The UK planning system is amazing. It produced unpopular monstrosities in prime locations, hideous low density estates with no facilities as well as remarkably ensuring a housing shortage.
Urban planning is a derivative of Marxism: the clean slate, science, modernism. Look at what (Marxist) Le Corbusier envisioned for Paris. Look at what the Soviets did to Moscow and the Chinese have done to Beijing. The Beijing of 1950 has been wiped off the map.
Not sure I agree. There seem to be well planned developments in Northern Europe which might not have the aesthetic beauty but are functionally great places to live with good transport, good facilities and shops, clean social spaces, kids playgrounds, schools, hospitals, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is either, I know a lot of Tories will say localism, and Labourites will say its just a question of money, but I think the type of people that work in local government in the UK are probably just as likely the problem.
"The Beijing of 1950 has been wiped off the map." - Yes, but so has the Kyoto of 1950. Although its numerous historic monuments have been preserved, the wooden cityscape of Japan's ancient capital, which survived the war more or less intact, was largely destroyed in a gradual yet relentless phase of postwar redevelopment. Now there are only a few small pockets of "old Kyoto" left. That happened under capitalism, not Marxism. Modernity, in all its ideological forms, has a lot to answer for!
The Centre of Nuremberg too was largely restored after the war. But what happened to Coventry also happened - in a lesser way perhaps given the different scale of destruction there but no less dispiriting - to Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and many other towns and cities in Britain. Much of this was the fault of municipal architects, town planners and engineers, all under the spell of
Corbusier-influenced brutal modernists like the Smithsons. I hate them all.
Some of Nuremberg was reconstructed, but quite a lot of it is a kind of postmodern riff on tradition: the old street plan was preserved, and buildings of the same kind of shape and structure of the old ones were erected - but using modern materials. I find that quite a fascinating approach - evoking the city's history while visibly acknowledging the catastrophe that happened there. Parts of Frankfurt are like that too.
It is one of the peculiarities of Western history, or rather, Anglo-American history, how the post-war planners and architects were allowed to run amok in urban centers and towns and blighting the cityscape with truly dreadful and often failed masterplanning schemes and buildings. So much power and credibility was given to a small number of men despite their schemes being heavily unpopular with the population at large. And making it even more peculiar was the complacency of the commercial classes in their abandonment of architectural pretensions for commercial buildings. How did the bankers and traders of the 19th century get to bless us with marvelous structures great and small only by the 1960s be reduced to monotonous, dull, and outright ugly (and cheaply built) pedestrian and often hostile buildings of no merit? How did the municipalities build grand classical or gothic courthouses and townhalls up through the 1920s only to descend to modern concrete and, these days, merely cheap steel and glass boxes? How did American cities, fully swept up in the City Beautiful movements of the 1890s-1920s, turn suddenly to mass destruction and clearances of the 1950s in the name of the eight lane wide concrete highways?
Interestingly enough, one of the common complaints against egalitarianism in the 18th and 19th century was the fear it would reduce all of society to an average ordinariness by preventing the emergence of the great and magnificent, and there probably is truth to it. We certainly see it in architecture. However, also worth exploring is perhaps architecture and planning might be the first fields to be corrupted by slavish devotion to progressive ideology in the western world, the post-war designers were distinctly hostile to all history and culture prior to their times, strongly believing in a brave new architecture and urban form for the inevitable progressive future. Yet, despite their progressive tendencies, they found strong support from unexpected quarters - the commercial classes. A forerunner of today's wokery and strange alliance between progressive left and the F500.
You suggest building a new medieval Coventry - why not indeed? There are plenty of precedents in Germany for the belated reconstruction of a lost medieval city. Only a few of the country's historic cities were reconstructed as they had been in the early postwar years (Munich, as one of the other commentators has noted, was one of them). But recent decades have seen numerous attempts. The old marketplace in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, was rebuilt in postwar utilitarian style soon after the war, and then re-rebuilt in medieval style in the 1980s. You mention the new "medieval" buildings in Frankfurt, and the Royal Palace in Dresden. In fact, it's not just isolated monuments in Dresden that have come back to life; substantial parts of the old city centre have been recreated even in the ten or so years that I've been regularly visiting Germany.
