either by the sociologists Ricky Burdett and Anne Power or by Richard Rogers, under the auspices of the Urban Task Force set up by the de facto minister for architecture and planning John Prescott, this has become the optimistic term for a middle-class return to the cities, and an attendant redevelopment of previously demonized urban spaces. It is inextricably associated with the urban paraphernalia I define as Pseudomodern: in terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant lottery-funded centres, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused riverfronts (Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, the Tyneside ensemble of Baltic, Sage and Millennium Bridge); in housing, the aforementioned ‘mixed’ blocks of flats on brownfield sites, the privatization of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, whether cheerful or gesturing towards sculptor Antony Gormley’s enigmatic figures (his ‘Angel of the North’, outstretched atop a former coal seam, is perhaps the most famous icon of regeneration), usually symbolizing an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realms’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to Derby or Portsmouth.
The process is partial and unevenly scattered, but reaches its most spectacular extent in the miles of luxury flats in the former London Docks, the new high-rise skyline of Leeds, the privatized retail district of Liverpool One, and the repopulation of central Manchester. Irrespective of the virtues or otherwise of these new spaces, this urban renaissance is widely considered to have ended in aforementioned city centre flats standing empty, as if the exodus from the suburbs to the cities was a confidence trick. Half-finished, empty or cheaply let towers in Glasgow, Stratford or Sheffield act as symbols both of the euphemistic ‘credit crunch’ and of the failure, as suburban boosterism might have it, of an attempt to cajole people into a form of living alien to British predilections—although the linked sub-prime crash in the US was a suburban rather than inner-city phenomenon.
So the suburbs—a fundamentally meaningless term, encompassing everything from Neasden to Bingley via Thamesmead and the entirety of Milton Keynes—are back, and with them a wave of criticism of the urban renaissance. It’s exactly that renaissance that this book seeks to critique, albeit not for the same reasons. British cities deserve better than to be reduced to a systematic regeneration formula of ‘stunning riverside developments’ and post-industrial leisure in the urban core and outside it a sprawl of giant distribution sheds, retail parks and what Patrick Keiller described as ‘reduced versions’ of the houses of 150 years ago.
This book is an autopsy of the urban renaissance, but one driven by constant surprise and fascination at just how strange, individual and architecturally diverse British cities actually are. When researching the articles which eventually formed this book, mostly on foot, I was amazed by this richness, and at how widespread ignorance of it really was. I include my own ignorance in this. Apart from the opening and penultimate chapters, this book is almost exclusively about cities of which I had very little knowledge at the start of 2009, when on the strength of a long rant about my hometown on my weblog, I was commissioned by the architecture paper Building Design to write a series on British cities in the recession. The ensuing pieces appeared under the appropriately depressive, underwhelming title Urban Trawl. I took a friend, a theatre photographer and lecturer, along to take pictures, knowing that he would not resort to the clichés, sweeping perspectives and endless summers so beloved of architectural photographers. This—for better or worse—explains the ubiquitous signage, overcast skies and neck-craning angles you will find in the images in this book. And aside from a final, parenthetical visit to Liverpool, visited for other reasons, this follows the unplanned path we took across Britain for Building Design. Many, many cities are absent here, for no reason other than the vagaries of my particular architectural interests and convenience. Belfast, Cumbernauld, Birmingham, Harlow, Bristol, Plymouth, Edinburgh, Hull, Swansea, Coventry, Northampton, Aberdeen, Basildon, Barnsley, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Preston, Barrow, Leicester and many others have my apologies for the implied but unintended slur on their character. I would have visited if I could.
Apart from quick trips as a child or adult to Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, these were places of which I had no prior experience, despite being obsessive about British architecture and politics (which may explain my occasionally Kaspar Hauser-like tone). This comes partly of being from the privileged south-east, albeit born and bred in one of its less privileged outposts. When I mentioned where I was going next to friends and relatives, there was often a certain amount of ridicule—why would you want to go to Leeds, or Milton Keynes, or Halifax? Why, when we all know that British cities are overpriced, ugly, thuggish and violent places built of concrete and glass, the ‘Crap Towns’ that The Idler compiled books about while its founder Tom Hodgkinson retired to the countryside to play at being a gentleman? The argument of this book, as well as the issue it takes with the pieties of Blairite regeneration, is that urban Britain is easily as interesting as the much mythologized piazzas of Italy. The problem is that after being given such a relentless kicking by successive governments and the invariably hostile press, by the 1990s local mettle and pride had broken, so any development was good, anything that ‘brought jobs to the area’ was permitted, and the towns strained to become something other than what they were, something distinctly less interesting—Florence in pine and glass, Los Angeles without the sunshine—when the mess and montage of these multiracial cities provided something which nowhere else in Europe can match. By far the bleakest and least welcoming city we visited for Building Design was Cambridge, which seems to suggest that there is an inverse correlation between national esteem for a place’s qualities and the actual pleasure one can take walking through it.
The dominance of the south-east, i.e. of the increasingly vast London Metro Area, is threatened only very slightly by Greater Manchester—hence the horror of BBC workers on realizing their jobs were moving to Salford, a shocking two-hour train ride away from the capital—and by nowhere else in England (Scotland, as in so much else, is a different story). This is only partly because London’s sheer size has such an overwhelming gravitational pull. In strict census terms, the nearest competitor is Birmingham, with less than one seventh of its population. If taken as conurbations, as continuous urban areas without rural interruption, then Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Tyneside, Leeds, all suddenly become much larger—the populations of Nottingham and Newcastle more than double, while Manchester’s leaps from around 400,000 to 2.5 million. Local government has not factored this in since the effective abolition of the Metropolitan Councils of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Tyne & Wear and West Yorkshire in the 1980s, along with the more notorious destruction of the Greater London Council. The capital partly recovered from this through the less powerful, more symbolic Greater London Authority, but the smaller metropolises never got theirs back in any way, shape or form. Accordingly, they tend to think of themselves as being far more provincial than they actually are. Cities like Sheffield or Liverpool too often play at being villages, with deleterious consequences for their true urban qualities; while the counter-movement to give them Urban Renaissance piazzas and towers ignores their actual features in a different but equally disastrous way, hence all those ‘urban villages’ bringing hermetic, provincial rural mores into the heart of the city.
Several books guided this guide, principal among them one published in 1934, a travel book called English Journey by the Bradfordian writer J. B. Priestley.9 In the following decade it was so widely read as to become one of those semi-mythical books that ‘won the ’45 election for Labour’—a sharp, populist, politely angry account of a deliberate attempt to look England in the face, from Southampton to Newcastle. This book is consciously written in Priestley’s shadow, albeit extending it outside of the dubious centrality of England, and focused much more strictly on buildings rather than anecdote and general observation. A few others also cast a heavy shadow—the mid-century journeys of Ian Nairn, the 1990s dérives of Patrick Keiller—and what links all three, other than my (usually hidden) references to them here, is a disinterest in or critique of Heritage England, and the pervasive myth of either an overcrowded or a green and pleasant land.
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