John Soane Medal Lecture 2022

Forty years of thinking about cities  has taught me that there are tonnes of ways to be an architect, numerous  hats that we can and should wear – abstract and analytical, political, sensual, social, artistic, pragmatic even. We need to be sociologist, citizen, geographer, activist and urbanist –  Master-Planner-structuralist and Situationist both,

I’d like to start by outlining 12 ideas and thoughts which aim to tease out an ideological and political context for our work. These quotes, images and observations capture the atmosphere and ethos of what we do and they provide a moral compass for our design process. I’ll then move on to describe how these ideas find expression in three of our built project. I will finish by talking about my sketchbooks/ and a series of theoretical or speculative projects/ ideas, including 8,000 Mile Island….. our vision for an array of maritime farms and offshore green energy plants tracing the coastal outline of our island from the Orkneys to the Isle of Wight and back… A vision for a food and energy self-sufficient UK.

One

The UK was broke in the aftermath of the Second World War, and yet successive governments still found the resources not only to fund the National Health Service but to build 150,000 homes annually. By 1975, nearly half the population enjoyed the benefits of living in council housing. In the intervening years, this policy has been reversed with a series of disastrous housing acts. Governments of both political complexions have abandoned their commitment to social housing. Since 1979, HALF of all public-owned land has been sold into private ownership and two million homes have been sold, at discounted prices, under the nonsensical ‘right to buy’ scheme. Today, only around eight per cent of the population lives in council housing.

Consequently in London alone there are currently: 170,000 homeless people (Shelter’s robust minimum figure); 8,000 rough sleepers, a total that has doubled in the last four years; 30,000  empty homes; and 150 families losing their home each day. At the same time we have seen an exponential rise in property prices and the cost of private-sector rentals ­– 259 per cent over the course of the last 10 years.

In my view, housing is basic infrastructure, and not a commodity, and the control of the land economy and housing production has to be a matter for government – much as it was in the middle part of the last century.

Three simple policies would decommodify housing and go a long way to ending end the housing crisis: 1. Introduce private sector rent controls; 2. Halt the selling of council houses under ‘right to buy’; 3. Create 150,000 council houses a year funded by direct taxation.

It would make ecological sense that a substantial proportion of these ought to be refurbished from the enormous stock (half a million in recent estimates of empty homes. Double glazing, roof insulation a lick of paint job done.

It would be interesting to reflect on ways in which this new wave of council housing production might be devolved, bottom up or incremental.

two

Housing shortage? What housing shortage? There are currently 250,000 homeless people in the UK and over 500,000 empty homes. There is no housing shortage.

Outside London in areas dogged by the collapse of the UK’s industrial and maritime economies there are row upon row of empty houses, silent deserted, street after street of boarded up homes, entire urban areas, depopulated, jobless. These include former industrial cities such as Rochdale, Bolton, Burnley, Stoke, Middlesbrough and  coastal towns  (where multiple deprivation indices are the most shocking such as Blackpool, Hull, Morecombe, Plymouth, Swansea where 150,000 homes lie empty.

Equally shocking in London 30,000 shiny new homes, empty, locked shut, never lived in. Cash cow, commodity, investment vehicle. Testament to investor greed, the amorality of pension funds, the disinterest of wealthy overseas buyers. London’s land-bank-larceny property industry the product of half a century of neo liberal Government economic policy aimed at promoting the ‘housing industry’ as one of the principal drivers of economic growth.

And this echoed on a smaller scale in second home and air b and b ghost villages, empty 9 months a year, working people priced out, forced out in a maelstrom of holiday lets.

The housing crisis would be over if we;

1. Instigate a massive programme of government investment in new productive industries, that would attract employment/ people back to our most hard hit depopulated urban centres where there are hundreds of thousands of empty homes waiting for them.

2. Set up a Government National Housing Service with powers to purchase hundreds of thousands of empty homes in run down areas. New Council Houses created through the refurbishment and improvement of empty and derelict property.

3. Municipalise long term vacant investment property.

Three

Walter Benjamin’s description of the culture and form of a street in Naples captures beautifully the idea of a city animated by the activities of its occupants – by a spatiality that is permeable, that invites occupatio0n. He gives us an intimation of the fragile and complex reciprocal relationship that exists between people and space, between culture and architecture. His message: without people and culture, space is inert.

