Prince Charles and John Ruskin: a Tale of Two Cultural Conservatives

“While your divine intelligence and will, Imperator Caesar, were engaged in acquiring the right to command the world,…..I hardly dared , in view of your serious employments, to publish my writings and long considered ideas on architecture, for fear of subjecting myself to your displeasure by an unseasonable interruption……I began to write this work for you, because I saw that you have built and are now building extensively, and that in future also you will take care that our public and private buildings shall be worthy to go down to posterity by the side of your other splendid achievements. I have drawn up definite rules to enable you, by observing them, to have personal knowledge of the quality both of existing buildings and of those which are yet to be constructed. For in the following books I have disclosed all the principles of the art.”


The Ten Books on Architecture: Vitruvius  (80-15 BC)
 
The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius, the only text on the subject to have come down to us from ancient Greece and Rome, provides not only a manual of Classical architecture but  also provides a clear insight into the nature of the politics of the time. The fact that Vitruvius not only dedicated the book to Caesar but claimed that his book “disclosed all the principles of the art” provides, for me, also  a certain amount of humour since today, no architectural theorist would claim to have settled, finally and irrevocably, all theoretical controversies surrounding architecture. However, while no two architectural theorists can agree on everything, one British architectural theorist, namely Prince Charles seems to have acquired a quite remarkable level of certitude in his own beliefs.
Prince Charles first  intervention in the debate on architecture came  in the 1980s. This  consisted of  a  television program and a book, both entitled  “A Vision of Britain.” In the television program he examined a drawing, illustrating the  primitive hut of classical architectural theory, a group of tree trunks which fortuitously grew close together with branches strewn across the top forming rafters and beams. 

From this he seemed to   conclude that the Classical style of architecture, since it derived from nature was  therefore  eternally relevant, seemingly appropriate in all times and places. Since that time he opened the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment and founded the village of Poundbury. He has also conducted high-profile interventions into developments such as the Chelsea Barracks site effectively torpedoing the design by Rogers Stirk & Harbour, insisting his preferred design “relates to nature.” 

Leaving aside the issue that deliberately scuppering an architectural project does raise very real constitutional issues, he insists he does not advocate simply a style such as Classicism. In a speech he gave to The Royal Institute of British Architects in 2009 he  stated:
 
“I am sorry if I somehow left the faintest impression that I wished to kick-start some kind of “style war” between Classicists and Modernists; or that I somehow wanted to drag the world back to the eighteenth century.”

His approach, it seems deals not with style but with social issues such as “bottom-up” planning, architecture which deals with problem solving. The antithesis of this might be seen as those obsessed with form and Prince Charles admits classicists can be as guilty of this as modernists. He states:

“I propose to speak of “organic” rather than Classical or Traditional architecture .”
And this, he partly explains is:
 
“one which is informed by traditional practice, and by traditional attitudes to the natural world”
 
But here, he seems to have embraced a rather circular form of reasoning.

The idea that Classical architecture, self-evidently relates to nature is rather more contentious than Prince Charles seems to realise. The subject has been discussed down the ages, especially during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries  when the subject of the hypothetical origins of classical architecture in nature became a huge bone of contention between various architectural theorists. Leaving aside the views of Vitruvius on the origins of architecture, the primitive classical hut was basically an idea invented by 18^th Century  theorists such as Abbe Laugier in France and William Chambers in Britain. This led to a more rational conception of classical architecture; Laugier argued that the five classical orders were based on columns and hence should only be used as freestanding elements and never in relief.  In the 19^th Century, British architecture turned towards a revival of the Gothic. This style had never entirely died out, surviving in unlikely quarters such as  18^th Century notions of the picturesque, keeping the  style alive until its  19^th Century   re-flowering.   Augustus Welby Pugin, architect of the  Houses of Parliament would only countenance  a Gothic rather than Classical approach. Indeed, he believed Classical architecture was flawed from its very inception. A primitive timber hut may have been the inspiration behind the Greek Classical Temple. But these forms cannot simply be transposed from timber to stone. A key example of this were triglyphs. Triglyphs were the vertical channels on the frieze of a Classical temple which represented the ends of timber rafters. The features were considered to be representations since the frieze of a Classical temple was constructed in stone, not timber. And hence, this motif, when reproduced in stone, indicated that the architecture no longer truthfully expressed the structure. 

