Disease, Demolition and Developers

Typhoid grips a suburb, a prescient planner envisages the pedestrianised harbour we know today, and the Harbour Board's reclamations set the foundations for our commercial heart; fascinating nuggets revealed by some little-known maps from over a century ago.

Proposed Extension of the City of Wellington (1877)

In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym of 'Mr Darnoc' – drew up plans to transform Wellington’s waterfront. His imagination was fueled by a big reclamation a year earlier, which created 190,000m2 around the northern end of Featherston Street – almost a third of all Wellington’s man-made land.

Seidelin’s credentials had been established by his masterplanning the redesign of Copenhagen, where his scheme to demolish the city's walls won Denmark's Medal of Merit two decades earlier. Wellington was an ambitious city, and the Danish architect didn’t hold back, with designs straight out of the Renaissance urban planning playbook. Heavy on symmetry (a challenge given our terrain), the city’s centrepiece was to be a curved waterfront basin where Te Papa is located today, with tree-lined avenues drawing people to the waterfront.

The plan was a rejection of the closely packed laneways and squalor that characterized Te Aro. Seidelin's map left the ghostly outline of the recently completed Queens Wharf in his layout as a reminder that his vision was of a modern city, rather than a colonial outpost; public facilities and major businesses would have to make way. Ornamental gardens at Herd Street would have required the demolition of the recently opened Te Aro Baths, and warehouses around the northern end of Taranaki Street were to be replaced by a large piazza – a concept that has never really worked in New Zealand.

Wellington's city councillors sensibly considered the design impractical and expensive: curved docks and enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill-afford. The proposal was rejected, and expansion into the harbour continued piecemeal for the next 50 years – a situation not too dissimilar to Copenhagen's remodeling, where many of the ramparts and lakes Seidelin wanted removed were retained and are popular parts of the Danish capital today.

Seidelin’s vision is intriguing because it merges radical urban form with the streets we know today. The map was drawn before the railway arrived in the city, but the Government Building (opened in the previous year) is clearly identifiable the end of Lambton Quay. 

The idea of an accessible waterfront would have seemed fantastical in the latter part of the 19th Century – yet 150 years on visiting cafes at the water’s edge as envisaged is central to the Wellington experience.

Typhoid Area (1892)

Wellington’s emergence as a shipping hub facilitated the spread of diseases, with SS England bringing smallpox to the city in 1872. Surges in measles occurred every five years, and Pertussis (whooping cough) killed 24 people in 1891 alone. Typhoid first appeared in New Zealand as an epidemic disease in 1860, and the period between 1886 and 1891 became known as the ‘typhoid years’ with 548 Wellingtonians dying from bacterial infections (including cholera). 

Meanwhile the city grew from around 15,000 in 1875 to 49,344 in 1901. Densely packed Te Aro was particularly vulnerable, with infrastructure hopelessly unable to keep up. It was hardly surprising that many Wellington families fled to settlements like Karori, including the Beauchamps with their young daughter Kathleen (writer Katherine Mansfield), following the death of their baby Gwen from cholera in 1891.

William Chapple, a 28-year-old doctor fresh from his previous practice in Motueka, set about mapping the deaths in the tradition of English physician John Snow, who Chapple would have learned about as a student at King’s College London. Snow (one of the fathers of modern epidemiology) had pinpointed the source of a major cholera outbreak in London four decades previously by plotting the location of cases, and traced them eventually to a contaminated water pump at Broad Street.

Chapple quickly identified Holland Street as the centre of the Wellington outbreak, where he found blocked pipes and lavatories causing excrement to flow under the cottages’ floorboards, sewers venting directly into the houses, and residents without plumbed lavatories emptying their ‘night soil’ onto the street. Unsurprisingly an inspection of the hospital’s admission records showed typhoid cases soaring after heavy rainfall, when excrement sluiced into the harbour in rivulets around and under people’s homes.

None of this squalor is obvious in Chapple’s deceptively simple map. The colour of the dots reflect cholera’s ‘blue death’ nickname, with the victim’s skin turning bluish-grey from loss of fluids, their distribution reflecting the slums that lined Te Aro’s laneways.

Chapple recommended ‘a complete system of sewerage on modern principles’ to empty the city’s waste into Cook Strait, rather than Lambton Harbour, via a sewer tunnel under Mount Victoria. The cost was controversial (£165,000 – $35m today), but the incidence of sewage-related diseases treated at Wellington Hospital fell dramatically once the infrastructure was completed in 1899.

Chapple later became a prominent eugenics advocate (‘habitual drunkards and nocturnal house-breakers’ were included on his list of undesirables). He holds the unusual distinction of being elected to parliament in both New Zealand and the UK, and retained his New Zealand medical registration throughout, returning to work at Wellington Hospital as the Resident Casualty Officer in the 1930s – perhaps he regaled the junior doctors with accounts of the city as he recalled it four decades.

Plan of 12 Building Sections on the Te Aro Reclamation (1906)

Established in 1880, Wellington Harbour Board was tasked with operating and expanding the city’s port. Starting work three years after Seidelin’s master plan was rejected, the Harbour Board embarked on a programme of reclamations driven by Chief Engineer William Ferguson that laid the foundation for the inner city waterfront of today.

