Posts Tagged Conservation
Saturday interview: Fiona Reynolds, National Trust director general
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2011
National Trust chief Fiona Reynolds believes planning law is the biggest test yet of the government's claim to be green, and is leading the backlash against the plans
I sit in the beer garden of a Cotswold pub – long before it opens – on a perfect autumn morning. Strands of spiders' silk, untethered from their webs, float through the air, visible only for a second when they catch a glint of sunlight. The leaves on the trees look golden in this light, and the fields stretch out in front as far as you can see. Could there be anywhere more beautiful than right here, right now? Count yourself lucky, you think, for England's green and pleasant land. And for its planning laws.
"I know we're sitting in a very privileged part of the countryside now, in terms of landscape," says Dame Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, as she sits down on a picnic bench and tries to get her collie-spaniel cross Lucy to sit too, "but this has all been protected through good planning and the moment you let good planning go, it's lost for ever." Reynolds doesn't have the look of a victorious warrior returning from battle – she is far too measured for that – but she could be allowed a small, self-satisfied smile at the firestorm the National Trust helped inflict on the government's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) consultation. Reynolds took the step – for the first time in her 11 years at the National Trust – of writing to all four million members and asking them to support its campaign against the consultation that could be the biggest change to planning regulation in several decades. Most potentially devastating, the Trust warned, was prioritising economic growth over longterm protection of the countryside when it came to planning decisions. Their petition was signed by more than 200,000 people and David Cameron stepped in and wrote to the National Trust, pledging to protect the "beautiful British landscape." The consultation closed last week, and the months of waiting have begun. "We've just got to hope the government is really listening. I'm passionate about protecting the countryside, and the need to get it right. If you get it wrong what you lose, you lose for ever."
She says she was "hugely impressed" by the response of the National Trust's members. "I think it's one of those things about our nation – and we're a very urban society now – but we do love the countryside, it's something that seems to be part of our character and our sense of what England is. I think people were shocked, particularly that a Conservative-led government should appear not to be passionate about the countryside. It just felt wrong."
The coalition is "so preoccupied with growth and of course we have every sympathy with that, but it's about what kind of growth, what kind of economy, and in a way the recession has given us a chance to think about the quality of what we do. We have 330,000 houses with planning permission that aren't being built because there is no money for mortgages, so the problems in a way are elsewhere. But given that we have a chance to build really well and intelligently – in a way a recession is a time to think positively about that. That's the disappointing thing: they felt they had to press the old 'growth at any cost' button."
The National Trust isn't a campaigning organisation, she says, and isn't about to become one, despite occasional forays onto the battlefield – it objected to the expansion of Stansted airport, for example, and against the government's proposed forests sell-off.
"[Campaigning] is dependent on the issue," she says. "I would not expect us to be doing it all the time. If we became rentaquote, that wouldn't be right. We reserve our voice for something that is really important, absolutely at the heart of our core purpose and touches what we stand for and where we make a difference. This felt like the single most important issue in the time I have been here. I think we should campaign on issues that are central to what we do and I suspect it would be rare, but when we make a contribution it matters. I think this is what this has shown." It is a "caricature", says Reynolds, that the National Trust is against all development. "We recognise we need housing, schools, the physical buildings where these things happen. Our big question is how we do it."
The National Trust is the biggest private landowner and biggest NGO, with an estimated one in 10 voters a member. Reynolds is head of a huge powerbase. Does this make her the most powerful woman in Britain? She laughs. "I wouldn't say that. I'm the luckiest woman in Britain because I have the best job in the country."
Are politicians frightened of her? "I don't know about frightened. I think they are listening, and that's absolutely right. I think the National Trust stepping up on this issue really made them think, and that's a good thing. They did the wrong thing with it by giving it this economic slant. I hope that our intervention will get us to a proper balance between social, environment and economic objectives. They're listening," she adds, "but we're not there yet. We don't know the outcome."
David Cameron's promise that his would be the greenest government ever is met by a small laugh. "I've yet to see it, put it that way. You can only judge a government by what it does. This is a big test and they haven't failed it yet because it was only a draft consultation, but it has to change significantly to deliver what the country needs."
When Reynolds was a child, growing up in Alston in Cumbria, her parents would take her to National Trust properties. She became a member of the organisation while she was still at Cambridge, where she did an MPhil in land economy. "I never thought I would end up running it, but I've always been intrigued by the National Trust. I love the sense of purpose. I love an organisation that has a long view back, but also a long view forward. We say to people we are going to look after places for ever for everyone, and I believe we will."
At 53, Reynolds has been in the job since 2001. "Now I'm suddenly feeling quite old," she says. "It's a bit of a shock, really. When I started, my children were small and now they're growing up." Her husband, a teacher, "did the stay at home bit. I couldn't have done this job as somebody who was also trying to be the number one carer, so I was very lucky that he was willing to do that, because it is very, very hard to be a mother and have a big job, to pursue a career. I know lots of people who found that impossible."
