Rip It Up and Start Again 2010

Rip It Up #1 What is the Contemporary City Made of? Owen Hatherley 14.10.10

KIERAN LONG: Owen’s here, I'm really grateful to Owen Hatherley for being here this evening to speak to us, but before he starts I just want to spend a couple of minutes talking by way of introduction. A bit about last week, and perhaps the meaning of last week in the context of this week, and then introducing Owen who wasn’t here last week, so it also will help him to understand the journey we’re on with Rip it Up and Start Again and with these first two lectures in particular. Because we sort of think of it as a kind of soap opera and this is a catch up. I don’t know how good I’ll be. Is Peter in the room? That's good because when I get it all... when I terribly misrepresent him, he won’t get too angry. But the reason I was able to do this is that we have a transcript and we have recordings of the lectures and we will be doing this stuff on line, but we don’t know when yet and the point is to be here in the room of course. So we’re... I'm really happy there are so many people here again and that's credit to you all and to Owen and that's a good start. But Peter’s challenge to us last week was to ask this question of, “What is a city for?” And he asked it in many, many different ways and I tried to make a few bullet points, which I think might help us kind of navigate some of the lectures that are to come, the evenings that are to come in the series. Perhaps it can kind of best be summarised by his theory about how various architectural approaches have, as he said, flattened the richness of the city in to kind of concepts. And a lot of that bears on the way we as architecture students, or people involved in the world of architecture, speak about the city and then how we operate on it. And he made six points, if you remember, it was quite hard to follow the second or third actually, some of you might remember that too, but there were six. The first was the Renaissance Distinction. The renaissance happens and then suddenly there's a distinction between the life of the city and the buildings of the city. This was one, in his words, conceptual flattening that he mentioned. The second, a Reciprocity Between Technology and Art that appears in the renaissance which leads to, as he put it, “Individual isolated buildings sitting in a civil lawn mowing project.” And I think we all know what that means, isolated monuments in the city. The third was a Perception of Collective Life less as a political order, less as something like a polis but as statistical generalisations that was his world of what housing is, housing, housing statistics and not citizens. Fourth, was this whole raft of metaphors that we all use every day to talk about the city and even made an amazing list, Space, Form, Morphology, System, Typology, Statistical or Sociological Distribution, Rizome, Network, Abstract Machine. These kind of ways we describe things that flatten the richness of the city in Peter’s view. Fifthly, the Perception of the City as a City of Signs, Codes; the city as a semiotic system. And sixthly, the idea that you can transform the city into pure information and then manipulate that information, this to him was the kind of most recent flattening, conceptual flattening of city making, if you like.

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What he said to us, which I think is really worth remembering is that all of those things make the city too easy to design. They take away the complexity and richness of the city, and they allow us to deal with single layers or things in a single horizon. And I was struck by an exchange I saw in the Guardian newspaper, who here has been to see the Ai Weiwei thing at Tate Modern? Hands up. Not that many, but you know what it is? More or less. It’s just he’s done the Turbine Hall and in the Turbine Hall are 100 million, 10 million, millions of sun flower seeds made out of ceramics. And I read... did anyone read the Guardian review of this by Adrian Searle by any chance? He made this kind of quite interesting point where he said, “The thing is about this Ai Weiwei thing is that it has multiple meanings, multiple interpretations” and he thought that was a good thing. And there was a really interesting letter in the paper the next day by somebody from a tiny gallery in London, I looked him up, who said that he felt that that Adrian Searle had made a mistake, that he’d confused meaning with back story and I thought this was very interesting. This was an example of what Peter’s talking about.

What's the difference between a meaning of something and just its back story? He mentioned lots of other things but I think I took two things that could be thought of as direct challenges to the student body, to us as tutors/students starting the year. One of them bears directly on how we begin projects in architecture schools. He said, he questioned the idea that a building somehow appears from in between the statistical research that you do and then what he called poetic research, i.e. you go and you make beautiful photographs and you make films and you cast your body and all that kind of stuff. And then somewhere in between that and statistics a building appears and he questioned that and he asked us, “How can that be true? Is that how a building is? What does that mean?” And if I can find my second page I can tell you the second thing that he... the second thing that he asked us to do which I think actually London Met has the potential to be really good at. Is what is the role of conflict, contest, collaboration in the urban order? What is... how can our cities accommodate bad buildings? How many bad buildings do you need for a good city? How much violence do you need for peace? How much illness for health? That question which seems so fundamental to the way that Peter thinks. So that in a way is my little summary of last week for those of you who weren’t here, to bring alive some of those things for those of you who were.

Now I’d like to introduce Owen in the theme of tonight, our title for tonight which I foisted on Owen and he probably won’t thank me for, what is the contemporary city made of? Just felt like an important question, we’ve asked what it’s for but we have these cities, we have them, they exist, we’ve seen a... or I've been writing about nearly 15 years of orthodox architecture and planning practice in the UK. What's that left us with? I ask myself, and Robert and I when we were thinking of this felt this was something good to look at and Owen is the absolutely perfect person to be talking to us about this tonight. Owen came to my attention first as a blogger of a really interesting blog, which he still is active on called, “Sit down man you're a bloody tragedy” which he may or may not explain the meaning of that title later, “nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com” for those of you who haven’t seen it. And he came to my attention as a magazine editor, as one of a generation of interesting bloggers, a few really interesting bloggers who have now since really made an entry into mainstream media, both architectural media and national media. He calls himself a writer and a researcher and his last two... he’s published two recent books, - 2 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

which you may be aware of. Last year Militant Modernism by Zero Books, which the Guardian described as, “An intelligent and passionately argued attempt to excavate Utopia from the ruins of modernism” which is rather grand. But a very exciting book. Most recently though, this year, which has just come out as I showed it to you last week, this book, “A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain” which was exactly the reason I asked Owen to come and talk to us and what this, I think, comes from and you’ll tell us more about it I'm sure, is the series of articles that he’s done for building design which involves him going to British cities. Some British cities, that frankly architecture magazines haven’t visited in years, and look at them for what they really are, look at them in a kind of, in a sense with testimony. Looking at the reality of these places in terms of both architectural monuments and also less formal places and found an outlet for that in a mainstream architectural publication and they're very interesting pieces. The book I think grows out of those pieces, and is expanded and deeper than those pieces were and very, very interesting indeed and it’s been really well reviewed. So I urge you all to take a look at it. So Owen is the best person because to talk to us about this, because he’s been looking at these cities professionally for the last what, couple of years now? Couple of years of this series, and so I'm really excited to hear what he’s going to say. I think it’s going to be very different to Peter’s lecture but hopefully equally compelling. So if you’d like to give a big welcome to Owen Hatherley and we’ll get his presentation…

OWEN HATHERLEY: Okay, so is this working now? This microphone, I can... I mean can people hear me at the back anyway? Yes so I could just...

UNKNOWN: Well there is a feed upstairs…

OWEN HATHERLEY: So if I hold it like this there's some sort of... will that do? Okay, alright.

AUDIENCE: It was working before.

OWEN HATHERLEY: Oh was it? That's what I was asking you in the first place. Right okay, thanks Kieran.

