Croydon: Zone 5 Strategy
Super-Dormitory
After the collapse of the Urban Renaissance, the suburbs are back, that much is clear. That preceded the election of the Tory–Whig government. Boris Johnson’s ‘Zone 5 Strategy’ proved again how successful a politician can be by appealing to the Free-Born Englishman’s age-old right to drive at four miles an hour rather than taking a bus, and since then the Party of government has explicitly favoured suburban, South East England, especially as the North becomes more hostile to it. Croydon, as the largest single area in Surrey and the largest Outer London borough, may be regarded as a fairly representative slice of the London/Home Counties grey area that has been a Conservative bastion for over a century, and that effectively governs the UK. It can serve here, in theory, as a typical exemplar of Home Counties Suburbia, in the same place as, say, Guildford, Woking, Watford, High Wycombe; areas designed as dormitories for City clerks, that have flourished to the point where they generate their own inward pull, and then their own peripherally located business parks, malls and factories. But why is it, then, that the first impression a stranger might have of central Croydon is that of a teeming, multicultural, independent provincial city? Why does the London Borough of Croydon so much want to be a City itself? And what can we learn about what a ‘suburb’ really is from this place?
Croydon regularly bids to receive the official title of ‘City’, and if it ever gets to fulfil its long-stated wish to drop the ‘sub’ from its ‘urban’, this quintessential commuter suburb will become a city of above average size, with roughly the extent and population of, say, Coventry or Hull. Croydon already has its own rapid transport system and its own rather particular pattern of urbanism, ahead of several official British cities. Many in South East England will be familiar with the strange sight that hits you when leaving East Croydon station. What with the trams and high-rises, you could believe you were in a wealthy West German industrial city – somewhere that is entirely confident about its own modernity, that willingly inhabited the late twentieth century without looking over its shoulder. The trams, too, are an unexpected joy, taking you from New Addington to Wimbledon, should you require such a service, while threading their lines above eye level. The contrast with both the average London suburb and the average English city is sharp indeed, until you walk around a little. Then the landscape starts to become familiar, and fast.
What you find on investigation is that Croydon is very English indeed: a result of the subjugation of planning to commerce. In short, in the 1960s an ambitious council offered businesses cheap office space, close to London, if they would fund infrastructural improvements. Within an astonishingly short time, a burb was transformed into a minor metropolis of skyscrapers, underpasses and flyovers; the trams would come rather later, but have a similarly metropolitan air. Since then the place has been the butt of numerous jokes. ‘Mini-Manhattan’, as if trying to be like New York was somehow less interesting than being like Surbiton. Croydon had, and has, ideas above its station, and for that it’s hard not to warm to it. Yet the problem with the place quite quickly becomes apparent. The dashing appearance from a distance gives way to a messy, chaotic reality, contrived in the good old, ad hoc, throw-everything-in-the-air-and-see-where-it-lands style so beloved of England.
Mini-Manhattan Revisited
In its ethos, the erstwhile Croydon of the Future resembles the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s. The towers are constructed at random, oblivious to one another, allowed to go as high in any place as the developers wanted. For that, it is hardly a paragon of social democratic urbanism, but in aesthetic it’s a 1960s living museum, left remarkably intact. A complete post-war skyline, accompanied only by a mere couple of recladdings, and only two completed post-1970s towers – an office block and an apartment block. Neither of these is of the slightest architectural note, though skyscrapers by Norman Foster and Make were planned before the crash, and a barcode façade can slowly be seen creeping up a concrete core near West Croydon station. As it stands, much of what you can see is mosaic, concrete and glass in the English corporate modernist manner. Accordingly, central Croydon has an accidental uniqueness: things obliterated elsewhere persist here. It’s strictly for the enthusiast – there’s a lot of period charm and plenty of places where you can re-enact your own personal kitchen-sink film, but not much in terms of real architectural quality. Richard Seifert’s fabulous hexagonal NLA Tower, probably that firm’s finest essay in tectonic corporate branding, along with Centre Point and NatWest, is justifiably regarded as Mini-Manhattan’s Empire State, the block that features on the promotional literature. It was recently repainted and restored, but there’s little else that shows any spark. The pleasure instead is in seeing the recent past’s generic, everyday architecture in an unusual state of completeness and survival.