Ferguson aligned the new wharves so that the prevailing winds would help ships manoeuvre, and reduce the requirement for tugs to help vessels berth; he also drove investment in hydraulic cranes. The port was recognised as one of the best equipped in the Southern Hemisphere. Ferguson created a partnership with the government and City Council to deliver a series of new wharves and land reclamations – including the Taranaki Street Wharf development, completed in 1905.

The reclaimed land was ‘a magnificent block’, according to auctioneers George Thomas & Co. ahead of its sale in February 1906 – and for once the real estate hyperbole was justified. A flurry of investment had transformed the surrounding area since the turn of the century, with a new fire station (reassuring for commercial building owners) on Lower Cuba Street, opposite the City Council’s impressive new Town Hall which opened on December 7th 1904. Concert-goers arrived on the electric trams that had commenced service in the preceding months, and in the summer rowers in the Star Boating Club’s boathouse enjoyed music from a new bandstand on the Cuba Street side of Jervois Quay.

It was all remarkably modern. The map reassured buyers that the land on offer was anything but the Te Aro of the typhoid years; it even shows the Polhill Gully Watercourse (described by the Evening Post as ‘exceedingly offensive’ a decade earlier) now buried in a long culvert under the city’s streets. The map omitted the city’s waste incinerator at Chaffers Park; it was expanded shortly after the Taranaki Street reclamation was auctioned off – caveat emptor.

The sale was well attended and two buyers bought all but one of the allotments; the State Coal Department purchased the land south of Cable Street (a new road named after the Harbour Board’s outgoing Chairman William Cable). The modernist John Chambers Building was completed in 1918, and the smaller Inglis Brothers bicycle workshop occupied the Taranaki Street end of the block – the Wakefield Market food stalls was the building's final incarnation prior to its demolition in 2007.

The land to the north was purchased by timber merchants C & A Odlin’s. The company completed its eponymous building within 19 months of acquiring the site, with Shed 22 built as a wool store by the Harbour Board when Odlin’s moved its timber yard to Petone in the 1920s. In the mid-1990s there were plans to raze the empty buildings and replace them with a reviled casino-hotel, but resource consent was withheld when the extent of the public opposition became clear.

Aside from those replaced by the One Market Lane development, the buildings that sprang up from the 1906 auction remain in situ, historic waterfront buildings that are fully renovated, earthquake strengthened, and home to blue-chip businesses like the Stock Exchange and architects Warren and Mahoney. A magnificent block – just as the auctioneer promised 115 years ago.

First published in Capital (Issue 81).

A gigantic shunting of workers

Last week the Office for National Statistics published research that found commuters who spend between 60 and 120 minutes travelling to work have lower life satisfaction, see their employment as less worthwhile, have lower happiness levels and greater anxiety. This in itself is hardly surprising, but it is useful to be reminded by hard data that ‘commuting is clearly and negatively associated with personal well-being’. Unsurprisingly the research suggested that people who work from home as the happiest: I’m self-employed, and the rare occasions I’m rammed into a rush-hour Northern Line train remind me just how lucky I am to avoid the daily grind on the underground.

Commuter at Waterloo

Our enthusiasm for commuting over long distances owes much to our historically excellent infrastructure, but also the failure to make modern city life accord with modern needs – not my words, but those of The Spectator back in 1964, which recognised that the ‘gigantic shunting of workers across the London conurbation’ was batty. This is particularly so when you recognise that drivers pay hefty fuel bills and require government to build costly roads, and that railway commuters need billions spent on capacity solutions like Crossrail (and Crossrail 2) while paying eye-watering amounts for season tickets. If your daily commute is an hour each way every day of the week, come Friday you’ll have lost a cumulative working day paying for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam with cyclists whizzing past you. Personally I’d rather spend my time with my family and friends, rather than listening to Southern tell me that yet again they ‘are’ sorry to announce that blah, blah, blah.

For many people the daily pilgrimage to work is an unwitting yet rational response to decades of poor urban planning. Escaping to the countryside to exercise what Nick Boles describes as ‘a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ is perfectly reasonable given some of the shocking housing built across the country in recent decades. After all, if your home is little more than a shoebox, having a garden for your children to play in is very sensible!

Yet ripping up the green belt to build garden cities simply compounds the cost and misery of commuting. Instead we need higher-quality housing in London and our other urban areas that entices people into living closer to where they work, and to challenge what the ONS describes as ‘inertia’ towards our rigid commuting patterns. Historically Britain’s inner city areas were much more densely populated than the leafy outer suburbs: today the reverse is true.

Fortunately there is hope. New homes are being built at sites like Battersea Power Station to higher design standards, and there is a renewed interest in promoting walking and cycling to work. And adopting new guidelines like ‘Building for Life 12′ means that for the first time in decades we are taking significant steps to avoid blighting lives at the planning stage with the expense and wasted hours of traffic updates and platform announcements – with which the inhabitants of our existing garden cities are only too familiar.

First published by Platform 10 on February 19th, 2014

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. I was encouraged to see the company's new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space.

The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube travel and packed conditions. So Crown knows that letting its buildings means accommodating the rocketing numbers of people who ride to work.

