Things outside London: the Ouse Valley Viaduct

George Bradshaw's Descriptive Railway Hand-Book (1861) is a marvellous, exhaustive, and really odd account of the new-fangled Victorian railway network and the places it connected   It blends semi-random factual dryness:

NUNEATON. 

POPULATION, 4859.

A telegraph station.

FAIRS.— Feb 18th, May, 14th, and October, 31st. 

with didactic instruction on how to think: 

The piquant Tudor or Elizabethan style...is so well adapted for buildings in which domestic requirements are to be studied.  It likewise harmonises thoroughly with the English scenery.  

God alone knows why Nuneaton station inspired this brief treatise on English architecture.  And, yup, just like we have Mrs Beeton's 1861 [snap!] Book of Household Management to thank for a century of considering garlic to be Dangerously Foreign, Bradshaw was indoctrinating NIMBYs into regarding Tudorbethan as The Best Style For Houses, way back in mid-Nineteenth Century.   

Also, George, what on earth is going on with your punctuation in that line about FAIRS?  Full stop, m-dash?  See me after.

Another bit of weirdness comes from the section on Balcombe ('Distance from station, 1 mile'), on the line from London to Brighton:

A short distance further on the line crosses the Ouse by the viaduct of that name, one of the finest works in the kingdom, which is only excelled by the viaduct over the Dee on the Chester and Shrewsbury Railway. It consists of 37 arches, and its summit commands extensive views of the surrounding country. 

As we are whirled along it, the prospect presents us with an unbounded scene of beauty, the country round being steeped in the most luxuriant verdure, and hill and dale, woodland and pasture land, succeed each other in infinite variety to the very verge of the horizon.

Are you okay, George?  There's some typically mangled language here, but anything that causes the author to lapse into a second-person reverie (lunchtime laudanum?) really must be seen.

And so I set off.  Somewhat whimsically, the mile-long walk from the station felt off-putting.  So I decided a better approach would be to take the train to Lingfield (literally just because I've never been there), and cycle the 90 minutes to get to the viaduct.  Perhaps I was channelling my inner George.

Lingfield station wasn't build until after 1861, so sadly we don't have Bradshaw's commentary on the building.  So, I'll repurpose his description of the countryside surrounding Statford: 'peculiarly English...but nothing striking'.  Ooh, you bitch, George.

Closer inspection suggests that the builders were likewise off their hods on opium - the banded brickwork doesn't flow across to the extension on the left, and neither does brick bond.  For that matter, the upstairs window is sporting a Gothic arch, whereas the ones beneath it are Romanesque, and the extension's doorways has lost the polychromatic brick trim.  One chimney stack is missing its pots.  It's like an architectural Spot The Difference.  Also, there appears to be one CCTV camera and one big bin per person in the village.

Using Google Maps for cycling directions is the unholy trinity of frustrating, fascinating and deeply weird.  Pootling merrily along a road, it'll suddenly decide to send you off past some bins (a recurrent theme) to a quagmire choked with nettles, mud and stiles which is notionally a path but is mightily bike-unfriendly.  But, just occasionally, it'll uncover something rather lovely.  Directing me down the back of a multi-storey car park in East Grinstead (here we go again...), the path improbably revealed itself to be a few miles of disused rail track, Worth Way.  Lots of dappled light, passing under old bridges, and no cars.  Delightful.

Anyway.  We're not here for nature - we're here for opiate-addled inspection of Big Piles of Victorian Bricks.  And, cor, it's a cracker.

Some George-style facts: 

HEIGHT, 96, feet.

ARCHES.—37, semi-circular.

BRICKS. Yes; 11 million, bricks.

The Wikipedia page tells a sorry tale of our best efforts to let this poor thing fall to pieces, but it was finally restored in the 1990s to preserve this really astonishing confection.

I get happy Barbican vibes from the paired normal/inverted arches here (Brandon Mews - image from here)

Final warning to cyclist: getting to Balcombe station from the viaduct involves climbing the hill that they didn't want the trains to have to.

Croydon Modernism no 3 - the new Old Town fire station

One of the few examples of modern architecture in Old Town is the excellently designed new fire station at the Duppas Hill Lane - Southbridge Road junction.  One end of the shortly to be constructed fly-over will come out at this junction.

