Paul Knox: London, heritage and capital.

Introduction to Lost London

0:00Hello. London, like Soylent Green, is people, but London is also buildings, and these buildings, like people, can be eaten. Like Soylent Green, this consumption is oftentimes for dubious reasons. What I mean to say is that buildings, good ones that hold deep and important histories, get knocked down and are lost. With their passing goes more than just stuff. In this episode of the A is for Architecture podcast, I spoke with Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, about his book Lost London, from Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, A History in 25 Missing Buildings, published by Yale University Press in April this year.

0:35Lost London's provocative move is to insist that ordinary buildings, a pub in Poplar, a roadhouse on a bypass, a block of council flats in Hackney, deserve the same analytical attention as a Wren church or a Robert Adam Terrace. As one should perhaps expect from an urban geographer like Paul, this pushes back against the exquisite art-historical approach, which treats buildings as art objects, and thereby frames architectural history around consecrated geniuses and great buildings. It is a seductive approach, for sure, but perhaps troubling in a different way.

1:06If everything means something to someone, how can we knock down anything at all?

1:12If you'd like to and can, please support the A is for Architecture podcast by listening in and sharing it, and by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to these, to the book, and to Paul are in the podcast description. A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

Paul Knox introduces his background

1:33Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted today to be talking to Paul Knox. Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. We're going to be talking about your 2025 book, Lost London, From Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, A History in 25 Missing Buildings, which you published with Yale University Press. It's a lovely book, and a very fascinating book. Not an ordinary history, and we'll get to that. Paul, before we do that, though, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

2:07Yes, thank you. Well, I guess with that introduction, the first thing I should say is I'm not a historian. I took geography at university, undergraduate, and then a PhD. And what I was interested in then and still was social inequality, and in particular, local and regional variations. I was interested in exploring social inequality beyond income, beyond economic measures.

2:38And so after my PhD, I got a job at the University of Dundee. My PhD, by the way, was at Sheffield University. So I went up to Scotland and found myself saying, yes, I could teach urban geography, which was a leap of faith on my part and certainly on theirs. And so then I really became interested in urban social geography.

3:09That was my niche.

3:11And worked at Dundee for a number of years, interspersed with a couple of interesting visits to the United States. This was at a time when we were going through the winter of discontent. The Thatcher administration was doing its thing with higher education and had the opportunity to teach summer school in Madison, Wisconsin, one time, and the University of Oklahoma,

3:43which is very different, another time. And that, long story short, resulted in some contacts that eventually led to a full year in the United States. And that, in turn, led to a position at Virginia Tech, which wasn't really on my radar until I'd spent some time there. But what appealed to me, turns out to be quite a good university and had a very good College of Architecture and Urban Studies.

4:19And the appeal to me as an urban social geographer was that there was architecture, there was planning, there was construction. The whole idea of the college at the time was that it was about the built environment. And so, I, like them, they, like me, I ended up moving here with my wife and young daughter and have been here ever since. I retired a year ago.

4:50And, you know, for a while, I was, I was on the, on the right side of things as a faculty member, doing my thing.

5:05Again, urban, social, geography, regional disparities. That was what I was interested in. And the usual kind of academic trajectory, I guess, is, you know, publishing, doing my research, doing the teaching. And then I found myself sort of ushered into the position of a dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies. I was 10 years doing that. One of the things looking back on that was the great privilege of meeting so many practitioners in their offices, you know, planners, but also architects.

5:49Learning from them is really in my job as a fundraising and, you know, maintaining relations. But looking back on it, I think I developed quite a bit of knowledge about, especially architects and to a certain extent planners, got interested in the professional ideology. You know, what's rewarded professionally and what's not. And from a college perspective, from a dean's seat, you know, watching design faculty, and we had industrial design, interior design as well, landscape architecture, just very different, to my view, from the social sciences, the physical sciences, biological sciences.

6:46And in terms of their points of reference and understanding of scholarship, one of the things that came out of that, and I'm dodging around a little bit here, was that it was increasingly apparent that what we all did was not being valued and recognized by wider society. Now, obviously, when, you know, some of the Republican leadership made this very clear, the younger Bush in particular, that expertise was not really valued.

7:26And part of my interpretation of that was that the game that we play, the way we keep score academically is to carve out a specialist niche and establish that, build on it. And it becomes rather arcane in many cases, not always, big exceptions in many of the medical, physical sciences, with a much more direct and appreciable contribution.