But, as we discussed the Haymarket redevelopment over coffee, I realised that the challenge facing Crown is that while car use is falling, budget freezes mean parking revenue has become much more important to the balance sheets of London’s inner city authorities. This is problematic for new cycling infrastructure, as installing bike lanes comes at the expense of income-generating street parking.

Catering for cars might superficially help local authorities’ coffers, but a string of studies have shown that bike lanes, locking points, etc. give huge boosts to local businesses: New York City’s recent flagship bike lane on 8th and 9th Avenues led to local shops enjoying a 49% increase in sales. Saving the £1,216 cost of a Zone 2 annual travelcard frees up money to spend in the local economy, and gets people off our overcrowded tubes and trains during rush hour.

None of this washes with Westminster City Council (Crown’s local authority counterpart). The council would be hauled in front of the Competition Commission if its parking business model was the product of anything other than geography – incidentally only a third of Westminster’s households have access to a car. Sadly, as things stand, it’s difficult enough trying to find somewhere to lock up a bike before going shopping in the West End, wasting valuable time that could be spent in the shops and cafes that pay the council’s rates.

The recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads is, obviously, terrible news. But I fear that the cycle lobby’s focus on fixing the Mayor’s flagship Cycle Superhighways misses a deeper problem: how we get the various tiers of local government to confront the sustained change in our transport use. The private sector manifestly gets where the market is at, as was clear when I saw Crown’s magnificent cycling facilities. Unfortunately, our politicians are stuck making rational decisions based on the perverse incentives of the city’s disjointed government structure. With London’s population gaining an extra 600,000 by 2020, this muddled approach is clearly unsustainable. Bold decisions are required.

First published by Coffee House on November 19th, 2013

Nimbyism? That’s not even the half of it.

Pity the poor Nimbys. Not only has the government’s horrible new planning regime come into force, but last week we heard the pro-HS2 lobbyists describing them as ‘posh people standing in the way of working-class people getting jobs’. Even Isabel blames them for wanting to preserve the idyllic views from their breakfast room window. Being a nimby is so last century.

Alas, calling the naysayers nimbys simply glosses over one of the biggest problems facing our society, namely how government deals with the built environment. This has little to do with preserving greenfields, areas of outstanding natural beauty, Jerusalem – or indeed nimbyism. It is simply that building houses in the countryside inherently designs significant expense into people’s lives. Little consideration is being given to how people are meant to travel to work, with developments usually far away from the local railway station, and money available for local infrastructure from Section 106 levies woefully inadequate.

So the lovely garden that the nice Nick Boles wants families to believe is their right has a nasty price tag attached ever so discreetly: the cost of a season ticket on our state subsidised railways and running two cars on our congested roads, with the cumulative loss of more than a working day a week in the commuting grind rubbing salt into the wound. We’re placing ridiculous and entirely avoidable stress on families, and commuting is penalising people for poorly designed cities.

The good news is that we already have lots of houses fit for families; the bad news is that they’ve mostly been subdivided into flats, a perfectly rational market response to the changing shape of British society. Of course we haven’t built enough houses, and yes, immigration has seen demand soar. But Britons are also leading different sorts of lives from a few decades ago: we marry later, and are more likely to divorce, meaning that fewer people are interested in the old concept of a ‘family home’. We’ve failed to build accommodation in line with the demands of 21st Century life, and the result is soaring rates of flatsharing in poorly converted apartments. Incidentally most young professionals must look at the protests over the bedroom tax with disbelief – in the private rented sector spare rooms get filled very quickly, and sharing your home is common if you’re young and saving for a mortgage deposit.

Frustratingly house building companies – almost uniquely – deliver products that the market doesn’t want. Unlike cars, cameras and computers where ‘new’ is aspirational, the building industry is churning out a product that only a quarter of home buyers would actively consider, a damning indictment that you’d think would merit a stiffer response than the Government merely ‘telling them to think a bit about it’. RIBA has already pointed out how bad regulations are for new homes, with people having to store food in their cars as kitchens haven’t been properly designed. Tragically the new planning regime will merely compound these failings, with swathes of new houses financed by state credit, built in the wrong place and for the wrong target market, and the opposition brushed off as heartless to the challenge of the ‘yet-to-haves’.

First published by Coffee House on April 11th, 2013

Pig ugly thinking

I’m reluctant to admit it, but it took me a few days to build up the courage to watch Nick Boles’ planning piece on Wednesday’s Newsnight. In my defence I’d read a great deal of the ensuing coverage, but my gut reaction was similar to hearing that Lindsay Lohan is back in the papers: trepidation combined with an awful feeling that it almost certainly isn’t good news.

Firstly, the positives. In an age where the perception is one of politicians not being in touch with the general public, Boles demonstrated a sound understanding that home ownership is still the foundation of people’s aspiration. And he is spot on in identifying immigration and slow house-building rates as a terrible combination – something that the previous Labour government completely dropped the ball on. He also realises that developers are failing to build homes that excite, with only 25% of buyers interested in new build properties.