Our projects work with the idea that space conditions and is in turn conditioned by society and culture, and that architecture can create the potential for social action and activity. I always find it helpful to visualise how people might inhabit the spaces that we create and I love revisiting our built housing projects to see how people’s lives are played out in their homes and in the courtyards and on the streets we have made.

Four

Housing accounts for 70 per cent of all the buildings in London. It’s what our city is made of. It’s what creates a hard edge to our streets, what surrounds our squares.

Therefore when we design urban housing we are designing cities. Designs for housing should begin as urban designs, driven in the first instance by our vision of a beautiful and socially integrated city. Projects like Edgewood mews and Donnybrook Quarter contain housing but more fundamentally they are a celebration of the collective life of the city.

Five

I’m for street-based neighbourhoods. Streets are an ingenious and effective means of organising public space. Axial streets especially, being easy to understand and navigate, can help to create a city that is well integrated, both spatially and socially.

Picture the experience of a stroll along The Laine in Brighton, an unremarkable but successful street with characteristics we can learn from:
– It is well integrated into the spatial fabric of the city, as part of network of streets that make the city permeable and provide strong visual and spatial connections between adjacent yet socially diverse neighbourhoods. 
– It is narrow, concentrating the public life of the area into a very limited space. It brings together people of diverse social, economic and cultural groups and creates the potential for a colourful social scene.
– The buildings that bound the street house a mix of uses – retail, leisure, business and residential – that create a vibrant local culture and 24-hour occupancy.
– There is a strong visual connection between the buildings themselves and the street. This means that every inch of public space is overlooked or naturally policed. It is hard to imagine a mugging or robbery taking place here.
– Narrow building frontages and numerous front doors create visual diversity and the potential for occupiers to personalise their space.

Now compare this to Pitfield Street, in East London, where you walk 50m up the street and turn right through a gap between buildings to enter a very different world – the vast hinterland of inter- and post-war housing estates that stretches across Hoxton. The designers of these estates eschewed the street in favour of a spatiality that has blighted the lives of thousands of residents for three generations:

– The spaces between buildings create no useful routes across this part of the city, forcing people to make lengthy and inconvenient detours around them. 
– Dead ends, blind alleyways, burnt-out garages, paladin stores block off any views into, or routes across, the estates. Concealed from view in this way, one of London’s most socially disadvantaged areas has become segregated from the rest of the city – a ghetto.
– The estates are laid out as a series of objects dotted around in acres of unused space: some concrete pavers or tarmac here, a patch of grass there. Such large, dispersed spaces tend to dissipate social activity, limiting the potential for people to meet or even to see fellow residents. Deserted most of the time, they create an environment which tends to isolate people and increase their vulnerability to crime. Some of the estate are afraid to leave their apartments. Most affected are the elderly, racial minorities and women.

Against this, I like to try and arrange our projects as a network of streets often interspersed with little public squares and gardens. I aim to align streets so that they create handy shortcuts and strong spatial and visual connections with adjacent neighbourhoods.

I like to imagine narrow streets which concentrate the public world into a fairly limited space, bringing together lots of different types of people. And it’s nice to think of narrow building frontages and numerous front doors creating visual diversity and the potential for people to personalise the space outside their home.

In his 1925 essay ‘Urbanism’ Le Corbusier said ‘a street is linear factory’ –typically hyperbolic. But it’s good to think of a productive city, houses over workshops, shop windows and loading bays, clobber at the kerb, messy cross-programming – pre-war London, Marrakech, Old Delhi.

SIX

I am interested in medium-rise, higher-density housing, and often try to explore the possibility of achieving this with houses instead of flats.

We like to experiment with unconventional housing typologies. Some of them are quite obscure or belong to a pre-modern vernacular – the Tyneside or cottage flat, back-to-back houses, courtyard house types, double and treble stack ‘walk ups’ – not to mention the hybrid terrace/courtyard notched terrace, which I nicked from Adolf Loos and Jose Luis Sert.

