What might have been

For every grand, beautiful or barkingly arrogant/insane/phallic building that gets built (yes, The Shard, I'm looking at you - hopefully you'll be the setting for countless The Towering Inferno or Mad Max rip-offs), there are countless alternative proposals.

I've just bought a fascinating old book, London As It Might Have Been, which collects rejected proposals for urban renewal. Some are beautiful. Some are unhinged. All reflect the socio-cultural context beautifully. For instance, the pyramids featured below all echo the Egypt-mania which gripped British society firstly after their involvement in Napoleon's Egyptian defeat, a deal which included lots of Egyptian antiquities finding their way to London (ahem) and the later British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

I don't necessarily think that any of these schemes would have been better or worse than what we have now - but they're certainly fascinating culturally and architecturally. First up: two proposals for Tower Bridge, and the final choice:

This is the proposal made in 1943. It's very Art Nouveau + Modernist, but it's also hugely optimistic: Holden drew this during the bombing campaign against London, so proposing a crystal glass tower suggests that he sees a peaceful future in the midst of the war.

Tower Bridge - a a beautiful but weird mix of Victorian mechanical engineering and medievalism, which is pretty typical of the period. Very British: hiding the modern under a 'heritage' skin. 

Here are the Pyramids: the first celebrates defeating the perfidious French and would have rivalled St. Paul's Cathedral for size at a cost of £1m in 1815. It would have been built at Trafalgar Square. The second is simply an ingenious way of storing London's dead. 

Once the Great Exhibition closed, people wondered what to do with the vast Crystal Palace, built entirely in sections in Smethwick and Birmingham.  

Here's one wonderful, ridiculous, steampunk suggestion:

Sadly, the building was simply moved to a part of Sydenham and the area renamed Crystal Palace. It burned down in 1936.

What of other public venues? As we all know, Wembley is a seedy area dominated by a bland Global-PoMo stadium monstrosity. But in the late 19th century, plans were afoot to beat the French (again) after their Eiffel Tower grabbed the limelight. All sorts of plans were put forward, but the winner was, well, a slightly taller copy of the Eiffel Tower set amongst an ornamental garden. 

The first 150ft or so got built, then the money ran out and that was it for North London's beautification. The stump was dynamited in 1907 and where it stood is now the pitch of the national football stadium. Not that the British are alone in not quite getting round to things: when the French gave the USA the Statue of Liberty, the bits and piece lay around in various exhibitions and parks in France and the US for years until the ungrateful Yankees donated enough dollar pieces to finally put the damn thing together. 

Finally, what of transport? Well, the trend was techno-determinist: the machines would shape the city. So this 1960s proposal envisaged monorails above Regent Street (cool, say I), while in the early days of flight, sticking airports on top of city centre railway stations seemed very efficient. 

Liverpool Street rail and air station

The combined Liverpool Street railway station and heli-pad

The Greater London Council's vision of Regent Street

It's easy to laugh at some of the more outlandish proposals, but some are genuinely visionary and quite a lot of them - especially the Haussmann-esque plans to demolish most of central London to accommodate government offices and royal palaces remind us that architects should never be left unsupervised. The airport/rail stations look to me like Albert Speer's plans to replace Berlin with the Nazi planned city of Germania, in which colossal scale replaces all humanist values. What's missing in many of the visions presented in London As It Might Have Been is any social vision. Where are Londoners - rich and poor - meant to live and work? Human interaction is forgotten. 

This isn't a feature simply of rejected plans. Look at the Shard: it radiates contempt for the little people toiling below. It's a mix of a massive penis and Bentham's Panopticon. Likewise the isolated, gated communities of Docklands and the Olympic Park: they shut out the poor and privilege fear and paranoia (as Ballard's Kingdom Come and Millennium People explore). We're living in an era in which architecture follows the whims of bg money: defensiveness, arrogance, disconnection and sterility are the key signifieds of all those plate glass palaces set beyond high gates and guards. Architecture is the expression of our fantasies and fears - but it's also the creator of the same emotions. 

Monumental

I've just received a massive book: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed: basically an architecture-porn tome of the most bonkers and brilliant modernist buildings you'll ever see.

The USSR wasn't all purges, executions and bread queues: there was an optimistic side to the People's Revolution (see also Spufford's novel Red Plenty, though admittedly it was submerged in grey concrete and misery for long periods (thanks to Stalin's perversion of Communism, but that's a rant for another day). Modernism and progressive politics once went hand-in-hand, until lack of money and imagination, coupled with poor-quality materials, produced the horrid hutches beloved both of East German commissars and British municipal housing officers. But there was a window in which People's Palaces and amenities were made with the very latest materials (to show how modern the USSR was), which meant concrete, allowing buildings to branch out, swoop and swerve. What a shame that concrete ages so badly and the building standards weren't great. But the architecture was often magnificent.

