Deep Fried in Gleadless
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I've written a lot about the Sheffield trip, the results of which should hopefully be up in a week or two pending some editorial decisions - but I did spend two days in the company of architectural media polymath The Sesquipedalist, in which time we visited Gleadless Valley, an Alton-style English Modernist-Picturesque estate in the south of the city. It's a place every bit as astonishing as Park Hill, and was planned by J.L Womersley at around the same time; the suburban counterpart to Park Hill/Hyde Park's ultramodern urbanity, using similar ideas - the use of the hilly landscape, access from the street, a breathtaking sense of scale - to milder, more placid effect. The whole walk is written up here, along with some very pertinent observations on the essential inadequacy of architecture - if even something as tremendous as this is considered a sink estate (note how here the picture has been taken from possibly the only angle that would not make the estate look beautiful), then we have to reverse Corbusier's choice between architecture and revolution. Incidentally, there is of course a Pulp connection - violinist, antiques dealer and former flying picket Russell Senior comes from Gleadless, which implies the environment produced at least one great modernist stylist.
posted by owen hatherley at 6:36 pm
7 Comments:
Been reading into the Crescents at Hulme lately which I understand were also designed by Womersley along with Park Hill. It is interesting how these failed so catastrophically (apparently you could buy a front door key for any flat from dodgy bloke down the pub for a tenner!) whereas Park Hill can be seen as a sucess in many ways... although I assume a lot has to do with management. Would be interested to see a write up on Manchester sometime (I'm sure the UMIST campus alone would be worth your while!)
Am going to Manchester for BD in a fortnight, funnily enough. I've been to the city twice before, and have a certain suspicion of it...I didn't know the crescents were Womersley, but certainly his stuff outside of Sheffield for Arndale et al is far less inspiring - and lots of what makes Park Hill or Gleadless interesting is their specificity - you couldn't replicate these places anywhere else, as the topography is so important to the design.
Mind you...anecdotal evidence from friends, backed up here, suggests that Hulme Crescents became some sort of weird Burroughsian interzone in the '80s and early '90s, which links up to one of the less known employments of the Smithsons/Team 10 streets-in-the-sky idea - New Babylon, brainchild of Constant, a Situationist who had close links with Team 10. Bureaucratic planning spilling over into Situationist practice, perhaps (and I've always argued they aren't as far apart as conventional wisdom would have it).
Back up the UMIST comment, from hazy memory.
Also, you're right about the Crescents, though I was only in the city from 92 onwards, and a bit removed from it. A couple of mates there. It was also a bit more 'crusty' than Constant, sadly. Seedy. But also had that spirit to some extent. It was fairly spectacular when it was pulled down. 'Dogs of Heaven' did a show there then, which involved a car being pushed off the top, amongst other things. My friend Pete was playing congas.
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