Pugin wrote:

 

“Grecian architecture is essentially wooden in its construction….never did its professors possess either sufficient imagination or skill to conceive any departure from the original type… it is extraordinary that when the Greeks commenced building in stone the properties of this material did not suggest to them some different and improved mode of construction.”

  The other great instigator of the British Gothic revival was John Ruskin who shared with Pugin a dislike for Classical architecture. Ruskin wrote the book “The Stones of   Venice”, on the  Italian city in the shadow of the Alps, which he regarded, rather strangely as the birthplace of Gothic architecture. Here, he describes the kind of architecture he admires in the great chapter “The Nature of Gothic.” Ruskin makes much of the savageness of the northern climate and the quickening of energy which must accompany endeavours, qualities which people of the north expressed in their architecture. Ruskin was a great advocate of architecture which “relates to nature,” and firmly believed that in the context of Northern Europe, Classical architecture was incapable of fulfilling this role.

Ruskin, evokes the  British climate and landscape with its heathland, ice, snow; language which  amounts to a sort of   word-painting.

 
“we should err grievously in refusing either to recognize as an essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alps;”


Evidently, he considered Gothic to be a sort of ' organic' architecture. For instance, he wrote in ' The Seven Lamps of Architecture' the following on piers in Gothic cathedrals:



'the resemblance in its shafts and ribs to the external relations of stems and branches.. . . necessarily induces in the mind of the spectator a sense or belief of a correspondent internal structure; that is to say, of a fibrous and continuous strength from the root into the limbs... ' .

 
Taking Pugin’s argument, that classical architecture was an essentially dishonest imitation of a timber hut, he argued that there could be no beauty in architecture without truth. In what is arguably the greatest book ever written about architecture, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture", Ruskin devotes an entire chapter to "The Lamp of Truth." Here he eloquently condemns all forms of untruth in architecture. The first is


"The suggestion of a mode of  structure or support other  than  the true one:”

 
However, he also states

  "The architect is not bound to exhibit structure; nor are we to complain of him for concealing it, anymore than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the human frame conceals much of its anatomy; nevertheless , that  building will generally be the noblest, which to an intelligent eye discovers the great secrets of its structure, as an animal form does, although from a careless  observer they may be concealed".

  He also condemns
 
"The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood)"

And

"The use  of cast or machine-made  ornament of any kind.”


He argues that

"For it is not the material, but the absence of human labour, which makes the thing worthless:"

He despised the sort of architecture that was being produced all around him by the industrial revolution. He was employed as a consultant to the architect Benjamin Woodward who was designing the Museum of Natural History in Oxford  but resigned when he realised that the building would have some similarities with  a Victorian railway station, with stone and brick used at the front and iron and glass  at the back of the building. The Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 may have had a touch of Regency elegance about it, reminiscent of Nash, but Ruskin viewed it with similar disapproval. However, I would argue  that, as time went on, Ruskin began to have to have doubts about his rigid architectural conservatism.

 

 
In 1859, Ruskin produced essay on the subject of industrial materials, “ The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art &  Policy.” Iron, Ruskin states, can be seen in the British landscape in the form of ochrerous stains, that is oxidised iron or rust on hillsides or in streams. A conclusion that might be reasonably drawn from this is that metal, used as a material in architecture can relate to nature.

He states:

“what do you suppose dyes your tiles of cottage roof? You don’t paint them. It is nature who puts all that lovely vermilion onto the clay for you; and all that lovely vermilion is this oxide of iron.”



Whether he thought iron could produce appropriate forms for architecture can be gauged by the following statements. Architectural writers were so pre-occupied with the academic approach that there was much controversy over whether buildings realised with iron  could be considered to be architecture at all. Ruskin,  capable of almost schizophrenic views on this subject was able to write the following views in the 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture';
 
“True architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material.”
 
And again;

“the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed adapted entirely to metallic construction.”

