HACKNEYED THEMES

Gavin Stamp argues that ordinary

spec builders may best solve the Prince of Wales's worries

A LITTLE to the north of the Oval lies Courtenay Square, Kennington, a most agreeable little urban space filled with trees. The enclosing buildings, like those in the surroundings streets, are humble, pretty two-storey Georgian terraced houses. They all look as if they were built at the time of the Battle of Waterloo. In fact they date from a century later and were de- signed by Adshead and Ramsay to rehouse the Prince of Wales's slum tenants of the Duchy of Cornwall. (Today, thanks to the Leasehold Reform Act, they largely house smart people like MPs.) In 1914 the Old Tenants' Hostel in Newburn Street, a model of civilised almshouse design, was Opened by Edward, Prince of Wales, him- self.

Seventy years later that Prince's succes- sor as heir to the throne is making another happy intervention into the sphere of architecture and housing, if with rather more controversy. Whether or not Dr `Rod' Hackney, the celebrated 'community architect' of Macclesfield, accurately re- ported his words, there can be no doubt that the Prince of Wales has a deep and intelligent interest in architecture. Dr Hackney's real sin was to put himself forward as the Prince's 'architectural advis- er' when, in truth, there is no one such person. The Prince of Wales seems to have Consulted or read a number of architects and architectural writers and then made up his own mind. His speeches on the subject have been refreshingly free from the mealy-mouthed cant and pretension which normally characterise architectural debate. In his remarks about Mansion House Square, about the National Gallery exten- sion and now about housing and the way our cities are being treated, he seems to me to be speaking with the authentic voice of his generation: a generation which has reacted with anger and dismay to the arrogant deeds committed in the name of

the Modern Movement.

Prince Charles has a valuable role to play in architecture for he can ensure that architectural controversies reach a wide audience when, normally, newspapers are only interested in buildings when they fall down or blow up. Whatever he may or may not have said to Dr Hackney on the royal train, it seems very likely that the Prince wished to raise the question of inner city housing at a time when the Govern- ment, so soon forgetful of its new 'Green' election-winning posture, is considering whether to halve the £600 million the Secretary of State for the Environment is demanding to deal with the country's decaying housing estates.

As a result, the Prince is accused of being 'political' and of forgetting his consti- tutional role. Of course public architecture — the product of taxpayers' money and planning law — is in the realm of politics —

it always has been but it is also a national issue, beyond politics, on which the Prince ought to speak. It is also an apolitical subject in the sense that both major parties,. Conservative and Labour, are equally responsible for past disasters and present tribulations. Politicians of both parties were instrumental in the national catastrophe of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s and 1960s when, owing to a complex mixture of utopianism and arro- gance, greed and graft, naivety and an excessive deference to architects and town planners together with a mindless worship of modernity for its own sake, a vast amount of the nation's wealth was poured into public housing which was socially, functionally and, indeed, physically in- competent.

That phase is now over. No high-rise, system-built or other form of concrete tenement housing has been built in Eng- land for well over a decade. Modern public housing schemes — when they are built at all — tend to be low-rise, of brick, of exaggerated domestic picturesqueness and small in scale. Such schemes are a direct response to the public's distaste for Mod- ern Movement council housing and to the burgeoning conservation movement of the 1970s. In fact, there is little new about what Dr Hackney preaches and practises. An intelligent alternative to urban renewal was presented in Nicholas Taylor's seminal book of 1973, The Village in the City, which advocated tight, intimate urban develop- ments with a commonsense division be- tween the public and private realms; that is, developments of houses, not flats. In the same year, Colin Ward's study Vandalism showed what was wrong with most modern housing and suggested more direct tenant control — instead of the distant, incompe- tent overlordship of the borough — as one answer. Few boroughs have yet put this sensible policy into effect: local politicians as well as architects who think they are social engineers all dislike freedom. It should come as no surprise that the very successful housing co-operative schemes in Liverpool were immediately starved of `There's a wonderful little restaurant.'

funds by the new Militant city council, which wants rigidly to control its client state of council estate-dwelling voters.

Of course, 'community architecture' is to a degree bogus as, despite avowals to the contrary, the architect must exercise some power. Dr Hackney's twee little brick houses in Macclesfield look very different from the extraordinary Byker Wall in Newcastle, a housing complex looking like a Tibetan monastery which was designed by Ralph Erskine in 1972 after extensive consultations with displaced local resi- dents. And now 'community architecture' has become fashionable and all and sundry are jumping on the bandwagon: at least it is a better bandwagon than the one before. The RIBA now has its own Community Architecture Panel on which sit such deep- ly unlikely figures as Sir Denys Lasdun and Richard Rogers. Significantly, the panel has yet to meet; I cannot help thinking that Rogers, the 'high tech' agent of high capitalism, is anxious to emphasise his posture as a caring socialist in case there is a future Labour government.

At least Rod Hackney gets on with building. He is a practical man. Unfortu- nately, his restored terraces merely look as if they have been done over by enthusiastic DIY owners in the spirit of Barry Buck- nell. The architectural character of the houses has been spoiled, but Hackney says that does not matter: what matters is that tenants or owners should have what they want. This begs the question, however, of whether architects are necessary at all. The most successful ordinary houses in Britain were not designed individually by architects. This is true both of the inter-war `semi', which — despite the sneers of architects and intellectuals — remains a highly desirable family house, and of the terraced housing of the 18th and 19th centuries. All were put up by speculative builders using standard house plans or pattern books. We could, and do, do worse today.

Inter-war suburbia was wasteful of land, but the terraced house is truly urban, economical and yet humane. The terrace consists of family houses, each with its own front door. Perhaps the most successful form was the late Victorian `bye-law- terrace', that is, the development of the Georgian terrace, of two storeys, with bay windows, and each house perhaps with its own small front garden and always with a back garden. Such houses were well built and sanitary — thanks to the bye-laws and, where they have survived the bulldoz- ers of the 1960s, still serviceable and useful today. After all, fashionable Fulham con- sists largely of mean late Victorian terraces of this sort.

The tragedy of modern English architecture is that architects are painfully picking up the pieces of a murdered tradi- tion, a tradition of civilised domestic architecture which was once the admira- tion of the world. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, the Danish architect and author of that wonderful book first published in English

in 1937, London: The Unique City, admired the English capital as a city of houses, not flats, and wrote that: 'One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry on seeing a modernistic architecture imported into London which is far less suitable to the spirit of the age than the Georgian houses of about 1800. . . the sight of which is one of the most remarkable experiences to the foreigner in London.' A further merit of the terraced house was that it could be grand or humble in scale while consistent in style; with the Georgian terrace there is no distinction between the `house' and 'housing', which is not the least repellent aspect of 20th-century domestic

architecture. These virtues were well understood by Adshead and Ramsay on the Duchy of Cornwall Estate in Kenning- ton. And these virtues remain within reach today. Just like Georgian architects, the enterprising young firm of Campbell, Zog- lovitch, Wilkinson & Gough have supplied a developer-builder in the East End with standard house designs for terraces and squares. Sutton Square, Mile End where 14 houses sold within eight minutes of being put on sale — may be as signifi- cant for the future of inner cities as Black Road, Macclesfield. The real test of all `community architecture' is whether it sells.