SLIDE 01 So, I think you kind of summarised the book fairly adequately but I suppose the gist of it was to... was a response to the emphasis on cities under New Labour, something which I think is ending now, I think there was a sense in which New Labour knew, although it didn't exactly place it the core vote, as they were always called working class voters but it did emphasise the cities. The hierarchy of New Labour was drawn from London or maybe Islington, Edinburgh, Manchester and so on and it had a kind of urban focus throughout. And this contrasted I think a great deal with the 1980s and 90s in which there was a... with the odd exception of things like Canary Wharf or Bridley Place in Birmingham there was mainly an emphasis on out of town shopping centres on ribbon development, on the lifting of all planning laws, as was enacted by Nicholas Ridley in the early 80s. Thousands of Asdas in the middle of nowhere and such like. And I think that's actually an idea which I think is not entirely, you know, was sensible in its original aims, later kind of curdled into something much more dubious. So the book is going through 12 cities, and tries to look at what actually got built in that period, how it kind of interacts with what's already there. And in that I've been - 3 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

rather heavily influenced by a book written in 1933 of a journey from Southampton to somewhere in Northumberland, by J. B Priestly called English Journey. Priestly is not exactly an architecture critic but he does have certain remarks on the built environment that are, in many ways, more insightful than those being provided by actual architecture critics at the time. He says at the end of his journey that he has encountered three Englands, there is England One, which I'm afraid throughout this will have my slightly dodgy photographs, so apologies in advance.

SLIDE 02 England One: England One is the green and pleasant land, it’s the one the tourists come to, it’s represented in this picture by Oxford, partly because I don’t have any pictures of the actual countryside. It’s... he describes it as a country which has ‘long since ceased to earn its own living’, but which, you know, is very prettily kept together by what he describes as England Two.

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Which is the England that actually makes stuff, the England that it’s kind of international prominence, or rather it’s kind of tendency to go round the world annexing other countries. Or for about 400 years come essentially from this England, from England Two. Which is represented in this picture of some Sheffield steel works; but anywhere from Manchester to Birmingham, to Glasgow, could really have stood in here. It’s an England which he describes as occasionally sublime, but deeply inhumane to its inhabitants. It’s an England which has magnificent railways stations, magnificent mills, and utterly mean and brutal working class housing.

SLIDE 04 This, he sees as being replaced at the time that he’s writing by what he calls England Three which I've demonstrated here by the Hoover Building, in Perivale in West London. England Three is suburban country, mainly based in the south, with odd little outposts in the West Midlands. It’s a world of concrete factories, none of the grime that was printed upon the factories of England Two. Semi-detached houses, ring roads, swimming baths and so forth, increasingly leisured, industrial capitalism which has become gradually more and more humane towards its inhabitants. Bear in mind, when Priestly was writing this he’s contrasting the fact that the previous England Two still goes on in the north. So finessing, or rather putting a gloss on Priestly that I'm sure he would have disapproved of slightly, I've added a couple of my own. I think that since that, over the last 70 or 80 years have been new two countries that have emerged which intercepted the previous three.

SLIDE 05 England Four, which I would say emerges after 1945 and dies sometime around 1979. It’s the country that is post war settlement, of social democracy or socialism, depending on your politics. Of council estates, of new towns, campus universities, of an attempt to create a fairer society without the huge divide between the second and third and first Englands that Priestly was outlining. You can see this by the way that council estates were built in fairly affluent parts of London, this is Dawson’s Heights in Forest Hill, an enormous council estate whose architect for Southwark Council, Kay Mackintosh, described as being inspired by the design of Scottish castles. Built as a monument and a focal point of what's actually an area of semi-detached housing. - 4 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

This was an era when although they didn’t use the rhetoric of mixing the classes that's now so popular. They built on Richmond Park an enormous council estate, something which now you’d never be able to get away with. This England ended in the late 1970s, being very heavily criticised. I'm always thinking of the line that someone says about the Soviet Union and the way there's a nostalgia for it in lots of Eastern Europe and Russia. That the early stages of disease might look nicer than death, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they're particularly pleasant. And there is an argument that because of what's happened since being so inegalitarian, so, as I will get to, so architecturally deleterious. We can be over romantic about this, this period of time, I certainly would be. But I think that whatever else can be said about it, and there are the Ronan Points, and grim sort of out suburban estates that one could easily criticise. But between 1945 and 1979, a country had been created which was fairer, which had a higher rate of employment, which has more social mobility than what preceded it, and what succeeded it.

SLIDE 06 And what's succeeded it, I describe as England Five. The fifth, the final one today, I've picked for particular kind of brightness and jollity, AHMM’s Barking scheme. We have these sort of glaringly coloured blocks of flats, housing flats which are far below the Parker Morris Scheme, the Parker Morris standards that council estates in the 60s and 70s had to adhere to. But they look much more aspirational, and so this England Five would be defined by two different moments. And rather than splitting them into two, I see them as different sides of the same coin. And the first of them would be the buccaneering Thatcherism of the 80s, of Canary Wharf, of out of town developments, of the kind of Norman Tebbit version of local politics. Of an English man’s home is his castle, of kind of Asda’s and pediments and shoulder padded office buildings in the development zones which I will get to later. While having the same politics basically running through it, from the late 90s onwards that become succeeded by a kind of more urban version of it. Where it’s still being built on ex-industrial land but being built for private clients. But on the other hand it’s now in flats, it’s now high density and architecturally it’s rather better, although that's fairly superficial I would argue. So I'm going to kind of go through certain typologies that have emerged in the last 30 years, and try and assess what's been built in these last 30 years, what sort of different categories you could divide it into. And whether or not... whether there's any way out of it, whether or not it offers any kind of hope for the future or not.

SLIDE 07 So I'm going to begin with the kind of sub-urbanism of the 1980s, something as we will see transcends political divides. I'm going to start with Ocean Village, a large development in Southampton, a port city on the south coast from where I think Kieran is also from. So I have particularly bitter and twisted things to say about it. This was a huge docklands site, the docks where the Titanic went from and so forth, which was levelled in the early 1980s. One of the parts levelled was the Ocean Terminal, an Art Deco building opened by Clement Attlee in 1950 which, despite only being there for 25 years, was levelled despite the fact that the listing lasted about another year. But anyway, this was the first phase of this imperative to build on brown-field land. And what's interesting about it when you go there is even though it’s in the centre of a fairly sizeable city of about a quarter of a million people, it’s completely suburban. You've got these kind of... it’s around sort of 30 or so pitched roof blocks - 5 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

with huge surface car parks in between. There's one shopping centre, rather there was one shopping centre adjacent to it, which got demolished after and replaced with kind of urban task force blocks which I’ll get to later. So you have, it’s an attempt to basically build suburbanism right into the centre of the city, that there's no reference to urban grain or any kind of sense of urbanity at all. This development is just next to a nine storey hotel built in the 20s and you’d never know, there's no attempt to kind of follow that precedent at all, it was built as if you're on an outreach to Basingstoke. There's various sort of... mainly bank offices, this development, or local offices for various banks and there's a small element of housing, usually aimed at the yacht- owning classes. And this, although it was undertaken by a Labour Council seems to encapsulate that early Thatcherite urbanism quite neatly.

SLIDE 08 The hatred of the cities that they had, and this of course reaches its greatest extent at Canary Wharf. Now Canary Wharf is much more urban than most of the others, the only one of these that I think has particularly urban qualities. In that it basically consists of skyscrapers rather than three storey buildings, pediments and pitched roofs. Although this is actually slightly deceptive of it, I think one or two of the towers you can see there were built in the 80s but anyway bear with me. Canary Wharf, although it appeals to all these metropolitan ideas of skyscrapers, there's a DLR slicing through it, making it all a bit Metropolis, you know. There was, on the other hand, a development which drew on the suburbanisation that was being enacted elsewhere. It was part of a series of initiatives undergone by the Tory Government usually in areas of very left-wing Labour Councils where they would have regional development companies which would be independent of the control of city councils, completely undemocratic, which would be given planning carte blanche. So on Surrey Quays, Isle of Dogs, Royal Docks there was essentially a complete lifting of planning laws and this was the result in this particular case. But if you go around Canary Wharf or Surrey Quays and these sorts of places, you’ll find that actually very close to these skyscrapers are very small low-rise developments. Again which look weirdly like they're in the outer reaches of Essex rather than in the shadow of skyscrapers. And this seems entirely consistent that although it looks quite exciting and city-like, the chance encounter is one thing which it strains to avoid. It’s completely privately patrolled, has complete private security. The idea that you could go leafleting or have a picket line or something like that in Canary Wharf is almost inconceivable. But again this suburbanisation was something that was seen as an architectural common sense, in the reaction to modernism. But because of the kind of extreme reaction to the tower block landscapes that were built in the 60s, that there was an equally extreme counter reaction.

