1 Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2010), p. xii.
2 Rory Olcayto, ‘The Mill, Ipswich, by John Lyall Architects’, in Architects’ Journal, 6/10/09.
3 See Adam Wilkinson, Pathfinder (London: Save Britain’s Heritage, 2009). This report, while excellent on the depressing details of Pathfinder, is somewhat marked by a misplaced sentimentalism about some nondescript housing—and it’s notable that the Pathfinder programme in Sheffield, which entailed demolition of less Heritage twentieth-century properties, is not considered worthy of comment.
4 Andrew Hosken’s Nothing Like a Dame—The Scandals of Shirley Porter (London: Granta, 2006) brilliantly profiles the use of housing as an instrument in class war, but it should be remembered that the policy worked—Westminster has been a safe Tory council for some time.
5 The analysis here is indebted to James Heartfield’s article ‘State Capitalism in Britain’, published in Mute, volume 2 #13, though this should not imply support for its neo-entrepreneurialist conclusions.
6 Alan Hess, Googie—Ultramodern Roadside Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004).
7 Chin Tao-Wu, Privatising Culture (London: Verso, 2002), p. 280.
8 Adrian Hornsby, ‘The Sheikhs Mean Business’, Architects’ Journal, 30/10/08.
9 J. B. Priestley, English Journey (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). Avoid at all costs the 2009 illustrated edition, which features a set of sentimental photographs of landscapes as different from Priestley’s pugnacious descriptions as could be imagined.
10 J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 121.
11 Clare Kennedy, ‘24 Floors—and the lift does not work’, Southern Daily Echo, 18/4/08.
12 Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Harvill, 1998), p. 22. Raban commented on an earlier version of my account here that ‘I didn’t “go looking for” dystopia, only to find it in Southampton: dystopia, in the form of the Millbrook estate, jumped up and mugged me from behind a bend in the road. I was teaching at the University of Wales when my father, a priest in the C of E, moved from a parish just outside Lymington to Millbrook in Soton, and acquired the title of “Rural Dean of Southampton”—a contradiction if ever there was one. I remember my first sight of Millbrook, as I turned off the main road: Kafka! Orwell! Christ! I’d lived for five years in Hull—a parallel bombed city, and hardly a byword for architectural elegance, but Millbrook took my breath away with its fresh-out-of-the-box style of brutalism. This was 1965 or ’66, and the estate must’ve been just post-natal.’
13 Jon Reeve, ‘City Is Third Most Dangerous Place to Live’, Southern Daily Echo, 25/8/2008.
14 Chris Huhne, ‘Say No To Urban Sprawl of Solent City’, 22/10/08, at eastleighlibdems.org.uk.
15 Peter Laws, ‘Southampton’s Vision of the Future Is Put on Hold’, Southern Daily Echo, 28/10/08.
16 BBC News, ‘Crane Topples Over at Southampton Docks’, at news.bbc.co.uk.
17 Bad British Architecture 10/3/09, at http://badbritisharchitecture.blogspot.com/2009/03/millennium-hotel-southampton-by-hkr.html.
18 Peter Walker, ‘Botched Council Renovations May Have Caused Camberwell Tower Block Fire’, Guardian, 6/8/2009.
19 See Elain Harwood’s essay on Lyons’s council schemes, in Barbara Simms’s Eric Lyons and Span (London: RIBA, 2006).
20 This wasteland was, incredibly, reserved for another Mall, Watermark WestQuay, a casualty of the recession. It was to be designed by the (now defunct) moderately outré practice Foreign Office Architects, in an unusual bit of daring.
21 See Clive Aslet, The English House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).
22 The latter of whom dismissed the place with a curt ‘back-of-an-envelope job’ to me in conversation, before going on to explain it as inspired by the welcoming, civic U-plans of 1930s town halls.
23 Lewis Smith, ‘Lord Rogers Redesigns the Rabbit Hutch for Wimpey’, The Times, 3/5/07.
24 Richard Vaughan, ‘Watch This Space’, Architects’ Journal, 29/11/07.
25 Ellis Woodman, ‘Caruso St John’s Nottingham Curtain Raiser’, Building Design, 13/11/09.
26 Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (London: Pan, 1960), p. 20.
27 ‘Trinity Square Developer Loathes His Own Scheme’, Evening Post, 29/12/09.
28 Royston Landau, New Directions in British Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 30.
29 J. L. Womersley et al., Ten Years of Housing in Sheffield (Sheffield: Corporation of Sheffield, 1962), p. 47.
30 Ian Nairn, Britain’s Changing Towns (London: BBC, 1967), p. 76.
31 Britain’s Changing Towns, p. 76.
32 Britain’s Changing Towns, p. 80.
33 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism—Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: Architectural Press, 1964), p. 132.