Of course, things can sometimes get complicated: in Berlin, the Communist administration demolished the old Berliner Schloss to build their Palace of the Republic; the post-reunification reconstruction of the former entailed the demolition of the latter - which itself had, if not beauty, historic importance. Elsewhere in former Communist Europe, the Latvians have come up with a rather effective compromise; Riga's Town Hall Square, largely destroyed in the war, has had some of its historic monuments (including the celebrated House of the Blackheads) rebuilt, but an ugly Communist-era building originally erected to celebrate the centenary of Lenin's birth has been repurposed as a sombre Museum of the Soviet Occupation.
Some countries were so effectively recreated after the war that you would never know they had been damaged. The Italians tended to rebuild in facsimile on the principle "Com'era, Dov'era" ("As it was, where it was"). There's some visible evidence of the effects of war in Milan, but in many places damage was seamlessly repaired. And you certainly wouldn't guess, visiting Malta, that Valletta was one of the most heavily bombed cities in the world. On the other hand, someone strolling through the Sergels Torg district of Stockholm would probably be startled to learn that Sweden had been neutral during the war; that was a case of mid-twentieth-century planners running riot.
By the way, I share your guilty pleasure in Stalinist architecture: the neoclassicism of that period is genuinely imposing. Minsk looks pretty splendid in its way, and so does Sofia, where the 1950s socialist Largo towers over relics of the city's classical, Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish and Muslim) heritage.
Totally agree! The destruction of our old towns and cities is absolutely heartbreaking. What's worse is that, with a few honourable exceptions, the architecture/urban planning industry is still making all the same mistakes, driven by an ideological horror of 'pastiche', and thus preventing the very sensible heritage rebuilds that you recommend, Ed.
It's so bad that the National Trust, who let Clandon Park House burn down in 2015 and pocketed £66m from the insurance, instead of restoring it are planning to leave it as a ruin and build a 'contemporary' roof and set of suspended walkways so that visitors can peer at the remains. If even the National Trust, whose *entire purpose* is conserving old buildings, can't be bothered to look after the nation's architectural heritage, the average town council isn't going to either.
Like all of us reading your substack, I share the horror at what the planners did to Coventry before and after WW2. But do we have it in us to make a decent stab at restoring what we had? With all due respect to your photography, I don't find that photo of Warsaw particularly inspiring. It's just about OK I guess. But it isn't a patch on those canal streets in Amsterdam or that square in Brussels. It feels to me that the anti-Nazi legacy of WW2 is that we can no longer have nation states and we can no longer have beauty in architecture.
No doubt, the reconstructed Warsaw is not a patch on Krakow, which survived the war unscathed (or, for that matter, the once Polish, now Ukrainian city of Lviv, which I fervently hope will survive the current war without too much damage). We probably don't have it in us to make a completely successful effort at restoring what we had. But we also don't seem to have it in us to produce interesting and beautiful modern architecture, so I suppose the question is whether we prefer at least trying to recreate past beauties or whether we resign ourselves to modern ugliness.
Well, who among us can know how they identified? Why not just affirm their authentic identity as a naked horse riding person who rejected the oppressive gender binary structure?
Ed may have had in mind that in her times, and for some centuries thereafter 'man' could refer to any person, male or female. My old OED, happily, still contains this form. I vaguely recall reading a document about one Wulfrun, founder of my own Heimat, referring to her as 'lord of the manor of Heatune', and thus Wolverhampton.
My own attempts to continue this ancient tradition have met with a generally frosty reception; despite citing Jacob Bronowski's relatively recent and outstanding work 'The Ascent of Man' (1973). Still, annoying the avant-garde yoof is a modest compensation.
This is true, although strangely enough the female version of gentleman - gentlewoman - can be found frequently in Shakespeare. Largely because the concept of 'gentleman' made specific reference to masculine virtues.
From what I can see 'noblewoman' was always rather rare and perhaps verging on. vulgar solecism. "Noble lady" is far more common, see Sonnet 91 for example.
I've had similar experiences. First, from a family holiday to Devon as a child, when I was most disappointed with the centre of Plymouth. I'd been expecting more feel of the naval glory days of Drake and the Napoleonic Wars, but can only remember a modern concrete centre - perhaps we missed something.
Then on another holiday, to Russia 20-odd years later (at the time of peristroika and glasnost, before the disillusion had set in), the guide who showed us round Petrodvorets outside Leningrad (as it was then) was typical. So proud of the way craftsmen had painstakingly restored their beautiful palace, so, for example, it was almost impossible to tell which of the carved wooden panels in one room were original, and which recreated by modern woodworkers.
