Troubling bridge over water

Right off the top of my head, here are some reasons why parks in cities are so great:

• You can sprawl on the grass;
• You can play frisbee with your mates;
• You can run around like crazy (or let your dog run around like crazy)
• You can have a picnic;
• If you are cycling from A to B and there is a park in the middle, you can do part of the route on off-road paths in pleasant surroundings;
• They represent nice big areas of land that would otherwise be taken up with private development that are conspicuously set aside, instead, for public amenity;
• Not only are they free, but you can just turn up when you feel like it and walk straight into them.

Amazingly, with the planned new "Garden Bridge" crossing of the Thames, which is supposed to combine pedestrian bridge with a fully-planted park, none of these simple things will apply.

What initially sounds like a wonderful idea quickly begins, on hearing the details, to take on the dimensions of a dystopian nightmare.  That is before, it has to be stressed, the thing has even been built. 

People will have to queue to get on the bridge. Ughh! Straight away, this destroys its utility as a genuine piece of transport infrastructure. That the bridge will be closed to the public overnight only confirms the point; the fact that there is no provision for cyclists (scandalous given the lack of cross-river cycleways) is merely rubbing salt in the wounds. Watch out for random closures as well: it will be shut off to the public at least once a month for corporate events, as if to hammer home the point that the structure doesn't belong to you as an ordinary citizen (as opposed to belonging to Joanna Lumley and the project's other celebrity backers).  Take note that you will be tolerated there on sufferance only.

It transpires that the bridge doesn't even really go anywhere.  On the one side, the South Bank is well served for river crossings already.  On the other, the Temple, attractive as the architecture there may be, there really is (and I can attest to this, having trained there) very little to see and do in an area which is essentially just a vast agglomeration of offices for barristers.   Unsurprisingly, then, the official estimate is that 90% of users will not use the bridge to actually get across the river, which is a rather odd finding in the case of a piece of supposedly "vital" transport infrastructure.

But it gets worse. It transpires that there will be a ticketing system and security guards at the gate. How grim is that? Part of the job of the bouncers will be to police a bureaucratic rule dreamed up by the promoters that groups of more than 8 people are supposed to book in advance.  No turning up on a whim with your mates or extended family then.  And regardless, any of the sense of spontaneity and freedom associated with a genuine public park will be utterly eliminated as you are processed onto the thing under the beady gaze of a hired heavy.  

There seems to be some dispute over whether picnics will be banned or not (something widely reported in the press but included as a "Fiction" on the "Fact vs Fiction" page of the website of the trust responsible for this horrendous project, albeit not one actually contradicted by any concrete information to contrary in the corresponding part of the "Fact" column).  At any rate, the point is basically irrelevant since it is quite clear from the renders that there will be nowhere to sit down.  No benches, no grass.  It appears that the trust are so freaked out about the possibility of unmanageably large (>8) groups of park users (marauding gangs of teenagers? gypsy wedding parties?) somehow evading detection by the bouncers at the gate, that they have deliberately designed out any sort of feature that would encourage anyone to actually use the crossing as a place to spend time in as opposed to somewhere to march through and hurriedly take some photos.

What is being proposed is basically a vast conveyor belt without the mechanism.  You will queue to get on, hurried through the turnstiles, and then pushed along the crossing by the throng of pedestrian traffic until you reach the other side.  Something to tick off a list of "must see" attractions, maybe, but an "oasis of calm" in the city, definitely not. 

In perhaps the most pithy comment on the project, one journalist has observed that, with these sort of attributes, it "... really sounds like the sort of thing you would expect to find in Dubai". 

I was amused to read that Richard Rogers (or Lord Rogers of Riverside, aptly-enough) has, though, this week pitched in to defend the scheme (you can read his argument here and judge whether it actually meets any of the objections). Amused, because I have just been reading Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, a damnation of the PFI-funded architectural legacy of the Blair/Brown government, and the introduction to that book highlights Lord Rogers's contribution to that sorry legacy though his spearheading of two key design and urban planning quangos right though the 90's and 00's, Urban Task Force and the Commission for Architecture in the Built Environment (CABE).

