In 2009, the dying Labour government came up with one of the more amusing of its political gambits. As urban regeneration and the new public buildings of the Private Finance Initiative were so prominent and so popular, how about a campaign focusing on them, presenting the buildings that resulted as proof positive that New Labour hadn’t broken its promises, that it was the party of change, that it was rebuilding Britain, and that social programmes were at its heart? The campaign was christened ‘The Change We See’. Go to the website and you find the explanation. ‘Since 1997, we’ve changed this country—rebuilding the lives of children, older people and families. Make no mistake, this could not have happened without supporters like you. Now we face an opposition who wants to deny our successes and cut the public services we rescued. We must stand together and show how proud we are of these historic achievements.’ So, it asks the public to submit photographs of PFI Hospitals, City Academies, Sure Start centres and the like to a Flickr group.
Sadly, it met with an immediate torrent of ridicule and subversion on a wide spectrum from political opponents to the editor of the Architects’ Journal. The Change We See entailed barn-like buildings resembling those built in the eighties and nineties for the supermarket Asda, housing Sure Start children’s centres; a surgery that resembled the cheap woolly designs used by the developer Barratt Homes; a Law Courts (sorry, ‘Justice Centre’) constructed in lumpily jolly 1986 postmodernist style that was, astonishingly, completed in 2005; a primary school that resembles ‘Britain’s Guantanamo’, Belmarsh Prison; and much that is less immediately appalling, but all produced in the chillingly blank Private Finance Initiative (PFI) idiom of clean lines, bright colours, red bricks and wipe-clean surfaces, as if furnishing a children’s ward. Soon, the Flickr group was being subverted by new ‘luxury’ tower blocks that looked like Soviet barracks; CCTV cameras; lampposts capped with spikes to deter vandals; stop and search cards; and images of poisoned brownfield land soon to be developed into housing … all contributed by mischievous Flickr users with the tag ‘Vote Labour’. This wasn’t simply some architectural criticism of a real political advance that aesthetes and snobs just didn’t appreciate. The functions are as awful as the forms: the omnipresent PFI schemes, or the bizarre notion that gentrification, as represented by the penthouses of Manchester’s Beetham Tower, ‘rebuilt the lives of children, older people and families’, other than the children, elderly and families of the decidedly affluent, of course.
My own little contribution to The Change We See—which the administrators cheerfully added to the group when I put it forward—was Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford, on the edges of London, where I have had the privilege of being treated for a long-term condition over several years. It was the first major NHS hospital built as part of the Private Finance Initiative, with the entire complex built and owned by the construction company Carillion, who claim to offer ‘end-to-end solutions’ for public–private partnerships. Like all PFI hospitals it is very far from the town centre. For reasons probably connected to land values, PFI hospitals are always on the outer reaches, in the ‘no there, there’ places, quarantined away.
Darent Valley, Dartford, the first PFI hospital
A landmark in the strange new landscape created by the loosening of planning controls in the ‘Thames Gateway’, Darent Valley Hospital is just adjacent to Bluewater, the ultimate out-of-town, out-of-this-world mall, which is bunkered down inside a chalk pit and impossible to reach on foot. So the bus takes you past the M25, through what is probably legally the green belt—that is, a landscape of 1930s speculative housing and minuscule farms where forlorn horses look upon power stations and business parks—before eventually dropping you off at the top of a hill, from which you can survey an extraordinary non-place. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, its ungainly, steep curve reaching to the hangars and containers of Thurrock, and an endless strip of sheds and cranes stretching out as far as the North Sea.
The hospital itself, designed by Paulley Architects in 1999, is done in the public–private style which is by now familiar from a thousand New Labour non-projects. No doubt constructed with a concrete or steel frame, it attempts to avoid looking ‘institutional’ via a series of plasticky wavy roofs (which, as a bonus, have also become the hospital’s logo), tiny windows, some green glass, and a lot of yellow London stock brick. Inside the series of corridors and wards, into which natural light never seems to penetrate, there are dashes of jolly colour in the carpets and a peculiarly abstract colour-coding system. But the real design feature is the central atrium at the main Outpatients entrance, where a giant Carillion logo looks over a big branch of Upper Crust, a WH Smith, and a shop which sells a huge range of cuddly toys, amongst other concessions. The first time I went here I was quite alarmed by the rather early twentieth-century equipment in this ‘twenty-first-century hospital’, but one can purchase a wide variety of pastries here. In the Outpatients waiting room, large screens show—always grainy—footage of local appeals and health recommendations.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually well treated here, bearing in mind the hours of waiting around, and I do what I’m told, placing all reasonable and unreasonable trust in the physicians, but sometimes the new landscape and the vagaries of hospital treatment can intersect in undignified ways. Behind the site is a new residential development, most likely built as part of the same property deals that created the hospital; the NHS is nowadays encouraged to maximize profit from its land. An estate of little spec-builder cottages spans out around a patch of wasteland, and their back windows look out into the strip windows of the wards. Some of the homeowners may have caught more than a glimpse of me undergoing a brief but rather invasive procedure, as the blinds wouldn’t go all the way along the window. This was not, I presume, in the property brochure.