It's perhaps the main reason, she says, why there are so few women at her level. Does she think it is getting easier? "I wouldn't say it's getting easier, but it's becoming more acceptable to have unconventional arrangements at home. But I don't think it's that much better for women. It's that age-old tension – even if you're not physically responsible for the children, you're emotionally thinking 'should I be there?' or 'I'm missing that sports day – again.'"
Reynolds worked at the Council for National Parks, then the Council to Protect Rural England, before spending two years as director of the women's unit at the cabinet office under Tony Blair. When she got the job as director general of the National Trust, she was accused of being one of "Tony's cronies", though she insists she was not on social terms with the then-prime minister. But still, her appointment was controversial. "I was the youngest director general and the first woman, and it would have been surprising if people hadn't gone 'hmm'. But I hope my track record spoke for itself, and now my track record from being there for 11 years – we've done some great things."
Membership – and income – has swelled under her directorship, and the organisation is steadily modernising. She acknowledges "nobody will ever agree with everything the Trust does, I learned that early on. It's not an organisation that in the detail of what we do we can please everybody, and it's impossible to try." For instance, the Trust was accused of "dumbing down" (and "Disney-fying") for its recent efforts to, as Reynolds puts it, "bring houses to life" by dressing guides up and recreating scenes in rooms. "I'm completely unrepentant, because I think our job is to make history appealing and accessible to a new generation who haven't all learned history in school. Provided you are telling the truth and there's an integrity, so you're not simplifying or glossing over difficult stories in order to make something sound nice, I don't think it's dumbing down at all."
But isn't "glossing over difficult stories" what the National Trust became expert at doing? It is only in recent years, for instance, that the National Trust has acknowledged how many of its properties were built on fortunes from slavery. "I think we recognise that we didn't always tell all the stories," she says, adding that it is changing. "If you go to properties now you will see much more about where the fortune came from that built the house, some of the slavery issues. We are prepared to tell the more difficult stories as well."
I've always felt too nose-up-against-the-window in most National Trust houses I've been to, and an unease at the worship of its original aristocratic owners a visit seemed to demand.
"I'm not sure it's worshipping," says Reynolds. "I think it's curiosity. People are really intrigued by it. If you go to the back-to-backs [former slum housing in Birmingham acquired by the National Trust], people are just as enthralled by them. There, for a lot of people, you could think, 'that might well have been me', whereas in a great stately home, you think, 'actually I would probably have been the scullery maid'."
The family membership has swelled, Reynolds points out, which makes the demographic younger. There is still much room for improvement, though. I suspect low-income families are still a rarity – quite aside from the entry prices, it can be impossible to get to many properties on public transport – and Reynolds admits there are few ethnic minority members. "I freely recognise that, and we've been working with properties that are either located in urban areas, or close to large areas of different populations. For example, Wightwick Manor in the west Midlands is surrounded by a huge Sikh and Afro-Caribbean community, and they have been working specifically on how to involve their local community."
Providing people with access to nature still underpins the Trust's original purpose. "We're very concerned about [people decreasing contact with nature]," says Reynolds. "One of our founders, Octavia Hill, said something like 'the need of air, the sight of sky and all things growing seem human needs common to all'. She was saying it's as important to have access to beauty, and the ability to get out into the countryside – that's as important as the roof over your head and something to eat. Which comes back to the planning issue. I've got shelves of books at home about the early-20th-century and the conservation movement beginning, and through the 20s and 30s the Trust was very involved in establishing our planning system. It just felt right that we should be there now defending it."
Our time runs out and Reynolds has to go. My last glimpse of her is in silhouette as she strides across open fields, her dog racing off in front towards the sun.
In praise of… gasometers | Editorial
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 20, 2011
Large iron tanks filled with gas floated up during the day, then sank back down
Something has gone missing in the view from the Guardian's King's Cross offices: a developing wasteland of trucks, cranes and railway tracks. The last of the great gasometers which cast their shadows over this bit of north London for a century and a half has been taken down. A neoclassical Victorian circus in cast iron, caught between King's Cross and St Pancras stations, it was an unquestionably beautiful industrial relic. Listed by English Heritage, which is insisting on their reconstruction nearby, the King's Cross gasometers were the finest examples of a very simple piece of technology. Large iron tanks filled with gas floated up during the day, then sank back down as they released it to homes in the evening. Of course if anyone proposed building something as huge and potentially explosive in the middle of cities today there would be outrage; but some gasholders lasted long enough to be loved. It would be hard to imagine the Oval cricket ground without them. Very few of those that survive are in use; some, such as the King's Cross gasometers, are set to be converted into flats or (in the case of the last to come down) a park. The modern gas system doesn't need them – but it does need more storage. On average the country has only two weeks' gas in reserve; in a cold winter that can come down to less than a week. By contrast, Germany has 99 days' worth in reserve. Perhaps those King's Cross museum pieces will one day be returned to their old use.
