Extras Kevin: Urban Regeneration

Date Published:

19/06/2008

Perfectly decent buildings are being bulldozed in the name of regeneration, says Kevin McCloud.

In this feature: what developers call 'urban regeneration' and the rest of us call 'another new shopping centre'. I live near Bath, a World Heritage city, which is a unique testament to the speculative developer of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. So much of what John Wood the Elder and Younger both designed and built remains - much of the city retains both its refined neo-Roman classical flavour and its delightful planned squares and crescents.

The peculiarly Georgian character of Bath makes it something of a special case when it comes to the addition and accretion of new buildings. The city's design codes are understandably intolerant of any new structure that will jar with the formality and overall composition of the existing place. So, a new modernist house that we’re filming being constructed to the south of the city centre has to be faced with a clean and featureless wall of locally mined stone. All well and good. But the proposed glass and ceramic extension by Eric Parry Architects for the Holburne Museum, despite being hidden well behind the principal facade of this lovely building, got a sad beating from the planners. Which I would argue is a dense and over-zealous application of their agenda, not least when Grimshaw’s new Bath Spa building demonstrates what beautiful dialogue can emerge when Modernism is stitched into Georgian architecture.

And as for the well-built and delightful neoclassical contribution from the early Thirties, Churchill House, just by the river, designed by WA Williams as a headquarters for the local electricity generating company? Well, it's a pleasure to know that such a rare and well-crafted contribution from a period when quality of design and construction were valued, remains intact. Sorry that’s completely wrong. Churchill House was bulldozed a couple of months ago to make way for a new piece of urban regeneration, the Southgate Centre.

The council giveth and the council taketh away. And with no obvious justification. Churchill House was, despite its Tuscan columns, carved frieze and entablature, a building visibly of its time that brought some well-mannered twentieth-century resonance to Bath. It was from an under-represented chapter in the big history of the city, a chapter that is now pretty well blank.

And to replace it? A bit of clunky twenty-first century neoclassicism, designed on a computer, cut by CAD and installed in huge panels on steel frames. It will be as soulless as its own cardboard model and as meaningless in Bath as anywhere else on the planet.

If you live in Reading or Chester, why should you care about Bath? Because what’s happening there is coming to a high street near you. Perfectly decent buildings that have historically contributed to the grain of a place and made it seem, in small ways special, are now being torn down faster than ever to make way for more identikit shopping centres. Our old 'background buildings' may be disused or dirty but that doesn’t mean to say they can’t be creatively reused. They may be problematic, expensive to repair or maintain or just unloved, but they have an important role to play in making our towns and cities feel unique.

One town that is in danger of losing that uniqueness is Aldershot. Having fought to maintain its community and arts centre, the 'Westy', residents now face the dubious pleasure of seeing the arrival of the new Westgate, a baubly 'shopping experience' in the town centre that will destroy two houses and a very fine and atmospheric Thirties cinema in its path.

We have to fight this bowdlerisation of our towns' histories otherwise we'll all be living in Nowheresville. We have to be loyal and vigilant, and fight for all that is idiosyncratically part of our home town or city and for every slice of ordinary history and every oddity that will otherwise succumb to 'regeneration'.

Any thoughts? Email info@granddesignsmagazine.com

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