Municipal Miscellany

A Things-style round-up of odds and ends, in lieu of a serious post, in order to partially dispel any concern that I am abdicating my blogging duties. I'm not abdicating so much as hoping somewhere else will take over my functions for a bit. The reason for this isn't so much sloth as the work of assembling and expanding the various Urban Trawls into a book to be published by Verso at the end of the year, entitled A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. More details and shameless, grasping plugging will ensue when there's a cover and such things. Meanwhile, and all mostly come across in the writing of the above...

I've probably linked to him before, but Iqbal Aalam is one of the most consistently brilliant things about Flickr - an architect with a seemingly endless slide collection of photos from 1960s-1980s (mostly) British architecture, which he occasionally updates by going back to photograph the sites as they are now. Some recent, insightful and depressing sets have been about Milton Keynes, specifically its attempts to purge itself of its science fiction past. At the top of his page now are pics of the demolition of the Bletchley Pyramid in favour of an astoundingly bland PFI style scheme that Cabe urged not to be given planning permission; but English Heritage decided a black glass pyramid was 'relatively commonplace'. So on those terms, I look eagerly forward to them delisting those thousands of Georgian terraces. More tragicomically, there's also some newly-taken pics of Norman Foster's Bean Hill, his first housing scheme, done on an extremely low budget in the mid-70s, now the least Fosteresque buildings imaginable. It's not often in the retrospectives, although a prize should be given to anyone who somehow manages to present Baron Foster of Thames Bank with photographs of what it looks like now.

Via one of my favourite Flickr groups, the Skybridge-Skywalk-Skyway pool, documenting the elevated pedestrian links across the city that we really ought to have by now, I found this fascinating set of The Mumbai Flyover, more specifically a series of overhead pedestrian walkways that are fulfilling one of the less utopian promises of Metropolis - the affluent in the sky, with the poor down below. The direct demarcation of class in terms of the very means of traversing exactly the same spaces. Unexpectedly, the photos are all by Andrew Harris, UCL geographer and organiser of some very interesting urbanist symposia. At which point I remembered he'd sent me one of these pics before, where he tells me 'although deemed pro-pedestrian it seems they are generally a way of removing pavements from busy roads, bypassing poor areas of housing and generating significant revenue for construction firms and their friends.'

The literal elevation of one class above another was, according to this old Prospect article, attempted by Wilson and Womersley in their plans for the University of Manchester, where the students would have the sky and the 'hoi polloi' Oxford Road. That's as maybe, considering the hoi polloi were often then living along walkways designed by Wilson and Womersley in Hulme - but the article is mostly lamenting the (then-imminent, now long-completed) demolition of the Maths Tower, one of the post-IRA bomb sacrifices to the hungry deities of regeneration. However, as is so often the case, the sacrifice accompanies a reconstruction, albeit of a rather strange sort. Photographs of the Mathematics Tower, designed by Scherrer & Hicks in 1967-8 and demolished just under 40 years later, appear remarkably similar to those of Islington Wharf, in Award-Winning Ancoats, New Emerging Manchester, designed by Broadway Malyan in 2007-8 at the time of the Maths Tower's demise. There's the very same combination of North-West redbrick vernacular and a series of canted, angular glass towers stepping upwards. Were these purveyors of shiny Dubaisms trying to appease the memory of Brutalism? No walkways however, of course.

In a similar Mancunian vein, here's a project on Hattersley, a suburban estate nudging the Pennines, on the outskirts of Cottonopolis, a document of a landscapes equally weird and mundane (link courtesy of Palace). Islington Wharf, meanwhile, is nominally part of New Islington, an incomparably inept redevelopment (with some interesting architecture scattered across the rubble) of the former Cardroom Estate, which is a vivid, extreme example of what has happened to municipal housing in the last decades. Councils are now actually building stuff, to a small extent, after the effective decriminalisation of council housing last year; among those designing it, in Lozells, Birmingham, is the proprietor of No2Self. He very kindly asked me to compose a short introduction to what is alive and what is dead in municipal housing to take with him to the planning committee. It mostly draws on stuff that has appeared here before, but it can be viewed and downloaded here, should you wish to do so.



Meanwhile, in more Brutalist revival news, Koolhaas borrows idea from the neglected late 'cosmic' period of Soviet architecture. But you know, in glass rather than concrete - but note the hapless commenter who asks ' I thought we we're trying to get rid of ugly concrete looking buildings like this?' If things were that simple. (link courtesy of the fragrant Ms Pyzik)

Finally, me on some recent London rebranding nonsense, in BD.