In the main Outpatients waiting room is a wall display on ‘Heritage’. Everything in Britain, especially in the Home Counties, must involve Heritage somewhere. Obviously there isn’t much to be found in a hospital which has only existed for ten years, but conveniently, it turns out that there was an Asylum for Imbeciles on the site in the nineteenth century. Sepia-toned pictures of this take up the space on the heritage wall. This is England, I always think when I’m here. I don’t mean in the sense that Iain Sinclair did when he visited Darent Valley in his 2002 travelogue London Orbital and imagined it an apocalyptic bedlam of lumpen proletarian troglodytes wielding bull terriers. I know it well, and it isn’t. It’s more because it represents a horrible, unplanned new landscape, the embodiment of New Labour’s attempt to transform the Welfare State into a giant business. It won’t admit to its newness, instead remaining petty and provincial, simulating a nebulous heritage. With its sober stock brick and metallic surfaces (by now blackened by the hospital incinerator) it doesn’t even have the pleasures of kitsch. Yet this dispiriting exurbia was not the whole story of Blairite Britain. The last fifteen years have also seen the attempted fulfilment—sometimes sincere, mostly cynical—of policies that purported to put urbanity and design at the centre of new building. In so doing, New Labour has fulfilled the wishes of some left-wing urbanists in a most unexpected fashion.
Perry Anderson recently wrote that Britain’s history since Thatcher has been ‘of little moment’.1 Admirable as this statement is in pricking local pomposities and arguable though it may be in political terms, in architecture, as in art and music, the UK has retained a prominence that is out of all proportion to its geopolitical weight. British architectural schools (both in the stylistic sense and as educational institutions like the Architectural Association) have retained a massive importance. The High-Tech school of mechanistic style founded by former partners Norman Foster and Richard Rogers was successful in Paris and Hong Kong before London and Manchester, bringing prestige that was appropriately rewarded in the less than futuristic, if geographically indeterminate titles the two men now carry, Baron Foster of Thames Bank and Baron Rogers of Riverside. The immediately succeeding generation of Will Alsop or David Chipperfield would have a similar fate, with successes in Berlin or Marseilles before the UK rewarded their firms with commissions; after them, students—seldom British—of the Architectural Association in London like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl would achieve international prominence and domestic obscurity for their Deconstructivist warping of architecture into something barely functional but instantly ‘iconic’; most recently, new ornamental-ists like Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) or Foreign Office Architects found employment in the Netherlands or Japan first and foremost.
London’s Financial District, as remade by Foster and Rogers
This pattern isn’t just at the level of architects-qua-architects, the famous Ayn Randian form-givers. The faceless megafirms for which British culture’s unambiguous corporate fealty seems particularly rich soil, such as RMJM (who recently hired disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin as an ‘adviser’), Building Design Partnership, Archial or Aedas, are especially prominent in the hyperactive building booms of China or the United Arab Emirates, producing watered-down versions of High-Tech and/or Deconstructivism for foreign export. Meanwhile, the brief televisual popularity of the Stirling Prize, the architectural Booker or BAFTA, showed both that there was an untapped public interest in architecture, and that British architects were as often to be found working abroad as in the UK, with the prize-winning entries in Germany or Spain more often than Wales or Northern Ireland. Why is it, then, that actual British architecture, The Change We Can See, is so very bad?
The answers to this question are usually tied up with New Labour’s particularly baroque procurement methods and an ingrained preference for the cheap and unpretentious, causing a whole accidental school of PFI architecture to emerge—often constructed via ‘design and build’ contracts which removed any control over the result from the architects, with niceties like detailing and fidelity to any original idea usually abandoned. The forms this took were partly dictated by cost, but also by amateurish parodies of exactly the kinds of high-art architecture mentioned above, creating something which Rory Olcayto of the Architects’ Journal suggests calling ‘CABEism’,2 after the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the design quango whose desperate attempts to salvage some possibility of aesthetic pleasure from PFI architects and their developers led to a set of stock recommendations. Their results can be seen everywhere—the aforementioned wavy roofs give variety, mixed materials help avoid drabness, the windswept ‘public realm’ is a concession to civic valour—but here I will call it Pseudo-modernism, a style I regard as being every bit as appropriate to Blairism as Postmodernism was to Thatcherism and well-meaning technocratic Modernism to the postwar compromise.
‘New Home, New Life, New You’—CABEism in Holloway Road, London
The most impressive neoliberal sleight of hand, one pioneered in Britain before being eagerly picked up everywhere else, has been the creation of what Jonathan Meades neatly calls ‘social Thatcherism’. It has existed ever since the mid 1990s, and was not begun by the Labour Party. From John Major’s avowed intent to create a ‘classless society’ to New Labour’s dedication to fighting ‘social exclusion’, the dominant rhetoric has been neoliberalism with a human face. The liberal misinterpretation of this has long been that it proves the existence of some kind of ‘progressive consensus’, a continuation of social democracy, albeit in a more realistic, less ‘utopian’ manner. In the built environment, the thesis of a social democratic continuum that connects, say, the Labour of Clement Attlee to New Labour has appeared to be supported by the resurgence of Modernist architecture after an eclectic postmodernist interregnum, and an apparent focus on the city rather than the suburbs. Lord Richard Rogers has proclaimed this to be the ‘Urban Renaissance’ in a series of books and white papers with titles that now sound deeply melancholic, not only because of the dyslexic architect’s verbal infelicities: A New London; Architecture—A Modern View; Cities for a Small Planet; Cities for a Small Country; Towards an Urban Renaissance; Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance …
This was enforced by bodies such as the Architecture and Urbanism department of the Greater London Authority locally, and the Urban Task Force and CABE nationally, with mixed success. It enshrined in policy things which leftish architects like Rogers had been demanding throughout the Thatcher years—building was to be dense, in flats if need be, on ‘brownfield’ i.e. ex-industrial land, to be ‘mixed tenure’, and to be informed by ‘good design’, whatever exactly that might be. The result—five or six-storey blocks of flats, with let or unlet retail units at ground floor level, the concrete frames clad in wood, aluminium and render—can be seen in every urban centre. Similarly, new public spaces and technologies were intended to create the possibility of a new public modernism. One of the most curious, and retrospectively deeply poignant expressions of this early New Labour urbanism dates from the point where it might have seemed a modernizing, Europeanizing movement rather than today’s horrifying combination of Old Labourist chauvinist authoritarianism in social and foreign policy and relentless, uncompromising neoliberalism. This is Patrick Keiller’s 1999 film The Dilapidated Dwelling, referred to by the director himself alternately as his ‘New Labour film’ or his ‘naughty film’, made for Channel 4 but unreleased on DVD and seldom screened. Like his earlier, better known London and Robinson In Space it takes the form of an oblique travelogue, only this time with interviews and an ostensible overarching subject—rather than the earlier films’ Problem of London or Problem of England, this is the Problem of Housing. Introducing it twelve years later, Keiller recalled that ‘I thought in 1997 that we were going to rebuild Britain, after all the damage that had been done to it, like we did after 1945.’ The film is a sharp pre-emptive analysis of why this would not happen.
