Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (53 page)

Denied a ready public sector patron naturally sympathetic to modernist design, architects were now at the mercy of commercial tastes. While there had long been a market in speculative office
blocks, architects found themselves being commissioned to design shops, bars and restaurants – jobs that in the 1960s would have been considered beneath a self-regarding architect’s
dignity. Yet Julyan Wickham’s work on the City of London chain of Corney & Barrow wine bars and the Kensington Place restaurant in Notting Hill Gate exemplified all that was best in the
marriage of architecture and interior design, demonstrating that identifiably modern spaces could – in the vogue of the decade – be luxurious rather than utilitarian. Other architects
chose to work alongside conservation projects, producing harmonious new works together with extensions and improved facilities whose intent was not to
replace the past but to
give it new vitality. Thirty years later, such an approach might not seem very remarkable, but in the early eighties it was tantamount to gross insubordination since it ran counter to the modernist
creed that the test of a great building was that it fitted perfectly its purpose, and once that purpose had gone there was no longer any point in maintaining the building.

Liberated from such shibboleths, disused and derelict industrial buildings like the Albert Docks in Liverpool and London’s Docklands were converted into expensive office, retail and
residential accommodation, where previously they would have been visited only by the wrecking ball. Importantly for architects, the revitalization of these newly fashionable areas also ensured the
commissioning of new structures. Along the Thames, the endeavours of Piers Gough’s CZWG practice to introduce innovative, quirky additions to the gaps at China Wharf near Butler’s Wharf
caught the imagination sufficiently to appear on the cover of the London telephone directory – an extraordinary achievement for a block of offices and flats only one year old.
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The development exemplified the new spirit in architecture: uniformity was out, eclecticism was in.

The notion that art involved a search for ultimate truths was mocked by such a mishmash of styles and reference points and by the introduction of humorous touches. Yet while the replacement of
local authority patronage by the private sector dealt a numbing blow to the austere modernist language that had ruled previously, it also provided the money for a new form of modern architecture
– high-tech – whose masters included Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Michael Hopkins. From a distance, high-tech architecture seemed like an industrial look for an increasingly
post-industrial Britain. Examined more closely, the shiny elements revealed a commitment to technology and innovation that, as a symbol of the age, ought to have delighted the prime minister
herself.

In some respects, high-tech designers had digested the lessons of modernism better than the modernists themselves: their buildings truly were machines for living, their form stressing how the
building worked, with features made out of those functioning parts – like pipes and cables – that even sixties modernists had tended to hide from view. Unlike the standard sixties
constructions though, high-tech architecture necessitated both expertise and expense, since cheap prefabrication and poor materials would quickly transform the cutting-edge to the cheap and tatty.
It was a style ideal for wealthy private sector companies seeking to draw attention to themselves. It was not for clients who could ill afford large maintenance costs, like Britain’s public
sector.

For high-tech, the top of the market was reached when the HSBC skyscraper by the British architect Norman Foster was completed in Hong
Kong in 1986. It was an
extraordinary office tower, rising as if on giant cranes with struts providing powerful cross-bracing for the floors. At £800 million, it was in absolute terms the most expensive building
that had ever been built. More significant from mainland Britain’s perspective was Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building in the City of London, also finished in 1986. Coming in at
£186 million, it almost seemed like a bargain by comparison. That price tag was misleading, however: it had significant long-term overheads, for if not kept in pristine condition it would
soon have resembled an inner-city oil rig. Twelve storeys of open-plan offices rose as galleries around a magnificent atrium whose appearance referenced Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. With
Lloyd’s, Richard Rogers had produced not just a machine for working in but the closest an insurance clerk could get to pacing around inside a human body. Its functioning organs were on full
outward display: shining pipes resembled arteries and veins, while prominent ducts and exhaust pipes acted as a respiratory system and extracted waste. Instead of their usual position at the core
of a building, lifts – made of glass – shot up and down the exterior, providing a constant sense of drama to a building alive with incident. It was, of course, too over-animated for
some tastes. ‘Poor old Lloyd’s,’ sighed one underwriter when he looked at his shiny new office, ‘after three hundred years . . . we started off in a coffee-house and
finished up in a coffee percolator.’
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But the nods to the past remained. As a
pièce de résistance
, an original
eighteenth-century dining room designed by Robert Adam was reassembled on the eleventh floor. Completed in the year of Big Bang, if any structure in Thatcher’s Britain might be singled out as
the icon of the age, the Lloyd’s Building was surely it.