Where higher-rise apartments are required it seems to me that pre-modern tenement housing and mansion block typologies are a good model. They define a clear and unambiguous edge to the street, and tend to concentrate circulation within the street itself, with numerous and regular points of street access and minimal interior circulation – think also of Neave Brown’s Alexandra Road.

Seven

Sergei Eisenstein said that Greek urbanists were the first great cinematographers.

While I’m designing I sometimes try to imagine our schemes as a screenplay, a sequence of views, picturesque, filmic even: long, lyrical tracking shots, a shocking jump cut, Sergio Leone-style shifts in scale from detail to widescreen panorama – silhouette, close up, perspective shifting, space unfolding, picturesque, sensual – a shadowy street with a little kick, tapering and narrowing suddenly before opening through an archway into the corner of a sunny square … mmm, nice!

It’s good in this context to think also of Debord’s Situationist dérive and psychogeographic maps, or Baudelaire’s flâneur – the city and its streets understood and experienced ‘on the ground’, at eye level

EIGHT

I love straight streets in grids – stretched, square, diamond, triangular, hexagonal grids. Let’s take a look.

Nine

Djemaa el Fna, the extraordinary public square embedded in the medieval walls of Marrakesh, in my view exemplifies what public space is – or at least what it can be.

Like all public space it is unique because it belongs at the same time to no one and to everyone – to old and young, rich and poor, tourists and locals alike. It’s a place where people can express themselves with relative freedom.

Djemaa el Fna has no monuments and is almost entirely surrounded by unexceptional buildings. For much of the day it remains fairly quiet. However in the cool of the evening the teeming alleyways of the old town spill into it and a tumultuous scene unfolds.

Little mobile kitchens appear from nowhere, people form circles around fire-eaters, acrobats and story-tellers. Theatre troupes perform on hastily erected stages. There are snake charmers and oud players, drum bands and fireworks. This is an architecture of festivity, ephemeral, mobile, in flux – foregrounded by people, its message embodied in its name: Djemaa el Fna translates as ‘Mosque of Nothing’. I love the idea of public space being a ‘mosque of nothing’: open, unprogrammed, where people can be themselves.

Behind the photographer is Djemaa el Fna’s antithesis, the Grand Mosque of Marrakesh – metre-thick walls, solid, immutable, unchanging.

Ten

In The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau says that space is practised place, everyday narrative, a word caught in the ambiguity of actualisation, on streets, in apartments and in the most intimate of domestic habits.

It’s useful to think about small things, everyday habits, domestic rituals, the turning of a door handle, footsteps on the stairs, the view from a window seat.

This preoccupation with lived experience and pleasure taken in our intimate relationships with our environment is evident in the architecture and ideas of Peter Zumthor: ‘I remember the sound of gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase…’ Thinking Architecture 1998

Our 1993 apartment interior in London known as Gadget Apartment celebrates everyday things and ordinary domestic rituals. It is homespun, assembled from oddments found in local skips, tips and junk shops, stuff left lying around. Cheap, handy, bespoke, the residue of previous construction and destruction.

–        Mono-gold door At the threshold between the public world and the apartment interior the inside face of the front door is covered in gleaming squares of gold leaf found in a junk shop.

–        Bath tidy Copper pipe wraps the bathroom wall as radiator, towel rail and handy hook for razor, soap dish and toothbrush. No home should be without one!

–        Tap and soap dish A tap assembled from bits of old taps and a spiral coat-hanger wire soap dish.

–        Match shelf A tiny wire shelf so you know where your matches are.

–        Wok-hob Two second-hand wok burners and some mesh out of a skip.

–        Metachron B1 table (with Ben Stringer) A dining table assembled from a triangle of broken glass and three traffic cones, all found in the street.

Eleven

In the 1950s the Corporation of Great Yarmouth embarked on the destruction of the town’s historic centre, 35 acres of tiny streets and alleys known as the Yarmouth Rows, home and workplace to over 18,000 people – extraordinary architecture, Elizabethan and Georgian, but in their view ‘an insanitary and utterly unsatisfactory form of development which could not possibly be retained’.

Slum clearance programmes like this resulted in the demolition of vast quantities of back-to-back and terraced housing in the Midlands and the North of England, the sweeping away of serviceable and popular tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the bulldozing of great swathes of street-based housing from Brighton to Newcastle.