I very much admire Richard Rogers as an architect, but like Hatherley I am suspicious of his competence as an urban planning guru.  For one thing he is an architect.  Jonathan Meades is, as usual, spot on, in pointing out the folly of allowing architects free rein to plan entire locales and comparing the results to "... the hubristic pomp that often results when actors direct themselves".  Here is Meades's analysis of why architects make quite such bad planners:

"The architectural idea is to fabricate topographical perfection: the immaculate, that is unstained, conception, a creation untroubled by context, by anything so messy as life, by what is already there - hence the covert enthusiasm for gated communities. which of course, are not communities but civilian fortresses, expressions of separateness."

This observation is almost uncanny given Rogers is right now defending of a 'public' park that plans to operate its own door policy.

At any rate, back in circa 1995-2010, when Rogers and his fellow quango-operatives were essentially spearheading a vast, multi-city, national building project, the exercise of control was necessarily rather more indirect.  Hatherley, in his book, recounts that "... desperate attempts to salvage some possibly of aesthetic pleasure from PFI architects and their developers led to a set of stock recommendations.  Their results can be seen everywhere - ... wavy roofs give variety, mixed materials help avoid drabness, the windswept 'public realm' is a concession to civic valour". 

The main failings of this whole era of public/private redevelopment were, as Hatherley rightly identifies, the fatuous, gimmick-y quality of the architecture, the meanness of its interior space and the meanness and ineptitude of the provision of amenities, and, again, the tendency to establish segregated communities despite the ostentatious emphasis on engineering socially "mixed" development.  Richard Rogers cannot be entirely blamed for all this.  

Instead, all such problems - and this seems entirely obvious now in retrospect - stemmed from the vain hope that the state could somehow procure, at no cost to itself, the provision of public amenity from profit-centric developers as a part of the price for getting permission to doing socially destructive things such as knocking down council houses to build luxury apartments.  It doesn't work quite simply because there is no incentive on the part of the developer to do anything to make the amenity in question - be it a hospital or a public park - any better than the bare minimum standards (if any) imposed by the guidelines. Such diktats will be met in the most grudging manner possible. 

From ...The New Ruins of Great Britain: Mill Street Student Accommodation,
Leeds, "... like a PFI hospital stretched vertically into a block of flats, a wavy blue
roof atop an incredibly badly built chequerboard facade"

You don't need to be a socialist (as is Hatherley) to appreciate that hand-in-glove 'cooperation' between state and private enterprise has a tendency to produce grotesque results: the wholesale handing out of tax-payer cash to bloated, incompetent and unaccountable monopolistic service providers (Serco, Capita, etc) combined with the necessity of bailouts when things inevitably go wrong. It was the Republican president Eisenhower, after all, who coined the term 'military-industrial complex' to criticise one particularly sinister such off-shoot of state capitalism.  (In this respect, one can make a serious case that the Iraq war, which trashed the reputation of the Blair government, in one of history's little ironies, was the mother of all PFI-fuck-ups, given the shocking degree of influence members of the said American military-industrial complex (Halliburton, Blackwater etc) had on the planning and execution of the conflict.  But that is, of course, another story.)

The underlying reason why the public-private approach to design spearheaded by Rogers doesn't work is because great design requires, instead of a formal, check-list programme, some driving source of intense personal motivation.  Hatherley, clearly a statist, doesn't seem to want to go down this route, but I don't have any such scruples.  I am comfortable with the idea that motivation can be sheer profit, as in the case of speculative residential development (of which there are lots of good instances in London), or quasi- (or even fully-) religious fervour, as in the case of municipal or philanthropic schemes for housing workers or what-not (see my earlier post for on the cottages in Compton, Surrey for a fine example of one of these schemes). What doesn't cut it, sorry Richard, is a list of recommendations by Lord Riverside implemented by a tangle of planning quangos and developers. 

Weirdly, even though the group behind Garden Bridge is an independent philanthropic trust, and indeed has been criticised for playing by its own rules, somehow the ethos of PFI - the ethos of half-arsed solutions, hype, and contempt, barely disguised, for end-users - has filtered through into its thinking.  All the vices showcased by Hatterley's book of early 21th century British urbanism are there: a gimmicky, headline-grabbing concept, a paranoid attitude to visitors and a miserably impoverished provision of amenity.  Even the murky, grasping relationship between private initiative and public funding has come into play: the trust asked for, and amazingly received, a £60 million contribution from London and national government for this nasty vanity project (the £3.5 million maintenance bill is apparently going to be underwritten by the public too).  You can also detect that familiar Daffy Duck-style, over-optimistic venality in the apparent assumption that the trust's own investment will be somehow recouped by selling use of the bridge to corporate event clients whilst periodically shutting out the public.  That may or may not raise significant money.  But wasn't philanthropy supposed to be about freely creating something that enriches other people's lives rather than merely managing an asset?  Nobody can remember any more.