Conservatism in 1980s architecture, nevertheless, typically manifested itself in something rather less of the moment, for it was also the decade in which neoclassicism was resurrected from the
doldrums in which it had languished for the previous forty years. That a classical revival was under way was apparent as early as 1981 with the first major exhibition of the work of Quinlan Terry.
Terry was a pupil of Raymond Erith who, almost alone among the architectural profession of the 1950s and 1960s, had persevered with Georgian classicism. Indeed, believing that the classical orders
were divinely ordained, Terry was perhaps even more certain of the rectitude of his own stylistic preference than were the modernists of theirs.
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He, too, was a fundamentalist, reluctant to compromise. Prolific throughout the eighties, much of this tweed-suited classicist’s work involved designing country houses, a process critics
sneered at as the nouveau riche’s efforts to acquire the trappings of ‘old money’ through the buying of fake heritage. Terry’s commissions included a summer house at Michael
Heseltine’s stately pile in Oxfordshire. An obvious choice, no doubt, for a man sniffed at for being a social arriviste who ‘bought all his own furniture’.
⁵

That Quinlan Terry’s classicism found favour with those with private fortunes to spend confirmed the suspicions of dissidents who viewed the Thatcher phenomenon as a
reactionary rather than a revolutionary process. At the peak of the Callaghan government’s high taxation policies in the 1970s, Terry had designed a classical column in the grounds of the
Hampshire home of Lord McAlpine (subsequently the Conservative Party’s deputy chairman) bearing a Latin inscription that, translated, read: ‘This monument was built with a large sum of
money that would otherwise have fallen sooner or later into the hands of the tax-gatherers.’
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It was to Terry that Margaret Thatcher,
supposedly careful with the taxpayers’ money, turned when commissioning the restoration of the three state drawing rooms at 10 Downing Street in 1988. Few architects of any age receive such
important political commissions, and the result was an elaboration of William Kent’s original eighteenth-century interiors. After viewing the refit, the former resident, Harold Macmillan,
mumbled archly that it reminded him of Claridge’s.

Terry nonetheless proved to be more than a mere eccentric catering for a select right-wing clientele with expensive, if not progressive, tastes. That neoclassicism was again becoming a serious
artistic movement was demonstrated by the major public buildings commissions reaching his bucolic Dedham Vale practice. At Downing College, Cambridge, he built additions to William Wilkins’s
original Greek-classical campus, including a Greek revival library and the Howard Building, which continued Wilkins’s elegant restraint on one side only to give way to a fussy version of
Palladianism on the other. Those who could get beyond the stylistic assertions were forced to conclude that as a lecture and concert hall it worked perfectly, with excellent acoustics.
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Terry had been chosen by the college not just because he worked within the classical medium but because his use of traditional materials meant fewer long-term
maintenance problems – elsewhere in Cambridge, modernist buildings were already beginning to fall apart, landing the university with huge repair bills. Terry used practical arguments for
traditional building materials, emphasizing their durability and energy-saving properties. In doing so he proved unusually ahead of his time, anticipating the environmental concerns that hit the
building industry in the early twenty-first century.
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Terry’s most significant commission proved to be the redevelopment of the Riverside at Richmond between 1983 and 1988. Fronting on to the river Thames, it was a prime – perhaps
the
prime – site in the affluent borough, a site that, all too tellingly, had suffered years of planning blight and decay. Restoring some of the pre-existing buildings and adding his
own, Terry created an extraordinary complex for office, residential and recreational uses. Part Georgian, part Italianate eighteenth century in inspiration, had it existed when Canaletto passed by
in the 1740s it would surely have
provided subject matter for one of his canvases. Rising confidently from the riverbank, it was a composition in warm red and yellow brick
and stucco plastering, with stone detailing, columns, an internal courtyard and even a fountain. Critics leapt to point out its dishonesty, for it was an elaborate fake in which classical facades
concealed modern office interiors and the neo-Georgian sash windows were pushed shut when the air conditioning was switched on. These compromises to the modern world were not Terry’s own
preferences but requirements forced upon him by the developers’ brief. Unperturbed by the dishonesty of aesthetic compromise, the development proved noticeably popular with the public, who
took to it as a pleasing and in-keeping addition to their elegantly old-fashioned neighbourhood and the perfect backdrop to a riverbank promenade. Not just popular with locals, it proved to be one
of a relatively small number of eighties buildings that attracted large numbers of tourists from almost the moment the scaffolding came down.

