The Guardian 5 April, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Charles and the urban environment
In the 1980s, Prince Charles had become notorious for his criticism of the soullessness of modern British architecture. The BBC invited him to make a documentary on the subject and in October 1988, the BBC duly broadcast A Vision of Britain.
The film was Charles’ personal view of how commerce and arrogance had not only pushed ordinary people aside and deprived them of a pleasant living and working environment, but had managed in the process to ruin much of Britain’s cultural heritage.
After the broadcast, the BBC received nearly 5,000 letters. Ninety-nine percent of them agreed with Charles.
"Various suggestions were made by all sorts of people about how the situation might be improved", wrote Charles in his subsequent book on the subject.
"One of the most common was that children must receive some form of architectural or environmental education in schools.
"The other was that the powers of the Department of the Environment and local authorities should be better regulated in the interests of individuals and not of property developers", wrote Charles.
After the film was broadcast, the BBC’s Daytime Live program invited viewers to send in pictures of buildings that, in their opinion, had ruined the towns they lived in. Hundreds responded, and the photos they sent include some truly hideous or monstrously inappropriate buildings!
Sensing something of real public interest here, the BBC decided to mount the photos as an exhibition. However, the Building Centre refused to exhibit them.
When the BBC finally found a venue, Building News sniffily called the exhibition a "smelly little show". Clearly the establishment was not amused.
Charles’ book was written 20 years ago and is replete with photos of bleak, windswept residential tower blocks. Some at least of these have been dynamited since then, as the social disaster of many of the brutalist visions of slum clearance became all too apparent.
Many however still stand. And Charles’ book points out that it is not only tower blocks that can be soulless and ugly.
He includes a photo of Earl’s Way, a new (at the time) residential thoroughfare in Runcorn, flanked on both sides by buildings only two stories high.
However, imagine, if you will, a very long rectangular box two stories high facing an identical long rectangular box across a narrow pedestrian walkway, the canyon-like view uninterrupted by a single tree or bush, or even a bench to sit on.
It may be "low rise", but it is still horrible. Made of the very latest in pre-stressed concrete, this sterile vision of workers’ housing condemns its inhabitants, as Charles’ caption puts it, to "live out their lives in a grubby launderette".
Charles frequently demonstrates an eye for the apt simile or metaphor: the National Theatre on the Thames Embankment "seems like a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting".
He compares the Reading Room of the new British Library unfavourably with "Robert Smirke’s glorious domed reading room in the British Museum". Instead of "linking learning to its classical roots" as Smirke’s room did, the new Reading Room in the multi-million pound British Library "looks more like the assembly hall of an academy for secret police".
Considering his own background and lifestyle, Charles is an odd bird to find championing refurbishing of working class dwellings as public housing in preference to demolition and replacement (with high-rise flats).
He is particularly pleased by the community action that saved at least part of Glasgow’s Gorbals. "The notorious tenements were not as bleak as their reputation suggested [although the accompanying photograph looks pretty horrible — RG], but they had been neglected from the beginning of the 1920s.
"Nothing was spent on them by their private landlords. … Now the age of the bulldozer is over.
"The surviving tenements in Glasgow are being refurbished and are making attractive homes. But this change of heart didn’t come without a fight from the local community."
Perhaps the most intriguing item in Charles’ tome is in the section on buildings lost or buried by insensitive development. It includes a historical photo of "the vast, fortress-like Quarry Hill flats in Leeds (opened in 1938)" — and demolished in 1978.
These flats we learn "were inspired by the heroic associations of the Karl Marx Hof: pioneer ‘worker housing’ in Vienna, where insurrectionists held out against the forces of a right-wing government in 1934".
Actually, the crushing of the workers’ districts in 1934 by the Dollfuss supposedly social-democrat government cleared the way for Hitler’s takeover of Austria the following year.
A complex and contradictory Royal, the old Charlie.