 Croydon Advertiser, 28 February 1964.

And indeed the fire station is worth approaching on foot from the flyover, where you can enjoy an elbow-bitingly bizarre pedestrian underpass mini-network. Having delved under the one road, you sort-of emerge, full of wonder, into a fenced-in trench underneath the suspended carriageways. It's as if it finally occurred to someone that having pedestrians milling about on the middle of a roundabout was a bad idea, so cadged them in. You can hear but not see the traffic whirling around as you dip back into another waterfall-mosaic underpass. Not town planning's finest hour.

The new fire station in Old Town is a competently handled building which speaks its purpose.  The administration block, with ancillary blocks beyond and garages for the fire tenders at the side, hold together well as a complete building.  Old Town will be brought to life if further development is carried out: the fire station, with the tall flats beyond, has given the area a tonic.

Article credited to 'A STUDENT OF ARCHITECTURE who writes regularly for The  [Croydon] Advertiser', I forgot to write down the date (but early '60s)

Those ancillary blocks, a range of low-rise offices, are standard late 50s-early-60s boxiform fare with generous strip windows and coloured spandrels, which gives a rather Harlow New Town feel to this part of Croydon Old Town. The garage consists of eight orthogonal arched bays, with runs of clerestory skylights and suitably bright red folding doors.

Strangely, neither of these old newspaper articles mention the tapering, rocket-like drill tower which, gleaming above the garages, is the fire station's most striking feature. This tower presumably enabled the fire fighters to train for tight stairwells in the speculative office blocks appearing in the town centre; and, plausibly, for any alien craft which might be found ablaze in space-age Croydon. The rocket tower is now topped with a cell mast, which fittingly evokes the telecommunications glamour of the contemporaneous BT Tower back in central London.

Cutely, this futuristic obelisk has been joined by a more recent pitched-roof mock up, for practising on all those Brookside-Bovis vernacular houses which came after Modernism.

Despite this minor and incongruous addition, the fire station is in remarkably good nick. This brings me back to another Advertiser clipping, from the official opening back in the early 60s (I really must write down the dates of these articles).

Looking at the building now, I reckon that this fire station comes the closest to how a brand new Modernist building would have looked like in 60s Croydon. Given the increasing threat that (re-)re-development brings to mid-century Modern buildings, and how many great designs are looking tired and distinctly unloved, it's refreshing to be able to see how bright and clean and novel these buildings were. It's a little bit of how the future used to look. 

Croydon Modernism no 2 - St George's Walk

St George's Tower is one of the most recognisable landmarks in Croydon.  A broad-shouldered, unapologetic slab, it stands immediately alongside the twin dual-carriageways of the ring road (whimsically named Park Lane here) as they dive down to become the Croydon Underpass. The traffic is now perhaps regarded as an intolerable inconvenience; but I suspect that the novelty of the part-built orbital was a seriously attractive demonstration of modernity and forward-thinking when the tower was put up in 1964. 

The building is more commonly known as the Nestlé Tower; perhaps for this reason the panelled ends always remind me of a two-finger Kit Kat.  Although, since Nestlé departed in 2012 and the tower stands empty, it's now perhaps more of a two-fingered valedictory to the town.

But my focus here is not on the tower; rather on the twin precincts of shops beneath which form St George's Walk. The covered half, beginning at the foot of the tower, is a sleekly Modern retelling of a Victorian covered arcade, with concrete tracery creating vaulted, geodesic domes of glass, and paired ribbons of clerestory windows like headlight trails in a long-exposure photograph.

Sad that it now looks like this, isn't it?  And your first thought may be that my prose is delusional special pleading. So let's tackle head-on the fact that this space is in a dreadful state.  This grime and disrepair by no means makes the precincts irrevocably bad, but it clashes hard with our bipolar cultural bias towards the very old or the very new. This distaste for the recently-dated is part of a shared pretence that what is new and fashionable today will retain those qualities forever; we pretend that our newest, shiniest building could never age and become old-hat, or grubby, or sad.  Properly old buildings (by which really, we only mean Victorian) are safely exempt from this, perhaps in part because of the modish practice of knocking up mock-Victorian terraces as new builds with strangely small windows.  St George's Walk has long-since plunged into the downwards spiral of middle age: outmoded begat boredom, disrepair begat abandonment.

