A future Labour government, if we are to believe images released by Angela Rayner and generated by the campaign group Create Streets, will build Edwardian-style new towns. The pictures show leafy streets of charming terrace houses and mansion blocks, furnished with Dutch gables, carved stonework, cast-iron lamp-posts and civic buildings with Gothic spires. This is one election promise that will not be fulfilled, except possibly in the form of unconvincing fakes, because for good and bad reasons builders don’t build like that any more.
One factor, as the rightwing commentator Henry Hill correctly pointed out, is that current regulations rule out many features shown in the images, such as flights of steps up to front doors (to enable wheelchair access) and low balustrades with widely spaced railings (to stop children falling out of windows). Hill takes the predictably libertarian position of blaming the regulations – “less than 2% of the population uses a wheelchair”, he declares, so why ban steps?
But wouldn’t the really smart thing be to design new towns that have all the virtues of the best Edwardian streets, such as trees and well-made details and natural materials, but use the benefits of modern construction, including good insulation and double-glazing? And where, also, disabled people can visit their friends’ homes and toddlers don’t occasionally bounce from windows on to the York stone pavement.
A curiosity of those images, which look as if an AI program was given a watercolour brush and asked to paint a chocolate box, is that their artist is oddly reluctant to include anyone who might definitively be identified as anything other than white. There are a few smudges in the background that might possibly represent people of colour, but otherwise the Rayner urban utopia looks strikingly caucasian. I can’t believe she really means that.
Standard fare
Farewell to the ever-paradoxical Evening Standard, at least its daily print version, whose termination has been announced. As most of its readership were commuters, it would portray the capital both as a glamorous metropolis of which it was thrilling to be a part, and fearful hellhole from where you would be grateful to get back to the suburbs. It gloriously combined, in its four-editions-a-day prime, a tabloid front section with a (metaphorically) broadsheet middle – that is to say punchy and knockabout reporting, often about celebrities, followed by the erudite musings of effete critics. Of whom, for 12 years, I was one. Sometimes the two cultures would cross over – I might get a call at 5.30am, asking for my views on the deconstructivist architect Daniel Libeskind in time for the first edition. Norman Foster once let slip to me that the famous wobble of his Millennium Bridge was the responsibility of its engineers. I then found my considered article on the subject splashed on newsstands all over the capital, having been condensed by the newsdesk wizards into the headline: BRIDGE ARCHITECT: IT’S NOT MY FAULT.
Lessons of Grenfell
Friday was the seventh anniversary of the fire that killed 72 people in Grenfell Tower. Even though the final report of the public inquiry is still not out, and (unconscionably) no charges have yet been brought against those responsible, it is at least clear from the catastrophe that effective regulation doesn’t only save lives, it’s also good for business.
Consider the waste that has gone into replacing the defective cladding on blocks of flats all over the country and the many other millions spent addressing the aftermath of the fire. It could all have been avoided if the construction work had been done right in the first place.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