34 See Andrew Saint (ed.), Park Hill—What Next? (London: Architectural Association, 1996), pp. 37–8.
35 Kelvin was, even more inexplicably, restored shortly before it was demolished in 1995, and is interestingly described in Peter Jones’ Streets in the Sky—Life in Sheffield’s High-Rise (Sheffield: self-published, 2008). A former tenant of all three deck-access blocks in the eighties and nineties, Jones claims Kelvin, the least famous and least publicly lamented of the three, had the warmest sense of community, while the reclad, heavily surveilled Hyde Park was the least enjoyable place to live.
36 Ben Morris, Sheffield’s Housing Timebomb (Sheffield: Respect, 2007).
37 Crispin Dowler, ‘How the HCA Spent £2.8bn in Four Months’, Inside Housing, 22/05/2009.
38 David Rogers, ‘Budget Gives £600 Million Boost to Housing Sector’, Building Design, 22/4/2009.
39 Nick Johnson, Park Hill: Made in Sheffield, England (Manchester: Urban Splash, 2006), p. 75.
40 Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan (London: Indigo, 1997), p. 269.
41 Jon Savage, Time Travel (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 361.
42 Comment left on my blog: http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2008/11/so-much-to-answer-for.html.
43 Most recently reprinted in Tom McDonough (ed.), The Situationists and the City (London: Verso, 2009).
44 Kevin Cummins, ‘Closer to the Birth of a Music Legend’, Observer, 12/8/07.
45 Comment on my weblog: http://themeasurestaken.blogspot.com/2008/11/icon-fire.html.
46 E. Jane Dickson, ‘Making a Splash’, Independent, 19/9/98.
47 Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester, ‘Hazel Blears: “We Need Mother and Baby Homes for Teenagers—Not Council Flats”’, The Times, 13/12/08.
48 See Anna Minton’s excellent Ground Control (London: Penguin, 2009), which among other things reveals that Salford spends more on the issuing of ASBOs than it does on youth services. QED.
49 Pevsner et al., The Buildings of England—Northumbria (London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 361–2.
50 T. Dan Smith quoted in Grace McCombie, Newcastle and Gateshead (London: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 79.
51 The film can be viewed online at sidetv.net/channel6/.
52 Fittingly enough, the earliest office blocks in London that ‘expressed’ their steel frames were a direct importation from Glasgow, in the form of Burnet & Tait’s Kodak House and Adelaide House, both incongruously futuristic for their place and context.
53 See Nairn’s Britain’s Changing Towns, p. 51.
54 For more on this, see ‘Constructing Neo-Liberal Glasgow’, by ‘Friend of Zanetti’ at the Glasgow Residents Network website: http://glasgowresidents.wordpress.com/tag/media/page/5/.
55 Graeme Murray, ‘Anger over Gorbals Designer Flats Plan’, Evening Times, 31/1/08.
56 Outram’s essays on the building are at http://www.johnoutram.com/judge.html and are highly recommended.
57 See Will Alsop, Supercity (Manchester: Urbis, 2004).
58 Simon Jenkins, ‘Adapt, Don’t Destroy—Leeds Is the Template to Revive Our Scarred Cities’, Guardian, 5/5/08.
59 1949 obituary, quoted in Edward Wadsworth: Genius of Industrial England (Arkwright Art Trust, 1990), p. 16.
60 We did not photograph the Titus Salt School. After Joel’s Mum said, ‘So, you and another bloke, probably also wearing a long coat, are going to stand outside a school taking photographs?’ we thought better of it—the suspicion directed at those taking photographs of buildings in the UK takes many forms. For more information on the chaotic design flaws of the PFI schools in Bradford, see Kaye Alexander’s otherwise sympathetic ‘Titus Salt School, Bradford, by Anshen + Allen’, Architects’ Journal, 28/7/09.
61 ‘Common Sense’ Regeneration—A Plan to Revive the Fortunes of Bradford and Its People (Bradford: Bradford Civic Society, 2009). See also Christopher Hammond’s useful, droll The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Bradford: Bradford Building Preservation Trust, 2006).
62 Sian Best, ‘The Cost of the Cardiff Bay Barrage’, Guardian 5/1/05.
63 Ruth Bloomfield, ‘Millennium Housing Falls Drastically Short of Target’, Building Design, 29/5/09. The fact that this article, listing the practical abandonment of the failed or never-started seven ‘Millennium Communities’ of ‘high-specification homes built to stringent environmental standards’ planned in 1999, claims New Islington as one of its ‘successes’ is telling regarding just how low expectations have become. It was planned to have created an already fairly minimal 6,000 of these high-spec homes by 2010. Only 1,626 were built.
64 James Gregory, In The Mix (London: Fabian Society, 2009).
65 Stephen Bayley, ‘There’s a Lesson in all this’, Observer, 13/7/08.
66 Quoted in Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 314.