Despite all this, and the regrettable fact that you have to look pretty hard to see it, the designs of St George's Walk are really rather handsome.

The second half of the precinct is uncovered and more reminiscent of a 50s square from a New Town or Coventry, albeit without the agoraphobia-inducing void in the middle. A run of offices is suspended over the precinct on slim pillars in grey mosaic flecked with gold and silver tiles. The enjoyably kitsch bunting draws out the particoloured spandrel panels beneath the overlooking rows of windows.

The arrangement of low sides and high buildings, along with the rain-porch projections on either side, describe conflicting vanishing points and create a cinematic sense of over-wide perspective, like Hitchcock's dolly zoom from Vertigo.  It's slightly intoxicating.

There have been schemes to redevelop the precincts, plausibly involving their eradication and replacement with luxury unique opportunity stunning development flats.  The most recent signs, however, hint towards a more respectful flavour of regeneration.  The recent arrival of the an art gallery suggests that maybe someone else believes the units could be used for more than snack bars and charity stores.  One can only imagine the transformative power of some fresh paint, a gallon of Windolene and a set of new lightbulbs.  And how many towns, I wonder, would kill for a purpose-built pair of shopping parades, minutes from the main drag, waiting patiently to be noticed?

I shall leave you to make up your own mind about the precincts and my special pleading.  Hopefully, one day I can update this blog with images that better reveal the sophistication and flair of the designs.

Croydon Modernism no 1 - No 1 Croydon

No 1 Croydon

Richard Seifert & Partners (1970)

This tower is a strong place to begin any tour of Modernist Croydon. It captures something of the post-War zeitgeist - the excitement of the Space Age, the possibilities of progress, the opportunity to build something new and better - and it's a great introduction to this singularly Space Age town. Welcome to Croydon.

And, let's be fair, the builiding is beautiful.

No 1 Croydon (also known as the NLA Tower, after its first occupants, and the Thruppeny Bit / 50p Building depending on your age in relation to decimalisation) perches on an awkward sort-of roundabout next to East Croydon station. As with Seifert's Centre Point in central London, the site is an uncomfortable contortion - here constrained to the south and east by roads, by a compact wedge of bus station to the west, and two tracks of Tramlink to the north.

Nonetheless, this is a proper sci-fi fantasy of a building, sharing a vision of the future with Kubrick's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sophisticated and tricksy design details confuse the eye. The silver-white mosaic tile finish gives a pristine, unageing feel to a building approaching its 50s. Incomplete architraves around the windows suggest that additional interlocking floorplates could be docked from above if more space were required, more befitting a space station than an office block in Surrey. Quite right.

Repeated floorplates, squares with chamfered corners, each offset by 45 degrees, create the impression of a cylindrical twisting motion, bringing to mind a Crossrail tunnel boring machine (perhaps a Victoria Line one would be more apposite given the tower's age, which also gives me opportunity to reference this super 1969 documentary on iPlayer). The tower has perhaps emerged from the jagged concrete pit at the base, or maybe it's burying its way downwards. Let's not forbid buildings from creating their own fantasy heritage and context (cf all those Victorian buildings which summon up ancient Greece or Rome for the British provinces), even if that heritage is actually in an imagined future.

Demonstrating a characteristically Seifertian [what's a neologism between friends?] aversion to right-angles, the tower is supported by jazzily-angled pillars, again in silver-white mosaic, projecting outwards from the underground car park and underpass beneath. Similar projections are repeated in Seifert's nearby Corinthian House (another great office block, on the other side of the train station).

No1 Croydon is an absolute gem of a building which has, for some reason, been declined for listing by English Heritage. Perhaps because it's not well-known, which I hope in some small way to remedy with this short essay in appreciation (cf also the Twentieth Century Society's feature on the tower as Building of the Month).