 
Here, for the first time, Ruskin acknowledges that new technology may fundamentally alter approaches to architecture. The French architect, Viollet-le-Duc, spent most of his career restoring his country’s cathedrals. He also wrote a number of great theoretical treatises on the nature of materials and embraced with rather more enthusiasm, the potential  new technology offered:

"We hear it maintained in the present day, as it was formerly, that iron cannot be employed in our edifices without dissembling its use, because this material is not suited to monumental forms. It would be more consistent with truth and reason to say that the monumental forms adopted, having resulted from the use of materials possessing  qualities other than those of iron, cannot be adapted to this latter material. The logical inference is that we should not continue to employ those forms, but should try to discover others that harmonise with the properties of iron.”

Here we can sense the stirrings of something new in architecture, detectable even in Ruskin.

The Gothic revival overturned the Classical tradition of axis and the orders and celebrated qualities such as asymmetry, originality and “truth to materials”. Once these ideas  had been accepted , the floodgates were opened to a wave of architectural innovation.

Prince Charles may feel that in the Georgian era, there was a sort of universal benchmark of quality, below which architecture did not seem to drop and that modern architecture has not achieved this. In many ways I would agree. However, there is at least one member of the Royal Family who seems to view with favour the work of at least one eminent modern architect. The Order of Merit is an award which is the personal gift of the Queen to bestow. In 1997 she gave the award to Norman Foster. 



( A version of this article appeared in The Salisbury Review).

The Auteur in London

Jean Nouvel is an architect whose critical stock has both risen and fallen in dramatic ways over the course of his career. His career as an architect of international importance was launched by the Institut du Arab Monde, one of the Grand Projets, built in Paris for the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. This building, with its expressed structure and intricate detailing, proved rather atypical of his future output. It embraced the modern materials utilised by British “High-tech” and, indeed,   envisaged by Jacques Tati in his film “Playtime.”  However, it has always been possible to differentiate his work from “sublime engineering,” which is how some categorise the work of Norman Foster. Nouvel utilised a similar artistic language exploring the aesthetics of mass production but fused with an altogether different sensibility. In Barcelona he integrated a polychromatic façade with an organic shape, contextually appropriate in the city of Gaudi. The Culture and Congress Centre in Lucerne incorporated a seemingly unsupported cantilevered roof stretching out to create a line of simplicity and purity similar to that of the horizon line of the lake itself. The critics, however, also insisted that his career had embraced many creative lows as well as highs. The Torre Agbar   was held to have inadequate spatial and urbanistic qualities. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris was slammed by the critics for its uninspired detailing. When he finally came to build in London he was greeted with little fanfare. His pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery was described as a dull one-liner, seeing as its entire creative strategy seemed to be to colour every surface red. One expressed the view that this was simply the work of an architect who was long past his best.

After failing to enthuse the British critics, he was given a second chance with a building intended to be permanent. He was asked to produce a mixed-use development, consisting of office space, retail and restaurants on a site just east of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Surprisingly, with “One New Change” he has managed to confound his critics with, I think, one of the finest new buildings to be built in London for years. The nickname “One New Change” has  already acquired,  “The Stealth Bomber” conveys nothing of  this building’s  quality.

On a site with such a distinguished neighbour, the strategy Nouvel seems to have adopted is one of reticence. The building  has a chameleon-like quality whereby it seems to adopt a sort of visual camouflage. The all-glass façade has been designed to reflect light,  meaning that most of it appears to be a milky-white. This is counter-balanced by large horizontal strips of muted colour, mostly a matt brown, created by fritting a brown pigment on one  face of the centre of a glass laminate. The decision to use brown coloured glass was a brave one. Presumably Nouvel was trying to merge his design with the brick buildings of this part of London. This is a  building without clearly defined edges. It’s transparency and emphasis on the way in which materials reflect light creates a sense of   dematerialisation, an unusual strategy in an age when some gifted architects side-step the approach of minimalism.