Unfortunately talk of people’s rights to a ‘home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ breezily dismisses some rather more fundamental difficulties. Paxman’s questioning was incisive, particularly in pressing Boles as to what his proposal actually meant. Developing 3% of the countryside doesn’t sound much, but talk of building over countryside equivalent in area to two new Londons in the next twenty years is far less appealing, particularly when you consider that many of the fields being sacrificed are in the already densely populated south east, where the demand for housing is highest and the roads already heavily congested. Boles could have fired up the public’s imagination by declaring war on the swathes of vacant houses, or the brownfield sites that are capable of taking half a million homes in southern England alone. Mind you, it's a great time to be a farmer – the fields you and your predecessors have worked for centuries don't amount to much in the Planning Minister's eyes, and are best sold to the friendly developer who is enthusiastically waving his chequebook at your land.

Poundbury fire station
(2009 finalist for the Carbuncle Cup) 

Likewise Boles’ description of ‘pig ugly’ architecture smacked of the Prince of Wales’ taste in buildings. Unashamedly traditional Poundbury hasn’t been a success, despite a concern for beauty, and it is simplistic to point to old buildings and argue that we need to take style lessons from the history books.’Old’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’, as anyone who remembers the properties demolished during the slum clearances will remind you. If Boles is serious about sorting out the housing problem in the next two decades, he should concentrate less on aesthetics, and more on raising design and build standards, as buyers will sacrifice the romance of a 100+ year old building for the ease of living in well designed, energy efficient homes that the government can deliver by imposing tougher building regulations. I lived in Stockholm for a year, where bringing up children in a central city apartment is the norm: having a family means finding a larger apartment nearby, rather than the London trend of fleeing to the suburbs.

What I found most troubling though was the notion that people had a right to some sort of suburban idyll. This is patronising tosh and intellectually lightweight. Boles’ notion of a right to a house with a garden is merely a prescription for how he thinks we should live our lives: I’d feel far more comfortable taking to Paxman about spacious, warm homes that are cheap to run and relatively close to the economic hub than some twee notion that harks back to pre-industrial Britain. One of the residents interviewed helpfully pointed out that we don’t live in an ideal world, advice that Boles would be wise to take onboard. Such a world would iron out many of the competing work / life tensions that determine where we live, but is also inherently impossible – my personal ‘ideal’ would be a lovely little cottage with an Aga, ten minutes bike ride from the centre of London, and next to ancient woodland.

Inevitably I have to compromise, as do millions of others, as the failure to build decent one and two bedroom apartments in the hearts of our cities has seen market forces driving the conversion of many family homes into sub-standard flats. This in turn reinforces the British public’s perception that what they really want is a cottage as far away as possible from our poorly designed urban areas, and discovering when they get there the misery of long commutes, high fuel prices, expensive season tickets and a feeling that the garden nice Mr. Boles gave them might not have been the quality of life game changer they’d quite expected.

First published by Platform 10 on December 6th, 2012

In praise of red tape

Two small stories made the news last month. The first was a report by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Institute of British Architects, which found that many of the UK’s new-build homes are poorly designed, with chaotic living spaces for the families that the large housebuilders seduced into buying them. Complaints abounded of homes without internal storage for everyday things like vacuum cleaners, and rooms fitted with the legal minimum number of power sockets, despite this being the age of the iPad and countless other electronic gadgets. Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page was damning about the quality of the homes being built in the UK, stating that the report ‘shows just how cramped and poorly planned much of our housing is today, and the extraordinary lengths people go to cope with it.’ RIBA rightly pointed out that our building regulations are in desperate need of modernisation.

The second story concerned the latest in the Coalition’s ongoing efforts to address the UK’s housing shortage. You can debate whether this is because of the banks’ lending policies, the Labour government’s immigration policy, raw material costs, etc. ad finitum: the simple reality is that we need more homes. The government announced that a new body has been tasked with looking at how housing standards could be simplified, and aims to tackle what (then Housing Minister) Grant Shapps dubbed the ‘alphabet soup’ that is the building code. Which sounds like the positive action we want from politicians, until you realise that it isn’t a bonfire of regulations that is needed, but the somewhat more painstaking job of tightening and fine-tuning our minimum standards for the new wave of homebuilding that the Government wants to unleash.

None of this is news to our leaders. Back in 2007 the Shadow Cabinet was presented with the far-sighted 'Blueprint for a Green Economy', which recognised that ‘building control and planning systems should be more closely integrated as they are in fact two sides of the same coin’. The demands we place on our living spaces haven’t changed much since then, and it is worth considering that the current offering from the building industry isn’t exactly popular. Currently only one in four home buyers would consider a new-build property, so clearly something isn’t right, as consumers generally prefer new things. If the government merely decides to axe energy efficiency requirements and other quality of life regulations in an effort to get house building going at the lowest possible price, they will be making a bad situation a whole lot worse. Why should the striving classes who will have to live in these new properties face needlessly high heating bills and cowboy home design? I prefer to be optimistic though: there is now a golden opportunity to ensure that new homes are built with sustainable systems like rainwater harvesting, which offers a return on investment well before the halfway point in a 25 year mortgage and reduces the need for costly utilities infrastructure in years to come.

I mention this episode merely because the War On Red Tape™ is back in full swing this week, with the announcement that the planning appeals process is to be streamlined. The PM is 'getting a grip' on the issue, and the government’s narrative sets the frustrated developers who wish to drive the nation’s growth forward against the Nimbyism and regulatory fat that is clogging up the economy. Cutting regulations makes for a good sound bite, and shows politicians as battling the morass of building paperwork that stands in the way of the slow march to economic recovery.

