Who to trust on housing

Jonathan Glancey is the Grand Old Man of UK architectural journalism: he must have been writing for The Guardian for 20 years at least. To last that long in such a business, you need to have something of the Vicar of Bray about you. So what is Glancey braying about now?

He is exercised – as are many UK journalists at present – by the question of how 3 million new homes get built without them becoming dully formulaic. On the surface of things Glancey seems to be pointing us to traditional sources of inspiration. In a piece on 17th July he praised dMFK’s houses-for-rent at Manchester’s New Islington (a neighbourhood masterplanned by Will Alsop) for being “foursquare”, built of “local bricks”, and standing on “a proper street”. What’s more, the architects had “listened carefully to the future residents”.

A week later – after the alarming flooding of large parts of the west north and Midlands of England – Glancey used his blog to return to this theme. He singled out the ancient town of Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire, for retaining some integrity after its inundation by the Rivers Severn and Avon: commenting on its “dense weave”, its “proper streets and squares” etc. He regards the town as an object lesson to those responsible for planning and building for the future: suggesting we need "more towns like Tewkesbury" -- dense and compact “new towns” of a traditional type.

Why do I call this “braying”? Because if you turn to the same author’s compact book on C20th architecture from 1998, you discover a rabid attack on Prince Charles’s model town at Poundbury in Dorset: a project that spearheaded the adoption in the UK of precisely the urban values Glancey now wants to be seen championing. In prose dripping with contempt he wrote there of a town that was “intended to be the forerunner of an entirely new way of living, a kind of idyllic “urbs-in-rure” in which houses and shops newly built to look old-fashioned would doff their cornices to renaissance style piazzas” etc. etc.

Now that the utter good sense of the Poundbury approach (of high density, streets and squares, local materials, and community participation) is widely accepted, Glancey has to walk a fine line: love the urbanism, hate the buildings (and hate those, like Prince Charles, who had the temerity to challenge architectural received wisdom). For all his praise of Tewkesbury, when he visited the medieval market town of Ledbury in Herefordshire (in a piece on July 2nd) it was to praise the “architectural daring” of an “armadillo-like” new design showroom, which had succeeded in breaking the historic mould. But then critics love this kind of stuff, on the whole: Eric Parry’s new museum scheme for the city of Bath may have “the denizens of Bath in a lather”, as Ellis Goodman informed us in The Daily Telegraph, but the critic concluded that “on this site if nowhere else … the normal rules should be suspended”.

Glancey’s instincts as a critic are generally good, but to stay where he is for the last two decades he has had to satisfy both influential members of the profession, and his own peers: and it is this, more than anything, that occasionally leads him into his intolerable prejudices and contradictions.

Less constrained by such pressures (his much-noted and timely departure from the sinking ship that was the Millennium Dome in Greenwich having given him celebrity above other critics, as well as a reputation for good sense) is Stephen Bayley, who is maturing brilliantly as a critic. He wrote on July 15th, also in The Guardian, about the looming 3 million new homes. “Why are we so very bad”, he asks, “at making good, ordinary houses?” But he takes some heart from clues as to what the next generation of architects might achieve (and, of course, like a lot of critics Bayley believes that if architects were responsible for more than the 25% of new housing they currently get involved with, then the world would be a better place). And his selection of the best of the new is commendably wide: from Richard Rogers’ eco-houses in Oxley Woods to Clague Architects’ version of the Kent vernacular at Whitstable. These architects know that “the housing question is not about luxury or austerity, traditional or modern, but about good or bad”, and they “design without prejudice”.

To return to the critics: I’m sure the Glanceys of this world would argue that all they are trying to do is separate the good from the bad. It’s just unfortunate about the prejudice that so often accompanies it; and that means we can’t always trust their judgment.