A walk around this suburban metropolis would take in the once chic, now shabby tapering tower the council built for their own offices, which nicely complements their earlier, enjoyably debased Victorian halls; a couple of sub-Seifert cubist experiments; a jollily Festival of Britain Travelodge in brick and zigzag render; Hilberseimer-style Zeilenbau blocks stepping along in enfilade wherever a developer could get a big enough plot; and in the distance, the chimneys of a disused power station ornamenting a giant IKEA. The problem, or for the dedicated flâneur, the fun, is in how it interacts with the suburb all around, or rather how it doesn’t. Arrangements are totally random – a row of artisans’ terraces with skyscrapers behind, would-be secluded Tudorbethan facing giant high-rises, the sound of birdsong vying with an endless rumble of traffic. Sometimes the place seems to be mocking itself, as when a churchyard meets a concrete subway you find the sign: ‘OLD TOWN CONSERVATION AREA’. In fact, there’s a lot of pre-Victorian, never mind pre-1960s remnants in among the towers, if you know where to find them – vestiges of Croydon’s unlikely former existence as a religious centre. The Victorian buildings suggest a place that already considered itself a cut above the average suburb – large-scale department stores that belie the ability to get to Selfridges in twenty-five minutes from East Croydon station.
In its sense of chaos and drama, Croydon seems to have rather little in common with the typology of the commuter dormitory, but appears instead as a slice of Inner London on the lam. One of the more thrilling, and telling, moments is at the back-end of the mini-metropolis, where the office-block landscape suddenly meets market stalls, butchers’ shops and caffs, while a black steel walkway stretches across to connect it to a block of yuppie flats. In that tension is encapsulated what makes central Croydon feel as much a part of London proper as Peckham or Tottenham, albeit much more distant from the centre. The accidental ensemble creates an acutely surreal urban experience, taking the capital’s pre-existing aptitude for juxtaposition and amplifying it. The most memorable part of it all, comfortingly but atypically, is an enclave of public space, the St George’s Walk arcade, which emerges from behind the drab Nestlé Tower. Part is open to the air, part is shell-roofed, with the rest propped up by mosaic-clad pilotis. It’s elegant, but it doesn’t manage to meaningfully connect with anything else. The place is divided and carved up, very literally. A walk from East Croydon to West Croydon railway stations initially takes you through a Business Improvement District, one of those privately owned, privately patrolled ‘solutions’ for urban management – which in this case means clean streets and a large quantity of CCTV cameras. It ends remarkably suddenly, just by West Croydon station, where dirt, rubbish and relatively ‘unsightly’ hoardings and shop signs take over, and the mood is fractious. Waiting for a bus here provides a front-line seat for crisis, with vicious arguments between shoppers seemingly treated as normal.
‘Oi, Cleanshirt!’
The residential Croydon that lies outside the Business Improvement District is somewhat uncharted. Near the NLA tower is some very low-density, lush suburbia, much of it turned into consultancies, dentists’ offices and other commercial uses. One large Arts and Crafts house in the shadow of the skyscrapers purports to be the Croydon and Bromley School of Philosophy, which charges for courses in ‘practical philosophy’. A rare new tower, a metal-clad tube of zero merit, is just adjacent. Residential towers are massively outnumbered by the offices nearby, but there’s some worth noting. The council estates that lurk just past the flyover have a couple of surprises, such as the Festival of Britain stylings of the Cromwell Tower, as worn and unclad as the centre’s office blocks. The most notable block, however, is Zodiac House, which fans of the sitcom Peep Show will be familiar with. It’s an enjoyable piece of 1960s kitsch, with bronze zodiac signs placed upon the ground-floor podium, which houses mostly shops that evidently went to seed a very long time ago; the flats above are well-detailed in concrete and brick, with very large windows, and look rather chic, despite the mess all around. It is apt enough as a location, given that Peep Show has been one of the few programmes on television in recent years to dare look twenty-first-century London in the eye, with its grim office jobs, its class divisions, its trust-funded layabouts, its compulsory business bullshit, its air of suppressed hopelessness covered with desperate hedonism. With the possible exception of the trust funds, all of these seem present and correct here.
