Drive through any medium sized British town today and I guarantee that you will see:
a) An ugly concrete shopping centre
b) A concrete multi-storey car park
c) An inner ring road complete with enormous roundabouts
d) A tawdry collection of grey 1960s office blocks
e) A retail park, most likely featuring Boots, B & Q, McDonalds or some other place that you try and avoid at all costs.
Of course we rarely take notice of our day to day surroundings and it is easy to take our often tawdry town centres for granted, as if they’ve always been that way. But look at a pre-1914 photograph of any British town and you may begin to appreciate that Britain once had some of the most beautiful and best maintained towns in the world. Whether it was the Victorian swagger of Glasgow and Manchester, the dramatic vistas of Edinburgh, the beautiful Palladian architecture of Newcastle, the staggering architectural wealth of Liverpool or the medieval charm of Norwich, Worcester or Coventry, the organic growth of British towns spoke of history, character and craftsmanship. I have never seen an ugly pre-1914 building; indeed Victorian architecture was a brilliant combination of craftsmanship, respect for the past and a belief in modernity. When you look at pre-war photographs of Britain you cannot help but marvel at how clean the streets were, and admire the roads, uncluttered by street furniture, the parks enclosed by neat rows of railings and the elegant trams trundling down cobbled streets.
Of course time cannot stand still in a modern city and architectural change is inevitable. The modernism of the inter-war periods produced some outstanding buildings on the continent but Britain was slow to catch on, and some 1930s British buildings started to show signs of the decline in architectural craftsmanship. Ominously the inter-war period heralded the age of the motor car and town planners began to draw up sweeping plans that would turn our city centres into glorified motorways.
Much of our architectural heritage was destroyed in the blitz; part of the price the country paid for opposing fascism. Yet we ourselves were not innocent of this criminal act of war; the repugnant Bomber Harris specifically targeted the medieval German city of Lubeck for destruction because he knew its wooden buildings would burn. In response the Nazis launched the Baedeker blitz which targeted ancient British towns such as York and Canterbury. Many beautiful buildings were lost in the blitz yet the worst desecration of our towns was not carried out by the Nazis but by our own architects, planners, council leaders and politicians.
Many town planners actually welcomed the destruction of their cities as it gave them the chance to impose grandiose and egocentric planning schemes upon their fellow citizens. Many bomb damaged buildings could have been saved but they were left to collapse in the name of progress, but the vast majority of the destruction of our towns and cities occurred in the 60s and 70s and it is no exaggeration to say that British architects were responsible for more destruction than Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Much of our architectural heritage was wantonly destroyed sometimes for no particular purpose; Liverpool’s 18th century custom house was demolished ostensibly to ‘provide employment’ according to Liverpool council. More often than not planners, architects and councillors put profit before heritage and pushed through the destruction of ancient buildings to develop hideous office blocks and shopping centres; the ubiquitous Arndale Centres being the worst culprits. Some criminal architects such as T. Dan Smith and John Paulson were convicted of bribery and corruption; but not before they had destroyed vast swathes of Leeds, Bradford and Newcastle in order line their own pockets. The architecture they imposed blights the towns to this day. The Royal Institute of British Architects may trumpet the beauty of architecture but its members often destroyed architectural masterpieces in order to win a commission for a new shopping centre/car park/office block well into the 1980s.
The worst offenders were the town planners whose obsession with the motor car resulted in ring roads that left our town centres isolated and decaying and pushed pedestrians into dank subways and over brutalist footbridges. And let us not forget the dunderheaded town councillors (ignoramuses on power trips, not a good combination) who led the wanton destruction of so many glorious buildings between the 1950s and the 1980s.
It may have been some consolation if the replacement buildings were of architectural merit, but apart from notable exceptions (Royal Festival Hall, Coventry Cathedral), we have been left with horrendous, brutalist eye sores which straddle our town centres like Communist era secret police headquarters. Our tram systems were needlessly scrapped and motorways, dual-carriageways and flyovers acted like medieval moats and made town centres hostile places for cyclists and pedestrians.
Thankfully the wanton destruction has abated and planners and councillors now understand the value of conservation and tourism. Incredibly tourist magnets such as Covent Garden were once slated for destruction but were saved at the last minute by the efforts of local residents. Alas it is too late as virtually every British town has already been vandalised and desecrated by architects; including towns that weren’t touched by the blitz, such as Worcester, Dundee, Newcastle and Edinburgh. The waste of so much money and resources on shopping centres, office blocks and road widening schemes at a time when the country was so strapped for cash was nothing short of criminal.
So next time you are in town and you spy a concrete 60s monstrosity then you may well idly wonder what beautiful building once stood in that spot and you may well feel a sense of anger and frustration, but let us also appreciate what did survive. Mercifully the wrecking ball could not destroy everything but many of our less famous buildings are under threat; next time you hear about a local piece of architectural heritage then make sure you do everything you can to save it; if only for future generations to enjoy.
