There is architectural life beyond EC1. The British Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale — very much regarded as Old Street’s British Pavilion — will celebrate the British provincial city. But what will it put on show? Architectural standards, sighed Peter Cook, the esteemed co-founder of Archigram and curator of the 2004 pavilion, alas “dropped like a stone” beyond Barnet.
Nonsense. Walsall Art Gallery, the Imperial War Museum of the North, the Eden Project, Dundee, Edinburgh and Maggie’s Centres in Scotland: you’ll find Britain’s best recent buildings far outside London. On this year’s Stirling Prize shortlist only one of the six buildings was in London. The winner, of course, was in Scotland’s capital, not England’s — the Scottish Parliament building.
The problem isn’t that modern British architecture is worse beyond the M25, it’s that it’s the bloody same. The problem with the British provincial city is that it’s not provincial enough. It doesn’t take pride in its difference; what distinguishes it from London — or anywhere else come to that.
A recent paper by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) discovered that 25,000 people have returned to the centres of Liverpool and Manchester. They come for mochafrappelattecinos, for centres all shiny and new, crammed with shops and bars, studded with new apartment towers. Fantastic. But have you actually looked at them? These Victorian New Jerusalems — once hotbeds of local and international industry and culture — have been made over in mirror images of London, of AnyCity, consumerist fantasies for the under-35s — mirror images of each other. Our urban renaissance is all Botox, plumping up craggy old features, but in the process making cities all the same.
The problem is that we have only one model for urban regeneration, and it’s applied ad nauseam. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, the economist Richard Florida prescribed for declining Western cities a diet of “creativity”, consumerism and coolness, the Barcelona or Bilbao model.
The thing is Barcelona and Bilbao propped up their “creative” urban renaissance with decades of state planning and infrastructure, and invested not only in international icon architecture to get them noticed by tourists, but architecture and culture thoroughly rooted in place, in their citizens.
Take Lille, in France, another declined former industrial northern city. Its solution as capital of culture last year was to actually ask its citizens what they wanted. Very 1789. Lille got grands projets, but it didn’t forget about petit projets, too. It built Maisons Folies, 12 grassroots community arts centres, many by local architects, and packed with the equipment necessary to create and sustain the new “creative city”, such as IT training centres and free recording studios.
The point, said its project director, was to celebrate that very French thing, l’art de vivre, the weaving of culture into local, everyday life. Its equivalent in Britain is “lifestyle”, which usually boils down to a new Starbucks and a branch of TK Maxx.
The “creative city” idea was leapt upon by mayors in Anglo-American cities because, badly applied, all it required from them was to lure developers in to pay for and polish up their cities. British urban planning has become simply marketing, using glitzy skylines and per-capita coffee-bar statistics to grab the promiscuous attention of private investment. We don’t use public money to plan. We use titbits to fund icons, to attract developers, and then to try to winkle from them what public good we can.
The result? One flashy icon (Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower), the odd middling arts centre (Baltic, et al), and a city economy propped up on shopping and call centres. Applied thus as a cure for all cities, another IPPR report concluded, this approach “is short-term and consumerist . . . and it is no substitute for a strong economy . . . Creativity and cool are the icing, not the cake.” In other words, feed our cities with more than icons, arts centres and flash loft apartments. Make them truly distinctive.
Instead, we have made patches of some — though far from all — cities marginally less crap than they were. That’s exactly why the British Council, directed by Ricky Burdett, the LSE’s professor of urbanism, is looking beyond London for proposals to fill the British pavilion.
The problem is that a lot of provincial centres have great one-off buildings (the FACT centre in Liverpool, for example) which are either badly funded or stand alone in their innovation, or both.
One blueprint for the future may lie in Castleford, West Yorkshire. There, for a documentary, Channel 4 has bought together locals and planners to create a future plan for the town. The project was initially meant to last 18 months, but has so far lasted three years. The duration of the process provides a valuable lesson: real regeneration isn’t about shiny makeovers but long, hard slogging. Future planning requires thought and consultation, not just splashy glass and steel.
The deadline for submissions to the British Council is Nov 11; details at www.britishcouncil.org
Tom Dyckhoff is on the advisory panel for the British Pavilion at the 2006 Venice Biennale
