For this year's Open House London, I decided to take on the London Borough of Southwark. This strip of the capital stretches from a slice of the south bank of the Thames centred around London Bridge straight down to Peckham/Dulwich in the heart of South London. It takes in quite a few big-name sights, particularly around the Thames, including the The Globe, London City Hall and The Shard.
I focused instead, though, on some of the less well-known locations listed in the guide, visiting 11 of them by the end of the weekend (get that you people who won the ballot to see 10 Downing St or the BT Tower and didn't bother to see anything else! Not that it's a competition...). Indeed, so ruthless was I in my quest for efficiency that I walked straight past a couple of places on my list because the queues were too long, resisting the temptation to flash the "L" loser sign at the all-too-patient punters as I walked by. Anyway... here's a run-down of what I did see.
0. A pre-Open House stroll wall around Southwark proper
This part of London, on the other side of the river from the City, is changing all the time these days - with the addition of City Hall a few years back, then The Shard and, recently, the neo-Bankside development visited in a previous post. What public space remains is filled, it seems, with people doing nothing but taking photographs of the latest architecture (The Shard, in particular), so for 10 minutes or so, before the first building tour started, I thought I would briefly join their ranks.
1. Unicorn Theatre, Tooley Street
Britain's only dedicated children's theatre, which opened in 2005. The exterior building is a dull box but inside there is lots going on from a design point of view. A member of the design team giving a tour of the place outlined the challenges of, amongst other things, accommodating fly lofts for the theatre scenery, deciding whether or not to have ticketed seating and the knock-on effects on the interior layout of this, and housing the theatre rabbit on the roof.
2. Tower Bridge Magistrates Court, Tooley Street
Just up the road from the Unicorn was another, strange addition to the Open House roster: a disused Magistrates Court, bought up by developers with an as-yet unrealised ambition to turn it into hotel. The developers signed up to Open House, it would seem, to try to drum up support for the scheme. They were, rather hopefully, handing out postcards to people so they could make representations in the developer's favour to the local council, the claim being that the plans would be better from a conservation perspective than the likely alternative, namely total redevelopment of the site to make way for residential flats, because the hotel concept would at least retain (some of) the original fittings and fixtures. There are plans, in particular, to turn the main courtroom into a restaurant hall, with the benches serving as dining booths.
The real appeal here was in marvelling at the bizarre, Marie Celeste way in which the place had been left, apparently in something of a hurry, by the previous occupants: virtually all the fittings in place, down to the coat of arms hanging on the wall the courtroom and the final rota displaying the names of the police custody team on a whiteboard outside the grim holding cells (which sadly there are no plans to retain).
3. The Coal Line, Peckham
This event involved a piece of infrastructure that has, yet, no physical presence, not even a construction site. The Coal Line is a nascent project to create a linear park, just under 1km long, alongside the railway line between Peckham Rye and Queens Road Peckham. We were taken on a tour of the proposed route of the park by the local volunteer group who are trying to push the scheme through. Or, at least, we walked alongside it, as much of the park is intended to be carried by a railway viaduct traversing abandoned Edwardian coal-delivery sidings, presently off-limits to the public.
I'm, for one, sold on the idea: I think it's great. In a previous post, I excoriated another proposed linear park - the godawful Garden Bridge across the Thames. The Peckham project is absolutely everything that The Garden Bridge (TGB) is not. It involves the reclamation of open space not current accessible to the public as opposed to, as with TGB, the private enclosure of something (ie The Thames) which is already public space; it makes maximum use of existing physical infrastructure as opposed to requiring, as does TGB, a vast and needless lump of engineering to be constructed from scratch at great financial and environmental cost; it will actually function as a genuine public territory - a normal park that you can fucking well walk straight into, for God's sake - rather than, as with TGB, a space where ordinary people are made to feel that they are, at best, being tolerated 'on sufferance' due to the ticket barriers, bouncers and random closures for corporate events; it also brings much needed recreational space to a very densely populated area that doesn't have much of the commodity as opposed to creating, as the TGB, a park that is no-where near anyone actually lives and so by definition can only function as a tourist attraction. And whereas TGB is a vanity project of Joanna Lumley heading up a cabal of powerful, well-connected big-wigs (this comment is not mere conspiracy theory), Peckham's Coal Line is about as grassroots as you can get, driven as it is by a group of "committed local residents with big dreams and bright ideas", as the website puts it.