SLIDE 09 This is in Liverpool, in the centre of Liverpool, this is about a five or ten minute walk from the dead centre. And again it looks like it could be an hour out of it. These were semis built by Liverpool Council when it was under the control of Militant who were a Marxist organisation at that point semi clandestine in the Labour Party. And this is basically an example of giving people what they said they wanted. When they asked tower block tenants in Liverpool, Liverpool had been incredibly badly hit by the collapse of industry and by the collapse of the docks. When they asked tower block residents what they thought of their homes, their immediate answer was, “We want homes with gardens, we’d quite like semis and gardens.” - 6 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

And because Liverpool’s population had plummeted so much because of the demise of the docks that there were few enough people living there that you could essentially suburbanise the inner city. It went from about 850,000 to about 400,000 so it more than halved between the 40s and the 80s. So you get this bizarre suburban landscape right in the centre that again is built by a very militant, very left-wing public authority. So at that point, it was complete architectural common sense that that's what you do.

SLIDE 10 This is an example from Brixton, this is directly opposite to Zaha Hadid’s new Evelyn Grace Academy which could be... which I've not featured in here but I could easily do so. Here you've got these little cul-de-sacs which are named after great left- wing heroes, you know, you've got Langston Hughes Close, Walk Whitman Close, Alice Walk, da, da, da and again the sense... even though you're building right in the middle of Brixton that you build so suburban architecture. Now that ends, I would argue, in the late 1990s, partly under the influence of persistent lobbying from certain architects who were closely involved with the Labour Party, most of all Richard Rogers. Rogers had been publishing various books throughout the 80s and 90s, Architecture: A Modern View, A New London which he wrote with the Labour MP, Mark Fisher (no relation to Mark Fisher who wrote Capitalist Realism). There's various others; Cities for a Small Planet, he’s written about 15 of these things and they all basically argued against the suburbanisation, argued that what needs to be done in inner cities was basically to do similar things to what was being done in continental Europe: where cities had grown rather than dispersed. It’s kind of essentially embraced citiness, embraced living in flats, embraced living closely together, embraced density, it embraced sublime drama of proper citiness, something which only really happened in the 80s with Canary Wharf and Rogers’ Lloyds Building in particular in the city of London. So when John Prescott, who at that point was Deputy Prime Minister but I think had an unofficial role really as kind of head of planning and head of development in the UK, as their resident working class northerner. There was the Urban Task Force, there was the Greater London Authority in particular had a very strong Urban Task Force, that argued for this kind of density. And this was also being argued for by the Commission for Architecture in the Built Environment which has, I think just narrowly avoided a scalping and just narrowly avoided being abolished by the bonfire of the quangos for how long it’s going to last, I'm not really sure. Which essentially said, it was trying to use the same sort of property developers that had built up things like Canary Wharf for the purposes, or built up the out of town estates, for the purposes of building in the city. So you get people like Barratt Homes, who were almost a by-word in the 80s and 90s in building these little pretend cottages, that they would start building tower blocks. And actually often companies like this, like Wimpey people that were building the tower blocks in the 60s in the first place, and they didn't get any better at designing buildings in the 40 years in between.

SLIDE 11 And looking at an example of this phenomenon the example that sprang instantly to mind was this development in Sheffield of student housing. Because quite often, depending on where you are in the country, who actually moves into these blocks? You get various different names. I've heard all sorts: ‘yuppie-drones’, ‘dove- cots’ and my personal favourite is ‘Blair boxes’.

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That these boxes go to different people depending on where they are, in the centre of London they go for enormous amounts money, places like Sheffield, Liverpool they tend to go to students and these ones in particular, are aimed at students. They have, if you walk around the inside these, pitifully tiny kind of public spaces, very, very small flats, very, very shoddy materials, but they've got to follow all the rules... they are very high density, they do, as CABE would suggest, they try to stop themselves looking monolithic. If this was done in the 60s first of all they would be large pockets of open spaces between these, there would probably be a school built nearby or something like that. And there would also be an architecture of homogeneity, you can imagine these would be kind of four editable blocks. Here they've kind of tried to stagger the skyline, to give it lots of different materials, bit of wood, bit of stock brick to try and make it look less like the three dimensional property speculation which of course is exactly what it is. So for an even more kind of egregious example of this we should try the housing built by the student developers Unite, but I think they've just changed their name, I think they're now called Liberty Living or something like that, but anyway you get the idea. And this again…it’s very, very high density and Unite actually are particularly keen on using pre-fabrication. So they're using these kind of 1960s methods, they're going to clip together erogenous architecture but it’s with a very different rhetoric. While there was a sense of 1960s housing, building for ordinary people, this sort of stuff always marks itself out as being about exclusivity. Unite’s developments are usually very heavily gated, they have incredibly tight security and they're basically about saying to parents who are sending their kids off to the scary inner cities of Liverpool or Leeds or wherever, ‘don’t worry they’ll be safe’. So that's some of the built results of the ‘urban renaissance’ as it’s been called. As to where actual inner architecture, as most architecture students would recognise it, goes, there's a subtle difference and rather than the kind of flat-out drop that you’ll get someone like Unite building, there's the riverside regeneration scheme. And they're all over the country: Cardiff Bay, Salford Quays, Clarence Dock in Leeds, Glasgow Harbour, absolutely loads of these bloody things. And the way it usually works is that you have a iconic building, this is the approach that comes from Frank Gehry’s building of the Guggenheim, I'm sure you're all familiar to the point of tedium with. That idea that you've got to plonk a building in a post industrial area and it’s fortune is transformed. And there is an element of economic truth to this, but it depends very much in whose interests you're talking about.

SLIDE 13 The example I came up with here is very close to where I live is the Laban Centre in Deptford, on Deptford Creek. A kind of small, straggly post industrial river way. So you have the iconic building here, the Laban Centre by Herzog and de Meuron, which again serves a cultural purpose, it’s a dance school. And then, on the plots adjacent, all the light industrial units that originally surrounded it, and actually which influenced the cladding of this building. That it has this vaguely drizzly, corrugated cladding because you have all these corrugated shelters around, but they all match.

SLIDE 14 And what you get instead is blocks which try to look vaguely like the Laban Centre while spending far less money. These towers here, which I think are welcoming their new tenants, proclaim themselves on their hoarding to be ‘inspired by dance’ - 8 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

because it’s by a dance school, you see. And in big letters that says, “RBS”. So you have this sort of strange fact that a bank that we own, are building luxury housing. And there seems to be no outcry about this, there's no considering whether we maybe should force them to actually fund something useful rather. Because the other reason I show it’s Deptford because it’s a particularly overcrowded bit of London, it’s a bit of London with particularly dilapidated Victorian, Georgian and some 1960s housing and despite this kind of enormous strain on housing there, usually because of the shortage of council housing, when a huge post industrial area is cleared you build the Canary Wharf works over the river. This has certain social consequences, which I'm sure you're all aware of. The next part of this schematic little arrangement of the last 30 years that I'm trying to outline, would be retail. There are essentially two things which the British economy has tried to unwrap, well three things perhaps, that the British economy has been running on over the last 30 years: the progressive decline of industry. One of them is arms dealing, arms dealing is quite hard to actually get a sense of the architecture of it, there's various kinds of enormous sheds out there: Preston and so on, where all the armaments are actually built by BAA Systems, but they're very, very hard to photograph. And they're not particularly urban, so you see no real sign of that on the streets. On the other hand there's retail, an enormous consumer credit boom with real wages which have been falling since the 1970s, you have to essentially keep people buying for goods to remain profitable and the way this has been done is by massive expansion of credit and retail. Initially this is done by importing the methods of the 1980s into the inner city.