Battle for City’s Broadgate site hots up
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 9, 2011
William Hill giving odds that Jeremy Hunt will not save 'historic' 1980s complex from demolition for new UBS headquarters
Expectations have increased that furious lobbying from the City is likely to prevent the listing of the 1980s-built complex in Broadgate that has become a tug of war between financiers and conservationists.
For the first time bookmaker William Hill has opened a book on a building listing and is giving 4-7 that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt will not save the complex.
English Heritage last week recommended that the entire 1980s development, designed by architect Peter Foggo, be given statutory protection at Grade II* level, dealing a major blow to British Land's plans to tear down 4 and 6 Broadgate to make way for a new "groundscraper" building that would house a £340m headquarters for Swiss bank UBS.
Although the law states that the listing decision should be made on the basis of architectural and historic factors alone, Hunt is under pressure from the City of London corporation to ignore his official adviser and choose not to list it.
The City argues that the new scheme is vital to maintain confidence in it as a banking centre. Hunt's decision on Broadgate is due in about two months' time, after submissions from British Land, the local authority and other interested parties.
A spokesman for William Hill said this was the first time it had offered odds in a listing case. "We believe this decision will be as difficult to call as a photofinish but English Heritage needs to upset the odds to come out on top."
The City of London Corporation had approved British Land's 700,000 sq ft scheme, and building was to start this summer, with UBS planning to move in by 2014. The corporation's policy chairman, Stuart Fraser, is due to meet communities secretary Eric Pickles next week to lobby for the UBS building. He said: "The Broadgate buildings aren't worth preserving or listing. They aren't of great architectural merit. Listing Broadgate will send out the wrong message. UBS would probably give up. Eric Pickles is very keen on bureaucracy not getting in the way of economic development."
Catherine Croft, director of heritage group The Twentieth Century Society, which is campaigning in favour of listing, expressed surprise at the odds. "I think it is fairly extraordinary because it suggests that William Hill thinks factors other than the accepted criteria [for listing] may affect the minister's decision," she told weekly trade paper Building Design.
"City boys do like gambling of course but Hunt needs to make his decision on the basis of architectural and historic interest. It would be very wrong for him to be affected by any other factor."
Croft added that she believed there were many other locations in the City suitable for the proposed UBS building, which has been designed by one of the architects responsible for the Gherkin, Ken Shuttleworth of Make Architects.
The planned building, at 5 Broadgate, would boast four trading floors each capable of holding 750 traders and has been described by Shuttleworth as an "engine of finance" with a design resembling an immense machine-tooled block of aluminium.
A spokesman for Hunt's Department of Culture, Media and Sport, noted that it was responsible for regulating both heritage and gambling. "It is always good to see two areas of DCMS come together but, as we always say when it comes to gambling, don't bet more than you can afford to lose," he said.
English Heritage deals blow to £340m UBS office
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 4, 2011
Watchdog backs listing of Broadgate buildings, where the Swiss bank wants to demolish its existing HQ and build a new one
British Land's plans to build a new £340m headquarters for Swiss bank UBS at Broadgate in the City of London have been thrown into doubt after English Heritage recommended the listing of the site on Friday yesterday.
The watchdog said Broadgate Square, designed by Peter Foggo, then of Arup, in the 1980s, is "one of the most important and successful developments of its period and type, possessing special architectural and historic interest, and therefore should be listed at Grade II*".
It added: "Rare for commercial developments, people enjoy Broadgate Square – in this sense, it is a triumph of urbanism, a special place in the financial heart of the capital."
British Land and its private equity partner Blackstone want to knock down 4 and 6 Broadgate and replace them with a new European headquarters for UBS. It has argued strongly against a listing of the two buildings, which are less than 30 years old, saying they were not of high quality and did not possess sufficient special interest to warrant their listing.
The developer also pointed out that the Broadgate arena and octagon had been extensively altered in the last few years and that the arena, which houses an ice rink in the winter, sculptures and open spaces would be retained.
The decision is now in the hands of the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and is expected in about two months, after submissions from British Land, the local authority and other interested parties. Ministers accept the majority of English Heritage's recommendations, although last week they refused to endorse its advice to list the 1970s Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead, and in March overruled it on ABK's 1970s Redcar library.
The City of London Corporation had approved British Land's 700,000 sq ft scheme, and building was to start this summer, with UBS planning to move in by 2014. The corporation's policy chairman, Stuart Fraser, acknowledged that Broadgate Square "embodied the newfound dynamism of the Square Mile post-Big Bang," but went on to warn that listing the estate "would damage the City's reputation as a leading global financial centre".