8:04And so, in terms of my own work, I started to think about how, how my interest, in general, might be made more interesting to, you know, to wider readership. And that's how I ended up, for the last probably 15 years or so, aiming at what the publisher's shorthand seems to be, you know, the Waterstone's dad.

8:37You know, that's somebody that can, you know, see something interesting on a bookshelf, pick it up and think, yeah, that's, that's, let's, let's have a look at that. Uh, so an entirely different audience. Um, I think my first step towards that was, and this is my first kind of, um, engagement with, uh, any pretense at history, um, was to write a book about my hometown, uh, Portsmouth.

9:07Um, so great loyalty to the place, uh, it's where I grew up. Um, and I, and I realized on my visits back to the UK, um, that there was so much that I didn't know about, um, wrote, you take for granted, you know, it was classic, you look, you look at things, but you don't really see them. Um, so I wrote this kind of, it's a love letter, uh, kind of a book, I made it open source in the hope that it would be, um, picked up by schools in the city.

9:39Um, and that, you know, that another generation, at least some of them, um, would, uh, benefit from that. And that, that gave me, uh, um, again, looking back on it, that gave me, uh, uh, uh, uh, some of, uh, I wouldn't say any expertise, uh, but a perspective on, um, on writing history. Um, and at some point I realized that here I was, had a pretty good reputation as a urban studies scholar.

10:12Um, but, but, but I wasn't a person that anybody could associate with a particular city. And so, I mean, I confess, sounds horribly egotistical, but, you know, so what city should I try and become not, not a master? Well, so London was, was what I began to write about. And so I've done several books on London now. Um, and it was an interesting experience working from 3000 miles away.

10:44I did have, uh, if I go back to my career after I, um, I excused myself as Dean after about 10 years and, um, the president of the university allowed me to, um, what do you want to do? I said, well, something that's got an international connection. And so for another eight or 10 years, I was responsible for our, uh, study center in Switzerland, which got me back to Europe, um, seven or eight times a year.

11:15And in the process, I would stop off and do field work in London. Um, and that was why it was interesting. It was kind of like a military exercise that I would prepare. What do I need to see, you know, how can I plan out the time to bus walking? Um, and the first, um, first book I did, I think, uh, published by Hugh Merrill.

11:46Um, he, he, he was kind enough to let me do all of the design work, layout, photography, but I, I, I logged about 500 miles walking, um, through London. And so I think I did my, you know, putting my, my, my work there. Um, and, you know, so one thing leads to another. And then academically after, after I, uh, I felt that I'd spent enough time traveling back and forth. Um, uh, excuse myself from those responsibilities.

12:19I spent a year or so as director of our, uh, bioinformatics unit. Um, I couldn't even spell that to begin with, but, um, they needed some new leadership for a little while. Um, and I was working on special projects and ended up the end of my career as, um, a dean of our honors college, uh, working with the, you know, the sort of A students, um, trying to develop a, a new curriculum, which was, um,

12:50but of a controlled nuclear experiment because we, we involved, uh, industry, uh, a fair bit. And what I was able to bring to that from my experience was studio teaching, um, I learned from the architects in particular, the, you know, the, the buzz, the value of collaborative projects in a studio environment. And so, so that was fun to do that.

Comparing British and American academia

13:18A beautiful story. How did you find the differences between Britain and America? Was the condition or the context in which you were framing your urban geography and latterly more architectural studies very distinct or were there strong overlaps? Particularly in terms of the way that you're talking about urban injustice or justice. Yeah, overwhelming differences, first of all, have to do with the cultural, societal, contextual differences.

13:53So coming, teaching for 10 years in the UK, um, and then coming to the United States, walking into the classroom. And I think this is probably still true. Um, and I'm, I'm going to exaggerate slightly, just, just slightly. Um, my experience in, in, in, in the UK was that, um, students, you can build credibility and, and respect academically with a classroom, but you have to build it. You're not going to give it. And, and, and, um, if you make a fool of yourself, then that's kind of, you know, fair.

14:27They, students, um, will, will take that side of it. Um, and, uh, completely different walking into classrooms in, uh, America where, I mean, you can lose the respect, but you're given it first, you know, on day one, maybe that was partly to do with a, you know, a British accent. But I think that's a general difference is the, the respect, uh, in the, in the classroom. And there's a parallel, um, at the collegial level that, um, I found that any kind of academic success was really, um, congratulated and celebrated in the American context, which was, you know, it wasn't the opposite in the UK.