The lack of listing has resulted in the recent uncomfortable addition of a small Sainsburys store in 2014, parasitically encroaching on the podium beneath the tower.  This, to my mind, is a thankfully minor incursion, albeit a shame. Nonetheless, it is an example of the threat to, frankly, a bloody super building from C21 commercial drivers. Which in its own way may appear appropriate, given the post-War whimsical erasure of our heritage (Seifert's 1960s redevelopment of Euston station led to the Euston Arch - chunky, daft and pompous as it was - being smashed up and dumped unnecessarily in the River Lea). However, to repeat the errors of the past, especially when we know precisely what we are doing, is a dreadful idea. No-one wins if we unthinkingly destroy  (or worse, knowingly) everything Modernist, solely because it doesn't look Georgian or Victorian or otherwise Old. No 1 Croydon really is a superb piece of architecture, which we really mustn't lose.

Please retain the the good things from the Twentieth Century. Or whenever. Please.

There, I think that's my epitaph sorted.

No 1 Croydon, reflected in Alico House

Welwyn: not a common-or-Garden City

I have been to Welwyn Garden City three times, and have ensured that each time the mercury has at very least been nudging the high twenties.  This is deliberate and important: WGC (as it's known to its chums) is an English fantasy, and must therefore only ever be visited when the English weather is fantastic.

(I'm not quite sure what this means for the people who live there).

WGC is the sister (slightly younger, slightly better-looking) of Letchworth Garden City, a short distance up the A1.  Each was established in the early Twentieth century by proto-hippie / philanthropist Ebenezer Howard, as a foil to the polluted and cramped cities formed during the industrial revolution.  They were hoped to be self-sufficient, rather than satellites to established cities.  These Garden Cities helped bring about the post-WWII New Towns; in a somewhat circular way, WGC itself was designated one of those New Towns in 1948.

In true English style, first impressions from the train station aren't particularly exciting. On the right side stretches the blank red brick of the Howard Shopping centre; directly ahead a badly-rusted bridge apparently made of spare rivets and unpainted scrap metal, attempting quite successfully to transmute into CoreTen.

On the left gleams a strangely clean factory, with low blocks of offices scattered around. The pristine white silos look like a Moderne chemical weapons facility, where civilised gentlemen with neat hair smoke pipes, whilst considering the best way to burn out the eyes of the dreaded Hun using a piquant distillation of mustard and bakelite. Reality, sadly, is less noxious - the factory (by the chief architect of WGC, Louis de Soissons, 1926) formerly made Shredded Wheat, which is much more wholesome. Pleasingly, it's also Grade II listed, so future generations can wonder why on earth the building isn't being consistently lauded as fab (although it does get a glowing entry in the Twentieth Century Society's architectural-coffee-table-porn book, 100 Buildings 100 Years).

Having broached that blank brick wall, the enclosed Howard Centre (1990) is also very white, and ends up being very dull through its desperate efforts to offend no one. Cut-and-paste context has been affected through the application of a disembodied clock and something that looks like the plans for hedge-planting in the formal gardens of a country estate.

However, if you fight your way through the dullards queuing in Starbucks, you can take advantage of the fine views from its balcony, turning golden in the improbable sun. 

Welwyn is arranged around a green core (the Parkway), which stretches for almost a mile.  And Welwyn Garden City, as opposed to a Welwyn Countryside City, is quite right.  There's a smooth, lush lawn, mature trees, and tidy borders for flowers. It's quite unrealistic; it's more like the Photoshop'd fictions used to sell the lifestyle opportunities (TM) of new builds on scraps of land near train lines. But here it's real! Although there are not many people around enjoying the fine, expansive lawns; like all communal spaces, the English interpretation is that this space is no-one's, rather than everyone's. It doesn't matter whether this is a concrete forecourt to a Brutalist bus station, or a welcoming and verdant lawn. It becomes somehow a place to be avoided. 

NO.  Or someone might speak to you.

The housing stock around the central drag is a riot of rustic charm and English passive-aggression. Tremendous effort goes into mainaining beautiful gardens; but they are essentially just moats around castles, intended to keep intruders, and the neighbours, at bay.  The street names could have been taken directly from Tolkien's Shire (or, having just looked up when The Hobbit was written, perhaps the other way round).

John Grindrod, in his super Concretopia, summarises the central core of WGC as 'low-wattage triumphal', and you'll soon see what he means.  The generous spacing and flat lawns create a uniquely heavy local gravity, and centripetal force that makes exploration strangely challenging. But, if you can make the effort, you can find the Daily Mail Model Village of 1922 - a cluster ('living museum', if you really must) of house styles, demonstrating house-construction techniques designed to help build a post-War England fit for heroes.