British Land said: "A decision to list would block the £850m investment in Broadgate, raise the question of where to locate 7,000 permanent banking jobs and put at risk more than 5,000 construction jobs, which would be created over the next three to five years, along with the associated economic activity and growth it would generate.
"It would send out a message to the world that London is not 'open for business', undermining the City of London's status as a global business centre."
RIBA awards offer a bird’s eye view of British architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 18, 2011
Selections ranged from a Zaha Hadid-designed opera house in Guangzhou to a timber hideaway in the Lake District – and included two buildings designed for the RSPB
From a student-designed steel shelter set among pine trees in a Northumberland forest to the commercial might of Jean Nouvel's One New Change shopping mall in the City of London, 89 British buildings spanning the length and breadth of Britain have won a 2011 Royal Institute of British Architects award. Meanwhile 13 buildings, from the Guangzhou Opera House to the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, have received RIBA international awards. While this is a case of British architects working at home and abroad giving themselves a pat on the back, the RIBA awards are one of the few opportunities to highlight some of the very best new work carried out by architects who are little known and yet whose work is often very special.
So, while you may well have heard of some of this year's award winners – Zaha Hadid for the Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton as well as Guangzhou Opera House, Norman Foster for the Masdar Institute, Michael Hopkins for the 2012 Olympics Velodrome and Jean Nouvel for One New Change – others are not exactly household names. David Lea and Pat Borer? Peter Beard/Landroom? Sutherland Hussey?
In 2003 Sutherland Hussey, an Edinburgh-based practice whose partners have worked for James Stirling, Renzo Piano and Hadid, came to national prominence with their low-cost design for a beautiful ferry shelter on the island of Tiree; it won the Royal Incorporation of Scottish Architects award that year for the "most popular building in Scotland". Now, they have been allocated a RIBA award for Love Shack, a low-cost "eco-house" in the English Lake District with views over Lake Windermere. Happily you can rent this timber hideaway, and understand why the architects deserve the awards – and, perhaps, to be better known than they are.
This year's prizes have been won by a number of buildings that are truly sustainable and kind to the environment, both to their settings and to the wildlife that inhabits them. Any bird-lover will enjoy two special if low-key projects designed for the RSPB. These are the Marshland Discovery Zone, Purfleet by Peter Beard/Landroom and a new hide at Titchwell, Norfolk, by Haysom Ward Miller. I haven't been to the latter yet, but I do know the converted freight containers at Purfleet that have been turned into a superb bird-watching centre on the Essex marshes.
Set on piles, with sections of mesh floor, you are very aware of being out on the wilds of the marshes – the water and waterlife below you, including rare water voles, and the birdlife wheeling across the Rainham, Wennington and Aveley marshes so close to London: peregrines, avocets, lapwings, little egrets and ringed plovers among them.
In the wrong hands, and with the wrong architects, these haunting marshlands might have become acres of junk housing and other fastbuck Thames Gateway developments. The RSPB has preserved the land and been a friend to both birds and architecture. At Purfleet, you'll also find the fine RSPB shelter designed a few years ago by Van Heyningen Haward.
A school that is friendly to children, nature and teachers alike has also won a very deserving award. This is the Sandal Magna Community Primary School, Wakefield, by Sarah Wigglesworth, architect of the inspirational dance studio for Siobhan Davies that won a RIBA award in 2006, as well as the Straw House, a self-build that resembles and is partly made from a heap of bales. Another award goes this year to David Lea and Pat Borer's WISE building, Machynlleth, also known as the Wales Institute for Sustainable Education at the Centre for Alternative Technology. At the heart of this ultra-green complex is a 200-seat lecture theatre with rammed earth walls rising 7.2 metres – the tallest such structure in Britain and in every way a breath of fresh air.
Awards have also been given to the kind of big, brave (and sometimes brash) buildings that naturally grab the headlines, including the appropriately theatrical Guangzhou Opera House and Jean Nouvel's decidedly controversial One New Change in the City of London.
Now in their 46th year, the RIBA awards remain valid because they ensure that panels of local judges up and down the country get out to see buildings that might easily be overlooked. While this could never be true of an opera house by Hadid, it can all too easily be the fate of small and deliberately secret buildings such as the RSPB's hides, and forest treasures including the Shelter 55/02, created by the students of University College London.