Today, the message of the film is: be careful what you ask of capitalism, as it might just grant your wish. In short, The Dilapidated Dwelling asks the question: why does the production of housing never get modernized? (With the linked question, why is construction so backward?) It seems to derive from the search for ‘new space’ in the 1995 travelogue Robinson in Space, where the novel if unnerving spaces of containerization, big sheds, security, espionage and imprisonment almost entirely exclude housing, which is only seen in glimpses, usually of neo-Georgian executive estates. Housing, when this film was made in 1997–9, was not new space. It has become so since, however, especially in the cities.
There’s a desperately sad yearning in Keiller’s two ‘Robinson’ films for a true metropolitanism, a Baudelairean modernity worthy of the first country in history to urbanize itself. In London, the capital and its infrastructure are strangled by a ‘suburban government’; and in Robinson in Space, ports like Southampton or Liverpool are weird, depopulated, the enormous turnover of imports and exports never leading to any attendant cosmopolitanism or glamour, the internationalism confined to the automated space of the container port. So it’s interesting to consider these films after the Urban Task Force, after the palpable failure of the Urban Renaissance, the death of which was arguably heralded by the anti-congestion charge, anti-inner city ‘Zone 5 strategy’ that got Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London.
The Urban Renaissance was the very definition of good ideas badly thought out and (mostly) appallingly applied. The expansion of public spaces and mixed uses led merely to pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee; the rise in city living has led to brownfield sites and any space next to a waterway, from the Thames’s most majestic expanses to the slurry of Deptford Creek, sprouting the aforementioned Urban Task Force blocks. Meanwhile, the film’s central suggestion—that new housing should not only be on brownfield or greenfield, but should moreover replace the much-loved but standardized and deeply dilapidated housing of 1870–1940 that dominates the country—was partially fulfilled in a disturbing manner. This is where the film is at its most controversial.
Britain, it argues, has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and the most dilapidated, and it is enormously expensive to retrofit—why not just knock it down and build something better? Chillingly for conservationists, Keiller takes for his model the modular, inexpensive, prefabricated construction of supermarkets, although introducing the film in 2009 he ruefully wonders ‘why I thought we should all live in Tesco’. Nonetheless, why be sentimental about substandard housing from the era that coined the term ‘jerrybuilt’?
The idea of destroying and replacing huge swathes of Victorian housing found fruit in the government’s Pathfinder scheme. Designed to ‘revitalize’ the economies of a selection of post-industrial areas from Birmingham northwards, it entailed the compulsory purchase and demolition of (most frequently council-owned) housing not so much to replace it with something better, but for the purposes of, in Pathfinder’s subtitle, ‘Housing Market Renewal’ in northern towns previously untouched by the southeastern property boom. The results are inconclusive, to say the least, and reveal just how little the quality of a set of buildings has to do with its place in the property pecking order. As Heritage campaigners were keen to point out, the streets tinned-up ready for demolition under Pathfinder were just those which, in London, would have been long since the subject of fevered property speculation. In Liverpool especially, Pathfinder’s demolition programmes encompassed some large bay-windowed nineteenth-century houses which would have gone for silly money further south—though they did not stop to ask exactly why their northern equivalents were less lucrative.3 The infill that replaced the Victorian streets, where it appeared, followed the Urban Task Force rules impeccably, albeit that the ‘good design’ element is somewhat questionable.
The architectural argument misses the truly original element in Pathfinder, what differentiates it from the superficially similar slum clearance programmes of the 1890s through the 1960s. It is a programme of class cleansing. The new housing is not let to those who had been cleared, as was the case with most earlier clearance, especially after 1945, but is allocated for the ‘aspirational’ in an only partially successful attempt to lure the middle classes back to the inner-cities they deserted for the suburbs. This is in no way limited to Pathfinder itself, but forms part of the managed neoliberalism which has pervaded New Labour’s approach to urban policy, as to so much else. Instruments brought in after 1945 in order to bypass the interests of slum landlords and landowners legally—Compulsory Purchase Orders, Development corporations—were now used to the opposite end.