SLIDE 14 This is West Quay in Southampton, a large development by BDP, I've once challenged someone at BDP about this and they said, “Oh we just took it over from Chapman Taylor, it wasn’t our fault,” da, da, da. Guilty is the phrase that comes to mind.

This is an absolutely enormous shopping mall, on the same sort of scale as the Arndale Centre in Manchester built in the 70s to match the kind of horror of preservationists and urbanists. So that kind of approach has never really died out, although the kind of stark architecture that something like the Arndale Centre has died out. West Quay is at the side of a small town. It has various design features, which it claims to be in keeping with the city around. It’s right next to some medieval walls, two of the second best preserved medieval walls in the country after York. So it has this rubble cladding here, makes it look a bit medieval. The rest of it is in the kind of usual tiling that you’ll find on any PFI hospital, any Sure Start Centre, any Asda, anything anywhere in the country. And when this was occurring, interestingly, there was also a regeneration scheme happening in the inner city in an area called St Mary’s. Which was a very dense, Victorian, 60s area and one of the poorest in the country. The solution to this was to demolish half of the high street and build a block of flats on it, which again are in sort of red brick, vernacular and so forth. They were slightly backward of these things, they'd not got the Urban Task Force memo at that point, they would get it a bit later.

SLIDE 15 So this approach of monolithic city centre development was replaced over the last ten years by this approach: this is Liverpool One. Again by BDP, absolve - 9 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

themselves, at least in architectural terms here. This is much like somewhere like West Quay: it’s completely privately owned, it’s not public space. But unlike West Quay, it has the appearance of being a part of the city. It’s not roofed over, you can walk through it like you can walk through anywhere else, and architecturally it’s not half bad: there's some nice walkways, there's a very nice park at the centre of it, you know there's certain things about it that aren’t too bad. But in terms of urbanism we’re still at the exact same point we were in the early 1980s of completely private landscapes. So there's an attempt, in architectural attempts to return to some kind of civic ideas, return to some kind of civic valour. You know, to try and make some of this actually pleasurable to walk through; something that's actually a half decent place and part of the city, unlike somewhere like the Arndale Centre at West Quay. But it serves much the same purpose. And then on the other hand you get the problem with various cities attempting to follow this, and not having the money to do so. And there's several cities which have tried to have these gigantic retail developments in the centre, and having this has not quite worked out, leaving large derelict spaces in the centre.

SLIDE 16 This one is the site of Hammerson’s Sevenstone development. Hammerson were the developers of West Quay, the one in Southampton now, and the idea of this was to have a mall without walls, a shopping mall with streets, which is supposedly permeable from the outside area with various different architects employed on it, again masterplanned by BDP. And the thing is of course is that Sheffield is very, very close to Leeds and you're very, very close to the Meadowhall Shopping Centre. So there's no real demand for building; shops have no real desire to be in the centre of Sheffield. So it’s been left with this, frankly very interesting, kind of inter-zone in the centre where the shopping would be. There's a similar scheme in Bradford where they went as far as demolishing all the buildings beforehand to make way for the scheme which was going to be developed by Westfield, the Australian shopping mall developers. They basically demolished the heart of Bradford to create this. Bradford has about a quarter of a square mile in the centre which has nothing built on it. And after about seven years of waiting for Westfield to actually build something there, the council have recently landscaped it into a temporary park. The first civic thing to have really happened to this temporary park was a rally by the fascist group, the English Defence League. So, you know it’s not looking good. The next part of this, is what this kind of scheme does to the earlier versions of England, going back to Priestly’s idea of these several different layers which are all overlaid, and all have different values and different architecture, is what this particular version of English neoliberalism does when it has to deal with historic architecture. And one of the things it does with industrial buildings, I have a footnote here on industry in the inner city. Inner city industry has disappeared, and this we all know, but to a large extent this has been replaced by industry out in the outskirts. I mean Sheffield for instance, produces as much steel as it ever did, it just does so with a tiny fraction of the workforce and where no one can really see it happening.

SLIDE 17 There's similar events here in Glasgow, this is the Templeton Carpet Factory based on the Doge’s Palace which is now luxury flats, surprise, surprise. And there are hundreds of schemes like this, everywhere from Lands End to John O’Groats of ex factories, ex warehouses, ex mills becoming upper crust flats. - 10 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

And this, it can be done subtly, it can be done badly, there's various examples of it where it’s done with a certain amount of historical sensitivity and somewhere it’s done very clumsily. This is one of the better examples. But in all of those cases you have this rather macabre feeling that these were places where people toiled and now places where people, you know, toil with their laptops.

SLIDE 18 Another example would be what's done with the working class housing of that period. This is Chimney Pot Park on Salford, by my favourite developers, Urban Splash. This is a large area of terraced housing which was scheduled to be cleared by a thing called Pathfinder, which some of you might or might not be familiar with. Pathfinder was an attempt to kind of basically jump-start the urban renaissance in northern cities that didn't have property markets. In London it’s quite easy to sell the idea of building tall in the city flats because there's a huge demand. In somewhere like Salford there is no demand. So the response to this was to…and I still can’t quite believe that they did this and they got away with it but anyway… The response to this was to demolish huge swaths of usually council-owned housing, of the Victorian, of the 30s semis, of the tower blocks, of demolishing it in swathes which then leads to more people without homes, leads to a housing shortage. And this housing shortage creates a property market, so everybody’s happy. And in this particular case the housing that was slated for demolition was actually taken on by a property developer, and what they did with it was quite interesting. Apart from the changing clientele which you can probably guess, essentially it becomes aimed at the people who will soon be working in the Media City development, where the BBC and various other media companies were moving to, by the old Salford Docks. It aims at upper middle class clientele, but it retains the aesthetic of 19th century Manchester. The brochure for this as I recall said, “Own your own Coronation Street home,” which you’d think in Salford that would be coals to Newcastle territory. But anyway there you are, “Own your own Coronation Street home.” You've got this kind of smooth facade here with the new chimneys on top. But in order to kind of produce this look, what they actually had to do was basically re-build the houses. I presume this was dictated by the space standards not being good enough, or it might have been dictated by the need to make money for construction companies, it’s all very opaque. But basically the entire interiors of these flats were stripped out, steel frames put in and they were turned upside down, so you would get living room on the upper floor and so forth and the car parks in between where the alleyways used to be.

