A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 1950s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It’s trying to make various points to its clientele which very few seem to have registered, whether critics or shoppers. So there are panels with little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges about the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures – well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanized sort, although the M25 is the most obvious land usage. These quotes are there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass – no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, evoking the pointy tops of Kentish malt kilns, showing a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalize all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list of all those people who used to make stuff is practically endless, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial or administrative. It’s a quasi-religious thing, this – an attempt at appeasing the gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer gods of consumption. What makes Bluewater’s didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibreglass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorializing it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater’s sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.
If Destroyed Still True
There is another peripheral exurb of Dartford that is worth visiting, partly as a way of getting Bluewater out of your system. New Ash Green was built by Span Developments Ltd, a company who were the other side of post-war mass housing to that of council estates and state-sponsored New Towns. Founded by the architect Geoffrey Townsend (who had to resign from the architectural profession because of his new job) and mostly designed by the talented Eric Lyons (later a president of the RIBA), an occasional architect to Southampton and Hackney councils but mostly a private practitioner, Span was both a profit-making business and an attempt to design spaces which were, at least implicitly, social democratic. They wrote of their approach, ‘community as the goal; shared landscape as the means; modern, controlled design as the expression’. So they were impeccably ‘Butskellite’, as the post-war consensus-describing phrase had it, only with the emphasis on Mr But rather than Mr Skell.
Span’s most famous work is in very desirable places indeed – Blackheath, Richmond, Hove, Cambridge. I remember once hearing a moderately successful youngish architect proclaim that ‘Span is interesting because it works’, implying that this was a contrast with things that didn’t work, designed most likely by local councils. It is however very hard to see how what Span were doing – car-free, pedestrianized public spaces, low-rise houses, plenty of landscaping, a Scandinavian softening of Modernism – was any different in design terms from, say, what Sheffield City Council did at Gleadless Valley which ‘doesn’t work’. Span works for one main reason: it was designed, and designed very well, for (often upper-)middle-class clients, so the spaces are looked after, the designs are scrupulously cohesive, and the inhabitants have invariably chosen to live there. It’s not mysterious, and it’s nothing to do with design. What cannot be denied is that Span produced very lovely places. New Ash Green is a harder sell, though, much more so than their enclaves in affluent districts of the metropolis. This place is not so much a New Town as a New Village which Span had designed in North Kent – so ambitious an undertaking that it basically bankrupted the company. The last few pieces of the scheme were entrusted to the somewhat less socially idealistic developers Bovis, then chaired by Keith Joseph himself, who as a government minister under Heath had tried to stop the place being built in the first place. Bovis still has its head office there, which might explain some of the place’s continued affluence.
As New Ash Green is not a town or a suburb I suppose it must be rural, although I say this with the proviso that I don’t understand or know anything whatsoever about the countryside, generally considering it an ideological phantom wielded as a weapon against towns and cities, inducing them to surrender any true civic life to dreams of homes-as-castles-and-investments, as opposed to a real place, which it must be, for some. You can only reach New Ash Green in a car, or by a tortuous public-transport route – the nearest largish town, Dartford, is reached via a bus which seems to be either hourly or two-hourly, depending on how bad a mood the bus driver is in. New Ash Green stops abruptly at one point, where rolling fields start. Yet although it’s essentially one of the Milton Keynes grids with all the surrounding infrastructure taken away, it’s far more urban in design terms than most of what has been built for the last thirty years, even if the urb in question is in the outer reaches of the Copenhagen Metro system. The houses, for all their wood and brick, are still deeply modernist, almost futuristic at times, an impression reinforced by the signage – pseudo-rustic names spelled out in science-fiction letters. Even the streetlamps have something decidedly Dr Who about them, furnishings that could beam you somewhere else entirely. The landscape – nature under strict control – is the truly impressive thing here, something which even the drabber Bovis parts of the estate manage to retain: a sense that everything is public, everything is permeable, except of course for the houses themselves. Span seem to have assumed that a largish, well-designed house with big windows and a garden was all anyone needed for private space, with CCTV and driveways strikingly absent. Lyons and Span had evidently not read about Oskar Newman’s theories of ‘Defensible Space’, nor had they spotted their incorporation into the Design Guide used by nearby Essex County Council. New Ash Green breaks every one of those nasty little rules, by placing what now seems like enormous trust in the place’s inhabitants. If, as Alice Coleman and her ilk have suggested, certain urban forms invite crime, then the in-between spaces here should be a constant fest of knifings and rapes. It’s hard to imagine they do so any more than in Dartford’s more obsessively defensible closes and cul-de-sacs.
There are nooks of mild criminality in the form of the graffiti that is scribbled on the walkways, much of which is so cute and indie that it seems like the local youth are all living in a Belle and Sebastian song. ‘If destroyed still true, please keep our memorie’s here.’ It is not suffocatingly nice, though, and New Ash Green lacks the obsessive upkeep, the Keep Calm and Carry On posters and the general austerity nostalgia that you can find in the Span parts of Blackheath. Nonetheless, by the standards of 98 per cent of Britain this is hard-line stuff – the hedges impeccable, the original features mostly in place, the spaces extremely trim. You could have a wonderful life here and you could also go completely bonkers in a week. Span probably knew from early on that this one would be a hard sell. The RIBA’s recent Eric Lyons and Span book about their ex-president reproduces some of the flagrantly sexist ads used to convince people to move to the back of beyond (or the back of beyond less than an hour’s drive from London). Architect’s Wives, ‘vital statistics (no, not those ones!)’, some fairly blatant suggestions of possible wife swapping and the general sexual intrigue that goes with being terribly modern.
The place may well soon become both modern and terrible, as architectural hacks Broadway Malyan are slated to redesign it. To get an architect of similar talent and prominence to Lyons, they should really be asking Richard Rogers – his recent speculative housing in Milton Keynes is a precise modern equivalent – but I don’t suppose he comes as cheap. The shopping centre is slightly knackered, but even when compared with many more inner-city estates, it’s thoroughly self-sufficient with its banks, health food café, branch of Oxfam, Co-op, newsagent, various other bits and bobs. I’ve seen places in Zone 2 with fewer amenities. Up on the roof there is some slight sign of ruffness in the graffiti, though having ‘HENCH’ as your tag is a bit sad. Like writing ‘I’M A BIG MAN, ME!’ everywhere. It protests too much. There appear to be only two places where New Ash Green seems anything other than idyllic: the back-end of the shopping centre, a car-parking area that for some reason has gone derelict before everywhere else; and the village pub, not exactly welcoming, full of regulars who look at us like we’re from Mars – which is rich, as they live on it. The door