Suitable cases for treatment
Sheffield's Park Hill Estate: can it be remodelled?
George Ferguson
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Kevin McCloud argues that demolition is not always the best answer, and suggests some creative alternatives
Human beings are the lifeblood of buildings. When humans leave because they won’t or can’t stay there, life drains out of a building and the building dies. Looked at like this, our towns and cities are like giant living organisms, places that need the oxygen of human habitation and which need replenishing, feeding and growth in order to survive. But, as we found when making the Demolition series, too many of them are ossified, infected or in some cases positively gangrenous with decay.
What's the diagnosis?
There are many reasons why disease sets in and buildings need to be removed. A tower block might have been poorly built, be inflexible in use and difficult to extend or remodel. A town centre could be poorly planned or never even properly finished. An office block might have been put up in a moment of supreme corporate vanity.
Buildings can fail because they’re designed badly and without conviction, because they’re superannuated or just because they haven’t been maintained properly. But that doesn’t mean to say we should demolish every failing building in the country. Sometimes the affected structure can be healed rather than amputated. In the series we examined several buildings that could be remodelled or creatively reused.
The guru of the modern glass-walled urban high-rise, architect Ian Simpson, looked at Crown House in Kidderminster to see if it could be made more transparent, colourful and contemporary. And in Sheffield, groovemeisters Urban Splash plan to redevelop the famous Park Hill Estate into something a bit more glamorously New Labour – trendy flats and mixed-use.
Alternative therapy
These are buildings which were nominated by viewers in their hundreds and which even made the Dirty Dozen list of most hated buildings, yet there appears to be a promise of new life in them – though I’m not sure that potential residents of Crown House would want to pay the kind of rents that a sexily remodelled building might command. This kind of financial and aesthetic makeover of old buildings might be workable in central Manchester, but is likely to be less viable in rural towns.
It isn’t very sustainable, environmentally or socially, to keep knocking our buildings down. Of course our towns and cities should grow and change organically, but not at cancerous speeds. The identity of a place is made up from the layering of its history, not from the number of shiny blobby buildings it has managed to collect in the last five years.
Future-proofed decisions
History helps us make sense of our cities, contributes to our sense of community and connects us to where we live, so we wipe it off the face of the planet at our peril. And after all, pretty soon shiny blobby becomes grubby blobby: buildings that the next generation will want to demolish. So there are two crucial questions we need proper answers to before anything gets torn down. Firstly, are we sure that this horrible building in question isn’t unique or of value to future generations, even as an historical document of some kind? And secondly, and most importantly for us, what is going to replace it?
In Gateshead I found myself defending a tired, semi-derelict and poorly built grey concrete car park. Once upon a time there was supposed to be a discotheque and bar on its roof. Shops had been cleverly integrated into the ground floor. Now, so many bits have fallen off, that it looks like a war-torn military super-bunker in Baghdad. Its only claim to fame was a brief appearance in the cult British 1960s film Get Carter. Michael Caine actually stood on it.
Tomorrow's icon
But you know what? Despite it making the Dirty Dozen, and despite it being loathed by almost every resident of Gateshead I could find, I don’t want to see it come down. It’s the last remaining work by architect Owen Luder (most of his other stuff has already been demolished) and despite its dire need of repair, poor construction and compromised design (I’m hardly selling it hard, am I?), it remains about the most exemplary car park of its time.
It’s a little slice of history – and of film memorabilia – which Gateshead may one day come to value in the face of the nearby collection of blobby glass. It represents a more optimistic age, when car travel was seen as sophisticated and glamorous. In 50 years time we may look back at 1960s automobile culture with the same fondness we now have for horse-drawn brewery drays and pony-drawn traps.
There is another good reason to keep the car park of course, which is that it’s now owned by Tesco. If it is ever demolished it will almost certainly be replaced by a supermarket (Tesco already have one store on the site). I’ll bet whatever gets constructed in its place will look just as, if not more ugly than what’s there now. And I very much doubt that in 50 years time people will be arguing to keep that.