SLIDE 19 A much more extreme, a much more expensive and rightly much more controversial version of this, and I'm afraid I could bore for England on this subject so bear with me, is Park Hill in Sheffield. So here you can kind of see what England Five does of England Four really. Park Hill is a very large council estate in the centre of Sheffield, along with the London Greater Council only one of the only Local Authorities to avoid system building after the war and hence have a far better council housing stock, much of which they demolished by Pathfinder, but anyway. And it’s a very, very complicated building. It’s built on a sloping site so on the lower floors it’s about three stories but the upper floors are about 14 stories, with the continuous roof line. And you have these streets in the sky running through them, - 11 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

which you can join onto, at the lowest level, on the street, so they actually join on to the rest of the street around. It was reckoned for about its first 30 years to be a success and then in the early 1980s began to be seen as a sink estate which may just be something to do with the fact that almost everyone in Sheffield lost their jobs at that point. But there was some controversy when... it had always been, despite this, it had always been virtually well managed as council estates went, it never became a place where people were forcibly dumped, it was never one of the hard to let estates where you would dump anyone you couldn’t stick anywhere else. It was a functional bit of city, not a particularly affluent bit of city but a functional bit of city. But after about 50 years of no maintenance... it was looking pretty ropy about the time of this Grade 2 listing in 1998, sorry Grade 2 Star listing in 1998. After kind of sitting around trying to think what to do with it for a while, or rather sitting round thinking how they could make money out of it for a while, the local council gave it to, it’s often thought of being sold it off to, but it wasn’t, gave it to Urban Slash to redevelop. Unfortunately around the same time that Urban Splash started redeveloping it, the property crash occurred so again demand fell massively. They responded to this, well the state responded to this, by massive bail outs and subsidies to Urban Splash to basically... the state is funding a property developer to remove, to turn a council estate into an area where there's only 25% state housing. So again, you have the state funding property speculation, it’s funding luxury housing. And the interesting thing about this also, as for Chimney Pot Park, the aesthetic isn’t continued, just as much as the politics isn’t continued. As a decision to strip out all the bricks from the building and replace them with these anodite aluminium panels , with the perhaps intended side effect that it now looks like it was designed by AHMM in the first place. It remains to be seen what will become of this place. They've almost finished panelling one block, which is deceptive, lots of people including a recent article in Blue Print, assume this means that people are actually moving in or will be moving in at some point. But there are no fit outs inside, there's no scheduled time that these flats will be let. A facade has been given to them to make it look like something is happening: no one is moving in, no one’s buying them and no one knows when they will be put on sale. Urban Splash described it that they will do it when the market revives, so good luck with that. So I'm going to end I suppose trying to be slightly more optimistic about two spaces, which in very, very different ways I think offer some sort of potential. Some sort of way of doing things differently.

SLIDE 20

The first of them, well this is a particularly esoteric example of it, but it’s Kieran’s suggestion so blame him! This is a passageway by Southampton Docks which is huge containerised docks stretching on for miles, which originally had a small area of parkland next to it and which gradually got, as the docks were expanded and the motorway was built alongside, got squeezed further and further and further until we now get this little snippet here. And it’s one of the most interesting kind of places to walk in the country, for one thing you can actually see a container port which is one of those things that you never, ever actually see and watch this enormous, fascinating automated process of all the robots moving stuff around. It has a tiny skeleton staff at Southampton Dock so you're essentially watching total automation. And on this kind of large concrete wall, it’s been used as kind of - 12 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

gigantic canvas. Not a subsidised street art where people have stencilled various images of apes and Che Guevara. You get the sense that it’s really the kind of space that people quite cherish. The minority of people certainly, the people using this, because these murals change on practically a monthly basis. But the people using this enormously value this space, partly as a space that's been just almost left out accidentally, that's a kind of leftover of planning, and have made it their own. I mean even the fact that… you have this enormous puddle ahead that they've laid planks over so you can get from A to B, you know, ingenious.

SLIDE 21 Another example, less for architectural than social reasons, is Homes for Change in Hulme. This was on the site of Hulme Crescent, a very large 60s estate designed by the same architect as Park Hill, on very, very similar lines. Which, after initially failing by all accounts as housing families, became housing for what, by the late 1990s would be called ‘creatives’. It was an area very much populated by musicians, artists, trustees, dealers, etc, etc. And it was demolished in the late 1990s as a kind of sacrifice to the new ‘tinted glass Manchester’ that was emerging after the IRA bomb. But the most politicised group in Hulme, the tenants who had been most militant about keeping their homes, formed a housing co-op and somehow managed to convince Manchester City Council and the housing association to give them some funding to rebuild some sort of approximation of the crescents in Hume. So it’s about one tenth of the size of the original estate but it uses lots of the same ideas. It has wide streets in the sky, it has walkways, it encloses a very large public space, which is easily entered from the streets around. It has all the kind of civic qualities that Blairite architecture has not had. Initially it does have the same architectural vocabulary showing that the aesthetic is often secondary. I mean with the kind of wood details and the stock brick and the kind of aluminium and what have you, it looks quite a lot like Greenwich Millennium Village. It looks like any other Blair box from a distance, then you get there and you find that actually there's something quite different going on here. And the reason why I think this place is so interesting is because it’s all the things that haven't been happening elsewhere, even though it’s usually mentioned that people do the thing about Manchester’s phoenix-like re-emergence from post industrial derelictions and what have you. It’s not property speculation, it’s not a luxury development, it’s not got some token 20% of affordable housing, which means ‘affordable to buy’ most of the time anyway. It’s a functioning bit of social housing. And one of the reasons why it’s working is that people have demanded it. It’s not a sense in which people, much like the sort of changes that happened after 1945, it didn't happen because of the goodness of Government, because of the goodness of the heart of bureaucrats or even architects. It happened because people stood up and said ‘we’re having this and we’re going to fight for it’. And I think if there's any hope it lies in that, rather than in designing the status quo in a slightly nicer fashion, I’ll leave you with that, thank you.

52.47

KIERAN LONG: Thanks, Owen that was great. I thought I really amazingly ambitious history, or recent history of British architecture and in particular city making, regeneration, what we call regeneration or have been calling that.

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And I had a couple of questions I wanted to ask Owen but I really want to get some questions from you guys, especially from people who live in some of these places or who are from some of these places, it could be interesting to get some points of view. Because I think one of the qualities of Owen’s writing and the way he speaks is that he speaks partly as a citizen, so we can feel like a room full of citizens perhaps in this conversation as much as architecture students. But first of all, I wonder if you might look ahead for us just a second. The new politics is emerging all around us and you mentioned the bonfire of the quangos. But in the context of something like this, doesn't a localism agenda make you optimistic? I mean, what do you think might happen out of that? I guess, I think I know the answer to that…

OWEN HATHERLEY: I think you do. I'm not particularly optimistic about it, I must admit. I think to a large extent it’s trying to give a friendly, caring, shiny face to fairly standard Thatcherism. What they're essentially proposing to do... we come back to the bonfire of the quangos, I suppose. I think it’s worth saying with things like the Regional Development Authorities or Building Schools for the Future and things like that; not just to defend them and say, “Ah they were great, there was no problem, we should have left them as they were.” You know, things couldn’t have gone on like that. I think they were profoundly undemocratic, profoundly dubious organisations. But the response of, you know essentially just demolishing these things and throwing hundreds, possibly thousands of people onto the dole queue is absolutely disastrous and that's what's happening more than anything else. I mean the localism agenda and the ‘Big Society’ and all this sort of stuff, is basically based on voluntarism, it’s based on the idea that charities will do this for free, or that essentially we shouldn't be doing this for a living, which is something which usually comes from those with trust funds. So it’s slightly, you know... not something I take particularly seriously. But I think with this, it’s based on a kind of misconception in a way. In that actually charities have kept building, for one thing. Like the Peabody Trust have been building for about the last 30 years, and Housing Associations have been building for the last 30 years. Councils haven't. Actually a Housing Association; it won’t be elected by its tenants, there's less security of tenure, the rents are usually higher, but because it’s a charity everything is okay. And I find that very dubious, the idea that, you know, that charity will solve problems.

KIERAN LONG: But their argument surely, is that Stateism hasn’t solved... you know the idea that a bigger state, Regional Development Agencies…people didn't want directly elected government - in the north, when they were asked if they wanted it. What’s your answer to that? I mean you're left wing clearly, but what's your answer to those kinds of contemporary lines?

