It is, respectively, a hotel, a car park, luxury penthouses and a concert hall, this last a preposterous Caspar David Friedrich thing billowing and crashing atop a 1960s warehouse. It was not initially part of the HafenCity plan at all; it was the private project of two local ‘business leaders’ who personally commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to draw up a ‘landmark’ scheme for the site, claiming that they would pay for the execution, holding many fundraising dinners among Hamburg millionaires in order to do so. Needless to say it soon went over budget, and the bill was offloaded onto Hamburg city council. The cost has risen over fivefold, and is hence a matter of some controversy. When I looked at the construction site of the Elbphilharmonie, rather than high-rent high-spec apartments for millionaires, I could see ads for bedsits, aimed at the building workers who are erecting this enormously complex edifice. They are at least going cheap, although the rate ‘per person/night’ implies that they aren’t supposed to stay there very long. Many are in both German and Polish, so readable by the workers from New Europe who are actually building the place.
As a town planning project, it forms a chastening contrast with the sort of schemes you will find in this book. Hamburg is not much richer than Edinburgh, yet it’s hard to believe HafenCity was designed by the same species that redeveloped Leith Docks. The place is a thumping indictment of the Birmingham Canalside, Bristol Harbourside, Belfast Laganside, London Docklands, all of which were trudged through for the purposes of the book you hold in your hand. As enjoyable public space, as urbanism contiguous with the existing city, as architecture, their equivalent in Hamburg is immeasurably superior, and any British councillor, planner or architect visiting the North German city would be well within their rights to fall to their knees and weep. All this masks the fact that HafenCity is the exact same place as Bristol Harbourside et al. It is a place which caters for, as the slogan goes, the ‘1%’. It has been commissioned by and for the ruling class. In order to get planning permission for such a project in a Social Democrat city, there are sops: a small percentage of ‘affordable’ units, public access, a University expansion and a U-Bahn extension, but these are minor differences, some of which you could find in the UK anyway. It’s the precise same typology – mixed-use redevelopment of a former industrial area, with only the most insecure, casual labour left for the former industrial classes. I dare say there’s less buy-to-let speculating and more renting, and suspect it is all much more carefully managed, but the basic ideology is not different. New Labour tried to make neoliberalism look nicer, and failed miserably, largely because they tried to create a social democratic city using Thatcherite methods. The Germans are constructing an unambiguously capitalist city using social democratic, or at least Keynesian methods – public investment, tightly controlled long-term planning, very little speculation. In the last instance, here too, the public purse ends up paying for the follies of the super-rich. But it really does look nicer.
Agency (1): A Corporate Headquarters for Collectivists
The problem with expecting alternatives to emerge from the practice of architects or from the town planning of less casino-based economies is that they’re still tied to the dominant orthodoxy, whether out of choice or otherwise. Returning, reluctantly as ever, to the UK, we can find three groups, three forces, which are able and willing to resist the extreme neoliberalism of the Tory–Whigs, and who could eventually become the pioneers, the clients, even, of a more equitable society. The problem with imagining the city we might want, of prospecting around for solutions, is always one of agency. You can propose it, fine. Who will build it, or at least, who will force the changes necessary for it to happen? I have three answers here, which are Trade Unions, Students, and the Young Unemployed. They have all, in the last two years, made their own interventions into urban space, all of a very different order.
In summer 2011, I visited the new London headquarters of Unison. Although they don’t, funnily enough, tend to be considered part of the Big Society, trade unions are still, by an overwhelming margin, the largest civil society organizations in the UK. The unions are voluntary, democratic, mutual, bottom-up, and yet they’re the very obverse of ‘localism’, philanthropy and the other current shibboleths. Membership might have declined since its late 1970s peak, and a series of amalgamations might have swallowed up many of the once-influential unions, with even the fearsome Transport and General Workers Union absorbed into Unite – but membership still stands at seven million, which puts the much-vaunted likes of, say, London Citizens in the shade. And paradoxically, the frontal attacks on public-sector unions from the coalition have revealed their unexpected strength, whether in the half a million who marched in London on 26 March or the 750,000 or so strikers who walked out during just one of the several public-sector strikes.
The largest, along with Unite, of today’s amalgamated super-unions, the public-sector union Unison have just begun occupying the first purpose-built trade union headquarters to have been erected in the UK for nearly thirty years, in King’s Cross, London. While as a piece of architecture it’s quite deliberately unspectacular, Squire and Partners’ building shows a face of the trade union movement that is seldom seen. The stereotypes of donkey jackets, gavel-bashing and brawny masculinity are wholly absent – instead, this is quite consciously an exercise in branding and modernization. It suggests what the 1997–2010 era’s Blairite buildings might have been like if Labour had remained a socialist party. It’s a fascinating, occasionally rather inspiring place. But the first thing to note about the Unison building is what it is not.
Oddly, given their once pivotal and still key role in British political life, trade unions have not always been major sponsors of architecture. The most famous union building is in Central London, in the form of David Aberdeen’s Congress House for the TUC, a very expensively detailed Corbusian palazzo, with a Jacob Epstein sculpture and craftsmanlike finishes. It is one of several in the Bloomsbury/King’s Cross area, near to the termini serving the North and the Midlands, traditionally the unions’ strongholds. Even now, the NUJ, Unite and others are nearby. Also in the area is the original headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers, a stripped classical building now occupied by University College. The NUM moved out of here even before their fateful defeat in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5, to a purpose-built headquarters designed by Malcolm Lister – relocated to Sheffield, as a gesture of distrust to Union leadership’s tendency to get cosy with the Great Wen. It was left unfinished at the end of the strike. Unison’s tower is almost certainly the first of its kind since then. The two have a passing stylistic similarity, both centring on severe columns as a slightly strained metaphor for mutual support. It’s worth remembering that the Unison chief, Dave Prentis – not exactly known as a firebrand – has said of the current wave of public-sector strikes that it will be unlike the Miners’ Strike, as ‘this time we’ll win’.
The air of siege and conspiracy that all this might imply is conspicuous by its absence; no union barons or smoke-filled rooms to be seen. Michael Poots, the project architect at Squire and Partners, calls it a ‘corporate headquarters’; Unison’s site manager John Cole speaks of a ‘bold high-street frontage’, and both talk about it as a form of branding, a statement of what trade unions are in the twenty-first century. Cole contrasts it with the office block Unison previously occupied just across the road, a large, slit-windowed concrete tower which he refers to as the ‘East European grey concrete building’. The union had considered moving to the City of London (before deciding that ‘culturally, it didn’t quite fit’), but decided to stay near to other unions and to the termini for the North. But happenstance has meant that the new Unison building directly faces the old. Originally designed for the local government union NALGO, one of those that merged into Unison, Cole says of the old HQ now that ‘it was basically a concrete tower block’, although this is also a fair description of the most obvious element in the new Unison building. To the Euston Road, it is a concrete-clad, steel-framed tower, with a mild case of the barcode façades and a rhythm of different window heights; but this becomes more complex at the rear and the side, where that corporate symbol, a glass atrium, links it to the listed Arts and Crafts Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, a former women’s hospital, and at the back, a small cluster of housing. It’s a complex more than a singular building, although this is hardly apparent from the laconic street frontage, where the most notable moment is the aforementioned branding: a large