Here's the Druzhba Sanatorium in Ukraine - once mistaken by the Pentagon for a launch-pad: rooms now available.

If you've acquired a taste for architecture-as-politics and vice versa, you really need to read Owen Hatherley's books and blog. He hates what property developers and Blairite bullshitters have done to our notions of architecture and public space. 

Dream homes?

Any Bond villain would be proud to live here:

Or here:

Where are they? The first is the Georgian Ministry of Highways, and the second is the Armenian President's official summer residence. From this wonderful book, CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed.

Manchester, so much to answer for…

(Sorry, I can never resist quoting the Smiths). Very unoriginal, I know.

Anyway, it isn't completely gratuitous. I went to Manchester today, for a Map Twats reunion: Jo, Cynical Ben, Neal and Dan. I went an hour early so that I could roam the back streets of that city looking for crack architecture. One of the advantages of being a proud Victorian industrial centre in which nobody's had a job since Charles Dickens asked an urchin to hold his horse is that the place is full of beautiful, abandoned industrial architecture: warehouses, factories, pubs and dosshouses. Many of the streets I wandered around were - two months ago - standing in for 1940s New York for the upcoming release of Captain America. You can see some excellent photos of the filming here, courtesy of fly-sycamore, many of them exactly the same shots I took.

Here are a few pictures - the rest are here, along with some of the Map Twats and a few shots from the Manchester Art Gallery, where we saw the Recorders special exhibition: cameras, heart monitors, microphones etc all responding to your touch. I rather childishly made a bank of pager screens say rude things about Clegg and Cameron.

For the rest of the day, we ate huge amounts of top quality cheese and meats, washed down with fine beers, while Ben regaled us with his Top Ten opinions.

No more dreaming spires

There's an interesting piece on university architecture here, which certainly speaks to me: my building could be Wernham Hogg's HQ, a council office or any other building.

It certainly wasn't designed by architects, but by a computer with no regard for education or art, which definitely impacts on the way we conceptualise the educational experience. For example, square rooms with the desks set out facing a notional teacher's place enforces a model of education which implies the one-way transmission of fact and of power, but students and some staff like it because it's familiar and reduces education from a complex and unsettling transaction to a simple and neat affair.

What are the inspiring buildings you'd like to model a university on? Interestingly, The Hegemon's New Technology Centre was a case study in the report: it's a fairly successful building, with some flaws, but the assessment is, well, rather dependent on what the university claims for itself. To put it very, very mildly.

The research project on university design is here.

Newcastle and Gateshead: architecture special

I'm at the Hilton in Newcastle-Gateshead (twin cities divided by the Tyne). The place is full of iconic buildings.

From my hotel room, I have a fantastic view of the Trinity Square multistorey car-park. So what, you may ask?

Firstly, it's a stunning piece of sixties sci-fi futurism (or would be if it weren't built with concrete). It's now abandoned - the lower storeys have been removed, so there's only a skeleton left to dominate the skyline, though demolition is promised by Tesco.

Secondly - it's a key setting in that bleak, gritty classic, Get Carter.

A corrupt property developer (unfortunately not the architect, also responsible for the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth) is thrown from the roof in the film. Actually, I rather like it as an abstract design, but the materials and setting are key, and I think they're both wrong in this case. I'd rather have this than another bloody plastic Tesco though. Can I be first to call them the BP of supermarkets?

These buildings need maintenance, which many of them never got, and they need to be flexible, which many weren't - built in an era in which planners thought they could shape the future themselves, the building failed when the proles failed to do what they were told - see also Sheffield's Park Hill estate (that's a video) - the largest listed building in Europe, now being refurbished by trendy designers Urban Splash.

Here's the Tyne Bridge. There are several bridges of varying ages across the Tyne. Uniquely, every single one is beautiful. 

My hotel's just to the right, overlooking the bridges.

Daytrippers

After court, I took the opportunity to wander over to the Cathedral. Coventry, thanks to the sterling work of the Luftwaffe, hosts the ghostly shell of a fine medieval cathedral, linked to a fantastic 1950s modernist replacement (by Basil Spence), dedicated to peace and reconciliation. The rest of medieval Coventry was also destroyed, replaced by a seemingly endless concrete shopping centre, some of which sells tertiary education.