Except this simply isn’t true. Ignore the fallacy that home-building delivers economic growth (it does, but only in the very short term, with the main beneficiaries being the shareholders of the large housebuilding companies, the farmers keen to cash in and flog their productive lands, and the migrant EU workforce needed to deliver the boom in construction). Appealing planning decisions is incredibly important to sustainable, harmonious communities.

For example, Conservative Wandsworth (my local authority) is an exemplar council: its reputation for competence regularly sees wards that vote Labour at general elections returning a full complement of Tory councillors at the local elections. Wandsworth has campaigned tirelessly against a 1,200 home development located well beyond reasonable walking distance to our local railway stations, with the local road network already desperately congested, as anyone who has battled their way down Trinity Road knows only too well. The appeals process has allowed Wandsworth Council to whittle down the ambitions of the developer to less disastrous levels, and highlights the importance of letting communities put their case and balancing the steamroller effect of the big developers’ deep pockets. Often projects are improved as designs are scrutinised, with the final blueprints gaining far greater acceptance from all sections of society – and surely this is a good thing?

There is also a broader, more philosophical point. We Conservatives believe in the power of the individual and society, not the blunt tools wielded by the big state, which is fortunate as the number of applications for judicial review in planning cases has dropped since 2006 – the rocketing 11,000 applications figure mentioned by the PM in his speech driven by immigration, that other political bête noire. Cherrypicking statistics belies the reality, and writing in Monday’s Guardian, Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC hailed the evolution of British administrative law since 1945 as a major achievement, and one that is in fine health today. Compare this to the confidence in our political system, which many of the public feel increasingly estranged from.

So here lies the danger. How much more alienated will the ‘little people’ far removed from Westminster or even just their local town hall feel when the government has lengthened the odds in their fight against the ruthless calculations of the circling developers? Regulation might feel like a brake on our economy, but it is the price we pay for people believing that they are part of an inclusive society. The general public’s simmering fury over the fast tax practices of Amazon, Starbucks, and other big businesses is a warning that politicians can ill afford to ignore.

First published by Platform 10 on November 22nd, 2012

Blindly protecting the countryside is not sustainable

The development of our green belt and countryside areas is back on the table, as the government casts around for ways to kick new life into 'Plan A'.

I grew up in prime green belt country on the Kent and Sussex border, and loved escaping from school to explore the rolling hills and woodland that characterises the High Weald. Twenty years on, I still find myself jumping on the train out of London at the drop of a hat. Alighting at stations like Cowden, with its narrow country lane the sole connection to the outside world, is a magical experience for reluctant city dwellers like me.

Sentiment should not guide policy, however. Our rural areas must help deliver the growth we need, and being precious about blindly protecting the countryside is itself hardly sustainable. Indeed the word ‘Weald’ means woodland in Old English, yet today many of the most scenic vistas are open heath, the area’s trees felled long ago to fuel furnaces that smelted iron ore dug up from deep holes. Four hundred years later these pits have become tranquil ponds. The few remaining woods became the setting for Winnie-the-Pooh’s adventures, innocently belying the area’s history as the centre of the English arms industry.

So my frustration at how easily the development of our countryside has slid back onto the growth agenda is not based on a simple aesthetic objection to concreting the urban hinterland. It lies in the ongoing failure to understand the intrinsic value of protecting the green spaces around our cities and further afield, and our inability to look into the future and picture the sort of country we want to live in.

CPRE’s name – the Campaign to Protect Rural England – hints at the nature of the problem. Protecting the countryside would be a great deal easier if people understood the fundamental reasons that make the organisation’s work so important. At the risk of sounding glib, the organisation’s cause might be stronger if they were the Campaign to Value Rural England. As anyone who has been arguing for protecting school playing fields will know, once the worth of something has been shown, the local community tends to be pretty strident in its desire to defend it. Unfortunately the general public’s understanding of countryside has for too long been tied to “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and the like, which does little to stem the remorseless march of the developer.

And so we need to make the argument that green belt land is fundamentally good for the economy, and counter the plethora of misguided headlines for the so-called growth agenda. Limiting urban sprawl focuses capital on regenerating existing land in our cities, which would otherwise require clumsy state intervention, or be left to fester as unsightly wasteland. The countryside also gives much needed space for cityfolk to blow off steam, go rambling, have pub lunches, and so on. And it provides livelihoods for people in agriculture who feed us, which is important given the looming global food security challenge – something those pushing the growth panic button seem to have forgotten. We need to remind the public of these arguments because there is an awfully large amount of money and time being spent to ensure people are persuaded otherwise. The litmus test is whether we can reconnect people who live inside the M25 and M60 with the green areas immediately around them.

Which brings me to the future, and – I suppose – the past. There is huge pressure on the government to unleash a wave of new house building, and the narrative being spun ties this firmly together with economic growth: the prospect of a house building windfall already has landowners and home-builders licking their lips with unseemly fervour at the profits to be made. By now you will be unsurprised to know that green belt land is being considered for much of this, with 11,000 new homes on the North West green belt that lies around Liverpool and Manchester. 7,500 houses are to be built on protected land around Bristol and Bath, and the picture for the rest of the country is equally discouraging: Surrey is unlucky enough to be getting yet another wretched hotel and golf course development.