But we can sometimes get it right in a different way. One of my favourite places to visit in England is the Weald and Downland Living Museum: https://www.wealddown.co.uk/ where ancient buildings from the south-east have been rescued and rebuilt in their former glory, often with appropriate gardens and livestock, and with reenactors baking, milling, smithing etc. So much more convincing than the very odd 'Medieval village' in Turin: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/medieval-village which is more of a ghostly theme park.
I’m always made nauseous by the comparisons that the British make between their sufferings in the war and those of the Europeans. Dresden lost 40 times as many people as Coventry did. How dare you even make the comparison?
Did Britain lose even 1% of its people? The US less than half that, Poland lost 18%, Germany lost 11%, USSR 13%. If the Allies had been asked for even a quarter of these numbers they would have collapsed.
In one of your links, the writer ponders, 'I wonder if the Coventrians who lived around those old streets in centuries gone by saw the same charm in their surroundings that we imagine existed when we look at those old photos?' What do you think?
"The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right."
Great article. It’s sad to think what we have lost or could have conserved - could conserve. Imagine rebuilding Coventry as it was, as a showcase for craftsmanship and beauty in the built environment.
Long ago, King Charles said that planners and architects had done more damage to London than the Luftwaffe. Perhaps now, 75 years later, we can all agree to stop "urban planning" before there is nothing left of our great cities.
Yes indeed - Nuremberg can seem a little like a film set for an ironic production of The Student Prince or The Tales of Hoffmann. But (as you suggest) anything’s better than the catastrophe that is Coventry.
The UK planning system is amazing. It produced unpopular monstrosities in prime locations, hideous low density estates with no facilities as well as remarkably ensuring a housing shortage.
Urban planning is a derivative of Marxism: the clean slate, science, modernism. Look at what (Marxist) Le Corbusier envisioned for Paris. Look at what the Soviets did to Moscow and the Chinese have done to Beijing. The Beijing of 1950 has been wiped off the map.
Not sure I agree. There seem to be well planned developments in Northern Europe which might not have the aesthetic beauty but are functionally great places to live with good transport, good facilities and shops, clean social spaces, kids playgrounds, schools, hospitals, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is either, I know a lot of Tories will say localism, and Labourites will say its just a question of money, but I think the type of people that work in local government in the UK are probably just as likely the problem.
I agree with King Charles about very little, but he and I see eye to eye on both architecture and urban planning.
"The Beijing of 1950 has been wiped off the map." - Yes, but so has the Kyoto of 1950. Although its numerous historic monuments have been preserved, the wooden cityscape of Japan's ancient capital, which survived the war more or less intact, was largely destroyed in a gradual yet relentless phase of postwar redevelopment. Now there are only a few small pockets of "old Kyoto" left. That happened under capitalism, not Marxism. Modernity, in all its ideological forms, has a lot to answer for!
Yes indeed. What the Italians have done to Rome is (actually) Fascist.
The Centre of Nuremberg too was largely restored after the war. But what happened to Coventry also happened - in a lesser way perhaps given the different scale of destruction there but no less dispiriting - to Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and many other towns and cities in Britain. Much of this was the fault of municipal architects, town planners and engineers, all under the spell of
Corbusier-influenced brutal modernists like the Smithsons. I hate them all.
Le Corbusier was truly the Devil.
Some of Nuremberg was reconstructed, but quite a lot of it is a kind of postmodern riff on tradition: the old street plan was preserved, and buildings of the same kind of shape and structure of the old ones were erected - but using modern materials. I find that quite a fascinating approach - evoking the city's history while visibly acknowledging the catastrophe that happened there. Parts of Frankfurt are like that too.
It is one of the peculiarities of Western history, or rather, Anglo-American history, how the post-war planners and architects were allowed to run amok in urban centers and towns and blighting the cityscape with truly dreadful and often failed masterplanning schemes and buildings. So much power and credibility was given to a small number of men despite their schemes being heavily unpopular with the population at large. And making it even more peculiar was the complacency of the commercial classes in their abandonment of architectural pretensions for commercial buildings. How did the bankers and traders of the 19th century get to bless us with marvelous structures great and small only by the 1960s be reduced to monotonous, dull, and outright ugly (and cheaply built) pedestrian and often hostile buildings of no merit? How did the municipalities build grand classical or gothic courthouses and townhalls up through the 1920s only to descend to modern concrete and, these days, merely cheap steel and glass boxes? How did American cities, fully swept up in the City Beautiful movements of the 1890s-1920s, turn suddenly to mass destruction and clearances of the 1950s in the name of the eight lane wide concrete highways?