Excalibur’s castles built from postwar dreams must not be demolished | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 7, 2011
The Excalibur prefab estate in south London may be scruffy, but it's a precious chapter in the nation's story worth preserving
As history, south London's Catford lacks pzazz. It has none of the raw brutalism of its neighbour, Lewisham, or the old world charm of Peckham. Sandwiched between Hither Green cemetery and the Ravensbourne ditch, it is one long aesthetic groan. But it nurtures in its bosom the largest surviving 1940s prefab estate in Britain, admirably named Excalibur. Lewisham council wants to throw it, like the fabled sword, into the lake of oblivion. This week Excalibur was declared fit only for demolition.
If this was Camden or Kensington or Islington such demolition would be unthinkable. Conservationist armies would rally round this eccentric enclave of 187 houses, complete with dig-for-victory outhouses and a curious tin-roofed church. But then if there were prefabs in those boroughs, they would have been demolished years ago. So is their surviving anywhere into the 21st century a vice or a virtue?
Prefabs were a blind alley of postwar rehousing. Churchill thought it a bright idea to use Spitfire factories to make components for mass-produced houses for people bombed out of their homes. They were bungalows of four rooms around a central service core, put down wherever a site was free, including if necessary a graveyard.
The project was a typical Whitehall cock-up. Five ministries were involved, delays mounted and costs soared. Originally priced at £500 each, which was already more than suburban semis had cost before the war, the prefabs cost £1,300. This meant they rented at 13 shillings, against a local council house at five shillings. Private and civic builders – who in France, Germany and Poland were busily restoring old homes – in Britain were starved of permits and resources, while Londoners squatted in ruins and slept in the underground.
Only 156,000 prefabs were eventually built, but they proved remarkably popular. They were not flats but "a home of our own". And they lasted. Though most were barely insulated wood frames, occupants were able to maintain them and keep them standing long after their official 10-year lives. Excalibur is the largest complete estate to survive, built by PoWs of Rommel's Afrika Korps before they returned to Germany.
This is today an extraordinary place. The demure terraces of south London give way to what might be a shack estate on Canvey Island. Both council tenants and owner-occupiers have decked their facades in fanlights, coaching lanterns and fake rustication. Gardens are crammed with gnomes and some have smart cars parked in front. The estate's champion, Jim Blackender, whose website is a model of community action, has bedecked his home as if expecting the England football team to arrive.
The whole enclave is an anarchic contrast to the anonymity of the system-built deck-access slabs that usually supplanted the prefabs, now being demolished as uninhabitable and impossible to maintain. The tenants of the vast Aylesbury estate across south London scream, "Get us out of here", but their salvation is expensive and endlessly postponed. Yet no ideologues are so dyed-in-the-wool as Britain's public housing officials, who have long regarded the chaotic individualism manifest in the prefab as intolerably antisocial and to be "designed out".
Lewisham council wants Excalibur gone. Residents were recently offered Hobson's choice, of agreeing to demolition and rehousing or the estate being sold to a private developer – and demolished. Even under such pressure only 56% opted for the first choice. The government has meekly listed six of the 187 for preservation, but none is worth preserving on its own. It would be like listing six houses in Belgrave Square. English Heritage has also refused to introduce conservation area control, on the strange grounds that "this would be imposing our view from above". Surely that is its job.
What to preserve is always a balance. This week a more celebrated prefab was in the news, Captain Scott's hut in the Antarctic. The appeal to preserve it in situ has raised more than £3m. Hardly anyone can ever see it. It could have been lifted, lock, stock and barrel, to the Science Museum. But it must be right to protect it where history and circumstance put it, a memorial to an extraordinary moment in world exploration.
So why not Catford? Conservation is enveloped in class. Labour housing ministers such as Yvette Cooper spent millions on consultants trying to demolish 19th-century streets in Merseyside and elsewhere, on the patronising grounds that old buildings were too good for working-class northerners. Much of London's housing was likewise declared unfit for human habitation after the war. From Chelsea through Camden and Shoreditch to the docks, there are terraces, mews and warehouses saved in the nick of time from the bulldozer, offering acceptable homes for rich and poor. Every property, even a prefab, has its price, as those who bought houses in Excalibur attest. Lewisham, like Cooper, is using a bulldozer where a chisel and screwdriver would do.
All historic buildings might be moved to museums to make way for something more profitable, or merely new. We could move old theatres, pubs, council chambers, even Shakespeare's birthplace. The whole of historic Britain could be dumped in a museum. Prefabs have already been moved to the Chiltern Open Air Museum and Avoncroft Museum in Worcestershire, where they look most odd.
We save buildings not just for their beauty. We save them for their visual variety and the memories they evoke in individuals and communities. I suppose the back alleys of Mayfair and the City of London, its churches, parks and squares, all get in the way of development. They serve no profitable purpose that cannot be supplied by a gherkin, a shard or a piazza. Yet we preserve them because we know they enrich the life of the city. They relieve its monotony and protect qualities of surprise and repose that modern design can no longer supply. There are no curved alleys or intimate lanes in today's architecture.