The current state of play is that the project organisers are seeking to crowd-fund a feasibility study, something which Network Rail, who own most of the land, have required to go forward with the project. Even though I'm not a local resident, I've pitched in because this is exactly the way I think future development in this country should happen. I really hope it gets off the ground.
5. Private residence, Asylum Road
5. Private residence, Asylum Road
One of the ideas in the book I'm writing at the moment is the notion that the manoeuvres that people are forced to employ to overcome tricky, restrictive design briefs always tend to add intelligibility to a design, making it more interesting and inviting than it would otherwise be had the brief been less restrictive in the first place. This principle certainly holds true with this tiny house, built on the footprint of a former garage. It is completely delightful, and what makes it so are the clever devices that it deploys to maximise the use of space: sliding doors, cub-hole style bedrooms, tiny, sunlit courtyards, use of mixed-height ceilings to make living spaces seem far, far, more expansive than their really are. There is more going on here than in many a home four or five times the size, but it magically didn't feel cramped - even though there were more than a dozen visitors wandering around inside. Inspiring stuff.
It could have been very different in fact: I asked the lady who, together with her husband designed and built the place, why it was so much less high than the terrace houses that it abutted. She explained that they had bought the site with planning consent in place, and simply redesigned the house within the existing envelope of the permission that had been granted. They could have sought to extend it, she admitted, and indeed there was a chance that this would have been granted. But I don't think they should be regretful about this decision at all: again, arguably, its the very limited envelope in which they were operating which brought the best out of the designers and makes the house what it is.
6. Peckham Library, Peckham Hill St
Will Alsop's Peckham Library, winner of the Stirling Prize in 2000, is, it dawned on me walking around it, a heck of an influential building. It basically defines an entire era of British architecture, namely that of the Blair/Brown years (1997-2010), or, more particularly, of the design quango, CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, 1999-2011) that they set up and whose recommendations helped promulgate the style-book of the epoch. What does the style involve? A kind of cheery, irritating vacuousness, basically: bright colours, supposedly 'friendly' curves, wacky spatial organisation and a post-modern obsession with creating 'iconic' forms (read: memorably weird, unique shapes). The classic text (already) is Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), which chronicles how increasingly dismal architecture of this type mushroomed up all over the island over this period. (The style has, incidentally, now entirely fallen entirely out of fashion: virtually all new developments seem to be exercises in tasteful, grey, largely rectilinear minimalism - see the entrants for this years Stirling Prize for a flavour).
I kept thinking, as we toured the interior by a member of the library staff, of Hatherley's book even though it doesn't cover this particular building. All the basic elements he identifies are here. The basic design is wilfully counter-intuitive: a giant up-side down 'L' that suspends the main library area above an enormous forecourt. The building is clad on one side with a material (patinated copper) that proudly announces 'design quality' on the other with brightly coloured panels. Best of all, the wonderfully crass concept of the "pod" pervades everything. The pods are strangely shaped enclosures suspended like enormous fruit within the envelope of the building (and in one case poking out of it, to create a typically CABE-) designed to create segregated, quiet spaces within the interior: a comically over-engineered solution to a problem already solved several millenia ago with the invention of the "room".
