previous | next

But the sixties Tower is too obvious a target and besides, with that fickleness of taste we are beginning to stop in our polemical tracks with a dawning of sincere admiration for some of the achievements of the sixties and the seventies. Trellick Tower in North Kensington is hyper-hip and rightly so too. Some of the big, bad blocks of South London are looking increasingly radical and dramatic. Yes, I am not so stupid as to ignore the real radicalism and excitement in those early days of social housing. In a fascinating issue of the Architectural Design called London Today (June 1961, price 3/6) the sixties adventure had just begun and one cannot help being enormously persuaded by the optimism of the articles. "This montage (says one caption) shows something of the change of scale that is occurring all over London, as the Georgian terraces are replaced by 15 - 20 storey blocks"….exciting! And not just single blocks, of course, but whole estates of blocks.

Fear not; this is not the usual lament over 1960s architecture. It is a different lament. The problem was that 60s architecture was (however radical) fundamentally unmetropolitan. These 1960s estates, apparently so urban, apparently so opposite to the rural were in fact the latest (hopefully the last) exemplum of the " Garden City"; there is an impatience with streets, a contempt for streets, an insistence on swathes of turf. We are looking at the last gasp of the principles of eighteenth century landscape gardening; it was the old English ruralising instinct still, covertly at work. Previous attempts at flat living at least conformed to the pre-existent urban fabric; they did not challenge the order of streets and traffic. They were metropolitan. Later Utopian schemes, (the kind of utopianism that liked to call a roof garden an Amenity Deck) did not wish to fit into this scheme. For as much as they built upwards they felt obliged to provide an equivalent amount of windswept land about them, perfunctorily landscaped, the very English ideals of Brown or Repton still just about discernible in the undulating lines and the trifling man-made hillocks (with vandalised saplings.)

The garden city never really applied in Europe. True, the London Square of the eighteenth century, indeed even of the seventeenth century was an influence abroad. In that most metropolitan of city projects, the haussmannisation of Paris, it threatened to provide a weakening alternative to what the great planner had in mind. Louis Napoleon wanted London-type squares, but Haussman succeeded in vetoing this, allowing but one square as such, that adjacent to the Hotel de Ville. Haussmann was right; for what is quite so wonderful about London squares? Give me a boulevard anyday. Squares may be right in England (I grumpily concede that people seem to think they are wonderful even though most of them were and still are inaccessible to the non-resident and non- key holder); but not in France; not in Italy. I recall that in the eighties in Naples tubs of flowers, pretty Englishy type flowers, appeared; hanging baskets too in the dazzling, hectic streets of Naples; some anglophile Neapolitan had obviously been walking around Christopher's Place in London or somewhere in Bath. They lasted about two weeks. Sorry; not right for Naples.

previous | next