Buildings for Blairism, #3

Grosvenor Waterside, Pimlico, London, Make Architects, Allies & Morrison et al, 2007-present

Suggested, and guided, via Entschwindet, this one offers rather less insight into ideology as currently practiced than the Home Office or the Millennium Village. It's interesting because of the contrasts around it, and because of the peculiar acts of naming involved. To get to Grosvenor Waterside, a former industrial bit on the western edge of Pimlico (obviously it's not where it claims to be. This is cleverly circumvented by the slogan 'Reflecting Chelsea'), the best route is to start from where the monumentally bland 1930s luxury flats of Dolphin Square (red-brick, monolithic, nondescript, and apparently the city stop-off flat of Prince William) face on the one hand the Pimlico School, a Brutalist masterpiece (similar to other GLC work of the period at the South Bank and Thamesmead - jagged, futuristic, expressionist) currently in the midst of demolition; and on the other, the 1940s comprehensive redevelopment council estate of Churchill Gardens. Pevsner was amused by this contrast, noting that the school facing Dolphin Square announced that the people were now in charge - and that the estate said the same thing, rather more quietly. If it were ever true, it certainly isn't now, in Westminster post-Shirley Porter.



Walk through Churchill Gardens, then you come to a series of early Peabody Estates. It's a depressing thought that these grim barracks would be considered more desirable than the council flats adjacent, simply because of the patina of age, and the blocks' deliberate lack of formal felicity. Visiting Churchill Gardens is a curious experience, because you've seen it so many times before, in reduced, cheap, cost-cutted versions. It's very severe, strictly geometric zeilenbau stuff, spacious enough for it never to seem mean - although lacking in the spark of otherness that its Brutalist successors had in abundance. Anyway - the flats are all named after poets, architects and such - Lutyens, Shelley, Byron.* When you get to Grosvenor Waterside, look at the sign. Not the one that implores you to LIVE IN A MASTERPIECE, but the map, where you note the names of the (still unfinished) blocks. A few make obvious references at Tate Britain, up the road a bit: Hepworth, Moore. Then you notice Caro House, and then - Hirst House. Surely Emin Flats is in progress. Confirmation, as if it were needed, that the Blairite conscience does not forget its debt to the Creative Industries.



The flats are the usual fluff - bland, overpriced, full of 'art' whether tacked onto the facade or of the 'public' variety , although seemingly with a finish and seriousness absent from the tackier Hackney variety of luxury flat. Most of all, this is worthwhile as an instructive historical contrast. In temporal terms, you have, all nearby, philanthropic brick tenements for the poor, 'luxury' brick tenements for the rich, intelligently planned and designed concrete flats for the poor, then finally semi-intelligently planned, clumsily designed concrete flats for the rich. Oh, and they are rich here - take a look at the project's website, which veritably screams Russian Oligarchs Welcome.

* (and a bit round the corner from there is the marvellous Lilligton Gardens estate, which has the accolade - blocks named after Aubrey Beardsley and Noel Coward - of being the gayest council estate in London)