Architecture

The thing about history is that you sometimes look at the behaviour of our ancestors and wonder Just what the heckers were they thinking?. You think about the witch-burnings of the 16th & 17th centurys and your face adopts a midly quizzical expression. You read that the Romans once gleefully crucified 20,000 Gauls in an afternoon and you shake your head wonderingly. You recollect the results of the 1997 general election and you make a faint tutting noise.

That's the thing about history. They did stuff which is incomprehensible to us now, but almost certainly made some sort of sense at the time.

The thing is, I often feel much the same about architecture and living in London one is surrounded by some of the most spectacular examples of civic architecture on Earth. I defy anyone to walk from Oxford Circus down Regent Street, across Trafalgar Square and then along Horse Guards and Whitehall to Westminster without periodically pausing to look up and the buildings and think You know, if I ever conquer the world I'm going to build something pretty much like this. Oh yeah. In the same way, the last time I went into St Paul's Cathedral I was so filled with civic pride that I actually grew three inches in height. True Story. And what's more, London is simply crammed with this sort of thing. It's difficult to walk round a corner without happening upon some architectural gem of which you'd previously been unaware. Something lobbed up in an afternoon by optimistic Victorians who thought nothing of leaving a legacy which would enliven, improve and lift the hearts of all who saw it. I love that.

The thing is, in about the middle of the twentieth century it all seemed to suddenly go badly wrong. As far as I can figure out, one day - I'm guessing it was in March 1950, give or take a week or two - some bright spark at City Hall decided to give the job of civic planning for London to an architect who had just finished a book with a title like Stalinist architectures twenty greatest achievements or maybe Albania: Building for the future and this fellow, whoever he was, decided that monumental paeans to the human spirit were old hat, and London really needed instead was plenty of pre-stressed concrete, lots of right-angles, and no trees whatsoever.

As a result you can be wandering past a grandiose edifice like County Hall, which looks like the architectural commission for it read "We want a building that says 'Up yours world, we're London and we're best'", and then immediately happen upon the South Bank centre, which look slike someone kicked over a huge pile of Jenga blocks. And this sort of thing went on all over the place - you've got Centrepoint Tower, which appears to have been modeled upon an inverted toast rack and is just as crumby*, or you've got Trellick Tower, which looks like the sort of thing I used to build from lego when I was six. Vast swathes of what might otherwise be perfectly nice parkland have blocky, rectangular eyesores on them instead.

And don't get me started on Stevenage.

And then, one day in - oooh, about 1985, I'm guessing - that civic planning job I was talking about earlier was taken over again by someone who'd actually taken the time to saunter round some of the more eyecatching bits of London and when the designs for the redevelopment of the docklands came round they said something like: "Tell you what, everyone. Rather than building something which looks like a housing estate in Gdansk, how's about we use lots of marble and have three whopping great towers designed so they look like they're flipping the bird to the rest of the world".

Which was an improvement, anyway.

^{*Ah, I kill myself sometimes}