The Daily Telegraph - Features
Why does Britain hate its architectural history?
Amid the gleaming towers that dominate the City of London, Bastion House stands like an awkward, unfashionable cousin. Some argue it’s a relic of 1970s planning – harsh on the eye and out of step with the rounded spaces and slanted walls of today’s architecture. But we should cherish it, and the adjacent building, which previously housed the Museum of London, while we can. For both are to be demolished after two years of consultation – and I, like many locals, am apoplectic with rage.
Firstly, the condemned buildings possess an austere beauty, and have, if anything, improved with age. I’ve only ever viewed the Bastion from the outside, but the Museum of London was a wonder; it was as though its quirky configuration were designed to accommodate the museum’s narrative. Both buildings were designed by Powell & Moya, located at 140-150 London Wall and completed in 1976. They look honest and no-nonsense; they celebrate structure; they have an authority that commands attention.
There’s also the fact that these buildings feel like the last men standing in an increasingly Eurocentric London, where bright colours and amoebic structures suggest you could be in Barcelona or Malmö. I remember the comfort of the raw grey towers of my childhood, as they stood impassive in the face of lashing rain. Those monoliths, such as the Peter Robinson store in the Strand and the old Daily Mirror building at Holborn Circus, now feel like images in a half-remembered magic-lantern show.
It’s hard not to see this latest development as part of the war against modernist architecture – a movement that people have often failed to understand. If you take modernism in more general terms, it’s generally admired, whether or not it’s loved. Indeed, so entrenched are the developments in Western culture that took place from the early 1920s onwards that it sometimes feels as though we haven’t really moved on.
For instance, we’re still beholden to the literary influence of TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Our concert halls still fill when orchestras play Stravinsky and Prokofiev. As for visual art, Picasso remains the highest-grossing artist of all time.
Yet, with architecture, we’re much choosier, probably because it’s the only art form that affects everyone. We appreciate only a few big names, and they’re the ones such as Le Corbusier who weren’t designing buildings with an obvious social purpose – and thus our appreciation remains purely aesthetic. Certainly the British public prefer it that way; what gets people’s goats is when architects are seen to intervene in public life. I suspect that a lot of the negativity is linked to a general hatred of 1960s urban development, which many see as a concreting-over of the nation’s soul, with the working-class dispatched into the skies. These tower blocks, supposed signs of local-authority bounty, were tarnished by some impractical quirks of layout that fostered criminality. The “unzipping” of the Canning Town tower block Ronan Point in 1968, caused by a gas explosion, resulted in four deaths and entrenched the detestation in people’s minds.
Yet there’s so much in our post-war architecture to be celebrated. Tower blocks brought their problems, both structural and social, but many buildings of that period had a true purpose, a design for living that has never been bettered. I remember being deeply envious of a colleague who lived on the Alexandra Road estate in Camden, north London, in the late 1990s. Here was a brutalist environment to put a smile on your face: step inside and you were greeted with an airy, capacious dream of a flat, with seemingly limitless space.
Nor should we underestimate civic pride. A friend who grew up poor in Birmingham once told me how enthused her parents were when they saw the Bull Ring centre for the first time, and how sad they were when this beacon of all that was modern and vital about our second city was demolished. They felt as though there had been a loss of faith from the wider world in something they’d once held dear.
I feel the same way about Bastion House and the Museum of London (which, as an institution, will move slightly west to Smithfield Market, and reopen in 2026). I don’t mind the new plans for offices by Sheppard Robson and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with its sci-fi curves and leafy plazas, but they do jar horribly with the rhythms of the Barbican complex. And I can’t help wondering whether retrofitting the existing buildings could have saved a lot of pain – not to mention carbon, the release of which will be caused by the rebuild.
But my ire goes beyond practicalities. I realise that London is constantly uprooting its past in the name of progress. Yet the city has also been good at preserving shards of its heritage. This development is drastic, and what’s more, it’s ironic. The TwentiethCentury Society has described the Museum of London as “the first post-war museum to be built in London and the largest urban history museum in the world”. With the demolition of this building, we are demolishing part of the history that it promoted.
It’s hard not to see this latest development as part of the war against modernist buildings