The problem Britain faces is that our experience of house building has been scarred by some of the terrible projects that were constructed in the mad dash to replace housing stock lost to the Luftwaffe and post-WW2 slum clearances. Shoddy housing schemes like Ronan Point and the Hulme Crescents mean we are not keen on the idea of dense urban living – hence the spread outwards. Fortunately the postwar municipal disasters are balanced by countless Peabody housing associations that demonstrate how successful communities have been created by good Victorian design, and even North Kensington’s notorious 1960s Trellick Tower has been recently redeemed. Yet the damage has been done. Politically the vision of compact urban living would appear to be a much harder sell than the ubiquitous two up/two down semi complete with double garage – which sits in complete contrast to the apartment lifestyle so popular on the Continent.

Changing the British perception of housing and the environment will take time – something that the Downing Street strategists probably don’t have a great deal of. But if we fail to recognise the value of greenbelt land and develop it for short term economic gain we are simply placing people further away from the city centre, and expecting them to pay extortionate prices for petrol or a season ticket – as well as waste their lives with the unnecessary grind of commuting. We are designing pointless expense and untold misery into people’s lives, and consigning the taxpayer to decades of road widening and dual carriageway improvements. That’s not a Britain that I want to live in, and looking at my fellow travellers on the rare occasions I take the train early in the morning, I know many would agree with me.

First published by Platform 10 on September 3rd, 2012

London's Centre Point building

This is an essay I wrote during my first year as a undergraduate at UCL. I've published it here as I couldn't find a decent single account of Centre Point's history, and it might be of interest to anyone who has walked past it wondering how it came to be.

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Critically explore how Centre Point fits into the surrounding urban landscape and assess how its function, design and everyday use can be used to examine processes of urban change in London.

Centre Point is a building that many Londoners regard with ambivalence at best. Its concrete construction and prominent position on the West End's skyline places it firmly in the imagination of the architecture of the 1960s, and the length of time the building spent empty adds to the general sense of its being unloved. However Centre Point's construction was not a simple redevelopment of an existing plot, but a substantial rezoning of the St. Giles Circus street layout, and assessing the building's aesthetic merit must include an examination of how it was integrated with its surroundings. Most importantly, though, is understanding the blend of politics and social change that allowed the construction of a building so vastly different from the surrounding area: in short, this boiled down to property speculation and motor cars.

Compared to Manhattan, London's skyline was historically dominated by church spires, a result of the 100' restriction that was in place until 1954 (Marriott 1967). The easing of building restrictions meant that property suddenly became substantially more lucrative – A.N. Wilson points out that in 1943 Land Securities was a sleepy company with three Kensington houses: 25 years later it was worth £28 million, and that this sudden expansion changed London's skyline 'so irrevocably and with such brutality' (Wilson 2005:114). The boom commenced in the summer of 1959 when construction started on the 118m high Vickers (now Millbank) Tower. This building showed how the outlay on purchasing land could be met by the revenues from the large volume of space in a high-rise building, and the new 177m tall Post Office Tower in Fitzrovia would have further spurred the interest of developers with plots of land in the West End.

Figure 1: the layout of St. Giles Circus and environs before the Centre Point redevelopment
(Ordnance Survey)

It was the rise of the motor car after World War Two that created the local conditions for redeveloping St. Giles Circus (the junction of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street). Urban authorities across the United Kingdom were busily reconfiguring streets for the era of mass car ownership, and London County Council (LCC) was keen to install a roundabout (the latest thing in highway technology) at St. Giles Circus to enhance the flow of the A40. This scheme was vigorously resisted by Pearlmans, the company who owned the land required by the local authority. Fortunately for the LCC, the city's property developers were usually amenable to doing a deal: 'Developers bought up the land required and made it over to the LCC; the council in return granted planning permission on adjoining land owned by their benefactors' (White 2008:112). And in Harry Hyams the council had found their man. As a private business concern Hyams had far greater flexibility to bargain with other landowners, and his solution was simply to throw money at the problem until it was resolved. LCC had offered the Pearlmans £55,000 for their property and been rejected, but when Hyams offered them £500,000 they gave in (Wilson 2005). He amassed other local properties to complete the collection of titles the project required, and in 1962 Hyams handed the site to the council in return for a 150 year lease at £18,500 a year – an amount that was regarded as peanuts at the time (White 2008). Construction started immediately. The use of pre-cast concrete removed the need for scaffolding and shortened the building phase, and Centre Point was ready for tenants three years later (Wright 2006).

The deal between Hyams and the council is the most important factor in understanding how Centre Point came to be at such odds with the surrounding urban landscape. Hyams' commercial savvy was in obtaining his pound of flesh from LCC, and the 20,000m2 building he was given consent for had a floor area equal to the size of the site that he handed over to the council – including the proposed roundabout. Hyams was also canny in his choice of architectural partner, and in Richard Siefert he had found someone whose 'reputation for speed and mastery of planning law made him the doyen of commercial architects' (Pawley 2001:online). Wilson is blunter, describing the 'undistinguished' Siefert's genius as 'not for architecture, as Londoners are now all too painfully aware: it was for getting round planning regulations' (2005:115) – a criticism that underlines how polarising Centre Point has been since its completion, but also the speed at which Siefert had to work. He submitted the Centre Point proposal on behalf of Hyams four days before the 1959 Town and Country Planning Act came into force – legislation that would have forced the development team back to the drawing board (Bayley 2006).

