Is Britain the world capital of drab?

1 Sep 2011

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A news item yesterday about controversy over a public space jogged my mind into thinking about various places I have been to recently, which ones I liked and which I didn’t. The piece of news was that Kings Cross Community Projects (KCCP) has called on Network Rail to scrap proposals for a new square outside the London mainline station, describing the design as “drab” and “unimaginative”.

The article commented: “In particular, KCCP is unhappy with the lack of green space, lack of a sense of identity, need for public art, provision for cyclists, lack of a water feature and harsh paving”. And they are right – the plan is drab and, if it goes ahead unamended, it will give one of the important gateways into our capital an Arndale Centre makeover. Perhaps then Kings Cross can be restored to its former glory as a desolate, dreary haunt for alcoholics.

Thoughts of drab, characterless public space inevitably led me to a sad reminiscence of a recent visit to Bath. A World Heritage Site, Bath recently spent £360m on its new Southgate Centre (pictured). A walk through the Southgate Centre on a summer evening some weeks ago was a pretty depressing experience. It was almost clinically dead. An unrelenting and unvaried hard surface spreads out before the pedestrian and every bit of character has been starched and ironed out of it. I hope it ages quickly, as this might give it some chance of at least looking a bit lived-in. 

Saddest of all are the occasional forlorn-looking trees marooned in a sea of paving. You would have had to try hard to design out pretty much every possibility of human interaction and civic life. On a roasting summer evening, people on the street wanted somewhere to sit, talk and watch the world go by and, recognising that nothing in the built scheme made this possible, someone in authority had carefully laid down a carpet of Astroturf on the ground so that there was a fake, temporary sort-of-a-village-green feeling.  There was something about that Astroturf that just made my heart sink. With so much money spent and so much attention paid to the Georgianesque buildings, was this really the best a city like Bath could do?

Fleeing the miseries of the Southgate Centre, I recalled a recent visit to the Piazza delle Erbe in Verona, which could not have been more different. Another small, compact tourist city with World Heritage status, Verona’s centre seems to have everything Bath’s lacks. The Piazza delle Erbe also lacks greenery (except on the balconies) but it does have obvious focal points, light and shade, texture, and interest. Even after hours, when the stallholders have shut up and gone away, it feels lived-in, like a place of some civic significance and not just a faux-Georgian culvert between retail opportunities.

The last place that came to my mind was in Odaiba, Tokyo. Here, an entire Italian streetscape has been created so that Japanese shoppers can experience the pleasures of spending an afternoon idling in a square, eating gelati and watch the sun set over archways.  This is not a particularly special experience, however, the Italian street is inside a shopping mall called Venus Fort and the sun rises and sets across the artificial sky several times a day for maximum effect. The management company has managed a reasonable sprinkling of artificial cypress trees and ivy, and the entire thing has been done with a tremendous Japanese sense of fun. It is a great place to spend the afternoon – lively, cheerful, and evidently designed as an enrichment to life rather than as a grudging concession to historic street alignments and the need for fire assembly points between retail outlets. If I imagine if a shopping mall sky were built over the Southgate Shopping Centre with timed sunrises and sunsets it would be a bit of an improvement, but Venus Fort would still be a much nicer.

All of which leads me to wonder – how is it possible that we can tolerate public space so dire that a naff theme park in Japan is a nicer place to spend an afternoon than the centre of one of our great historic cities? Not being Verona is a sin of omission, but the “drab” and “unimaginative” streetscape of the Southgate Centre, with its “lack of green space, lack of a sense of identity, lack of a water feature and harsh paving” is certainly a sin of commission.  Even if you are of the antediluvian view that landscape architecture is an afterthought once you have done the buildings, you must be able to do better than this after spending £360m (though I doubt more than  a minuscule proportion of this was spent on public space). 

Thank goodness the community groups in Kings Cross have spoken up loud and early to try and avert the same entombment of their public space. Landscape architects must have the opportunity of creating places where the rest of us want to spend some quality time in our lives.  Soul-destroying briefs from developers who have no idea what they are commissioning and just want something that will never wear down, never cost anything to maintain and, hopefully, repel most people as quickly as possible, are absolutely no good.  We must want better for ourselves than just to hurry through pointless, lifeless places, avoiding the winos.  We don’t want Britain to become the world capital of drab.

Posted by Fin Curch September 19, 2011

Re: New Southgate in bath
Absolutely the space could have been designed much better, and much criticism has been drawn from locals. This goes for the buildings also; despite the grand price tag, and that the stones were cut by Italian masons in Italy(!), obvious details such as window sill drips have been omitted.

However it must be pointed out that during the evening the entire spine of stitched streets that form the very centre of bath, its most connected and busy shopping street, is dead. Most of the cities evening entertainment/consumption venues are dotted around areas just off the centre. This is common in many commercialized cities. Think of Oxford street in london. Also worth a mention that in Bath (a UNESCO world heritage site) all of the original streets are paved in the same Yorkshire stone flags. That of course does not really defend the boring new paving in Southgate.

It would be very good by the way if you could post pics of the piazza dell Erbe and Odaiba.

All the best.

Posted by Alastair McCapra September 21, 2011

Hi I wanted to include pictures of all three but the format of the news only allowed one picture so I put in Bath.  If you google piazza del erbe and ‘venus fort’ you will find lots of pictures and can judge for yourself!

Posted by John Micklethwaite-Howe November 14, 2011

Wholeheartedly agree with the main article comments; plus perhaps the article format needs to accomodate a few more pics/illustrations, big part of what we do is visual.  The city I live in, York, has similar delusions e.g. a ‘World Class’ environment.  Well only if you don’t travel much i.e. outside of York and believe that tired, old pcc paving and broken street furniture is ‘world class’; I love it really.  Most depressing of all is that there is only one other comment on this article!

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