It can be argued, nonetheless, as the librarian taking us around did, that, in the context of this particular building, all this silliness was for a good cause: our guide pointed out, approvingly, that the non-intimidating look of the place was intended to be welcoming to kids from what is a fairly deprived area who might be put off attending a library with a more forbidding, institutional feel. I can believe this: the very young children in particular seem totally relaxed in the place - wandering in and out of the rooms/pods, chatting (quietly and sweetly) to the library staff and members of our tour group. And it's not a bad building, overall. Even the pods are, if somewhat useless, well-made and quite attractive as decorative features. But like so many pioneering buildings, it set a terrible precedent. The desire for a childish 'non-intimidating look' has no sensible application to a residential block of flats - the very idea comes across as insultingly patronising in such a context - and yet, following the feted example of Peckham Library, every developer in the noughties stuck a "wavy roof" (per Hatherley) ontop of each of their jerry-built tower and a random coloured panels on the outside walls. Alsop, therefore, has a lot to answer for in my opinion.
... To read part 2, click here.
It could have been very different in fact: I asked the lady who, together with her husband designed and built the place, why it was so much less high than the terrace houses that it abutted. She explained that they had bought the site with planning consent in place, and simply redesigned the house within the existing envelope of the permission that had been granted. They could have sought to extend it, she admitted, and indeed there was a chance that this would have been granted. But I don't think they should be regretful about this decision at all: again, arguably, its the very limited envelope in which they were operating which brought the best out of the designers and makes the house what it is.
6. Peckham Library, Peckham Hill St
Will Alsop's Peckham Library, winner of the Stirling Prize in 2000, is, it dawned on me walking around it, a heck of an influential building. It basically defines an entire era of British architecture, namely that of the Blair/Brown years (1997-2010), or, more particularly, of the design quango, CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, 1999-2011) that they set up and whose recommendations helped promulgate the style-book of the epoch. What does the style involve? A kind of cheery, irritating vacuousness, basically: bright colours, supposedly 'friendly' curves, wacky spatial organisation and a post-modern obsession with creating 'iconic' forms (read: memorably weird, unique shapes). The classic text (already) is Owen Hatherley's A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (2010), which chronicles how increasingly dismal architecture of this type mushroomed up all over the island over this period. (The style has, incidentally, now entirely fallen entirely out of fashion: virtually all new developments seem to be exercises in tasteful, grey, largely rectilinear minimalism - see the entrants for this years Stirling Prize for a flavour).
I kept thinking, as we toured the interior by a member of the library staff, of Hatherley's book even though it doesn't cover this particular building. All the basic elements he identifies are here. The basic design is wilfully counter-intuitive: a giant up-side down 'L' that suspends the main library area above an enormous forecourt. The building is clad on one side with a material (patinated copper) that proudly announces 'design quality' on the other with brightly coloured panels. Best of all, the wonderfully crass concept of the "pod" pervades everything. The pods are strangely shaped enclosures suspended like enormous fruit within the envelope of the building (and in one case poking out of it, to create a typically CABE-) designed to create segregated, quiet spaces within the interior: a comically over-engineered solution to a problem already solved several millenia ago with the invention of the "room".
It can be argued, nonetheless, as the librarian taking us around did, that, in the context of this particular building, all this silliness was for a good cause: our guide pointed out, approvingly, that the non-intimidating look of the place was intended to be welcoming to kids from what is a fairly deprived area who might be put off attending a library with a more forbidding, institutional feel. I can believe this: the very young children in particular seem totally relaxed in the place - wandering in and out of the rooms/pods, chatting (quietly and sweetly) to the library staff and members of our tour group. And it's not a bad building, overall. Even the pods are, if somewhat useless, well-made and quite attractive as decorative features. But like so many pioneering buildings, it set a terrible precedent. The desire for a childish 'non-intimidating look' has no sensible application to a residential block of flats - the very idea comes across as insultingly patronising in such a context - and yet, following the feted example of Peckham Library, every developer in the noughties stuck a "wavy roof" (per Hatherley) ontop of each of their jerry-built tower and a random coloured panels on the outside walls. Alsop, therefore, has a lot to answer for in my opinion.
... To read part 2, click here.
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