In this New Labour were not pioneers. The first to use the instruments of social democracy against its social content was Westminster Council under Shirley Porter, in the 1980s. Concerned that the Council was at constant risk of falling to Labour, the local Conservative leadership found that council tenants, spread liberally across the area by earlier reformers, were more likely to vote Labour. The Council had the legal capabilities to get them out, rehousing them in inferior accommodation out of the borough and offering their—often very fine—flats for sale to upwardly mobile buyers. With an impressive prefiguring of New Labour nu-language, this programme was called Building Stable Communities. Of course, this was gerrymandering, and Porter herself is still essentially on the lam from justice because of it4—but New Labour would do something very similar, without even the rational excuse of ensuring electoral success. Under the banner of making communities more ‘mixed’, council estates such as the huge Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle or Holly Street in Hackney were sold off and demolished, their tenants transferred elsewhere or heaped onto the waiting list, all in the name of what Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott would call Building Sustainable Communities.
The main semi-governmental organ of ‘regeneration’, English Partnerships, was designed to bring business and state together, the latter often sponsoring the former to such an extent that it would have been cheaper just to build on its own. It formed part of a weird grey area of almost entirely state-funded private companies—the Arm’s Length Management Organizations to which much council housing was transferred, PFI and outsourcing specialists like Capita and QinetiQ, both of which were formed out of government departments. They embody the phase of neoliberalism described by the cultural critic Mark Fisher among others as ‘market Stalinism’, where state dirigisme continues and grows, working this time in the service of property and land.5 By 2009 English Partnerships had transmogrified into the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), whose immediate task was to respond to the 2008 property crash with a house-building programme. Early on, there was some hope that this would lead to a new wave of council building, particularly given that waiting lists had spiralled after the crash, but instead private enterprise continued to be subsidized by the state, in the form of the Kickstart stimulus programme. This offered £1 billion of direct state funding to private developers and builders for ‘high-quality mixed tenure housing developments’, which would be assessed for said quality by the aforementioned aesthetics quango CABE.
After its first schemes were unveiled at the start of 2010, Kickstart was heavily criticized by CABE for extremely low scores on all their measurements—in terms of energy-efficiency, design quality, public space, access to facilities and public transport and much else. Both bodies refused to state who had designed the schemes that had been assessed or where they were, despite a Freedom of Information request by Building Design—the HCA’s head Bob Kerslake claimed it would damage the house builders’ ‘commercial confidentiality’. At the very end of the New Labour project was a massive programme of public funding for substandard private housing. This was the change we couldn’t see, as we weren’t allowed to know where the schemes actually were—although some of those in this book are likely candidates.
In terms of policy, then, an attempt to reform the Thatcherite city has had extremely ambiguous results; but in terms of architecture, the postmodernist architecture that characterized the 1980s and 1990s is, in a superficial sense, very much on the defensive, and has been for most of the last decade. Although it persists as the dominant aesthetic for speculative house-building outside the large cities, it is by now almost wholly absent from the architectural magazines and the metropolitan centres. This decline could be dated to the late 1990s, when two huge postmodernist buildings in London—Terry Farrell’s MI6 building and Michael Hopkins’ Porticullis House in Westminster (although Hopkins absolved himself through the astonishing tube station designed in the building’s undercroft)—were so aggressively statist and weightily bureaucratic in form that the signifiers given out, always important in postmodernism’s sign-fixated discourse, were deeply unattractive. On the contrary, the paradigmatic buildings constructed in London since the late 1990s have been those of Norman Foster, a once vaguely avant-garde technocrat notable for a seemingly Modernist lack of deliberate architectural-historical references and jokes, with an accompanying rhetoric of transparency and sustainability. This leads to what I call Pseudomodernism, which would be defined as Postmodernism’s incorporation of a Modernist formal language. Pseudomodernism has several elements. The cramped speculative blocks marketed as ‘luxury flats’ or ‘stunning developments’, with their attenuated, vaguely Scandinavian aesthetic; the glass towers whose irregular panels, attempting to alleviate the standardized nature of such buildings, have been dubbed ‘barcode façades’; and most of all, the architectural spectacles generated by ‘signature’ designers, most of whom were once branded ‘deconstructivists’ (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and a legion of lesser lights such as Make architects, who manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety).
Michael Hopkins, Westminster Jubilee Line Station
Norman Foster, Canary Wharf Jubilee Line Station
Terry Farrell with Liam Gillick, Home Office
Many former postmodernists are now pseudomodernists. The most notable is Sir Terry Farrell, designer of a multitude of quintessentially Thatcherite buildings in the 1980s, from Charing Cross station to MI6. His most pseudomodernist work is the new Home Office building, appropriately a PFI scheme, the first for a government building. With its combination of Weimar Republic curves and De Stijl patterns with eager-to-please colour—which here is provided, as per the Blairite fetish for the ‘creative industries’, by the artist Liam Gillick—it provides a calm, ostentatiously friendly face for the most illiberal administration in the history of British democracy. Nonetheless, the Home Office is merely an example of this idiom in its more domestically scaled version. Unlike most of its contemporaries, it does not aim to be that most essential of twenty-first-century architectural aspirations: an icon. The icon is now the dominant paradigm in architecture to such an extent that at least four different buildings erected in the last few years—one in Hull by Terry Farrell, one in London at Canary Wharf, another in Glasgow, plus an ‘Icona’ near the Olympic site in Stratford—have opted for some variant on the very name ‘Icon’, although they range in use from nondescript blocks of flats to an aquarium.