In the Cathedral, all the big names of mid-century art are represented by statues, stained glass, crosses and murals, notably Jacob Epstein, Sutherland and Piper. The pillars are slim, the organ is an absolute masterpiece, the architecture daring, beautiful… and yet. The art is stunning, but the building didn't quite work for me. I admired everything about it, but thought it fell short theologically (even though I'm an atheist, I do know a bit about this stuff - from my years as an altar boy). The problem is this. Here's the view down the nave towards the altar.

Stunning, I hope you agree. Modern and yet referring back to the vanished building. However, you wouldn't know from this direction that there are a set of beautiful stained glass windows along each side. You have to be standing where the ministers are to see them: i.e. transcendental beauty is denied to the congregation, which gets unrelieved concrete (just like living in Coventry) but available to the clergy. This is part of the the view they get:

This, to me, refers back to the days of the old Catholic Church, in which access to God was only through the clergy. The congregation at Coventry see concrete slabs - there's no hint of joy as they gaze directly ahead, other than in the tapestry at the end. Stained glass windows were previously used to tell stories to an illiterate crowd - now they just have to listen.

All Basil Spence had to do was reverse the direction of the folds in the structure which conceal the windows.

Fidler on the roof

Clever Mr. Fidler.

If you called in at Honeycrock Farm, you'd probably ignore this haystack.

You'd be wrong to do so. What was inside?

They were living inside the secret castle, hoping that once the period for objections to illegal buildings had expired: four whole years. They even kept their child away from school on the day the kids were asked to bring in a drawing of their homes… but the nasty judge has pointed out that people couldn't object to a building they didn't know was there, so the selfish farmer has to knock it down!

Still, it must have been beautifully insulated with all that hay.

To the point

The Welsh Assembly building - astonishing.

A Welsh epeeist prepares for a fight:

Ben Hughes can't believe what's just happened.

Nor can Steve Cowen (England manager) and Matt Haynes (England coach)

Darren Campbell, Olympic medallist, pays his respects to James Davis!

''…incubators of apathy or delirium"

I went down South this weekend, to see my friend Felix, who is exiled in Suburbia. The sun shone, I only bought two books (biographies of Melita Norwood and of Unity Mitford), ate and drank too much, and generally had a good time. I didn't get to the football because the tickets were lost, though I did notice on Sunday that Manchester United supporters were more common at railway stations the closer I got to London. Stoke City beat Blackburn Rovers, so ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to Laura, in particular.

However. Felix is living temporarily in Chalfont St. Peter, part of the very rich suburban belt around London. I find it hard to express how creepy, how strange it is. The closest I can get is to say that it's exactly as J. G. Ballard feels. I thought this yesterday, and then heard on Radio 4 that he'd died. His work had tailed off in recent years, but if you absolutely must read about the dysfunctional, savage, irrationality lying close to the surface of the most ordinary communities, he's your man.

Chalfont, Gerrard's Cross and all the areas like them are prime Ballard territory. They genuinely are different to our communities. Most striking of all is a mixed register or individualism and conformity which made me assume that they're all terrified - of each other but also of being different. Every single house had electronically-operated cast-iron gates. Virtually every house had a massive SUV - usually BMW, Mercedes, Audi or Range-Rover, despite the absence of anywhere to go off-road. Every house was a 1930s or fake-tudor modern house (with added Palladian pillars of the wrong size). Each house has a name to distinguish it, yet no name does: Hillcrest, Meadow House, Journey's End - nothing related to the specific place on which the settlement is built. The effect is so disconcerting that it would make John Betjeman, poet of the suburbs, itch.

I guess the point of the architecture, the gates and the SUVs is to show off affluence. The vehicles and the gates also announce separation. Your children aren't important - mine are. The air you breathe isn't important, mine is. My effect on you is irrelevant, your impact on my life must be eradicated. What's important is that I sit 2 feet above you, that I am invincible. It's power but it's also fear. Fear of you, fear of mixing with you, but also fear of being left behind. If the neighbours have an X5, you have to have one - or an Audi, a Porsche Cayenne, anything except a small car. There's no collective responsibility, to each other or to the environment. They're driven by the need to be the same as, yet separate from, their neighbours, whom they don't know other than as figures glimpsed through several layers of laminated windscreen or iron bars.

The gates are part of this system. I walked (subversively) past gate after gate after gate, wondering what they're for. Crime is low. Gates won't help much. Do they keep people out or in? Are these things signifiers of a desire to one day move out to a proper country estate, complete with a mile-long drive? Then I realised: they keep ME out and THEM in. The existence of the gates draws a physical line between them and us. Simply by being there, I was cast as the barbarian at the gates, and began to feel like one - excluded, demeaned, reduced and resentful. There are no barbarians until the gates create them.