Harry Hyams' decidedly fast approach to business and Centre Point's subsequent impact on London's skyline might well have been long forgotten had its impact on the immediate vicinity been a success: it wasn't. As the project's contractors were putting the finishing touches to the building, the local authority was quietly shelving their proposed changes, as the temporary one-way system around the site had proved so successful (White 2008). Porter describes Centre Point as 'a fine building squeezed too tightly into the wrong place' (2000:521), and it was this sense of imposition on the new street layout that provided a common cause for both the building's advocates and opponents. Paul Williams, the architect currently working on the site's landscaping as part of the new Crossrail station and a self-confessed fan of Siefert, recognises that street level integration was a weakness of architects in the 1960s and 70s. The indecisiveness over the roundabout created a site that Williams considers a 'lethal catastrophe which unsuccessfully mixes angry traffic with anxious pedestrians' (Bayley 2006:WWW). Hyett points out that the situation was compounded by a 'useless water feature [that] has sprayed pedestrians struggling to use the miserably narrow pavement around its base' (2001:online).

Today the site is changing again, and Centre Point presides over the large construction site for Crossrail's new Tottenham Court Road station. This will metamorphose into a public space that rectifies the 'dysfunctional and missing link between Covent Garden, Soho, Bloomsbury and Oxford Street' (Terry Farrell & Partners 2008). The landscaping that was so studiously in sync with the sense of 'white heat' modernity in the early 1960s in which the car was the future, will instead reflect the priority that today's urban planners place on the pedestrian. The visual line down St. Giles High Street from the Circus will be restored, pavements will be widened, and the area between St. Giles Circus and St. Giles-in-the-Fields will be prioritised for pedestrians (ibid.) – much of which seems to address Glinert's observation of public anger towards the original scheme:

What the 1950s and 1960s public found distasteful was the mass destruction of the locale – old St Giles and the stretch of ships at the northern end of Charing Cross Road which included London's first women's bookshop, opened in May 1910 to cater for growth in suffragist literature – to build a 380-foot, honeycomb-windowed white elephant'. (2007:188)

Crossrail will be completed in 2018, and it is worth pondering how the Centre Point building will be regarded in the decades to come. Freed from the shackles around its footprint, will the skyscraper finally enter the public's affection? By the time of his death, Siefert's reputation had been restored, with the Guardian noting in his obituary that in 1993 'his former enemies at the Royal Fine Art Commission called for the listing of Centre Point for its "elegance worthy of a Wren steeple"' (Pawley 2001). London's skyline has also moved on, and while the controversy surrounding Centre Point finished off any thoughts of building other skyscrapers in the West End, it is a relative minnow amongst the giants of the early 21st Century.

Figure 2: The proposed pedestrian plaza and entrances to Tottenham Court Road station (Crossrail)

So far I have concentrated on the impact of the physical building. But there is an elephant in the room that must be addressed when looking at whether Centre Point's everyday use is symbolic of urban change. 'Everyday use' is a complete misnomer, as the building was notoriously left vacant by Hyams, who would only consider renting the office space to a client willing to take the entire building. The dynamics of the booming property market were to blame, and the politicians felt powerless:

By June 1972, it had been empty for almost eight years, yet still Hyams showed no signs of finding a tenant; indeed, because of the tax laws on capital gains, he was probably making more money by keeping it empty than if he had rented it out. (Sandbrook 2010: 523)

Figure 3: Protesters occupy Centre Point in 1974 (Museum of London)

At a time of great social unrest across the country Centre Point was becoming the focus for protests about the wave of urban change driven by property speculators. There was talk of compulsory purchase orders and nationalisation of the building. Protesters broke in and occupied the building for two days in January 1974, and The Times columnist Bernard Levin asked:

'What sort of a society is it that says dockers are holding the country to ransom by striking but does not say that developers are doing so by keeping office blocks empty until the rent has risen high enough to satisfy their greed?' (ibid.)

The building's reputation had transformed from representing the excitement of the swinging 60s to the malaise that gripped Britain in the 70s.

Hyams finally relaxed his demands for a single occupant, and in 1975 a Greek shipping company took over the building's 5th floor. It was only in 1980 that Centre Point had its first major tenant, with the Confederation of British Industry taking over 14 floors (Wright 2006). Today the building is home to a variety of businesses, including a serviced office operation with flexible leases: a move that would surely have been an anathema to Harry Hyams back in the early 1960s, but one that reflects the flexibility that today's businesses demand. The battle between commercial property interests and government continues to ebb and flow, most recently with the Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 – legislation against which property agents have already honed their skills in avoiding compliance (Guilfoyle & Askham 2010).