15:18But, um, it was, it was, it was, you know, sort of politely ignored, um, and you do your own thing and, uh, and so on and so forth. So that, that was a, a refreshing, um, uh, and, um, very supportive kind of, uh, a difference. As far as, you know, your question about the, the differences or, or not with, uh, you know, disciplinarly,

15:48with architecture in particular, um, I didn't have a lot to compare it with, uh, in the UK because I was teaching basically social science. Uh, didn't have, uh, I, I did teach, um, along the road in, in, um, in Dundee at the, uh, what was at the time? College of Art, Duncan of Jordanston. I taught a couple of courses there, um, and knew some of the folks there, but, um, yeah, I didn't have a direct points of reference, really.

16:18Did you find that the way that, that expertise that you spoke about at the beginning, did you find that your position as a scholar within a university had significant credence within the professional world, the, the world of planners, town planners, architecture and design? Um, because here at the moment, I think there is a deep skepticism, um, articulated, if not realized between the academy and quote unquote, the real world, which is, I think, an absurdism and a shame.

16:56Yeah. And maybe, maybe it's accelerated now. Did you find it was a much more accommodating place where the university was seen as being a useful part of the broader cultural and political economy? Yes, I did. Um, very much so, uh, if I go back to my first couple of years here, uh, uh, this is one of the great advantages of naivety. Um, so Blacksburg, our campus is in Southwest Virginia. That's a couple of hundred miles away from, uh, Washington DC, but, um, the college has, uh, an outpost in old town Alexandria, um, in Washington.

17:32Um, mostly architecture. And our dean at the time, uh, made it clear that, uh, you know, we should do more scholarship, uh, as a college of architecture, um, and we should do more funded research, um, and offered, uh, anyone that wants to, um, get away from Blacksburg for a semester and, uh, teach up in our Alexandria facility, you know, you can, you can do that. Um, we'll help you with, uh, we'll help you with, uh, with travel and all the rest of it.

18:07Um, and you can get to know the perfect, this is where I'm going with your question. You can get to know the, um, the professionals, uh, the bureaucrats, the planners, uh, the, the, the, the architecture practices, um, in Washington. Um, and so I did, and, and one of the things that, uh, you know, I tried first of all was, uh, to talk to, um, folks in, uh, the White House. I ended up being able to organize, um, uh, a conference, which took place in the recently demolished part of the White House, um, um, uh, which was astonishing.

18:49Reagan was president at the time. And the nearest we got to, to Mr. Reagan was that, um, during a coffee break, um, a lot of us were standing in the corridor. And, uh, we were suddenly literally physically bundled back into the meeting rooms, um, by secret service because the president was, was walking along corridor. Um, but yeah, um, incredible. I mean, I was used to, to organizing things in the UK, um, as efficiently and as economically as possible.

19:24Um, one of the things that I learned very quickly was that here, if, if you organize, uh, you know, specialized academic conference, um, and you, you know, there's not much of a fee. It doesn't cost much. People seem to think, well, it's not worth going, but if you have a, if you have a higher price, make it more, well, then there must be something to it. It's very market driven. Um, but the, back to your question that, um, I think it's still true that, um, local, regional, um, not so much with the current, um, regime in Washington, but certainly still with local and regional, um, officials and with professionals, they do value what you might be able to bring.

20:14It's very interesting. I wonder if that's because your sort of interdisciplinarity as a geographer sort of brings with it a greater measure of what people see as sort of research integrity and robustness compared with something that perhaps has in the UK context has tended to wander down a rather arts oriented, um, subjectivist humanities perspective. Which is more difficult to sort of quantify the, um, political, social, and economic value.

20:47Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think, um, both sides of the Atlantic where I can really only speak to this, it's been a long time. Um, but, um, you know, architecture is very solipsistic in, you know, both, uh, professional offices and, uh, and in particular in, in academia. Um, and so that can work both ways, you know, you can be rebuffed because you're not, you know, you're, you know, a Philistine, you know, when I first became Dean of the college, I was definitely, I think, typecast as, as the kind of blundering Philistine who didn't get it, um, as far as, you know, the subjective side of the, the art side of, of architecture.

