When Urban Planning Goes Bad!!!

And now to Birmingham, which as you may remember was given the grand total of 3 out of 10 in my Architecture score yesterday...

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not part of the 'monstrous carbuncle' brigade.  There's quite a few contemporary buildings that make me want to heave because they're well and truly hideous, but there's plenty more that make me go, 'wow!  That's nice.  I really like that'.  In fact, I'm quite partial to a nice skyscraper or two.  Some cities seem to get the balance right: take London, for example, which has a few nice modern buildings scattered amongst its existing townscape, but which has restricted its big kick-ass structures to the Docklands Area.  Okay, so the price in industrial buildings was probably a high one in retrospect, but the results are truly stunning.

And then there's Birmingham,  Our initial foray into the city centre revealed such a disparate selection of buildings.  They were mainly functionalist concrete things of the 50s and 60s, with a few 'post-modern' pastiche type buildings of the 80s or 90s thrown in for good measure.   But caught in the middle were isolated survivors from an earlier era:-

So far, so good, but every so often, there appears a modern high rise monstrosity that looks as if it's just been beamed down from outer space:-

This example was a case in point.  I thought it was a very lovely building, but it just seemed to be completely out of scale compared with its neighbours...
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I've learnt through the years that such wholesale demolition and rebuilding can be down to one or two causes:the first possibility is the predations of the Luftwaffe, which in the case of Birmingham seemed quite possible.  Coventry lies just up the road, where the German bomber crews did a good job of completely pulverising much of the city, and Birmingham was also an industrial centre... 

But when I asked the staff at the library how Birmingham had fared in World War II, they just kind of shrugged.  Which meant that Birmingham's sorry state of random decontextualised redevelopment was down to an even greater scourge, one which has devoured many fine historic buildings through the years.

Yes, Birmingham's woes can I think be laid squarely at the door of the dreaded late twentieth century town planner.  The hallmarks are all there: the replacement of a grid iron road system with a convuluted labyrinth that is almost impossible to navigate, and a completely incoherent townscape.  My contact at the library later informed me that the council's policy had been to demolish everything old and to replace it with new builds until - thank God!!!- they eventually ran out of money, thus saving some poor old buildings from destruction.

Some of these treasures still cling to existence.  Here's a nice late 19th century brick number we passed by everyday - I particularly like the use of external tiling - we are near the Staffordshire potteries, after all:-

But at the heart of the city, I'm pleased to say, there lies a hidden gem which has escaped the jaws of the bulldozers.  It's a miniature Acropolis which includes the Town Hall, Museum and library (inspired, I'm sure, by the original in Athens - our Victorian friends were no doubt aspiring to the Classical ideals when they decided that their cultural buildings were to be built on the highest point in the city).  The library was yet another modern functionalist concrete number (what did it replace?  I really dread to think...)  but the Museum and Town Hall were 19th century originals.  The impression they gave was so good that I think they deserve a post in their own right.  In the mean time, I shall offer you a little teasing glimpse through the inevitable post-modern office blocks which now unfortunately overwhelm them:-

All this makes me realise that Glasgow isn't so bad, after all.  They might have carved a great big hole through Charing Cross, but at least they left most of our commercial district intact.