psychedelic urban experience, an area of exception that deserves to exist. What we can't afford is for its methods to apply to the whole country, because it offers the modern world nothing.

I'll say this for the place: as volume housebuilding goes, it's pretty good. If all the drab Wimpy-box estates were built with Poundbury levels of care and attention, the country would be a slightly better-looking place. But its advantages are mostly the result of care and patronage, supported by an indulgent council. If a similar-size area, owned by a benevolent and wealthy aristocrat or developer, were devotedly filled with a small town designed by MVRDV, or BIG, or FAT, or David Chipperfield, with the same level of attention to detail, it would succeed in the areas that Poundbury succeeds. (It might still be creepy, though, given the presence of that all-seeing, all-powerful patron.)

What we come down to is an entirely contrived "choice" between "modern" and "classical/vernacular/traditionalist" building styles. This is a false dichotomy, a red herring. Take a look at this story from BD, in which developer Barratt proposes both "modern" and "classical" building for the same site. They're both awful, it's no choice at all. It's really about good buildings versus bad, devoted planning and building against developer-led junk, unchecked development against urbanism. What I really wish is that Charles had been bolder and more willing to experiment - there's something bizarrely likeable about the Germano-Hobbit Brownsword, and whimsy has its place.

To close on a note of unalloyed praise for Charles' little urban laboratory, Poundbury makes use of combined service ducts in the middle of its streets, which make utility maintenance easy and minimise the need for disruptive roadworks. That's a functional, sane, elegant approach, one that has as much to do with vernacular architecture and traditional building techniques as suspended ceilings or ETFE pillows.