PLANNING
Piccadilly plot
Roger Barnard
The rough ride which the latest proposals for Piccadilly Circus have received from press and public alike should surprise no one, least of all politicians. Indeed, if the Westminster City planners and their private developer partners had produced a scheme with the deliberate intention of confirming the ordinary citizen in his hostility to architects and planners, or of proving to the radical young that professionals are only — as they say — " stooges of the ruling class," they could hardly have been more successful. Mercifully, the E100 million package of razzledazzle redevelopment, complete with a futuristic new police station under the watchful eye of Eros, does not involve the wholesale clearance of people from traditional living areas. But in other respects, like most central area ' renewal' in London, it is based on a vision of society that is essentially barbaric. Despite the incorporation of some incidental advantages for the public, such as the retention of Swan & Edgar and the reduced heights and plot ratios of the tower blocks, the scheme bears all the hallmarks of the continuing effort by those in command of urban affairs to define the roles and manage the activities of others less powerful or rich or knowledgeable than themselves. On these grounds alone, it must be judged a calamity which should be wiped from the slate. To say this is not to play the middleclass game of sentimentalising Piccadilly and Soho, whose 'raffishness' and colour ' are themselves based largely on corruption and economic exploitation. On the other hand, it is no defence of the plan to say that anything would be an improvement on the existing Circus environment. That could be true only if the proposals opened the possibility of thinking about ideal solutions, human values, and new ways of meeting basic needs and functions. They do not. On the contrary, almost everything in the package is open to criticism, from its bland, assumption about the advantages of increased road space, through its acceptance of the ' necessity ' for further office development in central London, to its peculiar notion of what constitutes an acceptable environmental standard for pedestrians. In years to come, tourists will continue to journey from the ends of the earth to see the Piccadilly goldmine, but what they will find is fool's gold in a concrete desert.
One day the true story of this speculators' bonanza will be written. In the meantime, some of its more dubious elements should be noted. There has been mysterious horse-trading between Westminster and Land Securities Investment, the most powerful of the three developers involved, to maximise potential office space and make the scheme 'economic' (to LSI, of course). Office development permits have been released 'without strings' by Peter Walker, for unexplained reasons and apparently without consulting the DTI or DEP, though Mr Walker claims that their granting will not prejudice the outcome of an inquiry. Equally disturbing has been Westminster's expenditure of ratepayers' money on briefing 'opinion formers' and leaders of professional societies in advance of the period of public participation' (which lasted only ten days and relied on doctored plans and models). But perhaps the most damning indictment of how the scheme was prepared was made by Nicholas Taylor, who revealed that not one of the Westminster planners had visited the interior of the Criterion Theatre — in architectural terms, the most important of the buildings now under threat — until the day before the 'scheme was publicly unveiled.
These remarks have been harsh and moralistic, and ordinarily I would be ashamed to use such a tone: none of us is a saint. But it is difficult not to despair for the reputation of the professions when respected architectural firms and planning departments seem willing to become the hired hands of private developers and anonymous urban bureaucracies which sponsor building programmes merely' to bolster profits, increase rate income, and keep human activity under control. No one can seriously deny that the plan for Piccadilly represents a shocking failure of imagination and nerve by the architects and planners involved. They appear to have capitulated without mumur to the self-aggrandising demands of transport engineers, construction firms, and property companies, which between them have increasingly taken possession of central London like mediaeval barons fighting for their share of confiscated plunder. In these circumstances, is it surprising that most citizens look on large-scale urban design as some sort of vulgarised cybernetics enslaved to municipal market research, and on architects and planners as either dehumanised or not quite sane?
No doubt the values of professional autonomy and social responsibility are thought unreliable guides to conduct only because they are so rarely tested in action. Instead, the order of the day seems to be: when rape is inevitable, submit and enjoy it. But if the future of the professions is to provide personnel who toe the line in an expanding technocracy, busily manning a social machine which runs for its own sake, how can they hope to survive, let alone change anything? To be fair, there is some truth in the claim that the scheme for Piccadilly embodies in an extreme form the 'professional dilemma,' where design skills of a very high order are required to be placed in the service of an ill-conceived and probably unworkable brief. But when the chips are down, it is pointless for wellmeaning professionals to plead that they merely do the best they can within the predetermined economic and political constraints. The only effect of a scheme like this is to strengthen rather than diminish the existing constraints, so that the drab and unfriendly environment which results seems to be the product of forces beyond control. And the more those constraints are reinforced, the more the design professions — engineers and surveyors as well as architects and planners — will become parasitic institutions closely bound to the social whole by the connecting tissues of power and affluence, rather than the spearhead of an independent counterforce for environmental improvement.
It would be more to the point if professionals could understand that what is proposed for Piccadilly Circus, as elsewhere, is the product of an economic and political system which refuses to face the consequences of its domination of the environment, and in the uncritical service of which their whole credibility is at stake. What is essential is not that architects and planners should become urban guerrillas or grass-roots social workers — the fashionable cant of the militant Young Turks — but that they should be authentic professionals, beholden only to their peers and mindful of the social consequences of individual acts. In sum, it is about time they learned to shoulder responsibility for the spectacularly bad consequences of their work. This does not mean that professionals should end their involvement in urban redevelopment. It means that they should think twice about what kind of power they have, about what and whom they are cooperating with, and try a little harder to know themselves and their constituents. They could begin by explicitly raising questions about what larger social and political purposes the professions should properly serve. And they could also insist that their professional organisations take an unequivocal lead in questioning the definitions of social need and economic priority which underpin the present urban shambles. What are the learned societies — the RIBA and the RICS, the RTPI and the ICE — going to do about the Circus? It is to be hoped that they will vigorously oppose the new scheme by every means at their disposal, and support their case by presenting reasoned alternative proposals of their own (as Simon Jenkins has done — unaided — in the Evening Standard), In the end, I believe that serious reform of the urban environment cannot be achieved until it has become part of a general social programme embodied in a new political movement. But such a movement will lack muscle so long as professionals, who should be among its key members, are prepared to go along with what is clearly wrong or stupid. Barbican, Bloomsbury, Elephant and Castle, Hay's Wharf, Covent Garden, and now the Circus: each is an example of the disruption of urban life by a kind of economics and politics which makes broad and participatory social planning almost impossible, but which rewards with money and power those who conform to its narrow demands. If the vision of the future which such projects represented were an inspiring one, there might be some point in making the sacrifices which are now being demanded. But at the moment, the prospect for London looks mean and barren, a massive unnatural disaster for which the environmental professions are likely to be cursed by an embittered community.
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