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well that's why I would come up with something like Homes for Change as being interesting, because it’s not particularly topped out. I think that actually council housing was going in quite an interesting direction before it basically got abolished, with things like Byker. And that you actually got an alliance of democratic control and the state that was quite interesting. That you would essentially, rather than kind of Walter Segal self- build type stuff, which I always find a bit over romantic. That there's this sense in which the state provides the expertise, provides the infrastructure and everything else can come from people’s actual direct involvement. - 14 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

As soon as the state departs, you get the contemporary situation now in somewhere like Lagos. The idea that a city without a state is going to be some sort of jolly big society of everyone involved in the Rotary Club or something. Actually you’d just get the collapse of cities. And again, I think the state is very much a red herring here. The divide between public and private sector is a red herring as well, and what we’ve actually seen for the last 15 years is the public sector working to try and encourage the private sector. Something like Path Finder and much of the Urban Taskforce stuff, you've got the sense that the state has been desperately trying to stimulate a completely moribund private sector. They're trying to conjure things like property markets, in places which didn't have them. And so the idea that there is some kind of fixed divide between state and capital in a sense, I think is fairly untrue. And the most important thing is that we elect the state, we don't elect charities, we don't elect Capita and Serco and big business and that's the crucial distinction. You can hold the state to some sort of democratic control, which you cannot do in business.

KIERAN LONG: I'm going to ask a few people who I can see in my immediate vision, I would like to ask Robert, I'm sorry I'm going to pick on Charles who’s here from FAT Architects in the second row and you lot. I'll question you some more about architecture before I do ask some of those people.

What’s wrong with Urban Splash? They win architectural awards, they commission good architects, some of whom are in this very room, to do buildings that win awards from the RIBA. Why do these buildings win awards? What's the problem?

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well they're not bad buildings. I suppose it’s sort of... I think it’s often missing the point to just attack it on directly architectural terms. But sometimes they build quite good stuff. I mean, my problem with it much more, is their social role. I think actually Park Hill is an interesting case because I think as well as being a massive transfer of public assets, I think it’s also architecturally a complete disaster. I think they've absolutely mutilated that building. They clearly didn't like it much in the first place and are trying to turn it into something completely different. And I think that's a fantastic mistake. But some of their stuff is quite pleasant but that's not really the point.

KIERAN LONG: What do you think the professional rewards it though? I mean they...

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well because it’s quite good. I mean the architectural profession is bound to reward architecture that's quite good. But I think it’s also based on this kind of idea that they reward it because they think... you know they've turned around the fortunes of cities. And again I think this is based on this very dubious idea about what cities are about. I remember when Liverpool One was nominated for the Stirling Prize, the nomination thing said, “Liverpool One has singlehandedly transformed the fortunes of Liverpool”. I thought what a ridiculous thing to say, the idea that someone in an estate in Bootle had their life changed by a frigging shopping mall is preposterous. What Liverpool One is trying to do, to their credit, developers like Grosvenor say that they're trying to do, is get people from Cheshire into Liverpool to buy stuff. So there's this kind of...

KIERAN LONG: I was quite surprised in the book that, Liverpool One is one of the projects that you think is pretty okay. I mean I dislike it even more than you... - 15 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

OWEN HATHERLEY: You probably do.

KIERAN LONG: ... It’s one of the few things that I really hate more than you.

OWEN HATHERLEY: Yeah, I'm a sucker for walkways.

KIERAN LONG: It’s all about walkways.

OWEN HATHERLEY: It’s all about walkways. One of the things I find most annoying about Urban Taskforce is bloody piazzas, just a square with nothing happening in it. I quite like the promenade architecturale. It’s admittedly a kind of crappy, pink kind of PFI detail promenade architecturale, but I like the fact you can walk through it and it looks interesting.

1.00.34 KIERAN LONG: Is anybody here from Liverpool or Sheffield? Yeah I bet you are, you're just not saying. I’d love to know what somebody from those places feels about some of the things that Owen has been saying, or any of the cities.

FLOOR SPEAKER: I'm from Sheffield, sorry about that. [LAUGHTER] I like the point about the Salford housing. I used this as an example in my degree and people, I think people moved out of it when Urban Splash bought it or some system like that. I think it was sold to them for £80,000 and then resold after, from what I saw, a garage on the back of it for £160,000. So you double the value of it, which doesn't seem to make sense. And I also agree with what you were saying about Park Hill. The budget for maintenance was reduced to a third of what it was pre-Thatcher when she tried to destroy the councils. And then people were moved in from the sink estates…

KIERAN LONG: Is there anybody else from any of these places who wants to make an observation of some of the things that Owen’s said? As he said I'm from Southampton and I remember Ocean Village, feeling like this rather surreal place from the future. But in fact when you're from Southampton you have quite a confused idea of what the future is. It actually looks like a suburb in Essex. Which turned out to be the future.

OWEN HATHERLEY: That was the future, exactly.

KIERAN LONG: Yeah…Has anybody got any more observations? Who knows some of these places? I'm going to pick on somebody now. Okay, Charles I'm sorry to do this to you. Charles from FAT Architects is here, you've worked for Urban Splash, you don't have to talk about that, but that's one of the reasons I’d be interested in your point of view. Do you have a point to make? Or a question for Owen?

1.02.27 CHARLES FROM FAT: I've hastily cobbled together a question, I was just lazily sitting back and listening to Owen make his talk. I suppose my question is more an observation, I was very struck by something you said when you showed the picture of the shopping centre in Southampton, and you said by BDP. And that struck me as quite an interesting explanation, or an interesting accusation, in that the sort of scheme, of the mixture of money, market

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forces, investment, heavily leveraged property development etc. I would suggest that BDP’s role as authors is pretty minimal.

OWEN HATHERLEY: Yep

CHARLES FROM FAT: And there's something interesting about your talk, not a criticism, just an observation, that it mixes a kind of love of architecture with a sort of coruscating critique of the circumstances that often brings it about. So when you talk about Park Hill, and you show a picture where the new cladding on it, or the new infill panels, in a sense you get to the point, where you say “it doesn't matter does it that they're lime green”. I mean I appreciate the fact that the old brickwork was quite subtle and rather beautiful and I'm a fan of that building for various reasons. But in the scheme of what's happening, does it matter the kind of aesthetic shifts that have occurred within that frame? So I suppose it’s a way of saying that architects are fairly powerless and certain aspects of architecture are, in a way, different from the bigger issues that are ruining our cities or not helping them and I don't know whether you feel conflicted in that.

KIERAN LONG: That’s interesting.

OWEN HATHERLEY: I know what you mean. I remember Steve Parnell saying a similar thing. I think Steve worked for... did he work for BDP or…? He worked for one of them for a while so I think it’s got previous. But I think...

KIERAN LONG: Who here has worked for BDP? Somebody must have worked for BDP.

FLOOR SPEAKER: I worked for BDP once.

KIERAN LONG: Great, we’re coming to you next!

OWEN HATHERLEY: Let me think about this one. I think, first of all starting with Park Hill and the lime green cladding, I’d be significantly less bothered about lime green cladding on a council estate. I would be a bit peeved about it, I’d be a bit like ‘aargh, you've arsed it up’, but I wouldn’t really give a toss, I wouldn’t be sat here ranting about it. I think it would be a shame but I wouldn’t really care. I think what's interesting is that in that particular case, and it doesn't always work as neatly as this, but in that particular case they've had to change the politics of it, and the architecture of it very drastically. In terms of naming and shaming I suppose, because I know you've got a problem with the Carbuncle Cup for similar reasons. I guess partly... I mean I was always really keen when I was writing Urban Trawl to find out who did everything. To kind of find out who was responsible, and actually it’s very easy to go ‘well actually a combination of Wimpey and CABE and the council are actually responsible for this’. But I don't know, I think there's a lot of examples where I just think surely you could have done better than this, even in something that is functionally that bad. You know that there's a sense in which there's a certain kind of absolving of responsibility, a kind of hand washing that I understand. But I think there's... I suppose the question is whether or not you could design something that serves all those interests, and it would still be quite good.

