popularity of the Stirling Prize, the architectural Booker or BAFTA, showed both that there was an untapped public interest in architecture, and that British architects were as often to be found working abroad as in the UK, with the prize-winning entries in Germany or Spain more often than Wales or Northern Ireland. Why is it, then, that actual British architecture, The Change We Can See, is so very bad?
The answers to this question are usually tied up with New Labour’s particularly baroque procurement methods and an ingrained preference for the cheap and unpretentious, causing a whole accidental school of PFI architecture to emerge—often constructed via ‘design and build’ contracts which removed any control over the result from the architects, with niceties like detailing and fidelity to any original idea usually abandoned. The forms this took were partly dictated by cost, but also by amateurish parodies of exactly the kinds of high-art architecture mentioned above, creating something which Rory Olcayto of the Architects’ Journal suggests calling ‘CABEism’,2 after the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the design quango whose desperate attempts to salvage some possibility of aesthetic pleasure from PFI architects and their developers led to a set of stock recommendations. Their results can be seen everywhere—the aforementioned wavy roofs give variety, mixed materials help avoid drabness, the windswept ‘public realm’ is a concession to civic valour—but here I will call it Pseudo-modernism, a style I regard as being every bit as appropriate to Blairism as Postmodernism was to Thatcherism and well-meaning technocratic Modernism to the postwar compromise.
‘New Home, New Life, New You’—CABEism in Holloway Road, London
The most impressive neoliberal sleight of hand, one pioneered in Britain before being eagerly picked up everywhere else, has been the creation of what Jonathan Meades neatly calls ‘social Thatcherism’. It has existed ever since the mid 1990s, and was not begun by the Labour Party. From John Major’s avowed intent to create a ‘classless society’ to New Labour’s dedication to fighting ‘social exclusion’, the dominant rhetoric has been neoliberalism with a human face. The liberal misinterpretation of this has long been that it proves the existence of some kind of ‘progressive consensus’, a continuation of social democracy, albeit in a more realistic, less ‘utopian’ manner. In the built environment, the thesis of a social democratic continuum that connects, say, the Labour of Clement Attlee to New Labour has appeared to be supported by the resurgence of Modernist architecture after an eclectic postmodernist interregnum, and an apparent focus on the city rather than the suburbs. Lord Richard Rogers has proclaimed this to be the ‘Urban Renaissance’ in a series of books and white papers with titles that now sound deeply melancholic, not only because of the dyslexic architect’s verbal infelicities: A New London; Architecture—A Modern View; Cities for a Small Planet; Cities for a Small Country; Towards an Urban Renaissance; Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance …
This was enforced by bodies such as the Architecture and Urbanism department of the Greater London Authority locally, and the Urban Task Force and CABE nationally, with mixed success. It enshrined in policy things which leftish architects like Rogers had been demanding throughout the Thatcher years—building was to be dense, in flats if need be, on ‘brownfield’ i.e. ex-industrial land, to be ‘mixed tenure’, and to be informed by ‘good design’, whatever exactly that might be. The result—five or six-storey blocks of flats, with let or unlet retail units at ground floor level, the concrete frames clad in wood, aluminium and render—can be seen in every urban centre. Similarly, new public spaces and technologies were intended to create the possibility of a new public modernism. One of the most curious, and retrospectively deeply poignant expressions of this early New Labour urbanism dates from the point where it might have seemed a modernizing, Europeanizing movement rather than today’s horrifying combination of Old Labourist chauvinist authoritarianism in social and foreign policy and relentless, uncompromising neoliberalism. This is Patrick Keiller’s 1999 film The Dilapidated Dwelling, referred to by the director himself alternately as his ‘New Labour film’ or his ‘naughty film’, made for Channel 4 but unreleased on DVD and seldom screened. Like his earlier, better known London and Robinson In Space it takes the form of an oblique travelogue, only this time with interviews and an ostensible overarching subject—rather than the earlier films’ Problem of London or Problem of England, this is the Problem of Housing. Introducing it twelve years later, Keiller recalled that ‘I thought in 1997 that we were going to rebuild Britain, after all the damage that had been done to it, like we did after 1945.’ The film is a sharp pre-emptive analysis of why this would not happen.
Today, the message of the film is: be careful what you ask of capitalism, as it might just grant your wish. In short, The Dilapidated Dwelling asks the question: why does the production of housing never get modernized? (With the linked question, why is construction so backward?) It seems to derive from the search for ‘new space’ in the 1995 travelogue Robinson in Space, where the novel if unnerving spaces of containerization, big sheds, security, espionage and imprisonment almost entirely exclude housing, which is only seen in glimpses, usually of neo-Georgian executive estates. Housing, when this film was made in 1997–9, was not new space. It has become so since, however, especially in the cities.
There’s a desperately sad yearning in Keiller’s two ‘Robinson’ films for a true metropolitanism, a Baudelairean modernity worthy of the first country in history to urbanize itself. In London, the capital and its infrastructure are strangled by a ‘suburban government’; and in Robinson in Space, ports like Southampton or Liverpool are weird, depopulated, the enormous turnover of imports and exports never leading to any attendant cosmopolitanism or glamour, the internationalism confined to the automated space of the container port. So it’s interesting to consider these films after the Urban Task Force, after the palpable failure of the Urban Renaissance, the death of which was arguably heralded by the anti-congestion charge, anti-inner city ‘Zone 5 strategy’ that got Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London.
The Urban Renaissance was the very definition of good ideas badly thought out and (mostly) appallingly applied. The expansion of public spaces and mixed uses led merely to pointless piazzas with attendant branches of Costa Coffee; the rise in city living has led to brownfield sites and any space next to a waterway, from the Thames’s most majestic expanses to the slurry of Deptford Creek, sprouting the aforementioned Urban Task Force blocks. Meanwhile, the film’s central suggestion—that new housing should not only be on brownfield or greenfield, but should moreover replace the much-loved but standardized and deeply dilapidated housing of 1870–1940 that dominates the country—was partially fulfilled in a disturbing manner. This is where the film is at its most controversial.
Britain, it argues, has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and the most dilapidated, and it is enormously expensive to retrofit—why not just knock it down and build something better? Chillingly for conservationists, Keiller takes for his model the modular, inexpensive, prefabricated construction of supermarkets, although introducing the film in 2009 he ruefully wonders ‘why I thought we should all live in Tesco’. Nonetheless, why be sentimental about substandard housing from the era that coined the term ‘jerrybuilt’?
The idea of destroying and replacing huge swathes of Victorian housing found fruit in the government’s Pathfinder scheme. Designed to ‘revitalize’ the economies of a selection of post-industrial areas from Birmingham northwards, it entailed the compulsory purchase and demolition of (most frequently council-owned) housing not so much to replace it with something better, but for the purposes of, in Pathfinder’s subtitle, ‘Housing Market Renewal’ in northern towns previously untouched by the southeastern property boom. The results are inconclusive, to say the least, and reveal just how little the quality of a set of buildings has to do with its place in the property pecking order. As Heritage campaigners were keen to point out, the streets tinned-up ready for demolition under Pathfinder were just those which, in London, would have been long since the subject of fevered property speculation. In Liverpool especially, Pathfinder’s demolition programmes encompassed some large bay-windowed nineteenth-century houses which would have gone for silly money further south—though they did