21:32Um, um, um, but it can work the other way as well, as you say, that, that, um, people sometimes do value what you might be able to bring by way of a more systematic approach, uh, which is backed up by methodology and, and, uh, a certain amount of more robust theory. Whereas, you know, you know, in, in architecture, that's what takes the place very often is simply a manifesto or a movement, which, you know, doesn't have this kind of deeper methodological, uh, theoretical foundations.

22:12Yeah. So, I mean, I found that all very interesting, you know, coming from one side and moving into the other. Yeah. Yeah. That is a very interesting thing. And, and I hope it changes in the UK at some point as well, because, because it's a fight to the bottom otherwise. Yeah. As a, as an urban geographer, and as you say, and we'll get to your book in a second, but I think this is one way of starting to talk about it. How did you find engaging with design as an activity? The book that you've written, Lost London, whilst it is a social history, a critical social history on some level, it also deals with the idea of design.

22:50How did you transfer or mould your thinking to engage with design?

Engaging with design as a geographer

22:55And backing up from that, is there an element within sort of urban geography of design thinking in the way that you engage with the city? I think, I think for me personally, it was osmosis and working, you know, day to day, but particularly when I was the dean of the college, I had a nice office and right outside that office was a big lobby where all the student work, the pinups and the crits and all the rest of it would happen.

23:26It's great energy. And, you know, I'd be invited in to participate in those kinds of things. Once the philistine part of it was kind of set aside somewhat.

23:38So for me, I think it was, it was sort of, osmosis was the metaphor, sort of grafted on to my understanding of cities. And I got more and more interested in the, you know, design, taste, you know, taste and class and design in that regard and the changing attitudes towards the built environment through the eyes of the professionals.

24:17The, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the building sector as well.

24:26And the, the other actors, you know, the great mass of the public of one sort or another. And so, yeah, I, I think I gradually have my eyes open to different aspects and dealing, trying to deal with, with different dimensions within the, the college. Because, you know, you know, on the one hand, there were, we had architects, it was a big, relatively for the United States, you know, 50, 60 faculty all together.

25:01And everything from, you know, pure design studio folks to, um, architecture historians, everything in between, but also building construction faculty. Um, and their alumni, um, you know, who tend to have, you know, uh, very big, strong hands, handshakes, um, and absolutely had no, many of them. I'd be careful what I say, um, but no real finesse or appreciation in terms of, of design.

25:36Um, so working around and through all of that, I think I, that's how I, uh, somehow translated the, you know, the interest, the value, um, the intrigue of design vis-a-vis urban geography and urban social geography, you know, the metabolisms of, of cities and, and the kind of bigger picture. So I've, I've always described myself as a bigger picture person.

26:06It's a nice way of describing oneself. Yeah. Nice to be in that position to be able to say that with any confidence.

The genesis of the book Lost London

26:13So Lost London, where does this come from? Obviously, you've already talked a little bit, I'll mention just now the idea of taste, I think was the word you used, about values of urban design and architecture. And your book obviously documents, what is it, 25 examples of buildings that have been demolished in London over the last, how long is it? You start off with one being demolished in the 1990s, I think, but do you go back further than that?

26:45And why, and why, I guess, why were you interested in this process of loss, this process of demolition? I can go back to one specific experience, but before I do, I think that what I've been interested in most recently is the way that individual, some big picture person, I just made the mistake of casting myself that way. But I'm interested in urbanization and found that, you know, one way of looking at the larger issues and processes and forces in urbanization is to do it through the lens of a particular building.

27:25And so you could look at a particular hospital and tell the story about the history of healthcare, for example. But at the same time, that particular hospital has its own history, its own biography, its own interesting stories. So I think that's, to me, that's the trope, is that you can take a building and tell a broader story, a thematic story, stick with the health.

27:59But you can also tell that broad story in relation to that particular city, in this case, London. And then you've got another layer, which is all the interesting things that may have happened to it, people that may have inhabited it or taken advantage of it. So that's where my mind has been. And on one of my trips back to the UK, I was doing some field work and I drove back from, I drove over from Manchester to Sheffield, where I did my undergraduate studies and graduate work.

28:37But as an undergraduate, I stayed in a hall of residence, which was a brand new building. I was on I floor, how many letters is that? But, you know, we were fairly high up. It was a slab, modern slab.

28:54And so I was shocked to get to the site and find that it had been demolished. And I think that was the, you know, that was the worm that eventually turned. And the feeling that I had that, you know, you don't expect a new building that was part of your life to just vanish. And, you know, think of all the things that, you know, the stories and happened. It's all gone. And that eventually came around talking to the publishers as a framing idea.