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I mean I was going on about... I wrote a long thing about HafenCity in Hamburg because I thought that was. It was like a yuppie scheme, like any other yuppie scheme in the world, but because the yuppies there are rather more demanding in their architectural tastes, it was far, far superior to anything that would be built here. So again I don't know how much of that is sort to do with client and how much to do with architecture, I don't know. I mean partly it came from, before I was writing about architecture I was writing about pop music and film, and there everyone always uses the direct: you know ‘this was by so and so’… ‘this was by so and so’. And it’s quite a difficult habit to kick, to see these things as having people responsible for them.

KIERAN LONG: I wonder whether I might just ask you to make a point. Would you mind speaking quite loudly or maybe in that direction. Oh we have a microphone. Hugh Pearman, editor of RIBA journal and critic of the Sunday Times, and former employee of BDP we’ve learned.

HUGH PEARMAN: I would like to say that was in the early 80s.

KIERAN LONG: When they were good. [LAUGHTER]

HUGH PEARMAN: Some of their stuff since has been a lot better, I must say. Not the one in Southampton. 1.07.02 For the first part, I was just going to back up Charles, just on that authorship thing. Is really, really difficult now and I think the system has so much blame attached to it now. And I’ll give you one example of a place I went to recently, a place where I think you lost your rag a bit in the book actually, Owen. This was Salford Quays. I went to Salford Quays recently because I wanted to look at Media City UK, as it’s called, it’s where the BBC is going. It’s not just the BBC, it’s a lot of other places as well, you've got the studios, offices and that, you name it, it’s all there. It’s about £600 million. Now if I were spending £600 million on a development, an urban development, I would probably spend about tuppence ha’penny more on architecture. But what you actually get there is a master plan by Benoy, later adapted by Wilkinson Eyre with the BBC buildings in particular down to concept stage by Wilkinson Eyre, and then handed over to the developers, Peel Holdings who then give it all to Chapman Taylor. So who do you blame? Actually it’s emerged as a relatively strangely, convincing American style down town mainly because of its density. Because the masterplan originally wasn’t that bad. But when you've got that kind of layering and that dilution of responsibility for authorship of buildings, then it becomes very, very difficult to say that's by so and so, that's by so and so. Sorting out the credit for that project is quite extraordinary.

1.08.48 So that's just a point I wanted to make, but I had a question for you finally which was that, okay a dozen cities and of course more since, but what was your biggest disappointment?

OWEN HATHERLEY: I don't think there was one really, I don't know. I remember going to Sheffield with great trepidation. I thought because I’d read all the architectural history books that go on about Sheffield and how fantastic it was in the - 18 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

50s and I thought ‘I'm going to go there and it’s all going to be gone and it’s going to be rubbish. It’s going to be like going to Reading.’ And it wasn’t at all, even though about half the buildings had gone there was still a kind of spirit to the place. So, let me think, where was really crap? Cambridge.

KIERAN LONG: See I thought you were going to say Leeds!

OWEN HATHERLEY: Yeah well Leeds I’d expected to be crap because I was going there with a photographer from Bradford and he was like, “Oh you don't want to go to Leeds.” So…

KIERAN LONG: What was wrong with Cambridge? People love Cambridge.

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well what I like most in places, and this kind of goes back to why I kind of like Liverpool One, is the feeling of being able to move through spaces, the feeling that there's nothing blocking your way, that you can walk. You know one of the fantastic things about, again going to somewhere like Hamburg, all these courtyards and walkways and all these spaces, underpasses and overpasses that can get you through places and I love that about cities. And you go to Cambridge and you can’t get in anywhere. Unless you're a student of the university and you've got the little swipe card, it’s all closed off to you. Apart from the little bit of the centre where you can go and see the chapel and what have you, and the Sedgwick site where you can go and gaze at the history faculty. It’s not a city as I understand it, it’s a series of little gated off enclaves, it’s horrible.

KIERAN LONG: That's pretty definitive. I’ll ask you which one you liked the best at the end maybe. Can I have some students asking questions? There's one right at the back, you’ll have to speak up.

FLOOR SPEAKER: I'm not a student, but...

KIERAN LONG: Oh sorry I can’t see.

1.10.40 FLOOR SPEAKER: I just want to make a point, your final conclusion about giving housing to people what they demand…Since the Second World War people historically demanded houses with gardens. For example Peterlee New Town by Lubetkin, tried to design a modernist New Jerusalem for the Labour Government. And all the miners said, “We’d like semis next”. It’s very interesting how you see in the future the demands of the population being met.

KIERAN LONG: Yeah this is an interesting point isn't it? Because of course, we are somehow all going to have our opinions taken on what's going to happen next. And the interesting thing is property developers use the same argument don't they? Property developers say, “We build this because it’s what people want and if they didn't want it we wouldn’t be able to sell it and we can sell it.” So I mean answer these two...

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well first of all it’s not strictly true about Peterlee. The reason why the Lubetkin’s plan was cancelled was because the Coal Board thought it would cause subsidence. It had nothing to do with it not being houses with gardens.

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In fact if you look at what Lubetkins planned for it, he was suggesting mock Tudor detailing amongst other things. Like Lubetkin envisaged a centre that would be fairly high rise and the rest of it being semi’s. Funnily enough, the semis that eventually got designed there were actually by Grenfell Baines, and hence by what would soon be BDP, but anyway. I think there is a massive element of truth in what you said, I don't think it’s the whole story. I think the fact that something like Homes for Change, the fact that here the tenants in Hulme Crescents didn't want homes with gardens, they wanted the crescents basically. On the other hand Liverpool is a great example of where in the 80s people had demanded homes with gardens again, and got it. And what's interesting there, is not so much that they demanded it to be private, they didn't necessarily want to own their house and garden, they did want a house and garden. And in the fact they were voting for the most left wing council there's ever been in the country, I think is quite key here. But I suppose at that point I think what you’ll get, and I think this is what you got a lot of after 1945, the idea that most of the town people were just building towers isn't true. Actually, you’ll get a mix of stuff, most polls actually done of council tenants show that something around 20% to 30% of people wanted flats and the other 70% to 80% wanted houses with gardens. That doesn't particularly bother me if that happens, I mean I don't really care, that's fine.

KIERAN LONG: You’ll end up with LA, spreading across...

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well, if it’s done properly, if it’s done well, you know. I mean if you do an actual proper public infrastructure and you get metro lines out there rather than endless ribbon roads, I think it can be done quite nicely. I think it could be done reasonably intelligently.

KIERAN LONG: I think it would be very interesting to put some of these things to both Peter, and to Florian and to Phil, who last week were talking about these issues. What comes in between cities. I want to get some more students to speak. George?

