Introduction
The Change We See
In 2009, the dying Labour government came up with one of the more amusing of its political gambits. As urban regeneration and the new public buildings of the Private Finance Initiative were so prominent and so popular, how about a campaign focusing on them, presenting the buildings that resulted as proof positive that New Labour hadn’t broken its promises, that it was the party of change, that it was rebuilding Britain, and that social programmes were at its heart? The campaign was christened ‘The Change We See’. Go to the website and you find the explanation. ‘Since 1997, we’ve changed this country—rebuilding the lives of children, older people and families. Make no mistake, this could not have happened without supporters like you. Now we face an opposition who wants to deny our successes and cut the public services we rescued. We must stand together and show how proud we are of these historic achievements.’ So, it asks the public to submit photographs of PFI Hospitals, City Academies, Sure Start centres and the like to a Flickr group.
Sadly, it met with an immediate torrent of ridicule and subversion on a wide spectrum from political opponents to the editor of the Architects’ Journal. The Change We See entailed barn-like buildings resembling those built in the eighties and nineties for the supermarket Asda, housing Sure Start children’s centres; a surgery that resembled the cheap woolly designs used by the developer Barratt Homes; a Law Courts (sorry, ‘Justice Centre’) constructed in lumpily jolly 1986 postmodernist style that was, astonishingly, completed in 2005; a primary school that resembles ‘Britain’s Guantanamo’, Belmarsh Prison; and much that is less immediately appalling, but all produced in the chillingly blank Private Finance Initiative (PFI) idiom of clean lines, bright colours, red bricks and wipe-clean surfaces, as if furnishing a children’s ward. Soon, the Flickr group was being subverted by new ‘luxury’ tower blocks that looked like Soviet barracks; CCTV cameras; lampposts capped with spikes to deter vandals; stop and search cards; and images of poisoned brownfield land soon to be developed into housing … all contributed by mischievous Flickr users with the tag ‘Vote Labour’. This wasn’t simply some architectural criticism of a real political advance that aesthetes and snobs just didn’t appreciate. The functions are as awful as the forms: the omnipresent PFI schemes, or the bizarre notion that gentrification, as represented by the penthouses of Manchester’s Beetham Tower, ‘rebuilt the lives of children, older people and families’, other than the children, elderly and families of the decidedly affluent, of course.
My own little contribution to The Change We See—which the administrators cheerfully added to the group when I put it forward—was Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford, on the edges of London, where I have had the privilege of being treated for a long-term condition over several years. It was the first major NHS hospital built as part of the Private Finance Initiative, with the entire complex built and owned by the construction company Carillion, who claim to offer ‘end-to-end solutions’ for public–private partnerships. Like all PFI hospitals it is very far from the town centre. For reasons probably connected to land values, PFI hospitals are always on the outer reaches, in the ‘no there, there’ places, quarantined away.
Darent Valley, Dartford, the first PFI hospital
A landmark in the strange new landscape created by the loosening of planning controls in the ‘Thames Gateway’, Darent Valley Hospital is just adjacent to Bluewater, the ultimate out-of-town, out-of-this-world mall, which is bunkered down inside a chalk pit and impossible to reach on foot. So the bus takes you past the M25, through what is probably legally the green belt—that is, a landscape of 1930s speculative housing and minuscule farms where forlorn horses look upon power stations and business parks—before eventually dropping you off at the top of a hill, from which you can survey an extraordinary non-place. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, its ungainly, steep curve reaching to the hangars and containers of Thurrock, and an endless strip of sheds and cranes stretching out as far as the North Sea.
The hospital itself, designed by Paulley Architects in 1999, is done in the public–private style which is by now familiar from a thousand New Labour non-projects. No doubt constructed with a concrete or steel frame, it attempts to avoid looking ‘institutional’ via a series of plasticky wavy roofs (which, as a bonus, have also become the hospital’s logo), tiny windows, some green glass, and a lot of yellow London stock brick. Inside the series of corridors and wards, into which natural light never seems to penetrate, there are dashes of jolly colour in the carpets and a peculiarly abstract colour-coding system. But the real design feature is the central atrium at the main Outpatients entrance, where a giant Carillion logo looks over a big branch of Upper Crust, a WH Smith, and a shop which sells a huge range of cuddly toys, amongst other concessions. The first time I went here I was quite alarmed by the rather early twentieth-century equipment in this ‘twenty-first-century hospital’, but one can purchase a wide variety of pastries here. In the Outpatients waiting room, large screens show—always grainy—footage of local appeals and health recommendations.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually well treated here, bearing in mind the hours of waiting around, and I do what I’m told, placing all reasonable and unreasonable trust in the physicians, but sometimes the new landscape and the vagaries of hospital treatment can intersect in undignified ways. Behind the site is a new residential development, most likely built as part of the same property deals that created the hospital; the NHS is nowadays encouraged to maximize profit from its land. An estate of little spec-builder cottages spans out around a patch of wasteland, and their back windows look out into the strip windows of the wards. Some of the homeowners may have caught more than a glimpse of me undergoing a brief but rather invasive procedure, as the blinds wouldn’t go all the way along the window. This was not, I presume, in the property brochure.
In the main Outpatients waiting room is a wall display on ‘Heritage’. Everything in Britain, especially in the Home Counties, must involve Heritage somewhere. Obviously there isn’t much to be found in a hospital which has only existed for ten years, but conveniently, it turns out that there was an Asylum for Imbeciles on the site in the nineteenth century. Sepia-toned pictures of this take up the space on the heritage wall. This is England, I always think when I’m here. I don’t mean in the sense that Iain Sinclair did when he visited Darent Valley in his 2002 travelogue London Orbital and imagined it an apocalyptic bedlam of lumpen proletarian troglodytes wielding bull terriers. I know it well, and it isn’t. It’s more because it represents a horrible, unplanned new landscape, the embodiment of New Labour’s attempt to transform the Welfare State into a giant business. It won’t admit to its newness, instead remaining petty and provincial, simulating a nebulous heritage. With its sober stock brick and metallic surfaces (by now blackened by the hospital incinerator) it doesn’t even have the pleasures of kitsch. Yet this dispiriting exurbia was not the whole story of Blairite Britain. The last fifteen years have also seen the attempted fulfilment—sometimes sincere, mostly cynical—of policies that purported to put urbanity and design at the centre of new building. In so doing, New Labour has fulfilled the wishes of some left-wing urbanists in a most unexpected fashion.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Perry Anderson recently wrote that Britain’s history since Thatcher has been ‘of little moment’.1 Admirable as this statement is in pricking local pomposities and arguable though it may be in political terms, in architecture, as in art and music, the UK has retained a prominence that is out of all proportion to its geopolitical weight. British architectural schools (both in the stylistic sense and as educational institutions like the Architectural Association) have retained a massive importance. The High-Tech school of mechanistic style founded by former partners Norman Foster and Richard Rogers was successful in Paris and Hong Kong before London and Manchester,
