news gatherer’. ‘That’s nice,’ he says when I get out the card. ‘But have you got permission?’ ‘What, to take photos in a car park?’ ‘This is private property. You have to have permission.’ He then makes me delete the photographs I took in the car park from the digital camera, one by one, before I am allowed out onto the ‘street’.
Leisure World
Quayside Pub
Castle House vs the De Vere
Except there is no street here. This whole gigantic site is designed solely for the car, so my being a pedestrian is already suspicious, impeccably white and well-spoken though I may be. There are two recent buildings as part of this spreading mass of shed: one for Ikea, which includes some public art on the wooden spirals of its car park; and another for cruise operator Carnival, which, with its high-tech cribbings, is almost a work of architecture, although not a work of urban architecture—it’s another business park building that is, somehow, literally yards from a medieval walled town. Similarly un-shed-like is the 1994 De Vere Grand Harbour Hotel (‘a shit-brown postmodern Brunswick Centre with a big glass pyramid fucked into it’, says Bad British Architecture, marvellously17). I’ve long thought this a risible, ridiculous building, but somehow in the context of blank, deathly sheds it seems to have at least some ambition, some statement of place and clumsy grandeur—and surely better a failed, ridiculous grandiosity than the utterly grim utilitarianism of the other city hotels. Behind the De Vere is a different conception of civic grandiosity, Eric Lyons’s Castle House. Better known for his private housing, Lyons designed here a powerful council tower block, detailed precisely in stone, concrete and wood. On the last of the walks where these photos were taken, it was being reclad with green glass and UPVC, a material which housing expert Sam Webb claimed had proven to be lethal in tower blocks at the Lakanal House fire in Camberwell.18 Regardless, it’s the cheapest and easiest way to dress a tower, whether a former president of the RIBA designed it or not. The assumption seems to be that its original fabric is automatically worthless, irrespective of it being considered ‘the finest tower in the south’ as late as the 1980s.19
WestQuay hinterland
But this is all really just leading up to Building Design Partnership’s enormous WestQuay mega-mall, the main occupant of the former Pirelli site. I’ve often avoided it gingerly, taken routes that circumvent it. I don’t like it, obviously, but the language that is used to attack it is remarkably similar to that which is used to attack some of the architecture I love. It’s out of scale, it’s too monumental, it’s fortress-like, it’s Not In Keeping, it leads to abrupt and shocking contrasts, it’s too clean and too shiny … well, yes. At one point it bridges the street, next to a line of Regency Terraces, and is full of arch contempt for that which precedes it, irrespective of an attempt to ‘respond’ to the terrace’s scale through an industrial, lightly brick-clad wall, with storage ever so slightly legible as its function. The shopping mall has a suppressed dreamlife, from the socialist politics of its ‘inventor’, the Viennese architect Victor Gruen, to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the shopping arcade as the house of the dreaming collective. BDP, the architects of this and many, many other recent British buildings, have their own socialist past. They began as a co-operative founded by George Grenfell Baines, an architect of Lancastrian working-class extraction, to unite architects, engineers, sociologists, in a non-hierarchical Partnership which could sidestep the hoary old myth of the autonomous architect (that they became a normal private company in 1997, of all years, seems apt). The mall derives from an attempt to recreate social spaces, to become a socialist-inflected social condenser in the context of consumer capitalism. If we condemn the malls without being very careful about how we go about it, we line up with the likes of Paul Kingsnorth, those who care more for the destruction of village shops than the collapse of industrial civilization.
I still hate it. Some of my friends helped build it, you know. Indulging in a bit of manual labour to save up money for their gap years. The first time I ever went to WestQuay I was shocked by it, not least because of the fact it coincided with the destruction of St Mary’s Street—and in their Waterstone’s I found a copy of the Monbiot book which has a chapter on this very topic. I read the entire chapter in there as a minor, piffling protest. Before WestQuay there was Colonel Seifert’s Arundel Towers—two office blocks surmounting a car park, a slide of which I have been known to use as illustration in discussion of the destruction of modernism in Britain. I remember it faintly; the strangeness and intrigue of its multiple levels and the Dog and Duck pub more than the twin towers. The break with Arundel Towers’ approach to urbanism was hardly total.
In terms of how it interacts with the landscape, WestQuay is as aggressive and forthright as any 1960s public building. It incorporates a deep slope, multiple levels and entry points, and two major walkways bridging the roads that the developers couldn’t obliterate. Unlike some of its postwar precursors, such as Castle Market in Sheffield (of which more later), there’s no pleasure for the walker in traversing all these different ways of getting from A to B. This isn’t merely because the earlier building is picturesquely lived-in and dilapidated, but because it’s not seamless: you feel the movement from one place to another, you are able to enjoy it in some manner, and the spaces contain places where you could stop and think rather than be induced to consume at every possible moment. But it is a remarkably complex building, including within itself a deceptively small street façade to Above Bar, the high street it destroyed, a glazed viewing area as part of the food court, and a John Lewis store reached via (internal, hardly palpable) walkways. Inside is what the mall’s website describes as a ‘focal point’, a descendant of Gruen’s ‘social’ spaces, where the lifts and escalators are all clustered, giving a frictionless impression of constant movement. The gestures at contextualism are present, correct and pathetic. At the end which faces the Medieval Walls, the architects have given it a complimentary and functionless watchtower, and the shiny, plasticky cladding is infilled with rubble to be In Keeping (something which was also employed by Leon Berger in his tower blocks at St Mary’s and Shirley). This rubble is mostly at ground-floor level, where it is part of sloping walls, thick enough to withstand a blast or a ram-raid. It has a symbolic function quite aside from the pomo ‘reference’ to the medieval wall: to deter anyone who ought not to be here.
WestQuay car parks
WestQuay’s social condenser
What makes it particularly malign is what happens at the back. Behind the walls and behind Above Bar is a large patch of wasteland20 and WestQuay’s service areas, which take up a massive amount of urban space. They are made up mostly of multi-storey car parks, but also of the series of retail parks that accompanied the main mall—three of them, all themselves with attendant massive car parks. Needless to say, this is not a nice place to walk around. The entire area, a mile or more, is simply not for pedestrians. Although this might be expected on the Kentish hinterland of the M25, it bears repeating that this is right in the centre of a city, in an era when government white papers have endlessly rambled on about the walkable city. This centrality is part of its justification: it keeps people in the city. But the economy is exactly that of an out-of-town mall: reached