A prospective image of London’s ‘Olympic Skyline’ in 2012 released in the mid 2000s showed an entire skyline of competing icons. The skyscrapers announced under Ken Livingstone’s tenure as mayor of London—named, in a manner Charles Jencks would appreciate, after gherkins, cheese-graters, walkie-talkies, helter-skelters, a shard—make none of the eclectic gestures and mashings together of different historical styles that characterized postmodernist architecture in developments like Broadgate and the original Canary Wharf. Stone has mostly been replaced by glass. Yet one thing that survives from Postmodernism is the conception of the building as a sign, and here as an easily understandable, instantly grasped sign, strongly opposed to the formal rigours and typological complexities of ‘high’ Modernism, especially its Brutalist variant. While it’s possible that the original Gherkin received its nickname spontaneously, there’s little doubt that the other towers, all announced around the same time, had a ready-made little moniker designed to immediately endear them to the general public, in order to present them as something other than the aesthetic tuning of stacked trading floors. Accordingly, by being instantly recognizable for their kinship with a household object, they would aim to become both logo and icon. Perhaps they might eventually become what Jencks describes as ‘failed icons’, more Millennium Dome than Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim; although always trying for the status of the latter, whose success in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has made it into a boosterist cliché, whereby the ‘Bilbao effect’ transforms a mundane city into a cultural capital, replacing unionized factory work or unemployment with insecure service industry jobs.
The other major change from the suburbanism of the Thatcher and Reagan version of neoliberalism is a new focus on the cities, something which is usually encapsulated by the under-investigated word ‘regeneration’. Indeed, any form of building in an urban area is usually accompanied by this term. The vaguely religious air is appropriate, as it often accompanies a fundamentally theological conception of architecture, where by standing in proximity to an outstanding architectural work, the spirit is uplifted, and the non-orthogonal geometry and hyperbolic paraboloids purport, for instance, to represent the experience of war through the disorientation they induce.
Daniel Libeskind, buildings for London Metropolitan University
An appropriate English example is Salford Quays, where the Docks of Greater Manchester were transformed into a combination of cultural centre and a development of luxury apartments, neatly combining both elements of Pseudomodernism. Two of the architects who most exemplify these ideas are represented there or nearby. There is Daniel Libeskind, whose tendency towards memorializing piety is so pronounced that he was described by Martin Filler as a ‘human Yahrzeit candle’. His Imperial War Museum North, with its sloping ceilings and a form which apparently represents a world divided, is supposed to formally incarnate the experience of war. Meanwhile, not far away in central Salford is a bridge by Santiago Calatrava, who is the infrastructural embodiment of Pseudomodernism, his structures seemingly always placed in areas that are busy being transformed from proletarian spaces of work or habitation to ‘regenerated’ areas of bourgeois colonization. These transformations of space are, it should be remembered, fundamentally different in their social consequences to the superficially similar ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ of the postwar period. Once, a slum clearance scheme would involve the slum-dweller being rehoused by the state in something which was, more often than not, superior in terms of space, security of tenure, and hygiene, irrespective of the decades of criticism these schemes have been subjected to. Now that this sort of naïve paternalism is absent, the slums are cleared so that the middle classes can settle in them, something usually excused with a rhetoric of ‘social mixing’, dismantling what had become ‘ghettoes’. The many schemes where sixties council towers have been replaced with PFI blocks are to urban planning what Pseudomodernism is to architecture.
That is, the Modernism of the icon, of the city academies where each fundamentally alike yet bespoke design embodies a vacuous aspirationalism; a Modernism without the politics, without the utopianism, or without any conception of the polis; a Modernism that conceals rather than reveals its functions; Modernism as a shell. This return of Modernist good taste in the New Labour version of neoliberalism has turned architectural Postmodernism, rather surprisingly, into a vanishing mediator. The keystones, references, in-jokes and alleged ‘fun’ of eighties and nineties corporate architecture now evoke neoliberalism’s most naked phase, the period when it didn’t dress itself up in social concern. In the passage from Norman Tebbit to Caroline Flint, the aesthetic of social Darwinism has become cooler, more tasteful, less ostentatiously crass and reactionary, matching the rhetoric.
However, it can be seen that the Pseudomodern takes many of its fundamental ideas, if not its stylistic tropes, from Postmodernism. At this point, we will take a historical detour. Postmodernist architecture was most intelligently formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in their 1972 book Learning From Las Vegas. This focused, via a critique of a caricatured corporate Modernism, on the alleged inability of Modernist architecture to communicate adequately with its users. In response, they privileged first of all, signage—the advertising signs of roadside architecture—and secondly, formal references to earlier, most often classical styles of architecture as a means of providing an architecture outside of the ‘dumb box’, as they described it. Charles Jencks’s Language of Postmodern Architecture, meanwhile, turned to full-blown neoclassicism, with an accompanying narrative of Modernist hubris, where the dynamiting of one of the US’s rare forays into social housing in St Louis became the precise date for the ‘death’ of Modernism. One element of Venturi’s argument was, regardless of their protestations, a Modernist one—a call for an architectural montage of neon signs and jarring formal clashes. Their praise for the chaos of signage that made up Vegas is, in essence, not vastly different to the rhetoric of the Russian Constructivists, whose work was motivated by what historian Kestutis Paul Zygas calls a ‘component fixation’; where designs were always presented with affixed billboards, posters, slogans, transmitters and tramlines, as if to plug them into the city’s dynamism. Much of the architecture and signage they describe was itself in a kind of Pulp Modernist idiom. Specifically, a 1950s style usually called ‘Googie’ to distinguish it from the apparently more rigorous Modernism of the International Style.