        Although the exterior is marked by a sense of blankness and repetition, certain techniques are introduced to give a sense of rhythm to the façade. The modular cladding system erupts at certain points with twisting planes, creating a sense of sculptural richness. An axis is projected from St Paul’s Cathedral into the centre of the building. This provides the route of an arcade-like space, one of four, laid orthogonally to each other which penetrate the solid mass of the building. It is possible that this simple arrangement, with its echoes of the Roman method of laying out a city along   Cardo and Decumanus axis, refer back to the City of London’s origins.  The four  arcade-like spaces lead to a central space open to the sky which penetrates the building down to the basement, providing a circulation core and light-well. Jean Nouvel has said that “architecture happens mostly inside” and it is only when you venture down one of these arcades that the building really begins to reveal itself to you.

If brown is the signature colour of the more public parts of this building then a change of colour signals the more private, internal spaces. On the  North and South axis, the arcades are roofed-in. The ceilings and entrance screens abandon the muted palate of the exterior and instead are coloured a glorious red on the Northern side and a mixture of red, grey and brown on the South side. The quality of twisted planes is repeated in the soffits, constructed by overlaying polished plaster onto sheets of glass reinforced gypsum, assembled   on site to prevent unsightly joints. The result is that each plane of the ceiling receives and reflects light in a different way.  This is more reminiscent of “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” than anything produced by the American aeronautical industry. The reflectiveness of the materials used throughout the arcades ensures that you are constantly catching glimpses of reflected images of the buildings surroundings and of the Nouvel building itself. This kaleidoscope-like  quality both dazzles and entices and as you progress through the arcade the ceilings above recess back as the space opens up into a mezzanine level. At pedestrian level, the envelope is simply constructed of glass sheets providing views and access into the retail units which line the internal ground floor of the arcades. There is one more spatial surprise: the various levels of the central core are interconnected by escalators which conduct you through enclosures faced entirely with  black glass. These look towards the central core as do a series of balcony-like spaces.

       The central core again adopts a mono-chrome palette and the overwhelming quality of this space is that of reflected light, from the stainless-steel wall climber lift, and planes of mirrored-glass. The latter are composed as series of twisting planes, their reflectiveness softened by the re-appearance of the matt-brown cladding. I visited the building on several occasions and found, in different weather conditions, the building displays a whole range of colours and light qualities rather like Monet’s paintings of haystacks or Rouen Cathedral. In seeking precedents for this work, we could look to the great luminous spaces typical of French Architecture. Jean Nouvel, when asked to name his favourite buildings, has referred to examples such as the Sainte-Chapelle and the Maison de Verre. However, the real cultural reference we should consider probably lies outside architecture. Standing in the darkly-shadowed subsidiary spaces around the central core, viewing the heart of the building, I was reminded of the spatial experience of being in a cinema. The sense of dematerialisation has precedents in the example of film. For instance, in Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,”  several key scenes appear as reflections in plates of glass. However, perhaps the key theoretical idea we should refer to is that of “montage” as understood by the Great Russian film-director, Eisenstein. Eisenstein thought that film illustrated a dialectical method. Each frame could be read at various levels such as symbolism and composition but would contain internal conflicts. This would lead to a succession of moving images, a “montage,” driving the narrative forwards.  In the film, “The Battleship Potemkin”, the massacre on the Odessa Steps ends with a close-up of a stone lion, presumably symbol of retribution. The building’s juxtaposition of utterly different spatial and material qualities suggests a similarly conceptual approach. Nouvel has said that:

“Architecture exists, like cinema, in a dimension of time and movement.”

      It also exists in the creation and framing of certain qualities of light. Cinematographers and indeed photographer often create lighting effects which to the viewer seem entirely natural and uncontrived. A portrait photographer may rely on an assistant holding a screen to reflect light onto a subject’s face, differentiating the foreground from background, but the photographer is always careful to crop this.  Nouvel seems to have a similar repertoire of mysterious techniques to control light hidden up his sleeve. He states that his one unrealized ambition is to direct a film, but with this building he already has taken his place among other architect-filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Fritz Lang.