Yet, the effect on 'them' is equally profound. Erecting gates separates them from an imaginary horde. It makes the inhabitants an embattled redoubt of civilisation, rather than as part of a community or society. However - what is their civilisation? It's little more than a fascism of conformist acquisition, genteel but competitive consumerism lacking values, morals, beliefs other than the vaguest of sentiments. The gates mark their failure to join a society, not their superiority. Consider this: at the height of the Roman Republic, at the Victorian moral high-water mark of the British Empire, the aristocracy built public baths and libraries, founded charitable institutions and schools, donated land for parks and joined Improvement societies. Many of them were tedious meddlers, or arrogant, or frankly scared of 'the mob', but they all realised that with power comes responsibility. In decadent phases - the Roman Empire, pre-revolutionary France, Enclosure Britain, this social compact broke down. Rich men built estates with high walls, swimming pools for themselves, home cinemas for footballers: private luxuries and a life separated from common humanity. This is the stage we're in. These middle-class gates signify insecurity, hatred and fear without responsibility. They don't want to share their country with us. They resent paying taxes, sharing schools, hospitals and open spaces - and our rotten political system has rewarded them. We make it easy for them to withdraw into private estates, expensive holidays, fee-paying schools and hospitals, then wonder why they hate us so much, why the Daily Mail has so many readers. They take the rewards of our society: cheap goods because we (and our foreign comrades) are paid badly and enjoy few employment rights, a well-educated workforce and a stable government while doing their selfish best to undermine the system which provides these pleasures.

Even worse, all the houses with gates are separated from each other. Despite living in identical houses and driving identical cars, they don't have the benefit of being a community of like-minded people because they lock themselves away from each other. Once the button is pressed, the gates swing shut and they're alone, anxiously gazing through the bars like institutionalised chimpanzees, developing paranoid fantasies and planning the next purchase of a shiny Germany SUV like the family across the lane whose names they don't know.

We should pity them. They fear us, though they don't know us. They'll never meet us. They ferry their children from gated houses in SUVs to private schools, never hearing an accent or opinion they don't like or already know. Strange voices, unfamiliar cooking smells, different skin tones, unpleasant sights never greet them because little of the world can be glimpsed through the bars they've erected for themselves. They're lonely, but they don't know it. They're scared, and they do know it - yet there's nothing of which to be scared.

Ironically, however, these gates, those metal behemoths won't keep them safe from what they're really frightened of: poverty. Each gate demarcates a patch of land, a big car, three holidays a year, a plasma screen and a clutch of school fees which now can't be paid - a parcel of debt which is a direct consequence of their fear. All these things are acquired on credit, on the assumption that moderately sized houses near London will always increase in value, because other people have them. Not having them is a source of the deepest kind of shame, driving this odd class to take on larger and larger mortgages, to put it on the credit card, then acquire another mortgage, another credit card ad infinitum. Now the party's stopped. Cars and houses are repossessed, the holidays stop, the school fees go unpaid, they move to unfashionable areas of London, swap Waitrose for Tesco or even Asda, and they get resentful and angry, as though it's not their fault. Perhaps, who knows, they revolt as Ballard detailed in Kingdom Come and Millennium People.

Should we fear these people? Pity them? Hate them? Perhaps all three? They're lost and lonely, the victims of Thatcherism, yet they hate and fear us. They despise our values, whether these are socialism, environmentalism, Old Toryism, class solidarity or a working-class version of their own ideological position. To them, we are simply a horde outside the gates. Yet if they could only overcome their fear, they'd learn that it's the gates which make us enemies, not enemies requiring gates. Only separation makes divisions between us, and only fear makes them separate. Is it their fault? Partly. They're victims of hegemonic forces (capitalism, largely, with a toxic brew of class- and race-related ideologies), yet they're intelligent enough to know that they're wrong. These SUV drivers use hemp bags instead of plastic, perhaps even offset their flights - they know that they're wrong, but they're too scared and selfish to embrace the collective future, to admit their weaknesses, their faults.

Gates and heavy cars and private schools are ways to avoid the difficult realities of life. Underneath the bluster, the snobbishness, lies terror - of us, of a life which requires responsible behaviour, responsible choices. If you know any of these people, help them out. Smash down their gates, torch their cars, burn their mortgage agreements. (Only joking. Invite them to diverse parties in poor areas. Take them to the pub. Plant a tree).

This house is available now, for £1,795,000.