29:32It's why not just take demolished buildings of one kind or another. There are different stories about, you know, why they've disappeared, how they've disappeared, just as there are stories about how and why they they were built. And so you can kind of reverse the thing. And then the then the challenge was to think, well, how can how can one develop an overall story of or history?

30:04Be careful. I'm not a historian, but something is interesting about London's development through a couple of dozen buildings. And so different kinds of buildings that can tell the story of of the city in different thematic ways, you know, from churches, you know, through to ordinary buildings that are not usually the subject of architectural historians, certainly.

30:41But nevertheless, have, I think, arguably an interesting story and certainly a place in the in the history of the development of the city. So that was how it happened. It is a very interesting one. And as you say, you claim to not be a historian, but I figure a historian is someone who writes history. So maybe I'm now a historian as well. I'll take it. You are what you do. Yes.

Political economy and building obsolescence

31:08You argue in the book that the loss of these buildings that you document, these 25 buildings, from the grand to the commercial, to the civic, to the domestic, from sort of named buildings all the way down to unknown, I suppose, now largely forgotten buildings in their states. The demolition of these buildings suggests that they're obsolete, but that this obsolescence is not not specifically or not necessarily a physical obsolescence. It's not that they're not useful. It's not that they don't even accommodate their function appropriately or effectively.

31:43But rather, there are political and social and economic reasons behind that. Can you speak to that idea a little bit? What do you mean by this? I think there are two scale levels to this. Any particular building, there can be any number of particular reasons for loss, for demolition, whether it's economic or functional obsolescence or the physical decrepitude. But there's also, and so, again, they can be informative and interesting.

32:19And, but at the broader level, you know, sort of additive levels, standing back, that obsolescence, to use that word, to stick with it for the moment, I tend to associate with the transitions from one political economy to another. So that there tends to be, you know, a rash of losses inevitably because, you know, with the industrial revolution, there's a rash of losses as the build environment gets torn down and replaced with factories, warehouses, railways, you know, tremendous loss of fabric with the railways.

33:08And later on in the industrial revolution, another wave, maybe with slum clearance. So as, so the transition from one political economy to another and its own transition gives you a lens through which to look in aggregate at the way that fabric is lost and replaced. I think another interesting one, another obvious one will, will be the transition to the welfare state and the modernization and planning.

33:46And, and, and as the welfare state gets underway, a kind of secondary change to the political economy with consumer society and a motor car. And so those, those, those kinds of changes in aggregate. So in between all kinds of individual cases, which are going to be exceptions or, or proving the rule one way or the other, but those big changes, the change to neoliberalism, you know, in the late seventies would be another.

34:16And then the, and then the, and then the kind of post-industrial economy that's attached to that. And then more recently, perhaps, particularly in relation to London, globalization that, you know, as London occupied a more and more pivotal, it was always a world city. But after the, but after the so-called big bang and the, you know, the big bang also coincided with European integration.

34:47It coincided with the demise of the Soviet union and the rise of the oligarchs and, you know, petrodollars in the middle East. It all conspired in London's case, and maybe a little bit beyond, but certainly in London to, for another sort of round of renewal and change with all the luxury condominiums and so forth and different sub areas.

35:19And the, you know, the borrowing down of, you know, in the, in Mayfair and other Kensington, you know, these huge basements, all, all part of that. So I think that, you know, that's the big picture thing that I've referred to that I'm interested in, but, but equally there, you take a particular example, and it may be, you know, physical obsolescence. It may simply be a developer seeing a so-called rent gap where, you know, more, more money can be made by tearing down and building something else.

35:51So it's all going on at once. It seems to me you call it big picture, but that still implies a sort of boundedness to what you're talking about is just that you've extended the boundary up. I was wondering whether it was more, more to do with a holistic understanding of what buildings are in relation to the culture in which they emerge. So rather than a kind of, in the traditional historiography, we've promoted genius and we've promoted the works of genius. And this seems to be the thing that defines the criteria for preservation.

36:27But if you step back from that and recognize that buildings are more broadly part of a whole epoch, a whole flow of ideas and knowledges and technologies and values and desires and so on and so forth, the building becomes less significant than the context in which it's in. And therefore, the need to maintain more of that becomes more evident, like working class housing, for example. You pick on, for example, the Roscoe Street Estate in Islington.