Excalibur is scruffy and working class. It probably offends a Niagara of government regulations. It costs someone's money to maintain and can, I am sure, evoke a pundit to say it is a reminder of a bad past. These arguments were used in the 1970s to fill in Southwark's Grand Surrey Canal with rubble, wiping out a slice of its people's history and an invaluable future amenity. The people of north London apparently merited a canal, but that was too dangerous for south Londoners.
We still find it hard to move forward without snapping the chains of the past. The prefab estate is a small piece of working-class history, no less worthy for not being conventionally beautiful. It is a chapter in the nation's story, when misguided, utopian bureaucrats came face to face with their own incompetence. Yet the result was a building that curiously struck a chord with a group of men and women who had been traumatised. They had lost the castles of their dreams, and now found them again. To walk around Excalibur today is to know this is still true. Like Scott's hut, it is a passing moment made permanent. It should not be demolished.
Letters: Prefabs, Fabs and mass demolition
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 6, 2011
The Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage are barking up the wrong tree in trying to "save" the prefab Excalibur estate in Lewisham (Anger over plans to demolish historic prefab estate, 3 January). The Excalibur residents' long struggle is a lesson about how people want to live together. It is not about preserving the fabric of damp, decaying homes well past their habitable lifetimes.
It is not a miracle that these homes have survived for so long. It is almost wholly due to hard work by the tenants and their management organisation. Stability and a supportive community at Excalibur grew from a feeling of "being in control", living in homes which are compact and easy to run, providing dignity and independence at an affordable rent.
Sadly, the pressures on housing in inner London don't encourage building detached bungalows. This has been taken on board by Excalibur residents, who for years have been developing plans to translate their ideals into achievable new homes, fit and decent, as they deserve.
Yes, let's study and respect the prefab history. A few examples to demonstrate one short-term solution, fitted to its time in the immediate devastation of war, would be better placed in a museum.
Caroline Mayow
London
• The campaign to save 9 Madryn Street is as much about stopping the council erasing an entire neighbourhood as about preserving Ringo Starr's birthplace (Comment, 4 January). The Ringo connection is important, and useful – as it grabs headlines – but the real story is the battle to stop a deluded council pursuing a regressive policy of mass demolition.
William Palin
Secretary, Save Britain's Heritage
Largest postwar prefab estate to be demolished
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 3, 2011
Campaigners say key piece of history will be lost after only six of 187 houses built by German and Italian PoWs listed
The UK's largest surviving estate of postwar prefab houses, described by conservationists as a unique slice of 20th-century social history, is set to be bulldozed and replaced by modern housing.
Only six of the 187 compact bungalows, erected from factory-built panels by German and Italian prisoners of war in 1945 and 1946, will be saved, after they received Grade-II listing last year. The remainder of the Excalibur estate in Catford, south-east London, will be demolished, along with its tin-roofed prefab church, St Mark's, believed to be one of a kind.
Campaigners say the planned redevelopment, formally approved by Lewisham council in September, will destroy a key piece of history from the aftermath of the second world war. The estate is the biggest surviving remnant of an ambitious project which saw 160,000 prefabs hurriedly erected during an acute housing shortage. Keeping just six, surrounded by hundreds of brand new houses and flats, would be pointless, they argue.
"This case shows a real gap in the historic protection legislation for 20th-century buildings," said Jon Wright from the Twentieth Century Society, which is urging English Heritage to step in and declare the entire estate a conservation area. "The overall planning and layout is far more important than just a few individual buildings. This is the only place in the country where you can still see an estate like this. It is very significant."
The local authority has long argued that the 55 sq metre (600 sq ft) houses, originally intended to last no more than a decade, are so basic it would be virtually impossible to bring them up to modern standards, a view shared by a number of residents, who are mainly council tenants.
But after a campaign by other locals to preserve the Excalibur, so called as the roads were named after characters from Arthurian legend, English Heritage recommended 21 homes be listed. The Department for Culture granted protection to six. Under current rules for 20th century properties, listing is reserved for buildings with few modifications while most Excalibur homes have – at the very least – replacement doors and windows.
English Heritage argued that the whole estate should be preserved by being named a conservation area. Officially, the organisation has the power to do this but is extremely wary of doing so against the wishes of the local council.
"It's a difficult situation," said a English Heritage spokeswoman. "Any conservation area would be administered by Lewisham and imposing our view from above would be quite drastic, particularly given the split of opinion among the residents."
But English Heritage was uncomfortable with the redevelopment, she added: "The estate is of huge historical significance overall, it's not just the individual listed properties. It will feel quite odd to just have a small group remaining, surrounded by modern houses. It would not be particularly rosy from a conservation point of view."
The Department for Culture said it could do no more. A spokesman said: "Apart from the listed houses, if it's the decision of the local authority to demolish the estate, that's pretty well it. It's local democracy and there's only so much central interference you can do."