If you, like your author, are a dreadful child, you may find some of the text amusing.  Nos 14-15 Meadow Green are headlined as 'Double Walls Rapid Erection' (teehee), whereas another bit of copy cheerfully reinforces gender stereotypes - 'The back doors of two of the houses will be fitted with "Receivadors" in which tradesmen can leave their goods without disturbing the housewife'. I bet they can.  Sorry, it's all gone a bit On The Buses.

Anyway, a little further on (you can make it!), lies a very early English roundabout (Letchworth Garden City apparently having the first).  It's not very photogenic, but it is part of history #educationisfun

Now, I understand that this kind of lush, gentle planning consumes vast tracts of land, and is probably therefore inherently evil.  But WGC tugs at my heart strings; perhaps its scale manages to realise a fictional Never Never Walled Midnight Garden Land Shire of unending space in which to run and hide and seek, before getting lashings of ginger beer and some (less tasty) iodine for that grazed knee. 

And I should probably address the apparent discrepancy of my mild obsession with neo-Georgian WGC, and my distaste for Georgian-pastiche Poundbury. I've no problem with the aesthetics of either place - I imagine Poundbury looks spiffy on a summer's day too. Rather, it's the gulf between the underlying philosophies underpinning each which affects me. 

Back in the early C20, WGC sought to provide a wildly better quality of life than that threatened by the density and pollution and growing pains of industrial cities.  It was looking to build a new, better future, albeit one using a Hobbity sort of architectural vernacular.  I cannot help but admire it for this.

C21 Poundbury, in contrast, uses its architectural language to convey all manner of pompous, slow-witted messages to its willing audience. It is an overblown argument about nostalgia, a daft assertion that life was better back in those Quality Street days of BBC1 dramas, when it was all Mr Darcy wet-shirt competitions and Empire-line dresses, before cars, before poverty or illness or other blights were created by those pesky post-War planners and their experiments with that nasty, nasty concrete. 

Perhaps, really, I'm more disappointed with the pathogenic and self-delusional English desire for this guff, rather than with Poundbury itself for catering for those desires. But it's much more English of me to express hatred for places than people.  Safer that way.

No mo' PoMo

Please clean me, rather than knocking me down. Oh, too late. 

So, Birmingham's old Central Library is to be flattened this very January.  It's a real shame, because the inverted concrete ziggurat is a great bit of engineering, and because it's undeniably part of Birmingham's history - the ambitious, hopeful, car-centric rebuilding of the city after the War.  The library is just as much part of the city's fabric as safely-old bits of Victoriana, or the shiny-shiny new bits of post-Millennial reconstruction (like the pleasingly-blobular Selfridge's bit of the new Bull Ring, or the Cylon-chic chrome cladding on the new New Street station).

But Madin's library (which I've prattled about more here) is of an unhappy age, where its Modernity is still too jarring, but years of dirt and fumes and systematic abuse (like the cluster of crappy shops cluttering up the ground floor) had left it grimy and unwelcoming.  The Central Library had been made into an undeniably nasty place to be; but we shall miss the building in years to come.

Traumatic urban realm.

But, elsewhere, perhaps Brutalism is finally being rehabilitated from everyone's Least Favourite style, to something it's acceptable to appreciate.  The Beeb screened two Jonathan Meades documentaries on Brutalism, which were typically super and typically difficult. These documentaries were later shown in the Barbican's very own Brutalist cinema, which really is preaching to the converted. Impressively, Preston's concrete fantasy bus station was listed in November 2014, a curious success of sculptural awe over commercial gain.

So, gang, having warmed you up to the nearly-socially-acceptable delights of Modernist concrete, how's about we push the envelope a bit? At the risk of sounding like an unexpectedly sleazy turn to a suburban dinner party, how's about we all try a bit of the old, y'know, Post Modernism?

Let me broaden your mind, like a slightly over-generous glass of soave as poured by an eager and clearly sweating host, with what was Marco Polo House (1987).  You may have known this better as the QVC building, next to Battersea Park. It was by Ian Pollard, who I'd never heard of either. 