No doubt the response of many - since we have all been worn down to rock bottom levels of cynicism by 20 years of ineptitude, from the National Lottery and Millennium Dome onwards, in large scale public projects - will be to say, 'OK, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing'.

Except it's not better than nothing.  

There are two opportunity costs here.  One is quite simply the cost.  Public parks are definitely worth spending money on.  For the price of this vanity project (£175 million) it has been estimated that 30 new London parks could be created, or 30 times the amount of open space.  East London, in particular, is very badly served for green open space.  We could create a larger, much more usable, and much more needed park there with the same money. 

The other opportunity cost is the site itself.  Whereas New York's High Line park, the success of which this scheme is achingly keen to emulate, involved the re-purposing of a derelict railway line to create open space that wasn't already there, there is no such canny recycling at play with the Garden Bridge project: instead it is an expensive bit of engineering that wastefully converts one form of open space to another.

For on the footprint of this planned development there is already open space, namely the River Thames, a waterway that in itself is scenic, historically important as well as, I would have thought, plenty iconic enough in its own right.  

Indeed, a large part of the charm and visual power of the Thames as it flows through central London comes from the fact that it constitutes a relatively open, expansive span of water. It doesn't have to look that way, though. Think of London's many lost, underground rivers. There is a continuum between having a big, powerful open river at one end of the spectrum and a culverted sewer at the other.  The more crossings you build the further along that continuum you slide.

Every additional bridge, particularly in that busy, central stretch, adds to the sense of enclosure, and takes a little away from the majesty of the river.  That means that every new crossing really needs to justify its existence in terms of the amenity it provides, and it needs to justify it with some force.  This pathetic, mean-spirited anti-bridge doesn't even come close.

Brutalism Under Wraps

Ooh!? Centre Point, all wrapped up:

It's a faintly amusing sight glimpsed whilst strolling down Tottenham Court Road: one of central London's most domineering buildings cutely packaged up for a piece of pop-up pop art.  Apparently, the wrap is a giant 'print', created by fashion designer Mark Eley and commissioned by the developers of the skyscraper's interior conversion into luxury flats to double as a screen to hide the construction works over the next 6 months.

It can be seen as part of a fairly positive trend at the moment (I've written about this previously) in favour of taking the trouble to inject some aesthetic content into temporary works, even if the concept here is a tad second-hand (uhm, the Reichstag wrap anyone?)

Is there a slightly sinister side to the message, though?  I'm reminded of Armando Iannucci's wonderfully accurate observation: 

"There are only two things in the world that give us absolute, total happiness. One is unwrapping a newly bought CD, and the other is seeing other people fail."

Whilst the latter guilty pleasure has been around as long as humanity itself, CDs are obviously a rather more recent temptation, and even the more generalised sin of unwrapping-joy is a creation of the steady rise of consumer capitalism over the last couple of hundred years or so.  

Now, if the cutesy appeal of the Centre Point wrap is, at some subtle level, derived from association with that cheap consumerist thrill that comes from the sweaty-palmed anticipation of de-packaging a pristine, virginal piece of loot from the High Street.... well, apart from the seediness of the image I've just set up (apologies), is this somehow an embodiment of the final triumph of shopping over architecture?  

Brutalism, modernism even, conquered by consumerism.  Owen Hatterley, in particular, would have a field day, one feels.

But don't feel bad, at any rate, for Center Point's architect, the late Richard Seifert.  One thing I learned from reading John Grindrod's excellent account of post-war construction in the UK, Concretopia, is that Seifert was one of the most commercially hard-nosed architects anyone has ever known.  He knew how to win commissions, and how to knock 'em out.  So he can hardly complain (from the great beyond) that what is probably his practice's signature work is, for the time being, being used a big symbol of commercialism.