Sixty years on, the same functionalist planning culture still prevails, favouring a dispersed, suburban, anti-social spatiality. Tick-box policy enforced through generic design standards, overlooking distances, car parking minimums, idiotic daylight, sunlight and air-quality indicators. Urbanism measured in habitable rooms/hectare, decibels, square metres, lux.

I would like to see radical new planning policy designed to encourage compact, continuous, urban form – a densely packed, convivial, congested city of intimately scaled streets and alleys where people from all different backgrounds could live alongside one another, where narrow streets compress and intensify the urban and human experience. In short, a socially and ecologically sustainable urbanism structured by idealism, rather than net-twitch neuroses.

TWELVE

There are 6 of us at Peter Barber Architects. We have worked together for many years. We place a great deal of emphasis on clear communication and easy working relationships, friendships in essence. Every birthday is marked with a meal out  and we have two big parties a year. We try to have an annual trip away to look at cities/architecture abroad.

We wanted our practice to remain small because we feel that we can be more effective if we can sit around a table together. We are quite unhierarchical. We try to be creative rather than corporate

Our design process is analogue, dynamic, exhilarating even. The computer generally has no significant role in the early stages of our projects. Instead we begin designing with simple hand made physical  block/sketch models to explore urban form and to test building massing, always in context. At the same time we explore  schemes very rapidly with numerous hand sketched axonometric drawings, eye level perspectives, plans and sections, the whole project as well as little moments, bits and details. The design emerges on see-through/detail paper one sheet overlaid onto the next, each layer incorporating a modification, correction or development. Bits get lopped off and added on to the models…they’re pretty scruffy sometimes. As the scheme develops models and drawings become more detailed, less sketchy, larger scale until finally we know what we’ve got and we can ink the drawings up.

Our office is on a fairly busy street in central London. We occupy a small building  with a pavement shop front where hundreds of working models produced over many decades, testament to our process, are visible to our neighbours and to passers-by. We have loads of visitors!

I ‘teach’ Architecture one day a week and have done every week for 35 years. I welcome the clarity and logic, the radicalism and experimentation that still flourishes in the best of our academic institutions.

I am an inveterate sketcher and it’s interesting to reflect with hindsight, how little dreamy visions and sketches, thoughts produced in a reflective moment, find their way from time to time, quite often in fact, into our built work.

Projects

Edgewood Mews

Edgewood Mews is a high density medium rise street based urban quarter located in suburban north London.

Its starting point is urban, aiming to provide well used public space bounded by a hard edge of buildings.

The site is a 250m long (by as little as 6 m wide in places) unloved strip of waste land between a traffic choked stretch of the 6 lane  north circular road and the leafy gardens of a row of substantial urban villas.

The scheme is laid out around a new tree lined mews street which runs the full length of the site creating very strong spatial connections with the street to the east and west, a handy cut through for local people and a beautiful new public space for new and existing residents.

The street has an intimate scale boarded on the south side by treble stacked walk up maisonettes in a continuous 5 and 6 storey tenement terrace which completely eliminates the noise and nuisance of the north circular. On the north side of the mews are terrace/courtyard hybrid double stack maisonettes which step down at the rear to meet the gardens of the  neighbouring properties.

The intermittent/notched roof profile enables us to achieve high densities of 800 habitable rooms/hectares while maintaining good light into the mews and a high levels of privacy and amenity for every dwelling. Each house has its own street front door and a good sized courtyard balcony or roof terrace.

At is mid-point the new Mews widens into a spectacular double crescent (shades of Athol Crescent in Georgian Edinburgh ) Here play equipment, trees and generous open space make it a favourite spot for kids on bikes and scooters, toddlers with tennis balls and impromptu games of badminton and footy. At either end, the mews narrows before opening out into the adjacent streets.

Along the south boundary the building makes a hard edge to the slow curve of the north circular- a kind of monolithic brick terrace. A 250m long double height arcade springs from the pavement, the building jettied and notched above. At either end the terrace there is a corner shop and above each shop the building rises to form a pencil thin tower bristling with balconies. Each tower marks the mews entrance and gives occupants a spectacular view across London.