These photos of mine date from 2013.  Marco Polo House has since been knocked down and the now-muddy site will be filled by another lump of luxury flats within flobbing distance of the thousands of trains that daily thunder to and from London Victoria.  Such lucky residents-to-be, stroking their iPad Airs and rattling with delight in their Smeg-fridged studios (Unique Prime Opportunity Stunning Development Aspirational Living etc etc).  The block will be named Vista, a curious homage to Microsoft's least good C21 operating system.

In Pollard's building, vertical slices of black-glass Miesian minimalism were interspersed for no apparent reason with heavy slabs of banded travertine.  It looked like some fantastical Lego set, built for real for adults to play in. I'm surprised to see that marble apparently goes manky with age, foxing in the sunlight like a copy of the Beano on the back seat of a Ford Orion. 

The slim volume Postmodern Architecture in London also enjoyed Marco Polo House, noting that it 'is often regarded as the most vulgar building in London', and broadsiding it as having 'the design integrity of a car-showroom'.  But, perhaps perversely, I can see an integrity and coherence in that alternating façade.  The building is not pretending to be ancient.  But people do insist on liking that classical stuff - so, here it is, just as you wanted, with a bit of kitsch 80s pep to keep it lively.  If you squint, it looks a bit like ruins.  Yes, it'll date in precisely the same way that shoulder pads and big hair must do, but that is an inherent feature, not failure, of fashion. Would be have more integrity were it a full-on pretend Grecian temple plonked next to the train tracks?

Pollard also built an early Homebase, up on Warwick Road near Earl's Court, in '88.  Homebases are so often big sheds.  Like huge ringroad supermarkets, they often seek to disguise their warehouse proportions by affecting tiled roofs and little vernacular clocktowers, whispering reassuring messages about being 'in keeping' to dense middle-Englanders and they wheel their trolley back to the Volvo. It's technically impossible to look at Godalming's sort-of-quaint, sort-of-thatched Homebase without getting dewy-eyed and humming Jerusalem, like an aunt at Christmas after her third sherry.

Pollard's building, however, really is special stuff. 

Demarking the edge of the carpark, essentially a fence, is a colonnade of Egyptian columns.  It's unclear if this is borrowing from antiquity, or Temple Mills in Leeds.  Is it important to know which?

There are etchings and glyphs on the Homebase walls, some picked out in gold. 

One of the figures is, charmingly, sitting on the fire escape.  The sharp comic-book boundary with the banded stonework does not permit any pretence that this is any real Egyptian artefact, uncovered in a London carpark. Nope, this is unapologetically fake.  The Egyptian style was an unrealistic representation of the human form; this is an unrealistic representation of the Egyptian style.

When the Georgians and Victorians aped the forms of Greek or Gothic buildings, they did so in part because they felt those forms were the aesthetic zenith and, in some confused quasi-moral assertion, were how buildings ought to look.  Pollard here is borrowing the Egyptian style not because it's the best style ever, and not even because it best suits the demands of the 80s DIY-enthusiast.  Rather, because he can. Egypt in West London? Why not?

Which leads to the cheekiest bit of pillaging - this curvy glass undulation along the side.

Which, as of course you'll know, is nicked directly and completely from James Stirling's art gallery in Stuttgart.  Notice how Stirling's red fire alarm box has been acquired and transmuted into a terracotta snake for Pollard's version.

(Credit: http://presse.stuttgart-tourist.de).  

Again, why not?  On one side of the building, Egyptian art; on the other, art gallery.  We are used to architects stealing from the ancient past for their new buildings.  Pollard, with admirable honesty, steals from both his ancient forebears and his modern contemporaries.  Or, even, Post-Modern contemporaries.

Pollard's Homebase, gaudy as it is, has far more integrity than Quinlan Terry's waver-thin Georgian shams (such as Richmond Riverside, which was being built at the same time).  Pollard is faking it, proudly producing a collage of nonsense for West Londoners in need of some magnolia emulsion and rawl plugs. Which I prefer infinitely to the saccharine pillock-pleasing crap of HRH Chaz's Poundbury in Dorset.

It's one of the most delightful, weird buildings I know. But I'm afraid you can't go and look at this building, either.  It's gone.  To be replaced by, yup, more Luxury Premium Ideal Opportunity flats. London doesn't know it, and probably won't notice for a few decades, but it's much the poorer for the loss of these two whimsical bits of PoMo.

