Coming to a bookshop near you soon! Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the book shops, here comes
#NoFreeParking
The paperback! Obviously please tell all your friends and family to buy 10 each😉
It takes 24 years to save for a deposit for a house compared to three years in the 1980s.
Arguably the most important fact in modern British domestic politics.
“The most important fact in modern British domestic politics: in the 1990s, a first-time buyer couple on a low-to-middle income saving 5% of their wages would have enough for an average deposit after three years. Today it would take them 24 years.”
What a melancholy comparison. It’s time, lavishly & liberally, to replant street trees, widen pavements, rip out ugly lights & reclaim streets from their highways officer overlords
Dickens Street, Toxteth, 1911 vs 2023
📸 via the great
@keithjones84
who is very worth following
The more I read about postwar European architecture, the more I realise how peculiar was Britain’s approach to postwar reconstruction.
These were built in Munster between 1950-1958
#DiverseModernities
The fact that
@BBCNews
is (right now) featuring Philip Schofield’s departure from ITV Breakfast as more newsworthy than death of Martin Amis seems to me to be deeply unserious, an abnegation of public sector broadcasting.
I want to defend BBC but they’re making it hard. 😬
Nothing is perfect in this world but the Gilbert Scott phone box (this is one of the original K2 designs used from 1926) & the London terraced square come pretty close....
Whenever I pass through Paris I marvel afresh at how late C19th & early C20th Europe “solved” the problem of creating wide & high buildings without them feeling oppressive or tedious, a lesson we promptly forgot.
If this was created in last 70 years it would be a tediously ….
Look how a few decorative details (dentils, brick lintels, string courses, a portico, textured bricks) lift the building on the left above that on the right &liberate it from the tyranny of transitory utility. It’s 200 years older. I bet it will last>200 years longer.
#DeepGreen
Intensifying existing streets beautifully is the best, fastest & most sustainable way of creating desperately needed new homes but our high risk, high cost uniquely discretionary approach to planning in UK makes it jolly hard. Meanwhile in Paris
📸 via
@michael_diamant
This should be one of Britain’s, indeed Europ’s, most famous buildings.
@ThePieceHall
in
#HeavenlyHalifax
Tomorrow I am lucky enough to be going there thanks to a hugely kind invitation from
@civic_voice
I am very excited 😊
This is the right decision by
@michaelgove
who deserves huge praise for withstanding aggressive lobbying from
@marksandspencer
. The case for demolition was always gossamer thin, destroying a fine inter-war facade, making Oxford Street worse and …
This is good news. I hope that
@michaelgove
is able to reject this deeply flawed proposal. It creates no new homes, destroys an elegant & important interwar building, makes Oxford Street less lovable and...
Arriving by foot for the first time in my life to Nottingham’s glorious train station, I give my regular paean of praise that the Victorians built our railways. Infrastructure with dignity
What is London's oddest building?
Here's one suggestion: former Wickhams department store on Mile End Road. Built in 1927 to be 'Harrods of east London'. But one business, jeweler's named Spiegelhalter, refused to sell up so facade was never completed.
📸David Sankey
Ok, I have the answer. We give back the Elgin Marbles and Greece gives back the Ionian Islands which we’re given by UK as a gift to Greece in 1864 and which also had this rather natty ensign….. Does that help?
In the 1920s, Le Corbusier, funded by a car producer, dreamed of sweeping away the boulevards of Paris & replacing them with 60 storey concrete towers, zoned by class & linked by fast roads in open countryside . It never happened…..
A few people (actually quite a lot) have asked me what I think of recent announcements on “the war on motorists.” Here is my reply which I suspect will annoy people on both sides …
“The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men & women … now all gone, 1 generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow”
Can a car park be good urbanism?
The New Street Garage in Staunton, Virginia is surely as good as one can imagine. Brilliant use of pilasters, rustication etc on one side …
Royal Leamington Spa, in 1910. Note how naturally & safely pedestrians move over & through the carriageway in the age of the tram, the bicycle & the cart. Cars bring liberty but they also take it away.
Charming colourised 🎬 via
@bo66ie29
Bill Bryson once said that if the Martians invaded earth, they'd think Vienna was the world capital. You can see why
Here's
#GentleDensity
with extra fiddly bits. "Mixed use" sounds like tedious planner speak but it should be ornamented & beautiful
Is it curtains for fake grass? I’m not a natural banner of things but it really is indefensible stuff. Needlessly wasteful and foul to the local natural environment.