Mcgrath Road Housing

Our housing at Mcgrath Road is a reworking of the back to back housing typology.

Back to back housing was the default typology for low cost high density housing in many northern and midland industrial cities during their rapid expansion in the nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands were built in cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Birmingham and Leeds, though strangely it was rare in London. Their construction was outlawed in the 1909 Housing Act because they were thought to provide inadequate /substandard accommodation, although some local authorities sanctioned their continued construction as recently as the late 1930’s.

In my view the type had a great many benefits. They were cheap to build and therefore relatively inexpensive to rent, they were arranged along streets and in courts which assisted in creating the potential for neighbourliness. They delivered reasonably high density while providing people with a house rather than a flat.

Little back to back housing has survived. A significant fragment remains in Kirstall and Burley areas of Leeds and the National Trust has saved 6 houses in Birmingham (out of the original 60,000 in that city) as a back to back museum. I went there in 2018 and I thought they worked beautifully. I was shown around by a couple of ex back to back dwellers who had lived a street or two away.

They had been kicked out in the 60’s slum clearance and rehoused in suburban tower blocks now also demolished! They both spoke fondly of growing up there.

Our project at Mcgrath Road works with the best that back to back housing had to offer and it deals with the commonly cited (and in my view sometimes overstated) shortcomings of the  Victorian back to back.  Each house has its own bathroom (in the 19 century bathhouses were usually shared). The top floor living room has a private roof terrace and its outlook is rotated so that each home is “dual aspect”. Original back to backs had no private outdoor space and they had outlook in one direction only, (not in my view a problem but a no-no in the modernist functionalist dogma which still pervades UK planning law.)

Each house has a deeply recesses arcaded frontage which is a place where people might choose to sit out at the street edge…a kind of level access stoop!  The houses are laid out in terraces around a new tree lined square and along two new streets which meet at a pretty curving corner. There are 26 houses all for shared ownership. Our client was the London borough of Newham.

Holmes Road Studios

Holmes Road Studios is a homeless facility built for Camden Council in North London. It provides high-quality residential accommodation together with training and counselling facilities all laid out around a new courtyard garden. 

The courtyard is defined at its north end by the existing Victorian Dutch-gabled hostel building which contains shared facilities and conventional hostel accommodation for residents with higher support needs. The other three sides are formed by 30 little studio houses arranged as terraces in an alms house typology, semi-independent, uninstitutional and private.

Each cottage is 16m2 in area and consists of a double-height vaulted living/kitchen/dining area and, at the back of the plan, a bathroom with a mezzanine bed space raised above it. The interior is lit via a partially glazed door, circular windows and a roof light. The use of a rustic-looking brick with a crinkle-crankle parapet gives the project a relaxed domestic scale. All of the rooms look out over the garden, which is conceived as the social heart of the hostel and will become a therapeutic garden project for the benefit of residents.
We imagine a group of residents working with a gardener to create and maintain an intensely planted and beautiful garden, with an apple tree or two, potatoes, green veg, soft fruit, herbs, a greenhouse, a potting shed and a sunny spot to sit and rest. We think there ought to be a little room/shed in the garden for private chats (1:1) and counselling. The garden creates a homely, domestic atmosphere in the hostel. The garden gives participating residents an interest and outlet for their energy, helping to foster a sense of belonging, self-worth and empowerment.

Sketches, dreams, visions

In this final section I would like to share some ideas from my sketch books some thoughts and visions for our future.

Architectural practise, the making of buildings in the here and now demands that to a significant extent, we work within the programmatic and technical constraints, prevailing societal norms and ultimately the illogic of our neo liberal economy and cultural system.

By contrast my sketchbooks (and my work in Academia) have provided me with a space to dream a little, to be speculative, theoretical, to cut lose and in answer to Lewis Mumford’s heroic rallying cry, to wonder about a different kind of architecture, urban form and society.

My ‘One year 365 cities’ project was an attempt to design a city a day for a year, resulting in numerous short experiments in urban form, unusual materials and  imagined life styles. Among these ideas is ‘100 mile city’,  a project to encircle London with a new street-based linear city  of factories, public buildings and 2 million houses. Another idea that emerged from the project is  Village VK3/C a self-sufficient farming cooperative village in rural Wiltshire built out of  earth from the ground on which it stands.

