Darent Valley, Dartford, the first PFI hospital

      A landmark in the strange new landscape created by the loosening of planning controls in the ‘Thames Gateway’, Darent Valley Hospital is just adjacent to Bluewater, the ultimate out-of-town, out-of-this-world mall, which is bunkered down inside a chalk pit and impossible to reach on foot. So the bus takes you past the M25, through what is probably legally the green belt—that is, a landscape of 1930s speculative housing and minuscule farms where forlorn horses look upon power stations and business parks—before eventually dropping you off at the top of a hill, from which you can survey an extraordinary non-place. The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, its ungainly, steep curve reaching to the hangars and containers of Thurrock, and an endless strip of sheds and cranes stretching out as far as the North Sea.

      The hospital itself, designed by Paulley Architects in 1999, is done in the public–private style which is by now familiar from a thousand New Labour non-projects. No doubt constructed with a concrete or steel frame, it attempts to avoid looking ‘institutional’ via a series of plasticky wavy roofs (which, as a bonus, have also become the hospital’s logo), tiny windows, some green glass, and a lot of yellow London stock brick. Inside the series of corridors and wards, into which natural light never seems to penetrate, there are dashes of jolly colour in the carpets and a peculiarly abstract colour-coding system. But the real design feature is the central atrium at the main Outpatients entrance, where a giant Carillion logo looks over a big branch of Upper Crust, a WH Smith, and a shop which sells a huge range of cuddly toys, amongst other concessions. The first time I went here I was quite alarmed by the rather early twentieth-century equipment in this ‘twenty-first-century hospital’, but one can purchase a wide variety of pastries here. In the Outpatients waiting room, large screens show—always grainy—footage of local appeals and health recommendations.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually well treated here, bearing in mind the hours of waiting around, and I do what I’m told, placing all reasonable and unreasonable trust in the physicians, but sometimes the new landscape and the vagaries of hospital treatment can intersect in undignified ways. Behind the site is a new residential development, most likely built as part of the same property deals that created the hospital; the NHS is nowadays encouraged to maximize profit from its land. An estate of little spec-builder cottages spans out around a patch of wasteland, and their back windows look out into the strip windows of the wards. Some of the homeowners may have caught more than a glimpse of me undergoing a brief but rather invasive procedure, as the blinds wouldn’t go all the way along the window. This was not, I presume, in the property brochure.

      In the main Outpatients waiting room is a wall display on ‘Heritage’. Everything in Britain, especially in the Home Counties, must involve Heritage somewhere. Obviously there isn’t much to be found in a hospital which has only existed for ten years, but conveniently, it turns out that there was an Asylum for Imbeciles on the site in the nineteenth century. Sepia-toned pictures of this take up the space on the heritage wall. This is England, I always think when I’m here. I don’t mean in the sense that Iain Sinclair did when he visited Darent Valley in his 2002 travelogue London Orbital and imagined it an apocalyptic bedlam of lumpen proletarian troglodytes wielding bull terriers. I know it well, and it isn’t. It’s more because it represents a horrible, unplanned new landscape, the embodiment of New Labour’s attempt to transform the Welfare State into a giant business. It won’t admit to its newness, instead remaining petty and provincial, simulating a nebulous heritage. With its sober stock brick and metallic surfaces (by now blackened by the hospital incinerator) it doesn’t even have the pleasures of kitsch. Yet this dispiriting exurbia was not the whole story of Blairite Britain. The last fifteen years have also seen the attempted fulfilment—sometimes sincere, mostly cynical—of policies that purported to put urbanity and design at the centre of new building. In so doing, New Labour has fulfilled the wishes of some left-wing urbanists in a most unexpected fashion.

       Be Careful What You Wish For

      Perry Anderson recently wrote that Britain’s history since Thatcher has been ‘of little moment’.¹ Admirable as this statement is in pricking local pomposities and arguable though it may be in political terms, in architecture, as in art and music, the UK has retained a prominence that is out of all proportion to its geopolitical weight. British architectural schools (both in the stylistic sense and as educational institutions like the Architectural Association) have retained a massive importance. The High-Tech school of mechanistic style founded by former partners Norman Foster and Richard Rogers was successful in Paris and Hong Kong before London and Manchester, bringing prestige that was appropriately rewarded in the less than futuristic, if geographically indeterminate titles the two men now carry, Baron Foster of Thames Bank and Baron Rogers of Riverside. The immediately succeeding generation of Will Alsop or David Chipperfield would have a similar fate, with successes in Berlin or Marseilles before the UK rewarded their firms with commissions; after them, students—seldom British—of the Architectural Association in London like Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl would achieve international prominence and domestic obscurity for their Deconstructivist warping of architecture into something barely functional but instantly ‘iconic’; most recently, new ornamental-ists like Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) or Foreign Office Architects found employment in the Netherlands or Japan first and foremost.