As with all architecture, it is intriguing to try to guess its tectonic logic. For instance, in a Rogers’s project, the staircases are usually placed on the outside in a lightly structured glass and metal enclosure. This means that one of the normal functions of a vertical circulation shaft, the cross-bracing of the floors, is not achieved. The solution usually adopted is some form of externally-expressed, structural cross-bracing. The Nouvel structure has similarly diagonal elements expressed in the cladding and in some steel members which touch the ground. I suppose stressed skins and even structural glass are possibilities but my instinct tells me that this glazing is simply curtain walling.

This is reminiscent of the art of the watercolour painter, where the paper, shining through the paint, actually represents the light. Along with this transparency, reflection and dematerialization have been added empathetic, tactile qualities achieved through more traditional materials such as polished plaster. The result is something quite ethereal. St. Paul’s definitely deserves a neighbour which shines brightly and in this building has found one.

New links - the NPPF and the Portas Review.

Two new links form the basis of today’s post.

The link on the right to the National Planning Policy Framework in its draft form.
The National Planning Policy Framework has  actually now gone through Parliament. You can read the finalised  document here.

I spoke to a planner recently who thought that the new planning guidelines will lead to lots of applications being challenged in the courts. Like most pieces of law, it is often only when you can refer to a body of case law, does it become apparent how a piece of legislation will be enforced. At any rate, the debate surrounding the correct approach to British Planning and urban design will run and run.

Here is  the Portas Review by Mary  Portas,  into the future of our high streets.

It is, of course, true that retail patterns are shifting, much of it moving to online shopping. There is, I would argue, still a role for physical spaces as opposed to virtual spaces. In the report by Mary Quant, commissioned by David Cameron, she stressed what she argued was the social capital of the High Street.

Incidentally, when the internet was invented, some people predicted the traditional library would now become irrelevant. As far as I can see, libraries are still going strong. In fact, architects like David Adjaye and Rem Koolhaas have virtually re-invented the library.

Birmingham Central Library

John Madin has died.

He was the architect of the original Birmingham Library. I recently visited this building and found much to admire. Admittedly from the outside it’s fairly grim but it has quite a beautiful interior. It has an atrium surrounded by concrete waffle slabs, perhaps as beautiful as the interior of the Lloyds Building, perhaps more so.

It’s an example of mixed-use, long before this became received wisdom, with cafes on the ground floor and more private spaces as you ascend through the building’s section. I asked a librarian what she thought of it and she described it as a “hive of activity.” Indeed it has lots of different activity zones with quieter spaces for study, just what a library should be.

If you describe this as “a place for incinerating books” this obviously shows that you have fallen into the error of considering buildings simply as objects and failed to realise the importance of a building’s spatial qualities.

I know the decision to build a new library to the designs of Dutch practice Mecanno has now been taken, on a site a short distance away. It would be a shame to demolish the old library though it seems this decision has also been taken. It seems to be due to be replaced by a new development designed by Glenn Howells Architects.

 I know this is regarded as a piece of “Brutalist” architecture, a much unloved genre. However, much of this kind of architecture is not as bad as it often supposed to be; some of it is actually quite good. Perhaps the original building could have been saved if it had been given a re-modelled façade.

What would Harold Say?

 Amid the controversy surrounding the National Planning Policy Framework as way of finding our bearings perhaps it would be worth while casting our minds back to the planning policies of previous Conservative governments. As I have already indicated here, I believe that the planning-free-zone of the 1980s often  led to urban design of a very poor quality. Perhaps if we extend the time frame further, as far back as the 1950s, then we can see examples of urban design which seem relevant today. The fact that the Conservatives won an election in  1951 and the subsequent popularity of that Government has often been attributed to  Harold Macmillan’s grasp of this issue. His willingness to campaign on this issue prior to the  election and the success of his tenure as Minister for Housing from 1951 -1954 where he famously met his target of 300,000 new homes a year, surely holds lessons for our current government. The failure of  the current Conservative Party to appreciate this lesson might explain their failure to secure an outright majority at the last election.

