The battle of Brunswick
Should the Centre be redeveloped? Alan Powers weighs up the arguments
Mecldenburgh and Brunswick Hanoverian titles — have made their home among the humbler Corams and Doughtys of Georgian Bloomsbury. We may like to think of London as an assembly of villages, but the great stucco cliff of Mecklenburgh Square, where the wave of respectability broke against Grays Inn Road and rolled back westwards in the 1820s, are fragments of a greater unrealised vision of celestial palaces.
In the grand symmetrical layout that cen- tres on the Foundling Hospital site and its approach from Lamb's Conduit Street, Joseph Kay's terrace to the east of Meck- lenburgh Square are mirrored to the west by something apparently very different the Brunswick Centre, long-gestated child of the 1960s, finally brought into an increasingly hostile world in 1972. Its stepped back terraces of flats, each with a little greenhouse-conservatory, are topped by a rhythm of great lift shafts. Visitors from other parts of London go there to the Renoir cinema, locals go to Safeways on the long central shopping concourse.
The Brunswick Centre has a difficult time ahead in the next few weeks. A Public Inquiry will decide whether Camden Coun- cil was right to refuse planning permission to a redevelopment scheme, the salient part of which is a six-storey new block of flats filling most of the open area by the cinema entrance. Rugby Estates claim that the revenue from this development is nec- essary to pay for upgrading the shopping area. Camden think it will spoil the sur- roundings. The Brunswick Centre is not yet a listed building, so its historical value can- not officially be reckoned central to the argument. The original architect, Professor Patrick Hodgkinson, believes that many alterations and improvements could be made to his masterpiece, but emphatically not the one which is proposed.
Apportioning right and wrong in this case is not easy. We might wish back the Georgian terraces formerly on the site, but we won't get them. We might wish that Hodgkinson's original project, involving a greater social mix in the housing, had been completed as planned rather than being squashed down to a mean standard by an earlier Camden Council. Private sales of flats are achieving this now by other means. We can all agree that to paint the concrete and cement surfaces off-white, as Hodgkin- son originally wanted, would be a great improvement. We may be glad that the extruded terraces did not push their way another block north to Tavistock Place, while regretting that they were only given a temporary wall at this end.
When the Brunswick Centre was first thought of, it was ahead of current think- ing, which would have recommended high- rise housing. By the time it was finished, like the Barbican, it was behind a more fragmented idea of city diversity, but so massively was thought embodied 'The trouble with Charles is that there's no enigma, and no variation.' in concrete that you must like it or lump it.
There is, in fact, a lot to like. It was no standard Arndale Shopping Centre but an attempt to do something for the communi- ty we are all still searching for. Shabby though the central concourse may be, it has a pleasant busyness, although its freedom from the car was bought at a high price of disconnection from the surrounding street network. The Brunswick Centre was not very good at coming down to street level, but its stepped section prevents its bulk from overpowering in close-up views. At a distance, it can be impressive, particularly where the run of flats is interrupted on the east side and a massive portico is provided facing the axis of Brunswick Square. Against the evening light, or on a winter's evening, the tall thin columns standing out against the chiaroscuro background pro- vides one of the few genuinely sublime architectural sights of London.
Theo Crosby, writing a prescient appraisal in the Architectural Review, remarked that this feature focused on open space rather than drawing in potential users from Russell Square station round the corner. This has left it vulnerable, but Patrick Hodgkinson offers an explanation. He saw it as a memorial to some of the thinkers who lived on the site — John Ruskin who was born at 56 Hunter Street, demolished for redevelopment, and the early members of the Bloomsbury Group whose first base was at Brunswick Square, where Duncan Grant painted murals of the tennis players on the courts across the road. Freedom and space in a city centre are apt tributes to the rather different geniuses concerned.
Rugby Estates have done their cultural work as well and produced a little squiggle, derived from some Omega Workshops pot- tery, to 'brand' their redevelopment as a genuine part of Bloomsbury. In building over most of the grand portico, however, they would take away something of real value. Whatever faults one finds in the design and execution of the Brunswick Centre, they are offset by its generosity of spirit and intention. By building up individ- ual units of functional utility to make a totality which is both grand and calm, Hodgkinson was consciously working in the spirit of Georgian Bloomsbury's first devel- opers, but with a much more complicated technical and social brief. As so often with the theoretical prototypes of the Modern Movement, the trial model became the unique instance. As soon as the Brunswick Centre was finished, the oil crisis and Post- Modernism ensured that the future looked different.
All the more reason, therefore, to ques- tion Rugby Estates's need to take so much away from the building in order to give something back. Camden Council's disas- trous involvement in the completion of the scheme and its subsequent lack of care can still be redeemed by a more creative solu- tion.
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