Googie was usually used to draw attention to burger bars, car washes, coffee shops—the name comes from one such, designed by John Lautner. It was an architecture that adapted itself to suburban sprawl and the sheer speed of the freeway by providing dynamic forms which seemed to mimic speed in their formal distortions while attracting the attention of the prospective customer travelling at eighty miles an hour via stretched angular forms and lurid colours. In his book on the subject,6 Alan Hess places the style in direct opposition to the high-art Modernism of Mies van der Rohe and his disciples, the classicist glass-skyscraper school that became the spatial lingua franca of even the most conformist parts of American capital. What’s interesting here is that in the American context, where Modernism was not as associated with social democracy or state socialism as it was in Europe, the debate was purely aesthetic. While the opponents of ‘Googie’ accused it of being crass and commercial, Mies’s Seagram Building was given tinted windows the colour of the client’s brand of whisky. While its outrageous geometrical illusions and structural expressionism were being criticized as mere dressing-up, Mies’s towers ‘expressed’ their structure by entirely decorative I-beams.
So in essence, the debate between classical and pulp Modernism in the US was one of taste. On the one hand there was the luxury aesthetic of the wing of the bourgeoisie that aspired to finer things: New York’s successful attempt in the 1950s to wrest from Paris the accolade of world fine-art capital, with some CIA assistance. In order for this to occur it had to set itself against a more straightforward capitalist hucksterism. In fact, with their deliberate defiance of the rules of gravity and geometry, their brashness and lack of formal precedent, Googie buildings were more true to the original Modernist impulse—futurists or constructivists would have recognized themselves in commercial designers such as Armet & Davis, or in the architecture of McDonalds, Denny’s and Big Boy, more than in Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Seagram or Lever. It’s also a reminder that the idea of Modernism as ‘paternalist’ imposition on the benighted proletariat, upon which Postmodernism based much of its self-justification, makes sense only if we begin with an extremely limited definition of Modernism. Principally, one that was restricted to the International Style, itself a pernicious legacy of the Museum of Modern Art’s dual depoliticization and classicization of Modernist architecture for American consumption. The Modernism that made it to New York was missing both the crass, neon-lit commercialism of the Berlin department stores and cinemas and the socialist fervour of the ‘New Building’, an anti-architecture for a new society.
It was not, of course, commercial Modernism which was critiqued by Postmodernists, but it can be seen in retrospect as the mediator between postmodernist theory and pseudomodernist practice. The work of Frank Gehry was, from the early 1980s, an adaptation of Googie’s Pulp Modernism for the purposes of architecture as art. The style of which he was one of the leading lights, which was termed Deconstructivism by the mid 1980s (in reference to its grounding both in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and Russian Constructivist form) actually continued many of the formal strategies of the roadside architecture of the 1950s. These architects—Daniel Libeskind among them—were notable both for ignoring the postmodernist imperative to genuflect before neoclassicism, baroque and the traditional street, and for a vocabulary of the non-orthogonal, the exaggerated and the audaciously engineered that owed more to LA diners than it did to the Bauhaus. This style has been applied in the last decade principally for the purposes of museums, galleries and self-contained theme park-like environments such as Gehry’s Experience Music Project in Seattle, or Nigel Coates’s National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield. Chin-Tao Wu’s Privatising Culture lists a few of those that were erected in Britain around the turn of the millennium: ‘you can experience … a simulated journey into space at the National Space Science Centre in Leicester, find out about geological evolution at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, have fun and learn about science at “@Bristol” in Bristol, or get hands-on experience of the steel industry at the “Making it! Discovery Centre” in Mansfield.’7 In terms of their combined Disneyfication and intensification of the city’s museum culture, these are deeply postmodernist buildings, regardless of their form.
St Paul’s Visitor Centre, Make Architects
The influence of Googie in contemporary urbanism is largely unacknowledged, but it is, I would argue, key to understanding exactly why the ‘signature’ wing of pseudomodernist architecture takes the form it does. Seemingly paradoxically, it aligns itself very closely with the heritage zones of the old capitals. Across the road from St Paul’s Cathedral is a tourist information pavilion by Make architects, the group established by Ken Shuttleworth, job architect on Norman Foster’s Gherkin. In its improbable geometry, its jagged zigzag showing zero interest in the expression of function or good taste, it could easily be selling donuts in 1950s Anaheim. There is by now a large amount of architecture like this, serving most often as a key component of urban regeneration strategies. Buildings for living in are more often done in a mild, asymmetrically patterned form of Scandinavian Modernism, while buildings for culture are allowed to make somewhat wilder gestures. This process can be seen in various buildings for the creative industries in Britain, with their logo-like names: Urbis in Manchester, The Public in West Bromwich, FACT in Liverpool. Its most extensive expression is not, however, in the UK, with its remaining vestiges of representative democracy, but in the oligarchies of Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi, for instance, has set aside a district solely for ‘iconic’ cultural buildings by Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel (who has designed a branch of the Louvre). Barry Lord, the (English) ‘cultural consultant’ for this zone, notes that ‘cultural tourists are older, wealthier, more educated, and they spend more. From an economic point of view, this makes sense’.8 No doubt this applies equally well in theory to West Bromwich or Salford.