So Croydon seems, at first, nothing like the kempt and leafy commuter enclave that a suburb is supposed to be. First it’s a Rhineland industrial-administrative city, then an inner-London muddle. But look for the housing built at the same time as the new metropolis, and you find that a utopian Southern California was more the model than Düsseldorf or Acton. The Park Hill estate (no relation to its Sheffield namesake) is a particularly remarkable case in point. Planned by Wates, one of the largest commercial volume housebuilders in an era when even they occasionally had pretensions to ‘good design’, this is one of the leafiest, most luxuriant of suburbs, with either bland little detached houses or vaguely Eric Lyons terraces in amongst mature trees giving way to, extraordinarily, St Bernard’s: a secluded 1971 estate of three short terraces by then-famous Swiss high-art architects Atelier 5, in a state of impeccable preservation – the equivalent of Barratt Homes bringing in Peter Zumthor to design part of one of their estates. St Bernard’s is built into a hill, with car parks under the houses and pedestrian passageways to the terraces, although signs remind you that the land is, in fact, private, and that you aren’t really supposed to be here. The materials are exquisitely used, stock brick and wood treated as luxurious rather than generic. ‘Public’ gardens are lushly overgrown, meeting the sharp lines of Atelier 5’s executive Brutalism. The effect is not particularly European, however; rather it looks as if some of the Case Study Houses designed by Californian Modernists in the 1950s had strayed accidentally into Surrey. Pacific Palisades in Purley.
However, these are exceptional; much more typical is the sprawl around the Borough’s centre, those burbs where ‘going into town’ means going into Croydon, not the West End. Thornton Heath, for instance. Many of these low-rise areas have their terraces, semis and villas suddenly interrupted by office blocks that seem to have got lost on their way from Cannon Street to East Croydon station. One such monster dominates much of Thornton Heath, squat and massively wide. It’s also here that the borough’s only notable post-1970s building has just been completed, a library extension by FAT. Their wilful attempts to épater les architectural bourgeois mask – or as they would no doubt see it, accentuate – an attention to architecture’s social purpose that is unusual in the UK today. Both of these aspects can be seen when you first approach the library. It’s the extension to an old Carnegie Library, a pocket-baroque in brick and Portland stone. Their addition is a white box with ‘LIBRARY’ in supergraphics across the top, the ostensible modernism ‘subverted’ by an incongruous support, put there as an evocation in concrete of the ubiquitous suburban half-timbering. Drop the ‘OMG jokes’ reaction for a second (if we’re lucky, the architects might eventually do the same), and this is a remarkably serious, not at all whimsical public building, warm, welcoming and on this Tuesday afternoon in May, very well used. Its built-in chairs and sofas look comfortable, which is an interestingly rare thing in new architecture. As a building, it’s a fantastic snub to the current rash of library closures.
Thornton Heath Library takes a small-scale thing and makes it better, in a place with large-scale problems. Far more common attempts to ‘solve’ these can be found in the overdeveloped new spec blocks of flats, or Saunders Architects’ generic Blairbuild Thornton Heath Leisure Centre, with its swoopy roofs and tinny cladding. Maybe these will survive long enough to acquire central Croydon’s unexpected period charm, but making the same mistake twice is somewhat less forgiveable. The London Borough of Croydon has suffered from over a century of non-plan, and the result is chaos – dereliction next to newbuild, dramatically crammed and then almost criminally low-density. It’s full of surprises for the walker, but it’s a disastrous way to run a city, as the horrendous traffic, or the decidedly tense tenor of public interaction, makes very clear. But what does it say about the South East, suburban England, the area that lords it over the rest of the country? This place is, in theory, a major example of our most powerful, most wealthy, most leafy areas. You’d never guess, though, as it feels like another Britain entirely – a poor but multiracial, intriguing but miserable place which could really do with social planning and social housing, rather than more speculation and a Business Improvement District. Croydon is a place. It could be much more of one.
Greater Croydon
The entirely excellent Croydon Tramlink connects the town centre with a large hinterland stretching into the boroughs of Bromley, Merton and Sutton, which can in turn be considered a kind of Greater Croydon. The Tramlink itself is exactly the same sort of entity as the Manchester Metrolink, the Sheffield Supertram or Birmingham’s ‘Metro’ – a tram that partially runs on streets, partially on specially built concrete viaducts, and partially on railway tracks. They called these ‘Metrotrams’ in the Soviet Union, where they also built opulent futuristic shelters for them. The Tramlink doesn’t have these, but it is once again very striking that a London suburb has been in advance of much of the UK’s larger cities in the provision of rapid transit. So six months after the first trip out, curious to have a peek at the other Greater Croydon, away from the tense streets of the town centre and Thornton Heath, we took the Tramlink out to Mitcham Junction. On our way we passed the site of the furniture store burnt out in the August riots, with a block of flats-above-shops still charred and boarded up, a reminder of the moment when all that simmering briefly overflowed. The Tram then traverses an unexpected stretch of very heavy industry, a vast site that now seems unevenly divided between warehousing, light industrial units and, mostly, enormous exurban retail units with gapingly wide surface car parks. From here, we set out to see some of the architecture of the future. Or, rather, we went to find two potential forms of voluntaristic urbanism that the future might promise for London and elsewhere.
