In received opinion, modernist planning and architecture is a sterile, over-rationalised affair. Supposedly, it is blind to context, a purveyor of universal solutions and interchangeable types.

Maybe you could believe that looking at many of the post-war modernist shopping centres and estates of Britain, but a quick trip to Sheffield ought to change your opinion. Or rather, a visit to a handful of landmarks that have miraculously escaped a council decidedly handy with the dynamite – Park Hill, Gleadless Valley, and finally, Castle Market. These places, all making gleeful play of Sheffield's exceptionally hilly and diverse terrain, were planned under J. Lewis Womersley, the City architect hired in 1952, who within a decade commissioned 50,000 homes, designing on the side a multitude of schools and local centres, of which the finest surviving is our subject here. Now that Park Hill is undergoing stripping and gentrification and Gleadless languishes in obscure poverty, Womersley's socialist, modernist Sheffield is best seen in this remarkable shopping centre, of all things - built in 1960-5 and now slated for demolition.

The job architect here, Andrew Darbyshire, designed what could be described as a Megastructure before the fact, although never as domineering and 'iconic' as that would suggest. Rather than, as is customary, plonking down from on high a hangar or a slab, Darbyshire fitted a multitude of interconnected structures into a small, sloping site – an office block, with a distinctive angular profile; a raised walkway system with shops; and the markets themselves, three floors – all with access to the street on different levels of the hill – and a wildly curving entrance ramp at the back. Inside, there is a panoply of strange and fascinating things.

Like Park Hill, what is clever and unusual in Castle Market is that it's a modernist design that specifically tries to engineer bustle and individuality, so that you notice both the ingenious design of the labyrinthine structure, but also the competing design ambitions of the many stalls and built-in shops. Much of Castle Market, both the building itself and its individual units, retains original 1960s signage, making it a particular goldmine for classic caff enthusiasts. There's The Soda Fountain, in elegant, continental Sans Serifs seemingly absconding from a Blue Note record cover; the competing signs of Sharon's, where more recent promises of greasy excellence sit alongside a midcentury modern sign declaring 'Snack Bar'; on the outside walkways there's the deep red vitrolite box housing Cafe Internationale, its name appropriately reflecting the former Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire; formica tables and oddly Victorian chairs at Tennant's; the aspirationally named Riviera Snack Bar, replete with palm tree motifs and the promise (or threat) 'watch out for our specials'; and, best of all, the excellent Roof Top Café, which boasts a fantastically ambitious space-age suspended ceiling hanging over formica tables, a patterned floor and net curtains. That's just those open on a Thursday morning.

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Posted by Owen on July 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)

When you tell people that you were brought up on the South Coast, people tend to think this involves ice cream, shale and all the windy, stopped-clock delights of the British seaside. Alas, in the case of Southampton they would be wrong. However the city does have one tiny little stretch of beach, and one so strange that it deserves a whole new category of terminal beaches all to itself.

Weston Shore, on the Southwestern edge of the city, before you come to the eerie village of Netley (more of which later) is a mix of Tarkovsky’s Zone, a 1930s beach utopia and a ‘60s brutalist dystopia, lining up in front of Southampton Water’s silty expanse. The first thing you notice is a line of identical towers, aligned one after the other in Alton Estate style, with one even taller one right at the end. Geometric and standardised, these council flats have at their entrances paths what can only be described as a meadow, an area of lushly overgrown vegetation leading to a thin road and a stony beach.

The road is dotted with a series of little 1930s concrete pavilions, as elegantly Modernist as anything built in that decade. A recent regeneration has cleaned them up, but in the process made them even more peculiar: each one now decorated with abstractions connected with the likes of World War Two, the Victorians, and (bizarrely) prehistoric archaeology, which frame the views of the towers and the beach itself.

Which is nothing to write home about: 2km of stones and general waste, but with pockets of undergrowth and further on, woodland. On the beach can be found some Stalker-esque inexplicable industrial waste: a pile of what seems like the fluff left by some moulting animal was lying there when I last visited. From the beach you get a view of port traffic and the occasional yacht going up and down the desolate waters, and a distant view of the vast Fawley oil refinery, its many slender towers complementing the bulkier ones on the beach side. Industry, the remnants of Social Democracy and disused leisure all make it a spot which can feel like an idyllic vision of the end of the world.

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Posted by Owen on October 21, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the 20s and 30s, all Modern architects seemed to be infatuated with Ocean Liners. The curves, contours and towers of a Cunard would be adapted into their houses and flats. The Brutalism of the 60s would, on the other hand, appear to have been a rejection of this high seas frippery for something more earthy and urban.

Wyndham Court in Southampton is the world’s only Brutalist Ocean Liner. This block of flats, which looms over Southampton Central Station, throwing the blandness of its surroundings into sharp relief, is – intentionally or not – a tribute to a bygone era of glamour and luxurious transport, fittingly in the very port where the Queen Mary, the Titanic et al made their voyages.

Making buildings symbolise something is something generally associated with the grisly jokiness of the ‘80s, such as Terry Farrell’s TVAM eggcups and so forth. Wyndham Court, though, makes its associations while never seeming anything less than logical. Twin blocks of flats angling themselves around a central public square, with shops at the edges and turrets sticking out strategically, hewn from white-grey, lustrous concrete, the long, jutting forms unmistakably suggest some sort of Corbusian cruise ship.

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Posted by Owen on July 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (5)

The Thames is a dead river. Save a stray tourist boat, and the Tate ferry that goes from one branch of Nicholas Serota’s World of Adventures to the other, London’s huge, majestic river is totally unused, and even in ‘Docklands’ it’s difficult to find any sign that it ever was. There’s one major exception to this, and that’s the Woolwich Ferry.

Not only is this a strange fragment of a past in which the river had some sort of function rather than being the backdrop to the ubiquitous ‘stunning developments’, it's also gloriously free. Just queue up at either side of the river : Woolwich SE18 or North Woolwich E16 – there’s a concrete shelter in case of rain – and at no point will anyone ask who you are or what you’re doing there, let alone ask for money.

The Woolwich Free Ferry was introduced in the 1880s by Joseph Bazalgette as one of his ‘improvements’, and the current terminus and ferries date from the mid-60s. The terminus is in shuttered concrete, with an angular staircase poking out, while the boats themselves are named after local politicians: all of a Leftish bent, given Woolwich’s history as a socialist stronghold. One of the three, marvellously, is called the ‘Ernest Bevin’, after the union boss and Cold Warrior foreign secretary in the Attlee government.

Go in the daytime or the weekend and the ferries are bracingly empty, with lines of benches sitting forlorn, while red-walled rooms labelled ‘SMOKING’ have their doors definitively locked. The ferry fills up at rush hour with people getting off at the DLR station on the North Side, going to the (until 2008) tubeless South. You can also stand on the traffic deck and gaze at this desolate stretch of river: the Tate sugar refinery (ironically enough) and the Thames Barrier dominate the riverscape here, with the leftovers of industry now overwhelmed by those riverside flats that cling to even the poorest stretches of Thames, with Canary Wharf (or ‘Thatcher’s Cock’ as it was once known) looming in the distance. At the front of each of the ferries is a little cylindrical lookout pod, creating a peculiar arch framing Woolwich Reach.

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Posted by Owen on June 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (3)