Much of this architecture has in common with Googie the reduction of the building to a logo, to an instantly memorable image: one that is appreciated in movement, as from a passing car, while quickly walking through an art gallery or museum on the way to the gift shop; or indeed while shopping, as with Future Systems and Rem Koolhaas’s work for Selfridges and Prada in Birmingham and New York, respectively. Although it may accompany exhibitions of art or simulations of war, it is not an architecture of contemplation but of distraction and speed. Yet it also continues the moralistic rhetoric of postwar Modernism, without any of the actual social uses—local authority housing, comprehensive schools, general hospitals—to which it was originally put. The new Modernism, like the new social democratic parties, is one emptied of all intent to actually improve the living conditions of the majority. Instead, the social use of the pseudo-modernist building, forever groping for the Bilbao effect, appears in a rather Victorian manner to be the uplifting of the spirit via interactive exhibits and installations.
Nobody ever suggested that roadside diners had hyperbolic paraboloid roofs in order to make us better people or induce us to ‘aspire’, let alone to simulate the experience of war or the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the formal links between Googie and today’s apparently radical architecture does suggest a truth at its heart—its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, in forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today’s architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds.
The ‘Urban Renaissance’ is key to all this, and irrespective of its courting of suburbia, New Labour was very much an urban party. Its bases remained in ex-industrial cities, and its hierarchy was drawn from North London, Greater Manchester and Edinburgh. The Tories, irrespective of their capture of the Greater London Authority, are essentially an outer-suburban and rural party, so it will be instructive to find out what they plan to do with this major Blairite shibboleth. Coined in the late 1990s either by the sociologists Ricky Burdett and Anne Power or by Richard Rogers, under the auspices of the Urban Task Force set up by the de facto minister for architecture and planning John Prescott, this has become the optimistic term for a middle-class return to the cities, and an attendant redevelopment of previously demonized urban spaces. It is inextricably associated with the urban paraphernalia I define as Pseudomodern: in terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant lottery-funded centres, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused riverfronts (Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, the Tyneside ensemble of Baltic, Sage and Millennium Bridge); in housing, the aforementioned ‘mixed’ blocks of flats on brownfield sites, the privatization of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, whether cheerful or gesturing towards sculptor Antony Gormley’s enigmatic figures (his ‘Angel of the North’, outstretched atop a former coal seam, is perhaps the most famous icon of regeneration), usually symbolizing an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realms’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to Derby or Portsmouth.
The process is partial and unevenly scattered, but reaches its most spectacular extent in the miles of luxury flats in the former London Docks, the new high-rise skyline of Leeds, the privatized retail district of Liverpool One, and the repopulation of central Manchester. Irrespective of the virtues or otherwise of these new spaces, this urban renaissance is widely considered to have ended in aforementioned city centre flats standing empty, as if the exodus from the suburbs to the cities was a confidence trick. Half-finished, empty or cheaply let towers in Glasgow, Stratford or Sheffield act as symbols both of the euphemistic ‘credit crunch’ and of the failure, as suburban boosterism might have it, of an attempt to cajole people into a form of living alien to British predilections—although the linked sub-prime crash in the US was a suburban rather than inner-city phenomenon.
So the suburbs—a fundamentally meaningless term, encompassing everything from Neasden to Bingley via Thamesmead and the entirety of Milton Keynes—are back, and with them a wave of criticism of the urban renaissance. It’s exactly that renaissance that this book seeks to critique, albeit not for the same reasons. British cities deserve better than to be reduced to a systematic regeneration formula of ‘stunning riverside developments’ and post-industrial leisure in the urban core and outside it a sprawl of giant distribution sheds, retail parks and what Patrick Keiller described as ‘reduced versions’ of the houses of 150 years ago.
This book is an autopsy of the urban renaissance, but one driven by constant surprise and fascination at just how strange, individual and architecturally diverse British cities actually are. When researching the articles which eventually formed this book, mostly on foot, I was amazed by this richness, and at how widespread ignorance of it really was. I include my own ignorance in this. Apart from the opening and penultimate chapters, this book is almost exclusively about cities of which I had very little knowledge at the start of 2009, when on the strength of a long rant about my hometown on my weblog, I was commissioned by the architecture paper Building Design to write a series on British cities in the recession. The ensuing pieces appeared under the appropriately depressive, underwhelming title Urban Trawl. I took a friend, a theatre photographer and lecturer, along to take pictures, knowing that he would not resort to the clichés, sweeping perspectives and endless summers so beloved of architectural photographers. This—for better or worse—explains the ubiquitous signage, overcast skies and neck-craning angles you will find in the images in this book. And aside from a final, parenthetical visit to Liverpool, visited for other reasons, this follows the unplanned path we took across Britain for Building Design. Many, many cities are absent here, for no reason other than the vagaries of my particular architectural interests and convenience. Belfast, Cumbernauld, Birmingham, Harlow, Bristol, Plymouth, Edinburgh, Hull, Swansea, Coventry, Northampton, Aberdeen, Basildon, Barnsley, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Preston, Barrow, Leicester and many others have my apologies for the implied but unintended slur on their character. I would have visited if I could.
Apart from quick trips as a child or adult to Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, these were places of which I had no prior experience, despite being obsessive about British architecture and politics (which may explain my occasionally Kaspar Hauser-like tone). This comes partly of being from the privileged south-east, albeit born and bred in one of its less privileged outposts. When I mentioned where I was going next to friends and relatives, there was often a certain amount of ridicule—why would you want to go to Leeds, or Milton Keynes, or Halifax? Why, when we all know that British cities are overpriced, ugly, thuggish and violent places built of concrete and glass, the ‘Crap Towns’ that The Idler compiled books about while its founder Tom Hodgkinson retired to the countryside to play at being a gentleman? The argument of this book, as well as the issue it takes with the pieties of Blairite regeneration, is that urban Britain is easily as interesting as the much mythologized piazzas of Italy. The problem is that after being given such a relentless kicking by successive governments and the invariably hostile press, by the 1990s local mettle and pride had broken, so any development was good, anything that ‘brought jobs to the area’ was permitted, and the towns strained to become something other than what they were, something distinctly less interesting—Florence in pine and glass, Los Angeles without the sunshine—when the mess and montage of these multiracial cities provided something which nowhere else in Europe can match. By far the bleakest and least welcoming city we visited for Building Design was Cambridge, which seems to suggest that there is an inverse correlation between national esteem for a place’s qualities and the actual pleasure one can take walking through it.
