Broadgate recycled

The proposal to demolish two 1980s office buildings at Broadgate in the City of London, and replace them by a new HQ for Swiss Bank UBS, designed by Ken Shuttleworth's practice Make, is making waves in London architectural and development circles. The Twentieth Century Society is lobbying for the existing buildings to be preserved.

In an interview with the Architects' Journal, Shuttleworth is quoted as saying that 'office buildings are commodities not monuments'. This is consistent with what the City of London's head of planning Peter Rees has been saying for years: that the City needs to churn its building stock to suit what businesses need, and that the last thing it needs is to be filled up with new buildings that can't be knocked down when their time is up.

An obvious question is begged by the objections to demolition: if an important business like UBS wants a big new building in the City, where do the objectors suggest that they go? The building stock in central London, out as far as somewhere between zone 1 and zone 2, has ossified to the extent that the number of possible development sites is severely limited. Anything older than the Second World War is now as likely as not to be proclaimed a 'heritage asset' unsuitable for demolition and redevelopment, even if not listed or in a conservation area. Until a couple of years ago, my rule of thumb for the cut-off point was the First World War; from this latest news, it appears the pace is accelerating, and the new age limit may be the First Iraq War.

In practice, the only substantial sites in central London that are unquestionably plausible for large-scale redevelopment are those that have big post-war buildings on them that no one loves. Usually these buildings are bigger than their surroundings already, and development economics suggests a new building bigger than what is there - with the attendant planning difficulties.

Make's proposed building has been likened to 'a piece of kitchen equipment'. Presumably this is meant to be disparaging about its looks, but it is an interesting observation in another regard. It tends to be the very oldest kitchen equipment that is replaced by the new - that sounds like the natural order of things. But with buildings in central London, it has become the other way round - only the newest buildings are allowed to be replaced.

Broadgate is a special place, and a special case - it would be a shame to see some of the original buildings go. But the controversy is symptomatic of the fact that as the pressure for the preservation of old buildings (and their 'settings', and the settings of their settings) has had more and more success, 'conservation creep' has gone too far.

Blue is the colour

The Barclays Cycle Superhighway is coming soon to an arterial road near you – the example above is at Millbank near Tate Britain.

That Bob Diamond certainly earns his money. Any advertisement more than about half a square metre in size needs planning permission. Any new development that affects the ‘setting of a listed building’ is pored over endlessly and in minute detail by the planners to decide if it is appropriate. But I doubt whether consent of any kind was needed for this scheme, which covers several square miles of premium London highway, no doubt passing through a few conservation areas on the way, with Barclays' corporate colours. Money well spent for them. It might have been worse if it had all been sponsored by Orange, but what happens when Barclays pull the plug? Let’s hope there is a bond covering the cost of scraping it all off.

The public squalor of London's eyesores

London's worst eyesores are not for the most part buildings in decent nick that you may or may not like - they are things that are in a mess because of neglect.

It would be great if public money could be spent on sorting out a few of the most outstanding, and most longstanding, examples in time for the Olympics. Here are three suggestions. Each is something that when I moved to London as a student about 30 years ago, I naively assumed was work in progress at that time, since they looked so decrepit then - but in each case, they remain as bad today as they were then.



















First, the Hungerford car park on the South Bank. SIXTY YEARS after the Festival of Britain, parts of the site of that great event remains a cat's cradle of public realm confusion - and at its heart the Hungerford car park: in 1951 the Transport Pavilion, but today, after endless squabbles that have got nowhere, a shabby mess and a visual embarrassment at the heart of one of the capital's principal destinations for visitors.














Secondly, the entrance to Highbury and Islington tube station - used by millions every year, now an interchange with the Overground too, at the heart of a lively and prosperous area. The entrance area has the feel and visual quality of the back entrance to something unimportant, with a prefab style station facing a prefab style back elevation of a post office building, the two given a certain coherence by the accumulations of decades of mechanical and electrical equipment installed with maximum thoughtlessness. The sad remains of a single pilaster of the grand Victorian station, seen above to the left of the entrance, offer a poignant reminder that caring about the look of everyday infrastructure used to be more than a minority interest.

Thirdly - the Hogarth roundabout flyover at Chiswick, the west London road network's answer to a Thorpe Park ride, ideally located to impress foreign visitors on their way in from Heathrow. Apparently made of Meccano and roofing felt, it looks like something the Royal Engineers could be half proud of - if they had put it up in a day or two with a view to using it for a week or two. It was built in 1969 as a temporary measure. Presumably someone tightens up the bolts occasionally, but it certainly makes me nervous when I drive over it. Sorting it out has obviously been in the 'too hard' tray on someone's desk for a few decades.

Not all of London can look spiffy, and a big city needs places for tattiness - such as the lower Lea Valley as it was until 2005, when few people went there and businesses unknown to HMRC could carry on in peace and quiet. The places described above are different - they are used or seen by tens of thousands of passers by every day.