Interestingly enough, one of the common complaints against egalitarianism in the 18th and 19th century was the fear it would reduce all of society to an average ordinariness by preventing the emergence of the great and magnificent, and there probably is truth to it. We certainly see it in architecture. However, also worth exploring is perhaps architecture and planning might be the first fields to be corrupted by slavish devotion to progressive ideology in the western world, the post-war designers were distinctly hostile to all history and culture prior to their times, strongly believing in a brave new architecture and urban form for the inevitable progressive future. Yet, despite their progressive tendencies, they found strong support from unexpected quarters - the commercial classes. A forerunner of today's wokery and strange alliance between progressive left and the F500.
You suggest building a new medieval Coventry - why not indeed? There are plenty of precedents in Germany for the belated reconstruction of a lost medieval city. Only a few of the country's historic cities were reconstructed as they had been in the early postwar years (Munich, as one of the other commentators has noted, was one of them). But recent decades have seen numerous attempts. The old marketplace in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, was rebuilt in postwar utilitarian style soon after the war, and then re-rebuilt in medieval style in the 1980s. You mention the new "medieval" buildings in Frankfurt, and the Royal Palace in Dresden. In fact, it's not just isolated monuments in Dresden that have come back to life; substantial parts of the old city centre have been recreated even in the ten or so years that I've been regularly visiting Germany.
Of course, things can sometimes get complicated: in Berlin, the Communist administration demolished the old Berliner Schloss to build their Palace of the Republic; the post-reunification reconstruction of the former entailed the demolition of the latter - which itself had, if not beauty, historic importance. Elsewhere in former Communist Europe, the Latvians have come up with a rather effective compromise; Riga's Town Hall Square, largely destroyed in the war, has had some of its historic monuments (including the celebrated House of the Blackheads) rebuilt, but an ugly Communist-era building originally erected to celebrate the centenary of Lenin's birth has been repurposed as a sombre Museum of the Soviet Occupation.
Some countries were so effectively recreated after the war that you would never know they had been damaged. The Italians tended to rebuild in facsimile on the principle "Com'era, Dov'era" ("As it was, where it was"). There's some visible evidence of the effects of war in Milan, but in many places damage was seamlessly repaired. And you certainly wouldn't guess, visiting Malta, that Valletta was one of the most heavily bombed cities in the world. On the other hand, someone strolling through the Sergels Torg district of Stockholm would probably be startled to learn that Sweden had been neutral during the war; that was a case of mid-twentieth-century planners running riot.
By the way, I share your guilty pleasure in Stalinist architecture: the neoclassicism of that period is genuinely imposing. Minsk looks pretty splendid in its way, and so does Sofia, where the 1950s socialist Largo towers over relics of the city's classical, Christian (and to a lesser extent Jewish and Muslim) heritage.
Totally agree! The destruction of our old towns and cities is absolutely heartbreaking. What's worse is that, with a few honourable exceptions, the architecture/urban planning industry is still making all the same mistakes, driven by an ideological horror of 'pastiche', and thus preventing the very sensible heritage rebuilds that you recommend, Ed.
It's so bad that the National Trust, who let Clandon Park House burn down in 2015 and pocketed £66m from the insurance, instead of restoring it are planning to leave it as a ruin and build a 'contemporary' roof and set of suspended walkways so that visitors can peer at the remains. If even the National Trust, whose *entire purpose* is conserving old buildings, can't be bothered to look after the nation's architectural heritage, the average town council isn't going to either.
(By the way, there's a resolution at the Trust's 2023 AGM to get them to change their mind on that - any members can pop over to the website https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/annual-general-meeting and vote in favour of it, if they disagree with it.)
Like all of us reading your substack, I share the horror at what the planners did to Coventry before and after WW2. But do we have it in us to make a decent stab at restoring what we had? With all due respect to your photography, I don't find that photo of Warsaw particularly inspiring. It's just about OK I guess. But it isn't a patch on those canal streets in Amsterdam or that square in Brussels. It feels to me that the anti-Nazi legacy of WW2 is that we can no longer have nation states and we can no longer have beauty in architecture.