The bad press surrounding the development of Centre Point spilt over to Siefert's work on other projects. His plans for NatWest's new headquarters involved the demolition of historic buildings, and while the canny Siefert was ultimately successful in his battle with the authorities, the decade-long planning battle meant that the 183m tall NatWest Tower was obsolete by the time it was opened in 1981 (Pawley 2001). More importantly, the desire for building iconic skyscrapers in the capital subsided for the next two decades.

Hyams eventually sold his interest in Centre Point in 1987. His approach might have made business sense, but today commercial property operates on a very different model, with large companies like Unilever sharing their iconic buildings with other tenants. 2008 saw the opening of The Paramount, a members' club located on the top three floors, and the venue was favourably reviewed by London's influential 'Coolhunter' blog as 'a blend of 60s retro and futurism' (Evans 2008:online). For decades Siefert's creation has been the ugly ducking of London's tall buildings, but with the passage of time and attention finally being paid to the building's immediate vicinity, will opinion still be so polarised ten years from now?



Bibliography

Bayley, S. (2006) 'At last, things are looking up at the end of Oxford Street' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/oct/01/architecture?INTCMP=SRCH

Evans, L. (2008) 'Paramount bar by Tom Dixon (London)' retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.thecoolhunter.co.uk/article/detail/1410

Glinert, E. (2007) 'West End Chronicles: 300 Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London' London: Penguin

Guilfoyle, S. & Askham, P. (2010) ' Rating (Empty Properties) Act 2007 and business rates avoidance tactics' The Sheffield Hallam University Built Environment Research Transactions 2,1,p.5-13

Hyett, P. (2001) 'Wonders and blunders' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2001/jul/02/wondersandblunders.architecture?INTCMP=SRCH

Marriott, O. (1967) 'The Property Boom' London: Hamish Hamilton

Pawley, M (2001) 'Richard Siefert' London: The Guardian retrieved 17th March 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/oct/29/guardianobituaries.arts

Porter, R. (2000) 'London: a social history' London: Penguin

Sandbrook, D. (2011) 'State of emergency : the way we were : Britain, 1970-1974' London: Penguin

Terry Farrell & Partners (2008) 'St. Giles Circus: Strategic Framework Study' London: Terry Farrell & Partners

Wilson, A. (2005) 'London: a short history' London: Phoenix

White, J. (2008) 'London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People' London: Vintage

Wright, H. (2006) 'London High' London: Frances Lincoln

Bicycles: a very Conservative way of getting from A to B

This summer has seen a transformation in the fortunes of the humble bicycle. Names like Wiggins, Hoy and Trott are now part of Britain’s sporting pantheon, and have inspired us mortals to pump up our bike tyres and take to the roads. But away from the hype around getting our children more involved in school sport, cycling has an important part to play in securing the sporting and social legacy of the Games.

Riding a bike is fun (and good exercise to boot), and by getting people out of cars, buses and trains we can reduce the need for expensive increases in public transport and road capacity: Transport for London’s Boris Bikes are run at a profit, unlike tube and bus tickets, which are heavily subsidised. Indeed, the bike is the ultimate Conservative way of getting from A to B: it offers complete freedom, and the user bears almost all the costs of riding!

Making our roads safer for cyclists also carries a useful electoral dividend, with the rise of transport poverty an increasingly pressing issue. UK roads are twice as dangerous for cyclists when compared to Germany, which in part explains why in Britain the simple act of hopping on a bike to get around is largely the preserve of affluent, young caucasian men. Ensuring our streets are a more appealing prospect for bikes is something that will play well with the sorts of voters we need to connect with – women, people on low incomes, etc.

The Department of Transport’s work with local authorities to promote 20mph limits in residential areas is a step in the right direction, but there is much more we can do. I think there are two inexpensive measures the Government can take that would be a massive step towards encouraging people onto their bikes in a safer road environment.

1) Simplify complex design standards. At the moment there is no overall idea of what constitutes design best practice when creating safer streets for bicycling. The Highways Agency addresses it in several publications, regional authorities have their own guidance, and local councils also have best practice documents – with no requirement for any of these to be followed. This seems incredibly inefficient, and unsurprisingly the internet is awash with photos of poorly implemented bike lanes that are at best a waste of time and paint. Instead, we should create a single document that local authorities must adhere to. Cyclists want better infrastructure, and having a unified, clear sense of what this entails would be an important step – and much more cost-effective.

2) Put the onus on drivers. Three quarters of car/bike accidents in London are attributable to drivers failing to look properly, yet in practise the law remains heavily weighted against vulnerable cyclists. Directing the CPS to increase prosecutions of careless driving seems a little heavy handed. Why not simply insist that drivers have to prove they were not at fault in civil cases, rather than the current situation where cyclists (who are to blame for only 26% of accidents) have to graft away to get redress? This balance of liability is common across the Continent, where it encourages responsible biking – a common gripe of the British motorist.

The cycling safety debate will come increasingly to the fore as fuel and ticket prices rise in the coming years. There is a huge opportunity for us, particularly given that Labour’s recently announced cycling policy fails to address the structural challenges inherent in making our roads more bicycle friendly. Offering cyclists reasonable legal protection and simplifying the spider’s web of design parameters addresses the core safety issues, and would be important steps in the right direction at little cost to the Exchequer. And it would also be a positive message to sell on the doorstep to the sort of people we need to win over in 2015!

First published by Platform 10 on August 23rd, 2012