Lewisham polled Excalibur residents earlier this year and 56% of them favoured redevelopment. The issue has polarised local opinion, with pro-conservation householders claiming a "yes" vote was inevitable as there was no prospect of the council spending money on modernising the prefabs, leaving tenants with a choice of accepting demolition or remaining in a damp, cold, outdated home.
For English Heritage the situation is reminiscent of the 60s and 70s when thousands of Victorian homes were demolished, dismissed as impossible to renovate for modern life.
"The difference is, there were still lots of Victorian buildings left but there are not many prefabs. It's possible that in 20 years' time people will think differently about them. But that's going to be too late for the Excalibur," said the spokeswoman.
They saved our Victorian cities. Now they are demolishing my prejudices | Simon Jenkins
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
Perhaps one day a 21st Century Society battling to preserve Canary Wharf will emulate the heroes of our Victorian heritage
From Trafalgar Square walk down Whitehall to Downing Street and stop. From this point on, the government in the 1960s wanted you to enter somewhere quite different, a British Stalingrad of concrete and glass slabs stretching to Westminster Abbey and Victoria Street. It was to obliterate acres of the city where now stand the Foreign Office, the Treasury, Richmond Terrace and New Scotland Yard, as far as the houses of parliament and across to St James's Park.
Nor was that all. The Mall was to be lined with more slabs and decks, like London Wall in the City. The Strand was to become a dual carriageway, and Covent Garden vanish under a forest of office towers. British Rail was to rebuild St Pancras, Paddington and Victoria to look like Euston. The centres of Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester were to be demolished, replaced by something like central Birmingham or Nottingham's Maid Marian Way.
We have forgotten, who ever knew, how close familiar Britain came in the 60s to going the way of eastern Europe. Those who regarded themselves as in the van of taste wanted British cities demolished. The architecture and town planning professions, led by the Royal Institute of British Architects, were almost universally destructive. Victorian Britain was derided as ugly, largely because it stood in the way of fees. Scorn was heaped on Gilbert Scott's Foreign Office and his St Pancras hotel. The only Victorian buildings mostly left sacrosanct were places of worship. Nobody could afford to rebuild them.
To celebrate its 50th birthday, the Victorian Society has published Victorians Revalued, a book recalling its battle honours. It is a noble record. Back in the 60s the society was the SAS of the conservation movement. It was founded after the demolition of the Euston Arch in 1961, a vandalism personally approved by the philistine Harold Macmillan, desperate to appear modern. Two environment ministers, Geoffrey Rippon and Peter Walker, planned to demolish the "government precinct", including the Foreign Office, and the entire eastern side of Bishopsgate in the City. The architects Leslie Martin and Colin Buchanan proposed to flatten the south end of Whitehall from Downing Street to the river, and the houses of parliament.
Five years of relentless campaigning by the Victorian Society defeated most of these plans. At the same time, with Nikolaus Pevsner and John Betjeman in lead, the society saved St Pancras. Next came a signal triumph over the Greater London Council at Covent Garden. In Liverpool, battle was joined against Graeme Shankland's plan to demolish the entire city centre, at the same time as T Dan Smith's Newcastle started to vanish under the wrecker's ball.
The story of these campaigns reads like a history of the Great War. Lost were the battles of Eaton and Trentham halls, the Coal Exchange and Barings bank in the City, the Imperial Institute in Kensington, Birmingham's Central library and Leeds's Park Row. Won were the battles of Carlton House Terrace, Covent Garden, King's Cross and Liverpool's Albert Dock. A climax came in 1974 with the V&A's sensationally successful 1974 exhibition, The Destruction of the English Country House. Before then a house was being destroyed almost every week; afterwards destruction virtually ceased. Never was art more potent.
It is hard in retrospect to appreciate how cliff-edge were these David and Goliath contests, and how desperately alone were the Davids. Against them were big money, big government and big architecture. The RIBA represented not a profession, let alone an art, but a financial lobby. At public inquiries, developers and architects called witnesses to argue for demolition – often corrupt art historians – whose payments were never revealed. Those whose sole concern was public aesthetics had to use their own time and money. Time and again they won. The survival of Victorian Britain was their reward.
The story was not just public against private interest. It needed a revolution in taste. The architectural historian Harry Goodhart-Rendel lectured in the 30s that "it was well-known that Victorian architecture was either bad or screamingly funny, or both". A National Trust secretary wrote in 1954 of the "vulgarity" of the Rothschild palace of Waddesdon, "artificially plonked on a pristine English landscape in all its horror".