No doubt, the reconstructed Warsaw is not a patch on Krakow, which survived the war unscathed (or, for that matter, the once Polish, now Ukrainian city of Lviv, which I fervently hope will survive the current war without too much damage). We probably don't have it in us to make a completely successful effort at restoring what we had. But we also don't seem to have it in us to produce interesting and beautiful modern architecture, so I suppose the question is whether we prefer at least trying to recreate past beauties or whether we resign ourselves to modern ugliness.
I would add Munich to the list of well restored cities, to the point that few people know it was largely flattened.
"the story of local nobleman Lady Godiva riding naked through its streets"
This is the first time I've read that Lady Godiva was a man.
Well, who among us can know how they identified? Why not just affirm their authentic identity as a naked horse riding person who rejected the oppressive gender binary structure?
Excellent point.
Aivlys, you win the thread.
Ed may have had in mind that in her times, and for some centuries thereafter 'man' could refer to any person, male or female. My old OED, happily, still contains this form. I vaguely recall reading a document about one Wulfrun, founder of my own Heimat, referring to her as 'lord of the manor of Heatune', and thus Wolverhampton.
My own attempts to continue this ancient tradition have met with a generally frosty reception; despite citing Jacob Bronowski's relatively recent and outstanding work 'The Ascent of Man' (1973). Still, annoying the avant-garde yoof is a modest compensation.
Maybe, but using the modern "Godiva" instead of "Godgifu" indicates that Mr. West was in updating frame of mind.
This is true, although strangely enough the female version of gentleman - gentlewoman - can be found frequently in Shakespeare. Largely because the concept of 'gentleman' made specific reference to masculine virtues.
From what I can see 'noblewoman' was always rather rare and perhaps verging on. vulgar solecism. "Noble lady" is far more common, see Sonnet 91 for example.
Good point. I might try out gentlewoman on the family yoof. Shakespeare, obviously, would never have engaged in vulgarity.
I've had similar experiences. First, from a family holiday to Devon as a child, when I was most disappointed with the centre of Plymouth. I'd been expecting more feel of the naval glory days of Drake and the Napoleonic Wars, but can only remember a modern concrete centre - perhaps we missed something.
Then on another holiday, to Russia 20-odd years later (at the time of peristroika and glasnost, before the disillusion had set in), the guide who showed us round Petrodvorets outside Leningrad (as it was then) was typical. So proud of the way craftsmen had painstakingly restored their beautiful palace, so, for example, it was almost impossible to tell which of the carved wooden panels in one room were original, and which recreated by modern woodworkers.
But we can sometimes get it right in a different way. One of my favourite places to visit in England is the Weald and Downland Living Museum: https://www.wealddown.co.uk/ where ancient buildings from the south-east have been rescued and rebuilt in their former glory, often with appropriate gardens and livestock, and with reenactors baking, milling, smithing etc. So much more convincing than the very odd 'Medieval village' in Turin: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/medieval-village which is more of a ghostly theme park.
I’m always made nauseous by the comparisons that the British make between their sufferings in the war and those of the Europeans. Dresden lost 40 times as many people as Coventry did. How dare you even make the comparison?
Did Britain lose even 1% of its people? The US less than half that, Poland lost 18%, Germany lost 11%, USSR 13%. If the Allies had been asked for even a quarter of these numbers they would have collapsed.
Ask people what was the UK bread ration in WW2, the potato ration? Do you know?
Coventry a quaint mediaeval town, Dresden the seat of the elector of Saxony, with an actual cultural pedigree and actual stature.
In one of your links, the writer ponders, 'I wonder if the Coventrians who lived around those old streets in centuries gone by saw the same charm in their surroundings that we imagine existed when we look at those old photos?' What do you think?
"The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right."
Quentin Crisp
Great article. It’s sad to think what we have lost or could have conserved - could conserve. Imagine rebuilding Coventry as it was, as a showcase for craftsmanship and beauty in the built environment.
Long ago, King Charles said that planners and architects had done more damage to London than the Luftwaffe. Perhaps now, 75 years later, we can all agree to stop "urban planning" before there is nothing left of our great cities.
Wonderful article Ed. The great Theodore Dalrymple highlights the monstrosity of post-WW2 architecture here https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-architect-as-totalitarian
Yes indeed - Nuremberg can seem a little like a film set for an ironic production of The Student Prince or The Tales of Hoffmann. But (as you suggest) anything’s better than the catastrophe that is Coventry.