Urban Gentrification Machine

Remove unwanted street clutter including stone cladding, backlit signs, fast food shops and people with this handy interactive Urban Gentrification Machine from English Heritage, available via The Guardian.

You too can live in leafy Barnsbury at the touch of a button if you follow the steps correctly. Remember, artificial stone cladding is not just aesthetically wrong, it's morally wrong too. If you like it you are a degenerate and a pervert. Move out. Leave this place for the decent folk.

(Above and top: before and after screen shots from how to 'improve' your street.)

p.s. Apologies to anyone who thought this topic was exhausted on twitter. I thought it needed posting.

Lines of Defence

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In a field near my parent's house in rural Essex there is a circle of trees. In the centre of this circle is a deep pit which for as long as I can remember has been an overgrown dump full of old pesticide canisters, redundant farm equipment and, for a while, an abandoned car. There are others like it nearby where people tend to fly tip abandoned washing machines and all sorts of household detritus.

But this one is different and harbors an odd secret. The pit was dug during the second world war and formed the entrance to a tunnel containing food supplies, explosives and munitions for a Home Guard auxiliary unit. These units, also known as Stay Behinds, were trained in guerrilla warfare techniques in order to disrupt a successful German invasion through acts of sabotage. Its members would operate literally and metaphorically as an underground resistance operation.



The bases for these operations formed an often elaborate underground network of tunnels and subterranean structures, photographs and drawings of which can be found here. These structures included radio listening posts like the one illustrated below which formed an even more invisible network of defence.



The hideaways and tunnels of the auxiliary units formed a subterranean line of defence that echoed the network of pillboxes and fortifications above ground. The GHQ (General Headquarters) line for instance stretched from Somerset to the Thames Estuary and then up to the wash. There were some 400 pillboxes across Essex, many of which are still there dotted along rivers banks and roads.



The landscape of the south and east coast is in many ways a landscape of fortification inscribed with centuries of invasion fears. I have written before about the transformation of landscape through military manoeuvres and the way that neutral space becomes contested territory. Boundaries too shift from being inviolate to potentially fluid and changeable. It is at such points that the precarious arbitrariness of these boundaries becomes most apparent and the most extreme kinds of nationalism flare up.



At Saint Margaret's Bay in Kent there are two very different kinds of defensive structures, one literal and hidden and the other symbolic and highly visible. At one end of the beach is a second world war gun emplacement, a blank hole in the cliff staring out to sea. At the other is a hip roofed, curiously Mittel European looking bungalow called White Cliffs Cottage. In 1945 this house was owned by Noel Coward, arch patriot and writer of, amongst other things, the film In Which We Serve.



Here is another kind of defence, the inflation of a certain kind of Englishness as a bulwark against foreign invasion. Nearby is one of those fabulously terrible local museums that trades heavily on the Coward association. It features hundreds of photographs of the writer hosting cocktail parties against the backdrop of the English Channel. Coward's work during the war as a propagandist was in many ways the opposite of the underground defences, an ostentatious display of resistance acted out through films and popular songs.

It's fitting then that his home should have such a flamboyant location at the foot of the white cliffs of Dover. Unfortunately Coward only bought it towards the end of the war which slightly reduces its camp bravado. Post war though the house would continue to have a role in the cultivation of myths of national character and defence. Coward sold White Cliffs Cottage to Ian Fleming, another xenophobic writer who set Moonraker there, a book in which the country's own defence system becomes a sinister threat.

It's easy to imagine both writers purchasing this house as some kind of plucky outpost, a flamboyant first line of defence against the enemy. White Cliffs is not actually the closest house to France though. That honour goes to an actual gun emplacement, a former army observation post that has been converted into a holiday cottage.



(Information and drawings are from this site)

Oh My Lord, or Why I Don't Wanna go to Chelsea.

OK, so this is the scenario. An unelected Lord who has sworn an oath to an unelected monarch admonishes her son for acting undemocratically*. Lord Rogers of Riverside is backed in this attack by the Royal Institute of British Architects, an exclusive closed shop enjoying royal patronage and dedicated to advancing the cause of its members.

Various high profile members of the RIBA call for a boycott of the Prince’s speech at Portland Place. These members are happy to bear royal support but not so far as to allow one of its members to address them about architecture. Lord Rogers meanwhile accuses the Prince of not wanting to take part in an open debate and calls for an unelected cabal of constitutional ‘experts’ to limit the Prince’s powers.

Meanwhile in their battle against Lord Rogers’ designs for the barracks site, the forces of conservation have commissioned an alternative scheme by Quinlan Terry, a "Champion of classical architecture"** who was recently fined £25,000 by the ARB for destroying two listed buildings.

My colleague Sean Griffiths describes the debate in today’s Observer as “two Chelsea pensioners still fighting world war one”. In truth it’s perhaps closer to a medieval feud between a prince and a powerful nobleman. Ludicrously and depressingly anachronistic it seems to have engaged public opinion in a way that few architectural debates usually manage.

The Chelsea barracks debate abounds in ironies. It also won't go away. Like a lot of architects though I’m finding it difficult to care about either scheme. I’m perversely intrigued by Quinlan Terry’s Hogwarts style alternative if only because its form seems so dementedly unsuited to its purpose. I would love to see what some of the high-end flats might turn out like in such a layout. Ultimately though it's not a real project, more a slightly ludicrous excuse for an argument.

Unfortunately it's the same old argument. Rogers defends his scheme on the grounds that every age has its own architecture and, presumably, his represents the apogee of our one. In such a scenario, the past is always presented as a continuous uninterrupted line of development with each discrete era utterly certain of its direction. This is clearly a psychological trick designed to make us think that there is no alternative to where we've ended up.

Meanwhile supporters of the Quinlan Terry scheme hide behind the miserable barricades of contextualism in a way that makes you long for some '60's style Brutalism to come and wipe everything away.

What this debate is about ultimately is style, a debate that architects are ill equipped to fight on the grounds that they are in denial about it. No one cares really about the densities, or hard to grasp notions of what constitutes successful public space, or even the quality of accommodation being proposed. It is, as they say, a style war and architects hate talking about style.

They are desperate to shore up their status as professional dispensers of rational, sensible advice. Lord Rogers has been the designer of some of the most ludicrously style crazed buildings of the 20th century. That's what so brilliant about the best of them. It's just a shame that the Chelsea barracks scheme doesn't measure up. Otherwise I would be out there campaigning for it.

Last week while I was sitting on the bus reading an article about Rogers' scheme being canned, a man (somewhat inexplicably carrying a pair of skis) leant over to me and said; "It's a victory for common sense". You have to say that whatever it is, it isn't that.

* James Heartfield unpicks this well in this article in the New Geography.

** Quoted from this article in the Daily Mail.

P.S. For a sane description of the scenario behind the whole thing you should read this.