The dominance of the south-east, i.e. of the increasingly vast London Metro Area, is threatened only very slightly by Greater Manchester—hence the horror of BBC workers on realizing their jobs were moving to Salford, a shocking two-hour train ride away from the capital—and by nowhere else in England (Scotland, as in so much else, is a different story). This is only partly because London’s sheer size has such an overwhelming gravitational pull. In strict census terms, the nearest competitor is Birmingham, with less than one seventh of its population. If taken as conurbations, as continuous urban areas without rural interruption, then Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Tyneside, Leeds, all suddenly become much larger—the populations of Nottingham and Newcastle more than double, while Manchester’s leaps from around 400,000 to 2.5 million. Local government has not factored this in since the effective abolition of the Metropolitan Councils of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne & Wear and West Yorkshire in the 1980s, along with the more notorious destruction of the Greater London Council. The capital partly recovered from this through the less powerful, more symbolic Greater London Authority, but the smaller metropolises never got theirs back in any way, shape or form. Accordingly, they tend to think of themselves as being far more provincial than they actually are. Cities like Sheffield or Liverpool too often play at being villages, with deleterious consequences for their true urban qualities; while the counter-movement to give them Urban Renaissance piazzas and towers ignores their actual features in a different but equally disastrous way, hence all those ‘urban villages’ bringing hermetic, provincial rural mores into the heart of the city.
Several books guided this guide, principal among them one published in 1934, a travel book called English Journey by the Bradfordian writer J. B. Priestley.9 In the following decade it was so widely read as to become one of those semi-mythical books that ‘won the ’45 election for Labour’—a sharp, populist, politely angry account of a deliberate attempt to look England in the face, from Southampton to Newcastle. This book is consciously written in Priestley’s shadow, albeit extending it outside of the dubious centrality of England, and focused much more strictly on buildings rather than anecdote and general observation. A few others also cast a heavy shadow—the mid-century journeys of Ian Nairn, the 1990s dérives of Patrick Keiller—and what links all three, other than my (usually hidden) references to them here, is a disinterest in or critique of Heritage England, and the pervasive myth of either an overcrowded or a green and pleasant land.
By the mid nineteenth century, this was the only country in the world which had more urban than rural inhabitants. Even now, after a century of sentimentalism about the countryside, around 90 per cent of us live in essentially urban areas, and although around 70 per cent of the landmass is still agricultural land, only 300,000 people actually work it. This might be an urban island, but extraordinarily Penguin Books were able to release a set of twenty books in 2009 called English Journeys, in obvious reference to Priestley, every single one of which dealt with the countryside. The bulk of Priestley’s account was urban, this being where the overwhelming majority of the English lived. At the end of this survey of a country torn between north and south, rich and poor, Priestley listed three Englands that he had found on this journey, all of them embodied in their man-made structures. The first was the countryside, an area of patchwork fields and local stone, one which has ‘long since ceased to make its own living’, pretty in its desuetude, if over-preserved. The second was that of the Industrial Revolution, of iron, brick, smokestacks and back-to-backs, more ‘real’ than the first but ruthlessly inhumane towards its inhabitants. Last was a third, commercial world of arterial roads, Tudorbethan suburbia, art deco factories and cinemas; cheap and ersatz, but without the brutality of the second.
Since Priestley, we could add a fourth and fifth England, or rather a fourth or fifth Britain, as this book attempts to avoid what Tom Nairn calls ‘Englishry’. These are, respectively, the country of the postwar settlement, of council estates, Arndale centres and campus universities; and the post-1979 England of business parks, Barratt homes, riverside ‘stunning developments’, out-of-town shopping and distribution centres. This book is, at heart, an architectural guide to this country, to Britains four and five. It charts both the ambiguous remains of the fourth, and the fifth’s frequent determination to wipe out any architectural trace of it, just as it tries to decimate the remnants of its collectivist politics—and here I attempt to treat Britain five with much the same retrospective contempt as it shows its predecessor, largely for the reason that I find its neoliberal politics every bit as repugnant as it does those of its socialist forbear. This is not, however, a ruminative book about urbanism that touches on architecture to illustrate an argument, but one where architecture itself is central, much as it is in New Labour’s Change We See campaign. ‘By these stones shall we be judged’, said the leader of Vienna’s City Council in his opening speech for the Karl-Marx-Hof, the gigantic council estate that Austrian Fascists would bombard a year later. This book uses architecture in an unashamedly subjective fashion to illustrate politics and vice versa, and aims most of all to awake in the reader an attention to their urban environment, in the hope that they will see it as something consciously made, something formed, rather than as a more-or-less irritating backdrop to the daily commute, a possible investment or a series of monuments and eyesores. Finally, if this book does that, it is in the hope that from there, people can think about how they can consciously make and consciously transform their environment.
I will begin, then, with the environment that did most to shape me.
