Swivel eyed loons 1

Michael Gove, secretary of state for education, champions the government's relaxation of planning controls because "we cannot think of our built environment without thinking of beauty" and we should welcome the prospect of new Chatsworths, NashTerraces of Regent's Park, Edinburgh New Towns, and Salisbury Cathedrals that the government "reforms" are about to unleash upon us. These new buildings of "grace and beauty'" will not only "ravish the eye and lift up the soul" but will provide new affordable housing for thrifty, aspiring, freedom-loving, socially mobile families. (Why be mobile when you live in a Chatsworth?) "No-one who believes in social mobility, in aspiration, in pro-family policies, in thrift and in freedom can be anything other than delighted by the release of more land for housing." The fact that "too few modern buildings can aspire to real beauty is a challenge to the architectural profession". That is the architectural profession which he has recently shouldered out of the business of designing new schools. The property developer "profession", hitherto bound hand and foot by those wicked mediocre architects, is not mentioned, but it is believed to be as delighted as Mr Gove.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song

New

Along the Thames a vast linear city was built in the 2000s, without ever being officially planned, announced or publicised. Briefly interrupted by central London's historic riverside buildings, to the east it starts at the Millennium bridge, to the west at Vauxhall bridge, with the apparition of the huge, hideous and expanding St George's Wharf complex. This linear city is a buy-to-let paradise, an almost endless enfilade of green glass, terracotta and wavy roofs, the boom's most visible legacy in London, blocking and defining the river. Only a handful of structures really stand in its way and interrupt it – the largest of them by far the rotting and magnificent hulk of Battersea power station, its stock-brick solidity a remarkable contrast to the Trespa all around. Except now, it's being pulled back in, as surely as the warehouses-cum-penthouses of Shad Thames, as part of perhaps the final big riverside development. A tube extension, bizarrely considered a priority by central government, has dragged this last post-industrial waste back into service. The flats went on sale two days ago, instantly snapped up by investors undeterred by the massive price tag.

Owen Hatherley

Old

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.


What became clear to the London Assembly’s Planning and Spatial Development Committee is that the Thames' understandable attraction as a location for exclusive residential development not only compromises the adequate provision of a riverside path but also results in the Thames being barricaded from its immediate hinterland and the rest of London.

Public space

The Shard

"Renzo Piano's creation, the tallest building in western Europe, finally opens its 69th-floor viewing platform to the public – at £25 a ticket. What does that buy you? Digital telescopes, jokey panels sending up famous London dwellers (George Orwell installing CCTV cameras, Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher on a tandem), and of course views stretching for 40 miles."

We have learnt a thing or two in the past several decades. Owen Luder's now demolished, much reviled, and featured in Get Carter Gateshead Trinity Square carpark included a restaurant on the top - which was never used, because of technical problems and a lack of commercial interest.

When the market picks up... 2

Birmingham Central Library

"A minority of people [support the library] but it's very easy for them to make comments when they carry no responsibility for the economic viability of the area." Clive Dutton, Birmingham City Director of Planning and Regeneration.

Wher I live in West Dorset the chief officer of the local planning authority is jnown as the Director of Environment: planning it seems is a Cinderella for those charged with responsibility for its execution.

"I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past. They are often more sentimental than valuable... As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement... As for future generations, I think they will be better occuppied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backwards." Herbert Manzoni, Birmingham City Engineer, responsible for the reconstruction (regeneration?) of the city in the 1960s.



The new library, by Mecanoo, on a separate site



When the market picks up...

Preston bus station

More Slough now

We seem to have a Government here full of junior ministers (and some senior) who specialise in bright wheezes. the latest comes from one Nick Boles, scion of privilege, comfort and rural preservation, who has announced, "All we need to do is build on another 2-3% of land and we'll have solved a housing problem."

His intervention arouses both horror and approval from different sections of society. The applauding commercial interests look over their shoulders to the comforting (to their ambitions rather than their actual sales expectations) existence of large numbers of people who cannot find afford to buy a house.

There seems to be an assumption that planning is largely responsible for what gets built, in the sense of it being the author of development. That is surely not so. It acts as a constraint on commercial and individual development proposals. It tries to determine where they do or do not get built and (to some extent) what form they take and what they look like but it doesn't draw up development proposals itself. It was only introduced when the country came to have so much built development and so much of it was detrimental that it could no longer be regarded as a sponge large enough to soak up all the damage.

Of course much of what we now value in towns and country was built without any planning controls, but one can hardly deny that an awful lot that we deplore was as well. Those thinking of just turning back the clock should look at rural development in Texas, where there are no planning controls outside city territory. I have seen it. It does not enhance the landscape; it is not durable; it does not benefit the poor or people of modest means - and exactly as Andrew Motion points out it is a common good lost for ever for the benefit of the relatively priviliged (despite the fact that the building is not going to last long).

The reasons why housing is unaffordable are a complex mix of economic, commercial, social and cultural factors. The idea that the problem is simply that the 'planners' will not allow development is mistaken and the government suggestion that all we need to do is allow X million more houses to be built by commercial developers (with a diminishing requirement for a few 'affordable' houses to be included). - anywhere, anyhow - will benefit commercial developers, landowners, wealthy would-be residents of the countryside, before it does anything to help low-income people who cannot afford to build a house.

I think planning at local authority level is often muddle headed, verbose and intellectually and politically corrupt. Not totally so, but it desperately needs qualitative improvement. The idea that the solution is to throw it out the window makes me weep. Leave it to commercial interests - they will fix it - like they've fixed everything else around us. Yes, a few enterprising individuals might get to self-build their individual houses somewhere which might be valuable contributions to the built environment, but at what cost to the rest of society? We have multiple social problems.