London IDEAS |
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London's future deserves thoughtful debate rather than quick slogans. This section brings together working papers, discussion documents and Peter's emerging ideas.
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Central London is a city of many layers. The Romans, Saxons, Normans, Tudors, Georgians and Victorians have all left their mark, as one period has built on the remains of another. Often the street patterns remain but the buildings change. The multiple layers are a result of the destruction of the city after the Roman occupation, the Great Fire and the Blitz, as well as of the unsentimentality of both the Victorians and the post WW2 reconstructors.
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Since lockdown, I have been cycling, in stages, along the coast of Britain. This provides some splendid rides, like the sea defences of North Kent; pretty Norfolk villages with some really good new housing schemes (contrasting with the tat of the volume housebuilders that you see so much of as you pedal across the English countryside) and the rail-to-trail routes through Yorkshire.
“We need to commit to architecture!” cried Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) at the Venice biennale this year when he chaired a discussion with Reinier de Graaf of Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) about the latter’s latest book ‘Architect, verb - the new language of building’.
The GLA recently announced that London boroughs have reached the target of 20,000 council-built homes by 2024 a year early, with more council-built homes started in the capital in 2022 than any year since the 1970s.
For a long time after the then Prince of Wales gave his carbuncle speech in 1984 in which he castigated contemporary architects there followed pretty fruitless style wars between the traditionalist and modernists, between neo-classical and high-tech, goths and minimalists, culminating in HRH’s interference in 2009 in the development of Chelsea Barracks where the Rogers Stirk Harbour’s masterplan was thrown out for some more conservative.
Seven years ago NLA organised a competition for New Ideas for Housing. There was a category on suburban densification with ideas about how sprawling suburbia might be encouraged to accommodate more people.
A key icon in Sir William Whitfield’s masterplan for Paternoster Square completed in 2004 is Sir Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar, the only remaining example of the ancient gates to the City of London. For nearly 20 years the little building has languished, largely unused as a curious relic of the Square Mile’s history.
The first lockdown Zoom interview I did was on March 20 2020 with Stephen Engblom, the head of Global Cities at AECOM. He talked to me from his house in Twin Peaks overlooking San Francisco about the COVID situation on the west coast and what impact the pandemic might have on the future of urbanisation. That conversation has now been viewed over 16,500 times.
Whatever happened to the Thames Gateway? I recently cycled around the Thames estuary as part of a journey, in stages, around the coast of Britain. It wasn’t a great experience - busy roads, big lorries, aggressive drivers. The landscape was gritty and flat: huge logistics sheds, power lines and industrial structures dominated the low horizon.
First stop is Leigh on Sea, which hosts the closest fishing activity to London and is the capital of the estuary's cockle-harvesting business. Up until the 1980s cockles were raked from the sands by hand but today vacuum dredgers suck up them in huge quantities. There are only 14 licences to fish for cockles allocated for the whole of the Thames Estuary and eight of them are held in Leigh. While the boats supply the traditional and tourist markets in the area, most of the catch is exported to Europe.
Leigh's economy grew on the raking of cockles because of the miles of sand revealed by the receding tides, which is also why Southend has the longest pier in the world - it needed to be that long so that boats could use it and people could get a glimpse of the sea at low tide. I was too early to be able to get onto the pier and was sorry to have missed White Arkitektur's Cultural Centre and Cafe which was erected in 2012. The structure was prefabricated at Tilbury Docks, shipped along the Thames and craned into position - a much more appropriate addition than the detritus I had found at Hastings. |
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