We therefore refrain from raising of the tower block, the new antique village or the riverside mansion that most basic and incensed of political questions: ‘Who did this?’ Yet an investigation of the process by which buildings rise reveals that unfortunate cases can in the end always be attributed not to the hand of God, or to any immovable economic or political necessities, or to the entrenched wishes of purchasers, or to some new depths of human depravity, but to a pedestrian combination of low ambition, ignorance, greed and accident.
A development which spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. They may be called Derek or Malcolm, Hubert or Shigeru, they may love golf and animals, and yet, in a few weeks, they can put in motion plans which will substantially ruin a landscape for 300 years or more.
The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outer space. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large. But it is only a mistake, and, despite the impressive amounts of scaffolding, concrete, noise, money and bluster which tend to accompany its appearance, it is no more deserving of our deference than a blunder in any other area of life. We should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws or nonsensical arguments.
Christopher Wren, A Plan of the City of London, 1666
We should recover a sense of the malleability behind what is built. There is no predetermined script guiding the direction of bulldozers or cranes. While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.
3.
There was certainly no predetermined reason for parts of London to turn out as ugly as they have. In September 1666, after almost the whole of the city had burnt to the ground in the Great Fire, Christopher Wren presented Charles II with plans to rebuild the capital with boulevards and squares, perspectives and symmetrical avenues, as well as a coherent road system and an adequate riverfront. London might have had some of the grandeur of Paris and Rome; it might have been a great European city, rather than a sprawl which foreshadowed Los Angeles and Mexico City.
Charles II commended Wren on the beauty and intelligence of his scheme. But the decision about how to proceed was not solely his to take: lacking absolute power, he had to defer to the City Council, which was dominated by merchants anxious over their tax revenues and the difficulty of reconciling their competing property rights. Wren’s ideas were evaluated by a team of commissioners appointed by the council and deemed too complex. Conservatism and fear took hold, and by February of the following year the plan was dead, Wren’s boulevards having been consigned to fantasy and London itself abandoned to the interests of the merchants, who, loath to give up a sliver of their yearly profits, happily condemned the capital to three centuries and more of inferiority.
4.
The contingent nature of bad architecture is equally evident when we look at old maps of London’s suburbs and see that what are now miles of blight were once acres of orchards and open meadows. There were farms at White City and apple trees at Willesden Junction. The terrain on which the disfigured forms of Shepherd’s Bush and Harlesden stand today was at the outset an arena of pure possibility, on which streets rivalling those of Bath or Edinburgh might have been built.
The idea sounds pretentious only because we are reluctant to imagine that on a patch of ordinary ground where nothing significant ever occurred (aside from the slow gestation of generations of crab-apples), one of the great urban rooms of the world – another Royal Crescent or Charlotte Square – could be summoned to rise. We are prone to falling into a series of illogical assumptions which hold us back from being more demanding of architects: we presume that man-made beauty has been preordained to exist in certain parts of the world but not in others; that urban masterpieces are the work of people fundamentally different from, and greater than, ourselves; and that superior buildings must cost inordinately more than the uglier architecture which typically takes their place.
But, in truth, there was nothing especially promising about the hills of Bath before John Wood the Elder got to them, or about the fields near the swampy North Loch above the medieval core of Edinburgh before James Craig drew up his scheme for the New Town. Both were generic swaths of earth, furnished with grass, sheep, daisies, trees and, in Edinburgh’s case, swarms of virulent mosquitoes. And, lest we feel tempted to shift our supposed locus of predetermined greatness from places to people, we should note that Wood and Craig, imaginative and highly persevering though they both were, did not possess a unique genius. The residential squares, gardens and avenues they built followed from principles which had been well known for generations. But each of these men was fired by the prospect of bringing a legendary city into being, a new Athens or Jerusalem, and in this ambition found the confidence to overcome the innumerable practical challenges involved in turning green fields into attractive streets. Having a belief in a special destiny, a sense of standing at a privileged moment in history, may well be grandiose and misguided, but it also provides an indispensable and therefore not unprofitable means of ensuring that beauty will have an opportunity to prevail.
The promise of Shepherd’s Bush:
John Rocque, A Survey of London and Country Ten Miles Around, 1746
Money can be no excuse either. Though Bath’s crescents and Edinburgh’s New Town were not cheap to build, we would be unfairly blaming a lack of inspiration on poverty by proposing that a tight budget ever condemned a building to ugliness – as a visit to the wealthy suburbs of Riyadh and the shopkeepers’ houses of old Siena will rapidly and poignantly attest.
Fed up with hearing that no great cities could be built in the modern era because the necessary funds weren’t available, Le Corbusier asked sarcastically: ‘Do we not possess the means? Louis XIV made do with picks and shovels … Hausmann’s equipment was also meagre; the shovel, the pick, the wagon, the trowel, the wheelbarrow, the simple tools of every race before the mechanical age.’ Our cranes, diggers, quick-drying concrete and welding machines leave us with nothing to blame but our own incompetence.
5.
Ask the property development company what sort of houses will go up on the doomed field, and you’ll be sent a waxy marketing brochure showing five different house types, each named after an English monarch. The Elizabeth II boasts chrome door handles and a stainless-steel oven; the George V has a fibreglass-beamed dining room and a Neo-Arts and Crafts roof; and the Henry VIII is, inevitably, a Neo-Tudor loyalist.
If, after browsing through the elegant presentation material, we still felt inclined to question the appearance of these buildings, the property developer would almost certainly retaliate with a familiar and apparently invincible argument: such houses have always sold rapidly and in great quantities. We would be sternly reminded that to scorn their designs would therefore be to ignore commercial logic and attempt to deny others a democratic right to their own tastes, bringing us into conflict with two of the great authoritative concepts of our civilisation, money and liberty.
But such a defence is not without its fault lines. A few of these came into focus as I flew to Japan, on my way to Huis Ten Bosch and the ryokan. Wedged in a window seat, unable to sleep, with the Arctic Circle shining a luminous green outside, I turned to a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature (1988) by the American scholar of Japan, Donald Keene.