 Reviewing planning policies as they currently stand, the approach to planning of the  last 10-15 years i.e. the Blair years were generally determined by John Prescott. John Prescott’s approach to planning and urban design was basically guided by the report “Towards an Urban Renaissance”,  probably the most influential planning document  during this period. “Towards an Urban Renaissance”  was produced by the Urban Task Force chaired by Richard Rogers so it really was his brainchild. Rogers argues for the polycentric city, that a city should not be seen as a single entity but as a series of villages or neighbourhoods.

 
Much of Roger’s argument revolves around density. This is measured by the acronym DPH  (dwellings per hectare.)  Only when this reaches a critical level is it possible to create a catchment area that can justify local services such as a doctor, bus stop, shops, school etc. This is the way in which a series of mixed-use, pedestrian-scaled  neighbourhoods are created. The walkable neighbourhoods thus generated are more sustainable than a neighbourhood which is wholly residential where people have to drive to an out-of-town shopping centre. A walkable neighbourhood also has social benefits were people will meet each other unlike a neighbourhood where the connections are all made with cars.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is probably the most interesting and valid initial approach to urban design. It needs to be mixed use and walkable scale. One of the reasons that the out-of-town shopping centres  became so popular, an  approach which became widespread in the 1980s , was simply that they had large, horizontal  car parks. However, in architectural and urban design terms the overall quality of these developments was often very poor. Car parks constitute nothing more than an urban wasteland. And one of the overall effects of out-of-town shopping centres was that many town centre shop closed; this led to what planners refer to as the doughnut syndrome – towns with holes at the centre. So a third quality is added to the requirements of a neighbourhood. A good public transport system obviating the need to always travel by car.
 
The idea of the neighbourhood is valid, with it’s 3 qualities, as I have outlined above, and  can be achieved with a majority of the dwellings consisting of houses with gardens. This has been proven to work, for instance, by the British  Garden City Movement. I recently gave an example, namely Hampstead Garden Suburb. This has the  quality of a village with a railway station at the centre.
 
It could be argued that the present Government needs a specifically conservative approach to this, in the sense that it is  something generated by private money rather than public money. To achieve this I would say firstly, that ideally an important step would be getting developers interested in the vitally important principle of mixed –use. Rather than building mono-functional zones such as out-of-town shopping centres and business parks, they should be encouraged to embrace mixed-use, both as buildings and neighbourhoods. This can be profitable as well as attractive. Instead of the approach of the single-story shopping shed surrounded by a car park you can have a multi-story building with shops on the ground floor and flats or offices above. This obviates the need for a enormous car park and if it is integrated into it’s neighbourhood, means that there will be houses with gardens within walking distance. All these activities can feed off each other, generating profits , with beautiful squares and landscaped streets instead of over-scaled vehicle parking.
 
As well as persuading developers of the benefits of mixed-use, we need to rethink attitudes to transport. David Cameron has said that he wants the present government to be the greenest ever. The initiative of the feed-in tariff was a good policy. It means that people can install photo-voltaic panels on their roof and sell the surplus electricity back to grid, meaning that the initial investment can be paid for in a much shorter period of time. However, finding a sustainable approach to transport is going to be much, much more difficult. Although we live in an age of diminishing oil resources, I personally doubt whether the electric car, which some people put their faith in, really is the answer. At present, they take 5 hours to recharge and have a range of 100 miles. I also doubt if the car powered on bio-fuels in the answer since their production depends on turning valuable farming land away from food production. What is necessary is to re-invent the notion of public transport. You may argue that this is socialist, because collective, rather than individual and conservative, but I am not sure I would agree. We already pay for roads collectively through our taxes so perhaps a proportion of this money should be  spent every year on public transport. All the roads we have paid for and built will arguably be empty in a few years time so perhaps we need to start modifying them for new types of transport i.e. trams can be retrofitted to existing road infrastructure. All this can be payed for by tax contributions and private developers through thinks like Section 106 agreements ( unfortunately these will be abolished under the NPPF). It is obviously easier to link up a tram to a constant power source than a car i.e. an overhead cable rather than a battery which goes flat every five  hours. The electricity can come from renewables i.e. solar, wind, ground source heat pump, CHP, biomass even nuclear. This entire approach will entirely change the look and feel of our towns and cities, reducing sprawl (which is often caused by cars) and leading to mixed-use neighbourhoods. This approach need not be excessively dense, as the example of the garden city movement shows.
 