Most recently I’ve been thinking about an idea, still brewing , not yet fully  formed, called 8,000 Mile Island…. The idea encompasses the notion of a countrywide  aquacultural and maritime industrial revolution that would see a ribbon of tidal barrages, off-shore wind farms, giant floating tidal turbines, deep sea fish and seaweed  farms…. tracing our coastline from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight and back. Such a project would bring renewed prosperity to our decaying, depopulated coastal towns and cities. It also offers a vision of a food and energy self sufficient UK  and an end to the housing crisis.

8,000 Mile island arises out of a number of questions and observations.

1 Could we  be energy self-sufficient? We currently import half of our energy, most of it in the form of gas and oil from tin-pot dictators in the Middle East for generating  clean green energy. It is the windiest country in Europe and it has the most powerful tides in the world - (a giant 15 metres tidal range off the Welsh coast).

2 Could we be food self-sufficient? Over half of our food is currently transported from overseas. Half of that comes from beyond the EU. The globalised food industry has the UK firmly in its grasp -food mile madness, collapsing biodiversity, small farmers displaced, pesticide run off, deforestation. This is a global industry sweeping aside local, even national interests for maximum profit and one which is blind to the climate crisis. The UK has an 8,000 mile coastline. Our land area is 95,000 square miles but  our territorial waters extend to 3 times that. Imagine a revolution in maritime food production.

3 The extraordinary Rampion Offshore Wind Farm located off the south coast and visible from the beaches of  Brighton and Hove currently generates energy for 350,000 homes. It cost 1 billion pounds to build. One hundred wind farms of a similar scale could satisfy the domestic energy requirements of the UK’s 35 million homes. The cost of all these? 100 billion pounds- or the same as HS2. Wind power currently satisfies 50% of our domestic energy consumption. Lets finish the job.

4 Lets end the housing crisis once and for all. It’s easy. Refurbish 400,000 empty Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in the midlands, in the north and in our coastal towns, as homes  for these new industries’ incoming workforce. Let’s redeploy the million people needlessly employed in housing construction in the south east to the making of 8,000 Mile Island. 

Picture this: build one hundred 400 megawatt off-shore wind farms and range them around our shores. Interlace them with thousands of floating tidal energy turbines out at sea. Construct enormous tidal lagoons in our estuaries. Put miniature community-run cottage-industry wave power machines and little barrages on rocky out crops and inlets on our shoreline in  Cornwall, the Hebrides and Cumbria.

Let’s intersperse these offshore energy industries with enormous seaweed farms. These are already under construction off the coast of Norfolk, North Yorkshire and in the South West. Seaweed carbon sinks Amazonian in their scale producing food, a source of energy and munching carbon as they go. Give us hundreds of deep sea coastal oyster beds, mussel farms, fish and lobster hatcheries, floating fish farms in the deep ocean producing hundreds of the thousands of tonnes of food and millions of gallons of fish shit fertilizer for supply to aquaponic farms.

Construct maritime research stations in a necklace around these islands. Link them to our coastal universities adding to and sharing knowledge of these nascent technologies and processes for the benefit of everyone.

Imagine existing fishing fleets - their local knowledge, their knowhow and equipment co-opted in to these burgeoning industries. Employ the infrastructure already existing in the UK’s declining off-shore oil and ship-building industries in Hull, Inverness and on the Clyde and think of thousands of new jobs in tired old Blackpool, Margate, St Leonards, Southend-on Sea, Newhaven. Think of the Housing ‘industry’ redeployed away from the south east and charged with  saving and restoring hundreds of thousands of empty homes, whole streets and neighbourhoods currently abandoned, in decay, now buzzing with new life, activity and prosperity from the incoming workforce.

Let’s think carefully about how these nationalised industries might make the best of top-down strategic planning, organisation and funding by Central Government combined with devolved management, bottom up, employing local knowledge, practically, usefully and efficiently applied and let's think how the profits from these processes and nationally owned industries might be reinvested into a sovereign wealth fund for the benefit of each and every citizen in our country.