The press has reported recently that residents in Poundbury want to install upvc windows rather than wooden ones because they are “greener.” But the idea that upvc windows are “greener” than wooden ones is for the birds. A quick thread....
Before daybreak, on 25 January 1533, a young English gentlewoman rose early in her chambers near the Thames, was dressed by her attendants & walked down a long Tudor gallery with linenfold panelling, blue & gold moulded ceilings, carved doors & rush mats upon the cold floor….
Is this the church of England’s most extraordinary rural parish church?
From the outside, St Lawrence, West Wycombe appears superficially sedate, a Georgian nave and a knapped flint medieval tower but …
Heavens. Fourteenth century wooden fan vaulting probably designed by Hugh Herland, Richard II’s carpenter. Still in situ, still performing the role for which it was designed, attempting a semblance of the celestial and the divine for those at morning or evening prayer. Winchester
These are (& should be thought of as) good ordinary homes. Nothing more. But nothing less either. Three terraced homes, two semi-detached, one detached. That such London homes can be worth up to £4m tells you something profound about London’s housing under-supply.
Fascinating to watch the media campaign to force Apsana Begum to move out of her council house, so they can eventually do this to her when she buys a new inevitably overpriced London gaff
Heaven be praised for the lengthening days. There is nothing like the low light on London stock bricks, turning the long burnt clay from yellow to gold.
Dear landowners, neighbourhood groups, councils, & investors,
@createstreets
unashamedly uses the wider evidence on what makes for popular, beautiful, resilient & sustainable places for people, prosperity & planet. Could we help you? Please do get in touch
How do we regenerate cities so that they are fulcrums of local pride, encourage visitors to the city centre & generally encourage happy & healthy, beautiful & prosperous places? Here’s a brilliant video about the brave & important work done in Dresden…
As expected, the embodied carbon case for pulling down this beauty is gossamer thin at best.
@marksandspencer
have got this one badly wrong& I suspect they know it. That’s okay. We all make mistakes. Cultural and corporate leadership now would be having a rethink & starting again
🔥THREAD 1/4 📢 PRESS RELEASE: New report blasts bulldoze and rebuild plan for M&S Oxford Street HQ📒🧱♻️Full details on the report and the ongoing campaign here➡️
#RetroFirst
#ClimateCrisis
#UKGovt
Some saying "I did it in X years" so it cannot be true. Sadly, it's not that simple. 25 yrs ago first-time buyer couple on low-to-middle income saving 5% would have average-sized deposit in 3 yrs. In 2015
would take 24 years. (Should have said 90s not 80s which makes worse)
Most ancient surviving image of London is a gold medallion of 10 aurei struck for emperor Constantine Chlorus. London is symbolised by towered walls besides the river …
The Grand Place, Arras on a very wet day. One of Europe’s great urban squares though over-parked at present.
Almost entirely rebuilt after WWI from 1919-23 so most of what you see in these photos is twentieth century.
This is rather good: "The socialist case for Trad Architecture. Conservatives don't have a monopoly on beauty" by
@AaronBastani
for
@unherd
. His basic point...
Always such a relief to rediscover King’s Cross Station. Lewis’s Cubitt’s masterpiece was named after a very short lived statue of George IV. Otherwise this might be Battle Bridge Station.
Thank heavens they cleared all the 20th century tat away.
What a joy it was today to be able to “pop in” to Paris for lunch on way home by train from Toulouse. I don’t think anywhere in the world (with exception of Vienna?) achieves the “top end” of
#GentleDensity
(5-9 storeys) so consistently well. Look at these exquisite balconies
One of the questions we often ask in neighbourhood workshops is; “where would you like your children to grow up and spend time?” Beautiful homes clustered around a village green onto which children can safely run is a theme that comes up time after time after time.
I have an unfashionably positive view of politicians. Nearly all are well-intentioned - even when they're wrong ! Nearly all put in long, thankless hours, give up evenings, weekends - all to be insulted & to be told they're corrupt & evil. (Which vast majority are not). All ...
The evidence is clear that good design is good for you and good for our neighbourhoods and civic life. Too many of the lives our fellow citizens lead are affected by poor places, no friends round the corner, less sense of community, less walking, less local pride...
