main bulk of the complex is the office block in the tower, spilling into the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building, and curiously it’s here that the difference between this place and any other corporate headquarters is most apparent. On one level, it’s a question of rhetoric. You find the brightly coloured sloganeering that adorned some Blairite structures, but the content is very different. Instead of, say, AHMM’s Westminster Academy and its Mandelsonian mantra of ‘Enterprise, Global Citizenship, Communication’, each room features the rather more meaty, contentious ‘Solidarity, Participation, Democracy, Equality’. What would once have been called ‘improving quotations’ are also littered around the building, with ‘everything from Mahatma Gandhi to Billy Bragg’ etched into glass doors and internal windows. Most memorably, given that the UK has, as Tony Blair once proudly pointed out, the most repressive labour laws in the Western world, one wall comes courtesy of Michael Foot: ‘Most liberties have been won by those who broke the law’. All this heated (albeit graphically soft-toned and lower-case) rhetoric has to have some sort of correspondence to how the building actually functions. Given that the organization exists at least in part to fight for better working conditions, it had to be ‘an exemplary working environment’. And here Unison are clearest about the old NALGO building’s limitations. Not only was it dark and lit by artificial light, John Cole also points out that it had ‘no social spaces’. Now, the union ‘wanted large floor plates’ in order to be able to create these areas. In the concrete tower block, there’s a very pleasant roof garden, a café, a crèche, a ‘breakout room’ and much else. In design terms, these aims are compromised a little by the rather cold, identikit corporate detailing. Cole comments that opulence was out of the question, as ‘we have lots of low-paid members’ (something that didn’t deter the designers of Congress House in the 1940s) but there’s no doubt that the spaces work. When walking around it I chance upon a small office get-together, with crisps and what is (euphemistically?) labelled ‘juice’. One comments that in three days in the new building, she’d met six fellow Unison employees she’d never met before. ‘It shows how a building can change things’.
Most of the workers I saw here were women, and the building seems – perhaps inadvertently – to reflect where trade unions are currently strongest, in poorly paid but traditionally ‘white-collar’ jobs, largely female, and highly computer-literate. In the face of accusations that unions are lumbering pre-modern dinosaurs, Cole points out that Unison has the the largest intranet in Europe, and Michael Poots lists with equal pride the building’s impeccable environmental credentials. Given the evident success of the internal arrangements and the lightness and airiness of the place, it’s a shame that its design language stays at such a low voltage.
That’s something which becomes especially clear with the transition to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. This late-nineteenth-century hospital was closed in 2002, with its functions transferred to nearby University College Hospital. The complex required a complete restoration of its much smaller, cosier rooms, with the original tiles and fireplaces scrupulously pieced back together. Sometimes this leads to enjoyably surreal juxtapositions, as when a vaguely art nouveau fireplace sits unused in the corner of a video conference room. Irrespective of the TUC’s brief foray into high modernism, the most famous visual image of trade unionism is deeply Arts and Crafts-influenced – the embroidered trade union banners that are still carried on marches, where the aesthetics of William Morris socialism, in a pre-branding era, still have a vivid emotional role. Framed with foliage, symmetrically organized and allegorical, sometimes you even find architectural modernism immortalized on them. One RMT banner I spotted on a protest a few months ago was centred on an image of Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove station. This powerful language is at least partly present in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. In its main room, which is being adapted as a museum, with interactive exhibits on feminism, the health service and trade unionism, there is remade Arts and Crafts furniture (that you can sit on, for once) and a small library stocked with the likes of Friedrich Engels, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sheila Rowbotham. If the rest of the building avoids traditional notions of what trade unionism looks like, here there’s a reminder, and it’s a quietly powerful one. Perhaps this is a project which needed rhetoric and imagery as much as clarity and spaciousness. While Squire and Partners clearly took the place very seriously, a more nonconformist firm might have reconciled the traditional and forward-looking impulses of the union in a more forthright, convincing, dialectical way. Instead, the pretty but mute faceted roof of the atrium provides the main connection. Maybe the commission should have been given to the Radical Postmodernists at FAT.
The atrium also leads the pedestrian towards the housing that was demanded by planning – deceptively so, as there is no public access. It’s a decent, unspectacular, stock-brick scheme of houses and flats, ‘mixed’ as ever, and clearly demarcated between the private element facing one way and the ‘social’ side the other, with both quite aggressively gated from the street. You’re reminded that the context is the redevelopment of Somers Town and King’s Cross, a working-class, industrial area of dense council housing undergoing severe gentrification, from commercial architects HOK’s BioMed Centre behind the British Library, that was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing, to the new St Pancras International or the King’s Place commercial development. It’s the sort of area where unions used to thrive, now being completely transformed. The Unison building shows trade unionism transforming in turn, and in that, it’s an optimistic, encouraging building, an enclave of sobriety and solidarity in amidst the regen tat. It stands its ground, quietly.
Agency (2): The Students Take the Squares
Sometimes, the self-referential, apolitical world of architecture intersects with politics in unexpected ways. In the same week as the student occupations spread, on the same day as the ‘Day X 2’ demonstration organized by student protesters against cuts and fee rises,3 there was a story in the local and architectural press that summed up much of what the students were fighting against.
This was the granting of planning permission to something called ‘The Quill’, a tower of student housing aimed by developers at students from King’s College. It’s a fine example of contemporary architectural idiocy, a lumpen glass extrusion full of clumsy symbolism – the flurry of steel spikes that gives it its name is ‘inspired by the literary heritage of Southwark’ – but it’s a reminder that students are far from the privileged, cloistered group that some present them as. It’s the obnoxiously detailed tip of an iceberg, of the pile-up of awful student housing that has resulted from the partial privatization of education. Developers have made large quantities of money out of some of the bleakest housing ever built in the UK, marketing it as student accommodation usually on sites which would otherwise be allotted to ‘luxury flats’ or other ‘stunning developments’. Student-oriented property developers like Unite (no relation) and the amusingly named Liberty Living are, amongst other things, revivalists of the prefabricated construction methods favoured by the more parsimonious councils in the 1960s, and their blocks, all with attendant ‘aspirational’ names – Sky Plaza in Leeds, Grand Central in Liverpool – recall the worst side of modernism, in their cheapness, blindness to place, and total lack of architectural imagination. Inside, they’re a matter of box rooms leavened by en-suite bathrooms, charging outrageous rents; the most apparently ‘luxurious’ of them, the skyscraping Nido Spitalfields, charges £1,250 a month for each of its self-described ‘cubes’.
They’re also a reminder that students were encouraged under New Labour to be an ideal combination of indentured serfs and aspirant yuppies; the actual conditions of students’ existence in the 2000s, from the poverty of their housing, to their catastrophic debt, to their part-time jobs in call centres, to their years of unpaid intern labour, were bleak indeed; but all was hidden by an oxymoronic language of inclusivity and privilege; you might be living in a cupboard, but it’s a cupboard with a plasma screen TV; you might seem to be underpaid, overworked