The London Borough of Sutton, run by Whigs and Tories, is one of the only major local authorities to become an official ‘Vanguard Area’ of the ‘Big Society’. This piece of ‘progressive nonsense’, as the internal Conservative discussion has it,11 entails the transfer of formerly remunerated labour over to volunteers, with accompanying swingeing cuts to council budgets and payrolls. Initially seduced by the vaguely co-operative rhetoric, a real city, Liverpool, signed up to be Big Society pioneers; but upon realizing rather belatedly that the Big Society was essentially a not particularly sophisticated cover for throwing public-sector workers out of their jobs and outsourcing services to Serco and Capita, it pulled out, leaving this affluent Outer London Borough (and nearby, even posher Windsor) to do the pioneering by itself. The process, without the cuddly rhetoric, can be seen at its most rapacious in the downsized ‘EasyCouncil’ in the inner-London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, where an outright class war is being fought between super-rich incomers and the tenants of its council estates. Sutton has far fewer poor people in it, so is able to stay cuddly, and accordingly it is the Whigs rather than the Tories that dominate the local council. Their approach to the question is best encompassed by the poster you can find on Sutton Council’s website, where ‘BIG SOCIETY’ is in yellow, with a smiley face in the ‘O’; ‘NOT BIG GOVERNMENT’ is in red, with a frowning face in the ‘O’. They really do think we’re that stupid.
The Future (Optimistic)
In any case the borough is an ambitious one, with various plans for ‘sustainable’ settlements in Hackbridge and Beddington, and a Big Society focus amongst the waters of Carshalton. Accordingly, there should be a lot to see. Making our way from Mitcham Junction, we proceed to Beddington, home of a complex called BedZED, or in full, Beddington Zero (Fossil) Energy Development. This is an estate of the Peabody Trust, the most famous of the unelected charitable organizations considered more trustworthy custodians of social housing than democratically-controlled local authorities; a ‘progressive’ side to our contemporary neo-Victorianism. The Trust was founded by a banker, George Peabody, a century and a half ago (which has lately made him the subject for occasional ‘when bankers were nice’ features and programmes), and is best known for immense, barrack-like cliffs of stock-brick housing across the second half of the nineteenth century, throughout inner London. The demise of council housing left the likes of Peabody as the last line of defence, and its directors, such as Dickon Robinson and latterly Claire Bennie, have been genuine enthusiasts for architecture and planning, which marks them out somewhat. BedZED is perhaps their most all-encompassing twenty-first-century scheme, an early 2000s project whose environmental and social seriousness is admirable, albeit cloaked by an architectural bumptiousness.
It is not exactly blessed with a delightful site. BedZED faces at one corner a large, straggling post-war estate of little wit or imagination, at another a crushingly dull development of ’90s mock-Tudor spec flats, and has as its hinterland one of those illusory places where London seems to end entirely, in pylons, brackish marshes and placid horses. It’s a long walk from Mitcham Junction Tramlink, or a stroll from Hackbridge station – not exactly remote, but hardly well-connected either. It’s a large development by contemporary standards, several rows of flats, accessible from the ground but partly connected by arched metal walkways. Creepers grow over much of it. The design is a superior essay in the now-defunct Blairite idiom (Peabody’s most recent estate, finished in early 2012 in Pimlico, reverts to their original yellow-brick monumentality, a sure sign of a shift in architectural culture). There is a lot of wood cladding; there are metal balconies; there is a great deal of glass. There is also some residual ‘vernacular’, in that the street façades are partly in an industrial red brick. The wood-clad upper storeys have a barrel-shaped overhang, and are topped with solar panels and multicoloured chimneys, a spout-cowl vaguely like a hen’s crest. At the edge of the estate is a combined power station running on the estate’s own waste, which also has a café and a social centre. The architects, Bill Dunster, and the designers of the energy-generating system, BioRegional, both have offices on site. Most ‘sustainable’ developments are fudges of various kinds, well-insulated but concrete-framed blocks, but this one really does what it claims; it really is an entire estate that is self-sufficient in energy. Whatever one’s opinion of the ethics or political efficacy of ‘opting out’ of a carbon-generated national grid – my view is probably fairly predictable – this place has had the courage of its convictions. It’s notable how it has had practically no successors.
