a wave of criticism of the urban renaissance. It’s exactly that renaissance that this book seeks to critique, albeit not for the same reasons. British cities deserve better than to be reduced to a systematic regeneration formula of ‘stunning riverside developments’ and post-industrial leisure in the urban core and outside it a sprawl of giant distribution sheds, retail parks and what Patrick Keiller described as ‘reduced versions’ of the houses of 150 years ago.
This book is an autopsy of the urban renaissance, but one driven by constant surprise and fascination at just how strange, individual and architecturally diverse British cities actually are. When researching the articles which eventually formed this book, mostly on foot, I was amazed by this richness, and at how widespread ignorance of it really was. I include my own ignorance in this. Apart from the opening and penultimate chapters, this book is almost exclusively about cities of which I had very little knowledge at the start of 2009, when on the strength of a long rant about my hometown on my weblog, I was commissioned by the architecture paper Building Design to write a series on British cities in the recession. The ensuing pieces appeared under the appropriately depressive, underwhelming title Urban Trawl. I took a friend, a theatre photographer and lecturer, along to take pictures, knowing that he would not resort to the clichés, sweeping perspectives and endless summers so beloved of architectural photographers. This—for better or worse—explains the ubiquitous signage, overcast skies and neck-craning angles you will find in the images in this book. And aside from a final, parenthetical visit to Liverpool, visited for other reasons, this follows the unplanned path we took across Britain for Building Design. Many, many cities are absent here, for no reason other than the vagaries of my particular architectural interests and convenience. Belfast, Cumbernauld, Birmingham, Harlow, Bristol, Plymouth, Edinburgh, Hull, Swansea, Coventry, Northampton, Aberdeen, Basildon, Barnsley, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Preston, Barrow, Leicester and many others have my apologies for the implied but unintended slur on their character. I would have visited if I could.
Apart from quick trips as a child or adult to Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, these were places of which I had no prior experience, despite being obsessive about British architecture and politics (which may explain my occasionally Kaspar Hauser-like tone). This comes partly of being from the privileged south-east, albeit born and bred in one of its less privileged outposts. When I mentioned where I was going next to friends and relatives, there was often a certain amount of ridicule—why would you want to go to Leeds, or Milton Keynes, or Halifax? Why, when we all know that British cities are overpriced, ugly, thuggish and violent places built of concrete and glass, the ‘Crap Towns’ that The Idler compiled books about while its founder Tom Hodgkinson retired to the countryside to play at being a gentleman? The argument of this book, as well as the issue it takes with the pieties of Blairite regeneration, is that urban Britain is easily as interesting as the much mythologized piazzas of Italy. The problem is that after being given such a relentless kicking by successive governments and the invariably hostile press, by the 1990s local mettle and pride had broken, so any development was good, anything that ‘brought jobs to the area’ was permitted, and the towns strained to become something other than what they were, something distinctly less interesting—Florence in pine and glass, Los Angeles without the sunshine—when the mess and montage of these multiracial cities provided something which nowhere else in Europe can match. By far the bleakest and least welcoming city we visited for Building Design was Cambridge, which seems to suggest that there is an inverse correlation between national esteem for a place’s qualities and the actual pleasure one can take walking through it.
The dominance of the south-east, i.e. of the increasingly vast London Metro Area, is threatened only very slightly by Greater Manchester—hence the horror of BBC workers on realizing their jobs were moving to Salford, a shocking two-hour train ride away from the capital—and by nowhere else in England (Scotland, as in so much else, is a different story). This is only partly because London’s sheer size has such an overwhelming gravitational pull. In strict census terms, the nearest competitor is Birmingham, with less than one seventh of its population. If taken as conurbations, as continuous urban areas without rural interruption, then Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Tyneside, Leeds, all suddenly become much larger—the populations of Nottingham and Newcastle more than double, while Manchester’s leaps from around 400,000 to 2.5 million. Local government has not factored this in since the effective abolition of the Metropolitan Councils of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne & Wear and West Yorkshire in the 1980s, along with the more notorious destruction of the Greater London Council. The capital partly recovered from this through the less powerful, more symbolic Greater London Authority, but the smaller metropolises never got theirs back in any way, shape or form. Accordingly, they tend to think of themselves as being far more provincial than they actually are. Cities like Sheffield or Liverpool too often play at being villages, with deleterious consequences for their true urban qualities; while the counter-movement to give them Urban Renaissance piazzas and towers ignores their actual features in a different but equally disastrous way, hence all those ‘urban villages’ bringing hermetic, provincial rural mores into the heart of the city.
Several books guided this guide, principal among them one published in 1934, a travel book called English Journey by the Bradfordian writer J. B. Priestley.9 In the following decade it was so widely read as to become one of those semi-mythical books that ‘won the ’45 election for Labour’—a sharp, populist, politely angry account of a deliberate attempt to look England in the face, from Southampton to Newcastle. This book is consciously written in Priestley’s shadow, albeit extending it outside of the dubious centrality of England, and focused much more strictly on buildings rather than anecdote and general observation. A few others also cast a heavy shadow—the mid-century journeys of Ian Nairn, the 1990s dérives of Patrick Keiller—and what links all three, other than my (usually hidden) references to them here, is a disinterest in or critique of Heritage England, and the pervasive myth of either an overcrowded or a green and pleasant land.
By the mid nineteenth century, this was the only country in the world which had more urban than rural inhabitants. Even now, after a century of sentimentalism about the countryside, around 90 per cent of us live in essentially urban areas, and although around 70 per cent of the landmass is still agricultural land, only 300,000 people actually work it. This might be an urban island, but extraordinarily Penguin Books were able to release a set of twenty books in 2009 called English Journeys, in obvious reference to Priestley, every single one of which dealt with the countryside. The bulk of Priestley’s account was urban, this being where the overwhelming majority of the English lived. At the end of this survey of a country torn between north and south, rich and poor, Priestley listed three Englands that he had found on this journey, all of them embodied in their man-made structures. The first was the countryside, an area of patchwork fields and local stone, one which has ‘long since ceased to make its own living’, pretty in its desuetude, if over-preserved. The second was that of the Industrial Revolution, of iron, brick, smokestacks and back-to-backs, more ‘real’ than the first but ruthlessly inhumane towards its inhabitants. Last was a third, commercial world of arterial roads, Tudorbethan suburbia, art deco factories and cinemas; cheap and ersatz, but without the brutality of the second.
Since Priestley, we could add a fourth and fifth England, or rather a fourth or fifth Britain, as this book attempts to avoid what Tom Nairn calls ‘Englishry’. These are, respectively, the country of the postwar settlement, of council estates, Arndale centres and campus universities; and the post-1979 England of business parks, Barratt homes, riverside ‘stunning developments’, out-of-town shopping and distribution centres. This book is, at heart, an architectural guide to this country, to Britains four and five. It charts both the ambiguous remains of the fourth, and the fifth’s frequent determination to wipe out any architectural trace of it, just as it tries to decimate the remnants of its collectivist politics—and here I attempt to treat Britain five with much the same retrospective contempt as it shows its predecessor, largely for the reason that I find its neoliberal politics every bit as repugnant as it does those of its socialist forbear. This is not, however, a ruminative book about urbanism that touches on architecture to illustrate an argument, but one where architecture itself is central, much as it is in New Labour’s Change We See campaign. ‘By these stones shall we be judged’,