John Summerson, while exulting in London's regimented Georgian terraces, replied to Betjeman's plea to help save St Pancras that he found the place "as a whole nauseating". Even today Colin Cunningham, the Victorian Society's former chairman, writes that "there are still a good many art enthusiasts for whom anything between Robert Adam and the Arts and Crafts movement is vulgar and undesirable".
What crippled the reputation of Victorian architecture was the identification of progress with clearance and modernism, with minimalist abstraction and whiteness. Old buildings were places of soot and gloom. To like them was a political statement, redolent of outdated mansions, outdated railways, outdated municipalism and outdated religion.
Many factors brought about a change. The charm of Betjeman's poetic propaganda depicted the 19th century not as grimly Dickensian but as quaint and loveable (helped by ITV's Upstairs Downstairs). Clean air and restoration revealed the decorative subtlety of the Victorians' gothic and classical themes. Even Summerson repented. "Surfeited as we are with the fruits of the Modern movement," he wrote, "with its boring slabs and daunting towers, everything Victorian has a delicious impact of strangeness and curiosity." Faced with the sheer tedium of most modern architecture, the 19th century seemed rich, colourful and lively.
Yet this story raises an intriguing question. Just as the 20th century eye detested the aesthetic inheritance of the 19th, so are we being accustomed to detest the inheritance of the 20th century? As we delight in Butterfield and Waterhouse, Pugin and Millais, Burne-Jones and Morris, are we ignoring some obscure subtlety in Lasdun, Seifert, Spence, Foster and Rogers?
I cannot believe it. Most, if not all, buildings erected in Britain between 1940 and 1980 seem to me bland computer-designed concrete and glass shapes on which no aesthetic eye has ever deigned to fall. Like Summerson, I find such towers and blobs lack respect for urban context or human scale. I long for Victorian qualities of decorative warmth and intimacy so lacking in the Modernist revival.
Yet the lesson I draw from the story of the Victorian Society is of humility to the recent past. Perhaps I need educating in the virtues of soaring towers and unadorned surfaces. Perhaps one day a 21st Century Society will struggle to preserve Canary Wharf, when its girders rust, its glass cracks and grass grows over its concrete decks – preserve it against a retro-Victorian developer and a Poplar Portmeirion.
Perhaps I should admit that we are all children of our time and place. But I still salute the warriors who saved Whitehall.
Response: Upgrading Broadmoor’s old buildings is not in patients’ best interests
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 24, 2011
NHS money will be better spent on redeveloping safer, up-to-date facilities
Your article, Battle to save Broadmoor buildings from demolition (10 October), explains the Victorian Society's rationale for including the hospital in its top 10 endangered buildings list. It doesn't, however, address the challenge of how to provide patients with the modern mental healthcare services they need in a cost-efficient way within a Victorian infrastructure. Tasked with improving on the average six-year length of stay for patients, West London Mental Health NHS Trust is seeking to manage this challenge through a carefully planned and environmentally sensitive redevelopment.
"We're not denying that [the Victorian buildings] may not be suitable for a modern psychiatric hospital," states the Victorian Society. They are not alone in this view; numerous official reports have deemed the fabric of the hospital "unfit for purpose". As your article states, the hospital was built in 1863, and was seen at the time as providing "an enlightened approach to care". However, psychiatric treatments have progressed radically in the past 148 years – and the environment in which this care takes place should be updated too.
As one of only three high-security hospitals in England, Broadmoor must be fit for purpose. As well as treating patients in a secure setting and ensuring public safety, it is imperative that the building is compatible with 21st-century design, thus ensuring patients' recovery is managed in an environment that is safe for those who work here.
In your piece, the society suggests that it might be "better to develop some of the yucky modern buildings that litter the grounds" of Broadmoor, yet our patients have benefited tremendously from these newer structures. Today, secure mental healthcare is generally conducted in purpose-built hospitals. These facilities have no ligature points, or T- or L-shaped corridors with poor visibility – instead, newer buildings provide natural light and space and have easy access to a range of treatment facilities.
The trust has a responsibility to ensure NHS resources are properly deployed, and this includes financial diligence. Spending public resources on upgrading outdated buildings with high running costs is not a good use of taxpayers' money, when the proposed redevelopment will not only reduce running costs but also deliver lasting improvements for the hospital's environment, services and the local community.
The society wants to save the hospital's listed buildings. Since our earliest redevelopment proposals, we've developed a strong working relationship with English Heritage and assured them that no listed buildings will be demolished.
The Victorian buildings' conversion into a hotel, mentioned in your article, remains a possibility. But one of our priorities is to ensure that a suitable alternative use is found for them, which will preserve their heritage and be an asset to the local community. The trust's proposals for this vital redevelopment enable us to strike a balance between our needs and the desire to preserve our heritage.
Architecture, Art and design, Comment, Comment is free, Conservation, Culture, Health, Heritage, Mental health, Society, The Guardian
No Comments