Meet Yvonne, a fine old French lady, perhaps a little dusty in the corners but she still "puts on her face" (as they said in her day) and welcomes the street with pride and dignity each morning
I actually want to be on the side of the BBC but if they’re not prepared to use the depth & breadth of the license fee to fund high culture that the market does not then is very hard to defend their current scope.
What a melancholy, self-defeating & idiotic decision this is.
Letter to BBC signed by 150 Directors of Music and Organists of Cathedrals and Chapel Choirs and Lecturers at Music Faculties in the UK and abroad.
#WeAreTheBBCSingers
… anaemic grid of spreadsheet architecture (probably) but instead look how playfully the facade is chopped with faces, corbels, rustication, 4 balcony “string courses” & 8 different window designs from full fat aedicule to oeil de boeuf. The everyday genius of the beaux-arts…
“Had I but plenty of money, money enough to spare
The house for me no doubt, were a house in a city square.
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!”
Believe it or not these 2 matching buildings on either side of Orleans Cathedral are modern (well post-war). The more I study the detail of post-war rebuilding the moreI realise what an outlier was Britain’s almost exclusively traffic-modernist approach.
“If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless.” I wonder how long this barcode urbanism will last before it is demolished in a future round of state-funded parasitic regeneration.
When I started my
@createstreets
journey 9 years it seemd quite a lonely road but the movement to create & steward more beautiful, liveable & sustainable places is (thank heavens) going from strength to strenght. I'm particuarly proud of the excellent work the team is doing...
Please forgive some shameless promotion, but here between two covers are all your Christmas present needs answered!
#NoFreeParking
The curious history of London’s Monopoly Streets. Available on pre-order here. It’s a snip ! ✂️
The gothic towers of Westminster. A world heritage site. Not one of these towers is medieval. Architects used naturally to create the future in communion with the past.
Quite right. "Units" is banned within
@createstreets
and we always, always (very nicely) challenge clients or fellow professionals who say it. Create:
Homes not units
Streets not roads
Town squares not central business units
Words matter because design flows from them.
The Office for Place is this week becoming a legally constituted Arms Length body & moving to Stoke-on-Trent. We’re delighted.
Nowhere could be more appropriate for the Office for Place’s home town. The very derivation of the name in the Old English …
As an interesting coda to
@networkrail
‘s grotesque proposals for
#LiverpoolStreet
rightly being resisted by
@thevicsoc
the comparable proposals to erect this inhumane lump above New York’s Grand Central in 1968 led to an important 1978 judgement in the US Supreme Court ….
I am sure this is the right decision by
@michaelgove
to review the new 1.1m window height rule which will make homes darker & less attractive to no purpose...
Penny of Alfred the Great, late ninth century.
Look how the reverse has a beautifully elegant monogram for every letter of LVNDONIA.
On the obverse, Alfred seems more like a Roman Emperor.
Reading about urban history continually surprises with the SPEED with which we used to change places.According to Wikipedia, Herbert Gribble won the design competition in March 1869 & they started building in June the same year. Inconceivable today.
… this (admittedly much bigger) lump is down the road, one of traffic modernism’s thankfully rare intrusions into the city of Paris. Comparative comment seems superfluous.
The hotel de ville in Arras dates from the 1920s and is a UNESCO world heritage site.
Almost everything you have been taught about the history of twentieth century urbanism, architecture & “heritage” is wrong or at best wildly incomplete.
#DiverseModernities
My son's blog on star wars urbanism was so good that they turned it, with a little paternal help, into an academic article (really). Forgive a little fatherly pride but this really is worth reading and will only take a few minutes. Sometimes children see things more clearly
As a proud Briton and an unapologetic Francophile with a half French family I am a complete sucker for this sort of thing & find it very moving.
#EntenteCordiale
🇬🇧 ❤️ 🇫🇷
London’s Admiralty Arch in the 1920s. Commissioned by King Edward VII in memory of his mother, Queen Victoria. Designed by Aston Webb, it served as the official residence of the First Sea Lord but was sold in 2012 for a proposed hotel redevelopment.
My younger son has just finished reading the Da Vinci code. thank heavens, he made me take him to Saint-Sulpice in Paris which features in the book. Architecture as poetry.