Coming back to Harold Macmillan, we should really reflect on what planning policies he implemented in the 1950s and 1960s. He did  not simply advocate the relaxation of planning in favour of a developer’s free-for-all. The housing targets he set and met  were placed within the context of the planning policies of the day, policies evolved by figures such as Patrick Abercrombie and Frederic Osborne, both of whom were among the most gifted planners this country has ever produced. They were responsible for policies which included the New Towns, Green Belts and inner-city renewal. Looking back on this now, with over 50 years of reflection to draw on, it is clear that not all of these policies were unqualified successes.  Inner-city renewal often took the form of demolishing housing considered unsalvageable because  of sub-standard quality or because of war damage, and replacing it with concrete high-rises. Not all this housing is as bad as is now often supposed. Some of it was actually quite good. The high-rises, from the gleaming white concrete of early modernism to the grey concrete of the Brutalist era, were a mixed blessing, ranging in quality from good to awful. Some have called for them to be demolished and sometimes this approach has been adopted. However, it is noticeable that no one has called for the New Towns to be demolished and examples of this genre, such as  Harlow and Bracknell, are still viewed as attractive places to live. No one as far as I can see, wants to see the Green Belts built on. Hence we can still look back on the Macmillan era as a time when planning was approached responsibly and from which we can still draw relevant lessons today.

A responsible approach to urban design needs to be aware of the two scales at which towns and cities are experienced. I have already discussed the first scale, that of the neighbourhood. The next scale is that of the overall city i.e. a polycentric cluster of neighbourhoods. Urban life can, of course, be exciting, with all the facilities we associate with city life. Its drawback can be that it is actually too stimulating. People feel permanently exhausted, trapped as they are in built-up environment, cut off from nature. This can be mediated by building city neighbourhoods with a high proportion of the dwellings composed of houses with gardens. Another form of mediation is to deliberately limit a city’s size. This can be done by creating satellite towns. This was the idea behind the New Towns of  Macmillan’s time and indeed the Eco Towns policy, proposed in the last days of the Labour Government.

Many have voiced fears of a planning free-for-all and indeed it seems that under the draft National Planning Policy Framework, local authorities who do not have a core strategy in place by April 1^st 2012 will be able to exercise no control over development in their area. It often seems that all planning policy in this country is directed by developers, nimbys, the heritage lobby and organisations such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England. All these groups sometimes pursue irreconcilable goals; this state of affairs will only get worse if there is not a proper planning policy to reconcile the wishes of all the various groups. Rarely is there a planning policy aimed at meeting the needs of all the British People. Many fear that the  effect of the NPPF, if it goes through, will produce very poor quality development which will not meet their housing needs or other building needs.

The British Garden City Movement: Hampstead Garden Suburb

When trying to describe a specifically British type of urban design, some people fall into the error of recommending the British Garden City Movement justifying their argument on the reason that suburbia, they say,  is basically what British people want. The British Garden City Movement was one of the most remarkable urban design movements this country has ever produced. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with suburbia.

In order to justify that statement, I have chosen to look at an example of the Garden City Movement from 1909, Hampstead Garden Suburb. It is true that the typology of the house with garden is still relevant. However, I would argue that there at least three basic ideas that distinguish a Garden City from conventional suburbia:

Firstly, although both contain houses with gardens, A Garden City will also contain places for work, education, worship, shopping etc. In short, although a Garden City will try to create quieter, residential areas, it will also try to embrace the principle of mixed-use. It is worth remembering that the Garden City movement took place at time before mass-car ownership ( although it did take place during the age of the railways; all of the original garden cities have railway stations at the centre i.e. Letchworth, Welwyn, Hampstead and Bedford Park.) Modern development which includes out-of-town shopping centres plus suburbia cannot be considered an equivalent because a genuine garden city would contain shops within walking distances of residential buildings.