A good use of public funds is to lift the look of places by tackling messes in prominent locations like these that can never be sorted out by the private sector. In time for the Olympics please.

Put Out More Flags (but not in WC2)

Loads of Union Jacks in the Mall today, probably something to do with the Royal Wedding. But only a couple of weeks ago, traders in Covent Garden were being told not to display Union Jacks, apparently because they were being shown on 'low quality products'. Low quality products of other kinds seem not to have been forbidden. Rum. One can see why the owners of Covent Garden wouldn't want it to end up looking like the east end of Oxford Street, but can it really be the national flag that is lowering the tone?

About 30 years ago, a UK-based American Playboy executive , Victor Lownes, had the tops of the railings to his Mayfair mansion picked out with gold paint - only to be told that this was not acceptable and that they would have to revert to the usual black. Why? Because it was 'vulgar'. He pointed out that the Queen had them around Buckingham Palace. That, he was told, was an entirely different matter.

Taste, it seems, is all about context.

Chippo and chips on the beach at Margate

To Margate on a hot and sunny bank holiday Monday to see the newly opened Turner Contemporary (no 'The', no 'Gallery'), designed by architect of the moment David Chipperfield ('Chippo' to the Architects' Journal).

Chipperfield's project replaced a more ambitious and more obviously 'iconic' proposal by Norwegian architects Snøhetta for a new pebble-shaped gallery building rising out of the water just off the stone pier - a perfect reflection, one might think with hindsight, of pre-credit crunch extravagance (the pebble scheme was abandoned amidst stories of spiralling costs) giving way to the 'new austerity', of which Chippo's architecture is said to be representative.

Some reviews have expressed disappointment with the building's reticence, but I found the approach refreshing. Along the coast at Sheerness is a famous example of the 'Functional Tradition' from which so many English architects have drawn inspiration - the 1850s Boat Store, built for the Admiralty. One could place Chipperfield's building in the tradition of 'knowing' architecture inspired by that earlier tradition - doing what is appropriate, in this case without the rhetoric found in some of his cultural projects abroad. His sketch diagram of the project, available as a postcard in its shop, is so banal as to make you wonder just how hard architecture can be. But if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

On our visit a lively and varied crowd were enjoying themselves in the galleries and social spaces inside and outside. It felt like it could become a real local institution, living up to the implication of the website's description of Turner Contemporary as an organisation rather than a gallery. Margate has its problems, which are plain to see on a day trip, but you don't need to agonize about whether or not there could ever be a 'Bilbao effect' here, to have an optimistic view of the potential for a place like this to help a town like this improve itself.

















At the other end of the beach there is a surprising work by another well known architect - a Beaux Arts 1920s railway station designed by a young Maxwell Fry, later a prominent purveyor of white modernism. Its listing description, more colourfully than many such, says 'Fry went on to loudly embrace the international modern style, one of the first native-born architects to do so in England. He later became coy about his years with Southern Railways.'

If you sailed more or less due north from here across the Thames estuary, you would come to Felixstowe where last year I came across a similar case - but in reverse - of a tyro work showing stylistic interests rather different from what you might expect - the young classicist-to-be Raymond Erith involved, also in the 1920s, in a strikingly modern church design.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind. But the architectural profession tends to rather tribal stylistic allegiances, now as then, so stories like this are particularly pleasing.

The art of objection

An evening attending a local authority planning committee meeting leaves you tired, thirsty and headachey. It almost always involves passages of carpetchewing tedium, interspersed if you are lucky with high drama and/or a few laughs. Often, there is a need to bite one's tongue in the face of lies, incompetence or flagrant idiocy.

But nevertheless, it is good for the soul, and reminds those of us who are involved in making planning applications of what 'due process' can include.

The goings on at such a meeting recently led me to reflect on whether objectors are better advised to behave reasonably, or to overegg their grievance for dramatic effect. On offer from objectors were, amongst other things (1) an articulate, well-informed account of the pros and cons of a scheme, concluding that on balance it should not be accepted and (2) a shouty rant. If you want to get something stopped - and of course the same spectrum of kinds of objection can be found in what people submit in writing - which is the more effective strategy? I'm not sure that the answer is obvious - it would make a good research project.

Growth + localism = trouble

Many have pointed out that the coalition's 'localism' and 'growth' agendas are on a collision course. The doublethink that is involved was identified a while back by the late political philosopher Jerry Cohen who lamented so-called conservatives who 'blather on about warm beer and old maids cycling to church and then they hand Wal-Mart the keys to the kingdom'.

The rise of nimbyism has coincided with that of planning policies about 'town centre first', building on brownfield land before green field etc. If high density mixed use walkable neighbourhoods are the goal, then things need to be built close to, if not actually in, people's back yards. Thirty years ago, we were building supermarkets and business parks well away from anywhere that anyone lived, and well away from anywhere nice.

The downside of prioritising the preferences of the nimbies could be more hypermarkets on the ring road. An alternative upside model would be to build some proper new towns.