36:57Is that a fair way of understanding it? I think, yeah. Yeah, I think you put your finger on it there. Yeah. I mean, not that the, you know, sort of art historical approach, you know, should be set aside. But as you've put it very well, I think there's, there's, there's, there's more to it. And my hope is that the Waterstones dad will pick up the book and, and see more as they're walking around rather than just looking and not seeing.

37:36I mean, I think that that's one of the things I learned with working with students for some years, I would do walking tours through London with, with groups of students from here. And I really enjoyed being able to help them, you know, not just look, but see what they're looking at and understand it in context, in the context that you've described very well. You start the book talking about the demolition of St. Helens Tower, the Aviva Tower, which was rather an exquisite piece of Miesian architecture.

38:11This is a good example of what you're talking about in this, these transitions of political economy, aren't you? A building that was probably not even 50 years old. Yeah. Getting wasted for something bigger. Yeah, something with, partly technological with, you know, floor plates and, and so forth. And, and partly the, the, the, the value of a square footage in that particular location. So, and again, I would insert globalization there and the way that the city is, you know, it's had to expand out and up in order to accommodate that, that role, that London role as a world city.

Notable missing buildings and histories

38:47In the 25 chapters, in the 25 examples, sorry, which do you feel are doing the most work in terms of explaining your thesis most clearly? My goodness. Let me think. I mean, you've got Milbank Penitentiary in there. That surely has to. That's, yeah. Which of your children do you like the best?

39:11We all have one. No, I'm only joking. I don't think, I think East India House is interesting because of the, not just the lost building, but the entire lost history. We don't talk about that darker side of empire and, and how the East India Company was, you know, as a company. So there's a, there's a history of, there's a corporate history there that's wrapped up in that, as well as the urban history and the, and the history of empire and, and the way that London itself was affected by the enormous scale of, of what was coming out of East India House.

39:55You know, the way that it affected people's dress and, and, and consumption habits, you know, drinking tea and wearing cotton. And the, and the, and the so-called nabobs who would come back, the retirees who made a bit of money and were the only ones that could afford some of the housing that was going up in Mayfair. That kind of, you know, broader ripple effect that was coming out of one building. But that was, I mean, that was demolished in the 1860s, 1862, as you note.

40:27Yeah. Seems strange even now that even at the height of its efficacy and agency, the East India Company is already starting to self erase, moving away from a neoclassical, almost Florentine style of architecture towards whatever it was that replaced it. Yeah, so it was taken over by, it was basically nationalized. And, and so, you know, it outlived its, just outlived itself in terms of its previous function. So the building went with it.

40:58And again, the political economy changed with that, at that time. So it's scooped up in, in all of that. But yeah, good question about which of, I'm going to look at my list again. I think you're right, Milbank Penitentiary, that's a, some of them are much better known buildings. Obviously, Crystal Palace is very well known.

41:26One of my favorites actually is the Necropolis Station. And the office building is still there on Waterloo Bridge Road. And that's an interesting story about, you know, how, how a metropolis deals with its dead.

41:44And so the architecture there is not very prominent. I mean, it's a not particularly notable building what's left of it and what got demolished in or bombed in the Blitz was even less distinguished. But the whole story of it, I think, is, is compelling.

42:08If your position is right, everything has value as a historical artifact and can tell us something significant and important about the past and therefore about the present.

Democratic decisions and demolition

42:20How do we decide what needs to be demolished or can be legitimately demolished, given that it's all important? I don't have an easy answer. I do think that these decisions have been in the hands traditionally of, you know, rather narrow group. People who claim somehow to know the answer, often seemingly to me, you know, definitively. But if you take my argument, then, yeah, it does raise the question of, you know, where do you draw the line?

42:55How and when? Again, I don't have an easy answer. One of the things that I take from all of this is that appreciate it while it's there. And again, from a kind of design discipline point of view, a wider appreciation of the built environment and its various facets and symbolism and history and associations and reasons for being would be nice.

43:32Accepting then the inevitability that there is an economic or a functional or a political reason for every building eventually to go. And then that raises the question, well, every building, you know, there's some that and the answer would be yes, there are. Now, we have to put our hands then in, have to put the question in the hands of a more broader, if possible, a broader, more democratic base, a more informed society.