Secondly, in order to maintain a balance between built-up space and green space, a balance vital for health  and happiness,  a Garden City can only be allowed to reach a certain size, at which point a new Garden City must be started elsewhere. The ideal size  is based on a module of a neighbourhood or pedestrian-shed. One such module is a village really; how many such modules can be allowed to accumulate before a new city must be founded? Ebenezaar Howard  considered that the population of a garden city should be 32,000. According to the Rogers-led Urban Task Force the number of people necessary to support a hub of local services is 7500. So according to Ebenezar Howard’s approach, a garden city will contain about 4 neighbourhoods or pedestrian sheds. The illustrations to “Garden Cities of tomorrow”  don’t seem to bear this out but these  were only meant to be diagramatic.

The third principle is green belts, which define the edge of the city, maintaining a proper relationship between town and country. Strong planning controls would be necessary to prevent people building on them. Ebenezer Howard’s original proposals  allowed various activities on the green belt such as convalescent homes and agriculture; he envisaged them as growing their own food. A public transport infrastructure was provided though these were the days before mass car ownership and its attendant congestion had become a real problem.

This vision was realised at Hampstead Garden Suburb and indeed a host of other lessons can be drawn from this example as well. If one was going to learn lessons from this, one might as well be honest and admit that the some of the original principals have  been eradicated. Features such as a green belt and finite size were part of the original design but  are no longer there. The relentless growth of London meant this satellite was absorbed into Greater London.

One key  quality has been conspicuously retained, that of a mixed-use neighbourhood. Within a walkable-scaled area you will find housing, shopping, education and places of worship. What other qualities have been achieved? As a way of answering that question, perhaps the best method would be to walk the reader through a sequence of spaces, starting with what was conceived as the gateway to the entire project, the following buildings at the North of the site, at the junction of Finchley Road and Bridge Lane/ Temple Fortune Lane.

One of the eternal rules of good urban design seems to be that density can be increased where there is access to good public transport. Strangely, this rule is broken here. The high density part of the development is placed at the opposite end to that where the tube station is, Golders Green tube station.  These buildings are consciously modelled on medieval examples but can be seen as exemplars of what is now taken as a commonplace of good urban design; mixed-use. These buildings contain shops at ground floor and flats above. One might contrast this with single storey shopping buildings, without a different use above, which might be taken as a leitmotiv of bad urban design. As well as a failure to adopt the mixed-use approach, another fault of this type of building is the lack of height and hence a failure to create a sense of enclosure in the external spaces.

Several types of external space have been created. The first might be taken as a busy road with activities for pedestrians at the bases of the buildings.

Quieter residential streets have been created.

One of the great types of space created in this example of the Garden City Movement, and indeed in most of them is the green set in the close. Here they vary:

From closes surrounded by large detached houses.

To those enclosed by smaller, it would seem terraced houses.

This type of housing is also found at the Central Square which forms the centre of the whole community. 

The main public  buildings here  are by Lutyens. Whilst many agree that neighbourhoods need a centre, opinions differ as to what this should consist of. Whilst some would like to see all types of communal buildings at the neighbourhood centre, others take a  different view. Some take the view that whilst communal buildings such as schools should be placed at the centre, shops should be placed on  arterial road on the neighbourhood periphery, where they can attract passing traffic. This does seem to be the approach taken at Hampstead where Henrietta Barnet, the client for the whole project,  took many of the strategic decisions. With true Victorian zeal, believed that alcoholic drinks were a form of wickedness. She would not allow pubs or even shops around the main town square. The result is  a square occupied by two churches and the Henrietta Barnett School for Girls.

This has recently been subject to an interesting extension by  Hopkins Architects.

Streets are aligned to frame the views of the main public buildings

Hampstead garden Suburb has lost its character as a village separate from London though part of its green belt was preserved as an extension to Hampstead Heath. It remains as  a good example of a neighbourhood. I would argue the generic neighbourhood has four qualities: mixed-use, pedestrian scale, access to public transport and public spaces of real quality. Hampstead Garden Suburb has these in spades.

( Thanks to HGS Trust for the map of Hampstead Garden Suburb and Simon Kennedy, architecturalphotographer, for the photo of the extension to Henrietta Barnett School © Simon Kennedy 2011).