Garden cities for to-day

Ebbsfleet: village

So, the Coalition has announced plans to build another New Town at Ebbsfleet. I'm not sure really how this is news, as it's surely the whole point of Ebbsfleet station, standing alone, glassy and gleaming in some fields not very near very much. Actually, the rhetoric is not to build a New Town; rather, to build a Garden City. Actually, it's a 'locally-led Garden City', and I've just been sick in my own mouth. Perhaps the fear is that towns connote the mediocre, lacklustre; cities evoke culture, grandeur, a really big branch of Boots.

In many ways, Ebenzer Howard's original Victorian vision of a Garden City has aged off into irrelevance. There is no longer the need to chose between choked industrial squalor, or honest toil in a rural fantasy. City centres tend not to be packed with coal-fuelled factories. Down here in the tertiary-service South, office work now exists and employs millions of us; we have telephony and its sexier younger friend, the internet, which help us not have to be in those offices to work anyway. And offices can co-exist with houses without necessarily polluting them to buggery. So what is a C21 Garden City? Is it just some housing in a Kentish chalk pit?

Welwyn Garden City is beautiful account of what England doesn't look like

Perhaps, the blurb tootles, since 'the Government does not wish to impose any definition of what Garden Cities are, but instead intends to work with localities to support them in developing and delivering their own vision'. Christ, is this the legacy of Modernism - such an antipathy of planners and architects that we'd rather entrust the development and delivery of a new town to a locality rather than actual human people?

Anyway, the Coalition's blurb doesn't really care what a Garden City is or was or should be - the name is just a catchy something, a vehicle 'for councils to take a strategic development decision about how they should meet housing need over the next decade and beyond'. Ah, so it's just about housing, and nothing to do with those difficult ideas like place, or belonging, or coherence, or home. Just houses. And a train line to elsewhere. And, of course, Bluewater shopping centre (which would be one heck of a high street).

Popping down the shops for a Curly Wurly

Despite my irritation with the naffness of the rhetoric espoused about the new Garden City/-ies, I'm interested to see what the prevalent masterplan behind such a new Garden City would be. The original Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn were all grand vistas and pastoral fantasy Olde housing.  And the UK's first roundabouts. The mk 1 post-war New Towns had informal, pedestrianised shopping precincts, usually ringed by an orbital road and gentle warm-brick Modernist housing in an arcadia of green space.

The UK's first residential tower block, in Harlow

The mk 2 New Town Milton Keynes is a grid format announcing the primacy of the car - there is no grand vista because all roads are of equal importance - with a high-tech glass-box shopping megastructure at the centre, with housing shielded from the roads by rows of trees and wodges of green. And the UK's first multiplex cinema.  What philosophy would guide a C21 Garden City?

I suppose the functions of the town centre will be taken care of by Bluewater (surely making the Garden City much cheaper to build), and it comes with the A2 as a bypass, helpfully pre-built by the Romans. Perhaps the housing at Ebbsfleet will adopt the eco-friendly qualities of somewhere like the post-Millennial BedZed (Beddington Zero Energy Development, since you ask), a distinctly decent Peabody Trust development on some brownfield land to the west of Croydon. Here rows of south-facing townhouses are softened by huge triple-glazed windows and extensive foliage. The bridges remind me of Thames-side wharf buildings, for some reason.  The site is intended to be close to a train station and bus stops to reduce the reliance on cars, and various parking spaces have charging points for electric vehicles.

Photovoltaic panels are in evidence, and the somewhat-wacky heat-exchanger funnel-things pivot in the wind, an eye-catching statement about the estate's green credentials. Fine, some of the technology doesn't work as designed, but the designers' efforts have helped reduce water and energy consumption, which is at very least a bit cheaper for the residents.

It's all rather appealing (and worthy without being too preachy), and so much better than the lazy vaguely-Victorian blocks of new-builds behind Bedzed in their own sea of parking spaces. Although I rather doubt that the Ebbsfleet Garden City housing would be as demonstrably outré as BedZed; given the comtemporary English tastes for Anything Olde, they're much more likely to be mock-something and safely vernacular. And they're unlikely to be 'affordable' in any sense other than NewSpeak vote-seeking spin. Alas.