View of the construction in the City of London, near the Swiss Re building (Gherkin). Photograph by Dan Chung
Good architecture, likable towns, and genuine communities can go together. They certainly used to. This, though, requires thoughtful planning and considered development; for a government in thrall to spin, "coolness", US business school jargon and the need to measure and monitor all things (and people), the result has been a wave of brash and flashy commercial architecture and urban planning at one end of the spectrum - those "vibrant" northern city centres - and cascades of cheap, cheerless housing on the edges of towns and in what was once countryside.
Commercial interests have been put well ahead of humane considerations and, as a result, architecture and planning have suffered. So here is the New Labour conundrum: a decade of ever increasing busy-bodying, bullying and preaching by a highly interventionist government and the emergence of ever more cheapskate building and third-rate planning where ordinary people are concerned.
Ordinary towns quietly adorned with more modest architecture have been under consistent attack by this determinedly metropolitan government. The attack has been largely by default. The failure to stop the spread of greedy supermarket chains, the closure of local post offices and other key local services, has often stripped the life and purpose from small town centres. No amount of crowing about the number of "accessible" new art galleries or 24-hour bars in big city centres can compensate for the undermining of such genuinely "sustainable communities" which are now far more dependent on the car than ever before. And, yet, it is from such genuine communities that good and appropriate architecture, including housing, breeds naturally and without the need for vast new estates.
I don't doubt that we've built some superb, one-off buildings by truly impressive architects over the past decade. But those triumphs - including Norman Foster's 30 St Mary Axe (aka "the Gherkin"), Nicholas Grimshaw's Eden Project, the Welsh Assembly by Richard Rogers and even the Scottish Parliament by the Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue - are largely unconnected with government edicts or legislation.
I don't doubt that many cities have enjoyed a renaissance. Much attention has been given to showpiece design and architecture but I do worry about the way that the architecture of the less well-off, of the everyday, of our sprawling new suburbs and car-bound rural housing estates is in a very sad, and unsustainable, state indeed. Even as I write, and as dozens of regeneration bodies meet over their beloved "lar-tays", to further the grim and nebulous cause of "sustainable", "vibrant", "accessible", "24-hour" communities, underpinned by good design, another field will have been dug up not so very far from you and planted with the kind of houses that ought to make us hang our collective head in shame.
This is one of the very richest countries in the world, and yet we can't afford to build decent homes for ordinary people, and good domestic architecture was once something Britain was famous for worldwide. The Blair government has, though, served the wealthy, and Flash Harry architecture, very well indeed.
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