44:18And so if it's not too kind of clever sounding an argument that the more people do appreciate the built environment and all of its nuances, while it's there, the better informed we can be about the decisions from a planning or conservation point of view. You know, you know, also recognizing the, you know, second level effects of, you know, British history being co-opted, just like the flag can be co-opted.

44:55You know, you know, different class interests and so on. I'm not very sympathetic to the kind of connoisseurial view of all of this in terms of the built environment, because there are plenty of examples of how that connoisseurship just changes over time, 180 degrees sometimes. But I think, you know, a better informed, more appreciative Waterstones dad can help, maybe.

45:33But yeah, it's not an easy question. It's not an easy question. And it comes back to this issue around power, doesn't it? Who gets to make decisions around these things? And this idea of a democratic voice in this decision making, an informed democratic voice, a true democratic voice, perhaps, is the ideal. But then you do end up with situations like Robin Hood Garden, where the residents themselves, very keen on the demolition of the building, and the experts were not keen at all. Again, this issue around why buildings get lost seems to me, according to your argument, to be about power differentials within decision making, often driven by economics and often driven by very large scale transnational and globalized corporations like the East India Company to begin with.

46:20But then you pull it back to that other level, and you get average Joe and average Jane, sort of actively advocating for the demolition of things that might be okay, might have value. Yeah. Again, I don't have the answer. I mean, on that specific, I do have an opinion on the Robin Hood Gardens, having visited the place before it was torn down, not be on the side of the residence. Why? Well, it was miserable for all of it might have been radical on the drawing board and exciting for the design community to see something as big as that and that fit all of the metaphors.

47:05Actually living in it was not a very pleasant experience. Now, I know the Smithsons turned that back on the residents, you know, said that, well, they should look after it a bit better. Taking advantage of taking advantage of the welfare state, you know, be appreciative.

47:24But it wasn't designed very well to me. The spaces weren't, the living spaces and the communal spaces were not conducive to what a working class population could best use. So, and I guess, from my point of view, the sort of overblown rhetoric in defense of Robin Hood Gardens simply pushes me more on the side of the residence.

48:02I mean, I think Elaine Harwood described the, you know, the mounds of rubble that have been covered in grass in kind of elegiac terms. And the Smithsons somehow, I think it may have been the Smithsons, but one of the critics or the Smithsons themselves described the, you know, the central area as being referenced to the Georgian squares in central London. I mean, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not something I haven't answered.

48:50I mean, we recognize the issue, but, um, uh, it comes back to, to a reliance on education, um, which I see as the, you know, the foundation of whatever democratic mechanism or system we have. Um, and, uh, I'll go back to that example of, uh, of, of the love letter I wrote to Portsmouth that is called Strong Island. And if any of your listeners want to look, it's, it's available online, open source.

49:23Um, but yeah, my, part of my, um, wishful thinking is that, um, you know, secondary school students with access to that can appreciate not just the history of the city, uh, a little better, but, um, as voting citizens, um, will have better informed decisions about planning, design issues, um, with some of that knowledge.

49:54I'm sounding too inflated to my own ears here now, but. No, I think I understand what you're saying.

The scale and impact of modern renewal

50:01There seems to me in the book, I mean, the very fact of it, the idea of loss. And lost London. There's a sort of lamentation at the heart of what you're talking about. And London continues to, in many situations, lamentably demolish buildings. I think you point out it's between five and seven thousand a year that get demolished in London. But you also point out in the Victorian period, the vast amount of rebuilding. I mean, you point, point out obviously the great fire of London and a huge rebuilding that had to occur at that time.

50:32And the loss of the medieval city as was in favour of a more Renaissance city. And then in the Victorian period, as the population explodes and industry requires cheap labour, city again demolishes itself and rebuilds itself. And we, to a certain extent, don't lament that. But we, I think many people feel a disquiet about the way that renewal is now done in London. The erasure of parts of the built heritage.

51:04I mean, the most recent one in my mind is the construction of the London Olympic Park, which for a running and jumping competition, demolished vast amounts of quite inner urban London. What is different now about this form of loss that we're seeing? And again, we go back to St Margaret's Tower. Why does it feel more problematic? I think part of the answer is going to be because of the scale, power and reach of the principal actors.

51:36That they are international or transnational, that they're operating across boundaries with public-private partnerships, that the boundaries that before really did exist as boundaries. And now they've been merged. And what has been done is not just by larger and more powerful actors, but with, that are accountable to a market that goes well beyond London.