1.13.44

GEORGE: I'm slightly worried that there might be underneath this lecture, which has some very inspiring ideas, a worrying prospect for architects. Which is that all your schemes that succeeded, succeeded because of the demands of people and the markets, and the failures were failures of market demand and failures of kind of financing and resources behind projects. And the architects seem to have been just anesthetising planners and producing sort of vaguely pleasant designs for the chattering classes to read about in the glossy magazines. And there's a few hundred architecture students in this room and I’d love if you could produce some encouragement and what it is that we should do. There's a lot of... there's a big chunk of the future of sort us architects out here…

OWEN HATHERLEY: Okay, yes quite right. Well I think one of the things to do, is to look at what architects did in the last time there was a great depression. If you look at what architects were doing in the 30s people were mostly building private housing and luxury flats. Like Lubetkin spent the 30s basically designing villas and luxury towers, and spent the whole of that decade producing propaganda and basically saying, “We want to build this, no one’s letting us build this but this is what

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we want to do. We’re going to build this fantastic new city and this fantastic new world.” And actually in the 30s no modernist architects in the UK were actually building it. Like the MARS Group, the Modern Architecture Research etc or whatever they're called. They've produced all these kind of plans for London that no developer, none of their clients would actually have wanted them to do. They did it because they thought this is the way they thought the city should be like. Some of their ideas were great, some of them were quite dodgy. But I think the fact that in that period even though they were kind of limited to private clients, they were speculating, they were coming up with ideas, they were coming up with ideals and coming up with new ways of living throughout that decade. And I think that's again partly because there was a pressure of political movement there that some of them like Lubetkin or Goldfinger had an attachment to. But partly also, they weren't satisfied with what they were doing so they speculated on what they’d rather be doing, and I’d like to see that. I suppose my main criticism of architects, they've got a job to do like everyone else and it might be as miserable as any other job but the difference is you can also, I don't know how much spare time you lot get, but if you do have it think about what the world could be like rather than what it currently is.

KIERAN LONG: Quite right. So I don't want to go on too much longer, maybe a couple more, yes a hand up.

1.16.31

FLOOR SPEAKER: I live in Elephant and Castle and as a citizen even though maybe my involvement has been rather token, I've been quite enthused by the way my opinions as a citizen have been taken into account in the planning process. And I just wonder if, with the new society or big society, whatever it’s called, what role do you think citizens will play going forward in this?

OWEN HATHERLEY: What sorry?

FLOOR SPEAKER: What role do you think the citizen will play in the planning and building process in the next ten years?

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well I think it depends very much where you are. I think in all the places where they’ll be getting heavily into the Big Society which will probably be in Taunton or Carshalton or wherever, you know all the little villages where they will be able to run their own buses and build their own houses. I'm sure it’ll be wonderful. Again, I suppose I’d go back to my last point really, with the kind of consultations that local councils set up there's not really much you can... I know there's exceptions to this, I know that some of the stuff you've done is an exception to this. But in the most part, consultation is about rubber stamping something you’ve already decided upon. And I think it’s not the same as democracy, to organise a meeting, usually on a weekday when everyone’s at work and say, “Right you can all comment on this thing we’re going to do.” I think...

KIERAN LONG: Is democracy then our ability to comment on any planning application? We have that right, it gets put in the local pub or the post office or something and you can go and look at it. I mean is that better than consultation? I mean that seems less active, less proactive. - 21 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well I mean it depends on how it’s done. I mean consultations are habitually done. The fact of them being usually at times of the day when everyone’s at work for instance. You know they're usually done, quite expressly, in order to deter people from actually turning up. And then you say you've done your consultation. I always think of the poll of residence that they took with Robin Hood Gardens, which I don't think is a particularly fabulous building but I think it’s interesting that there was always the Tower Hamlets way of producing a statistic, like “all the residents want to leave” and actually you go into that and you find that about 15% of residents were actually asked. Then an actual resident went round and did his own poll where he did 50%, and found that the majority wanted to keep the building. So you know they're usually done to serve a particular end. And I think these are long term things, they need to be looked at with proper long duration. I think again one of the interesting things about Byker, is it took 11 or 12 years of kind of setting up your office there and getting constant feedback from residence, and constantly engaging with people. And that I think is potentially much more interesting than having an open day.

KIERAN LONG: I think in future evenings in this series we’ll talk about planning in more detail. But there's a hand up over there, great.

1.19.40

FLOOR SPEAKER: I come from near Sheffield and based my dissertation on Park Hill. And I had a feeling that perhaps the council has to move people out and to gentrify the area, has something to do with people not liking the aesthetic qualities of the building. And where I live now in Hoxton, I see the regeneration of the housing being done in a very bad way, with little care for the quality of the blocks that have been built there. How do you see that we move forward to carry on with what we’ve already got?

OWEN HATHERLEY: How do I see moving forward from what we’ve already got? I think one thing is... one of the big problems, and this will sound very post war and paternal for me, but one of the big problems is education. The fact that people, and I do think this is true and this might sound insufferably patronising to some, I'm not sure, that people don't tend to think when they look at architecture. People who can be very, very sophisticated about music, or about the films they like, or about telly or about art, will still look at architecture in a very conservative fashion because it’s not really something we’re taught to think about. It has no real role in primary or secondary education, it has barely even any role in A Levels and stuff. There’s no encouragement of people to look at it other than, you know, big shiny telly with the likes of the Stirling Prize where you cheer on the new Bilbao effect building or the demolition thing where you have this...like burning of the buildings. So I think that one of the things is to encourage people to look at stuff. The fact that like in Sheffield you’ll still get people talking about Park Hill and go, “It’s this big monolithic block and it’s really high density and no one wants to live high density.” And you want to take them to things like West One or Devonshire Green or take them to the block of flats they show by the Supertram Bridge and go, “This is twice the density Park Hill ever was, it’s a damn sight less well built, it’s got less - 22 – www.ripitupandstartagain.org

architectural thought behind it, look at these two things.” But one of them is shining regeneration and new yuppie flats, and one of them is a council estate and that's what people see first of all before they see anything else. And I think that's only really going to change through education.

KIERAN LONG: If I may make an observation too that relates to what Peter was saying. I think there is a discourse that's missing about kind of what some of these buildings mean. And it’s very possible actually, this is another conversation we might have in the pub later, but it’s very possible that by the 60s already, the architecture and its expression was so divorced from civic meaning or the kinds of civic meaning that endures, that it hasn’t endured somehow and perhaps if Peter were here he might illuminate us on that and we can ask later in the series. Maybe we’ve got time for one and a half more questions, points, observations or just...

1.22.44 ROBERT MULL: Can I ask a question? I can see the sort of panic in Kieran’s eyes because as we move from Rip it Up to Start Again, we have to answer all the questions that you're being asked. I think you you've made a fantastically heroic attempt to begin to hint at what might be England 6 but could you help us by giving us a working title for England 6 as we move through the series?

OWEN HATHERLEY: You mean what I would like to be in this England 6?

FLOOR SPEAKER: Yes.

OWEN HATHERLEY: Well I’d like to see it draw on the best bits of England 4.

FLOOR SPEAKER: Can you remind us what 4 was?

OWEN HATHERLEY: That we build on the more egalitarian cities that we were trying to build after 1945, without making the mistakes that they did. Because even by the late 70s people were trying to adapt to that and were looking at how modernist housing worked, and how it didn't work, and were adapting it rather than completely abolishing it. Again for the same purpose, for council housing and for universities and for public purpose. And in a way I’d like to see it to be re-opening of what, it strikes me to be, a closed book. To continue it in many ways, as well as avoiding certain things about it which we’re rightly suspicious of.

KIERAN LONG: Thank you. I think we’ll call it an evening there. Can we please thank Owen so much, not just for his lecture but for really gamely fielding all of those... Before you go I want to say a quick word about next week. Next week is the first of a kind of trio where we start to get into a bit more depth about some actual real concrete places. And that will be looking at the Thames Gateway, looking critically about what the legacy of the Thames Gateway has been. Mark Brearley will be here, the director of Design for London, we’ll have Geoff from the AOC here and others, so please come, tell your friends and thank you for being here tonight. Thanks.

[End of recorded material]

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