The Prince of Wales’s admiration for the classical pretensions of Richmond’s Riverside was, of course, reason enough for the architectural establishment to hate it. Their distinctly
non-deferential animosity towards the heir to the throne had been aroused by a speech he delivered at the 150th anniversary dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) at Hampton
Court Palace in May 1984. Rather than pander to the mood of self-congratulation, the prince threw oratorical stink bombs, chastising what he saw as the profession’s forty years of arrogant
disregard for place, scale and the public’s wishes. The particular target for his ire was the striking and unabashedly modernist design that Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) had proposed for
the extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. He likened it to ‘a carbuncle on the face of an old and much-loved friend’.
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The ‘carbuncle’ reference was a potent phrase which left the RIBA audience spluttering at their guest speaker’s impertinence. With that one royal sentence, ABK’s scheme
for the National Gallery extension was wrecked. Emboldened by his success in speaking truth unto power, Prince Charles intervened again three years later in an effort to scupper proposals for a
site considered even more sensitive than Trafalgar Square. This was Paternoster Square, the area surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral. Reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe, it had been rebuilt after
the war with utilitarian office blocks of such breathtaking banality that they had daily tested the ingenuity of photographers trying to get Sir Christopher Wren’s baroque masterpiece in the
picture and the encroaching slab blocks out of it. The laity’s excitement that the dismal offices were to be demolished soon subsided when the replacement proposals by Arup Associates turned
out to show little more regard for the historic setting. ‘Surely here,’ protested the prince in another widely reported speech, ‘if anywhere, was the time and place to sacrifice
some
profit, if need be, for generosity of vision, for elegance, for dignity; for buildings which would raise our spirits and our faith in commercial enterprise, and prove
that capitalism can have a human face.’
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He backed up his words with support for an alternative scheme – John Simpson’s
Georgian-style reworking of the area in elegant brick, which followed more closely the old medieval street plan. The London
Evening Standard
and public opinion, when asked to consider the
two alternatives, weighed in heavily in support of Simpson’s scheme. In 1988, a slightly chastened Arup submitted redrawn plans which, while modern in execution, at least made a passing
semi-classical nod to the setting. But it was still not contrition enough. This plan, too, fell by the wayside. The prince on the warpath had claimed a second scalp.

By now, Charles was making the most noteworthy royal intervention in British life since Edward VIII had opted to marry the woman he loved. It seemed that scarcely a major new development could
proceed without being weighed against what His Royal Highness/popular opinion – the two were generally conflated – either thought or could be presumed to think. More precise elaboration
on the heir to the throne’s opinions was provided in October 1988 when six million viewers watched him broadcast his ninety-minute
Vision of Britain
on BBC 1’s Omnibus programme.
Its themes were expanded as a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum the following year, complete with a ten-point manifesto and an accompanying book. His request list included the
restoration of the human scale in domestic building (ascending according to the structure’s public importance), the rediscovery of a sense of enclosure and intimacy, the use of local building
materials, visually pleasing decoration and a respect for setting. The past was to be learned from, not discarded in pursuit of ‘abstract principles’. The exhibition attracted packed
crowds, with most of those who left comments supporting the prince’s agenda, while his accompanying book was a bestseller. At a time when architecture books rarely had a first print-run in
excess of three thousand, Prince Charles’s was two hundred thousand.
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Having caught the popular mood, the prince’s sentiments were
picked up and echoed by the prime minister. Thatcher devoted an entire section of her 1987 party conference speech to lambasting the ‘folly . . . incredible folly’ of ‘the
planners [who] cut the heart out of our cities. They swept aside the familiar city centres that had grown up over the centuries. They replaced them with a wedge of tower blocks and linking
expressways, interspersed with token patches of grass and a few windswept piazzas, where pedestrians fear to tread.’ To this she added the accusation of a left-wing political agenda, which
the prince had been unable to articulate: that the planners’ creation of the ‘urban utopia’ without ‘a pub or corner shop . . . snuffed out any spark of local enterprise.
And they made people entirely dependent on the local authorities and the services they chose to provide.’
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