This isn’t just the project of some ‘green entrepreneurs’, though, but in theory a full-scale social housing estate. How much does it actually work as such? It may be foolhardy to make generalizations on brief acquaintance, but there were ample semiotic clues that some might have moved here because of Lifestyle (those growing their own veg on the balconies), and others because they had got lucky on the waiting list (those with St George flags covering most of the floor-to-ceiling windows). Remarkably for a place so surrounded by desolation, there’s a lot of people milling around. That might be a consequence of the scheme’s density, which feels pretty odd in front of a great big scrubby expanse, but comes over as quite genuinely warm, or maybe that’s just by comparison. The most memorable effect is created by the pedestrian route under the arched overhead walkways, where half of what you can see has been overrun by greenery. The car-free spaces feel genuinely permeable and relaxed; you are even trusted to wander around the walkways without any gating. If, as is surely the case, a zero-carbon economy entails a massive new industrial revolution, then this place might be a genuine paragon. Yet it is so obviously an enclave that it’s hard to sustain the optimism; it may in fact just be a new incarnation of the cool, exclusive modernist suburbia of St Bernard’s, albeit with a ‘social’ percentage. Libertarian bores might like to complain about sustainability regulations, but the point remains that there is still only one BedZED in the UK, and it’s tucked away in Beddington, without a night bus. It’s hard to imagine the coalition building more.
The Future (Pessimistic)
As a case in point, neighbouring Hackbridge, which the Whigs are claiming as a ‘sustainable suburb’, contains two large new blocks in the most banal and debased Urban Renaissance idiom: both taking up tight corner sites, both heavily overdeveloped, both of them just concrete frames encased in ‘friendly’ yellow-brick cladding. The area around is a particularly odd outer-London landscape, where factories and village closes sit next to each other without the intervention of zoning regulations. As you cross the thin, marshy River Wandle, there is a small, mildly Brutalist estate of low-lying blocks of flats, pebbly concrete and white weatherboarding. Most of them pull back away from the river, leaving a quiet public space where they could have maximized rental value. Then there’s an incongruous cul-de-sac of breeze-block flat-roofed cottages in the East Tilbury manner, then an acre or so of achingly Neighbourhood-Watched subtopia, before you eventually arrive in Carshalton.
Carshalton is, I’m told, the real Big Society enthusiast in the area, itching to deregulate and voluntarize itself so long as the TfL buses still pass through. As a village that was evidently swallowed up by London later than many others, this is another place that feels sharply like an enclave, a place carved out by its inhabitants as a way of remaining genteel within the Wen’s outer circles. At first it’s indistinguishable from the 1930s ribbon development all around, with the PFI college (‘Carshalton College – Realising Ambitions’) easily imaginable in Hackney. Less typical are the little weatherboarded houses and Garden Suburb closes, and least typical of all is the central feature of Carshalton – its ponds, pretty expanses framed by what looks like one-part fishing village to one-part John Betjeman Surrey utopia. The high street just off here has the sort of picturesque curve and dip that puts an extra few thousand on the price of property; surely those living here put ‘Surrey’ rather than ‘London’ on their correspondence, so convincing is the village illusion. Of course some in this place enjoy the idea of running their own public services, putting in a bit of time en route to the golf course. A Union Jack hangs from a window in this enclave, to complement the flag of St George in the other enclave at Beddington.
We’re now out of Greater Croydon, out of the Tramlink’s remit, although ten minutes on the bus takes us to West Croydon’s carceral bus station, from which we embark to Valley Park, the site of the former Croydon Power Station, now IKEA. Inner Croydon might feel like a fairly urban and dense place, but that’s all absolutely exploded here, just a short distance away. Shed after neon-lit Shed, all of them enormous outlets for sundry retail chains, all of them with a great expanse of car parking in front. It’s the exact sort of disurbanism that the last twenty years of planning policy has purported (not always entirely honestly) to oppose, and hence the exact sort that is supposed to pioneer ‘recovery’, after the planning regulations have been sufficiently dismantled. BedZED and this place are surely diametrically opposed in every possible way, but then it hasn’t been unusual over the last two decades to find strip malls abutting sustainable Millennium Villages. Even with that in mind, there’s something especially foul about Valley Park, an inescapable pall of menace. The chimneys of the Power Station now decorate IKEA, a place dedicated to interior design, to keeping one’s own house in order, and letting all outside it go to hell.