52:12So a lot of the regeneration, I don't know how much, but a significant fraction seems to be offered off plan to folks well beyond London and well beyond the UK in many cases. And so it's partly a question of, I mean, geography again, it's partly a question of scale. Partly with that comes a different set of, a different kind of accountability,

52:49not in this case to London or to particular boroughs, but to something that is very hard to pin down. I think that's part of, at least part of the answer. Yeah, that lack of voice or even possibility of voice of anybody other than international finance. Yeah, I think as you walk by a building site and such and such is coming to you.

53:19And that's the first a lot of people will know about it is that, you know, there's this development company or whatever, whatever, whatever's behind it. And so it's no wonder that people get upset.

53:37I think there's a, there's a positive side to that. If you think back way to the seventies and, and a regeneration proposal for Covent Garden upset so many people outside of the normal stratum of folks who are interested in conversation. So it broadened the constituency for conservation immediately because it was going to affect so many working lower middle class areas and it stopped it.

54:12Is this impulse, this conservation impulse, this desire to kind of memorialize buildings and it fits within a contemporary, in a way, a contemporary obsession with memorialization, which I've done a couple of podcasts with folk around memorials, because I am very interested in the, in the way that the, the public imagination has been turned probably by the media and its government towards almost permanent memorialization of events and peoples and things, which I find

54:47quite fascinating in itself. It's a, it's a sort of sociologically, it's a very strange thing. And to me, it speaks of a lack of confidence and a profound ontological anxiety, but this conservation, this desire to conserve these things, either through the active preservation of artifacts, or in the case of your book, in the, the written conservation of them, the repositioning or the refinding of these things in a way to kind of not pickle them in aspect, but certainly, yeah,

55:20memorialize them in an interesting way. Is it always conservative? Is there a progressive argument for the form of conservation that seems to be implied, this retention of things and this close study of things that you, that you describe in the book? Is there a progressive argument for it?

Memorialization and museumization

55:39Yeah, I think there is. Let me respond, first of all, in more general terms to your point about memorialization. I think a lot of what one sees across the country now has to do with, on the one hand, globalization, and the more things get standardized, the more they seem the same, the more people want to hold on to something idiosyncratic or particular to a neighborhood, a district, a city, or a period.

56:16And at the same time, part of that is wrapped up in that, I think, is what the two economists, Pine and Gilmore wrote a few years ago about what they describe as the experience economy. So it's not so much now about having things, but it's, it's how you experience having them. So events in shopping malls, et cetera. And part of that experience too, I think is not my word, but I've seen it used

56:47museumization, the way that museums have been used to anchor and the aspect of the, the sort of star architecture of, you know, after Bilbao, et cetera, the, the way that they anchor cultural quarters and the cultural quarters themselves are tied up in this experience economy. And, you know, and you, you buy a bauble or a t-shirt or something in the museum shop as proof that you

57:17went there and part of your, you know, cultural credentials. And that's a very strong element of all of that. So it's just not just the memorialization, but the museumization. And here's my answer to that is that interestingly, it's typically not very progressive

57:41in the way that, that all comes out. I was reading recently about the Titanic Museum in Belfast, which as it's replete with so-called guides in Edwardian costume, explaining this, the history, of course, which, and the memory of which in Belfast was, there was a kind of collective loss of memory for a long time because of a certain shame that the shipyards could have produced such

58:17a vulnerable vessel. But now there's a big museum in the, in the, I think, credibly in the league of star architecture, you know, it's a, um, interesting geometry and a very flashy looking building. But the, um, the story of the Titanic and the people that worked in designing, making, making, building it, the shipyard story is largely been set aside. You know,

58:47it's too hot to handle in a sectarian city because, uh, Harlan, the Wolf shipyard, the whole Titanic thing that was, um, you know, the, the shipyard industry was, was, um, basically code for, um, loyalist politics in, in Belfast. And so Belfast is trying to get itself out of that box of being perceived as a, uh, sectarian city, but in doing so it's, it's missed the opportunity of, I think,

59:17of being a progressive, telling the story progressively. It's more about the, um, what a big ship and what a big tragedy. And yeah, of course I'm doing rough justice to it here, but I think that's one example where, um, um, that memorialization could, could be more, um, progressive, um, if it was, if it had a broader scope, but of course it doesn't appeal to the people that are going to show

59:50up because they've seen the Titanic movie or, or whatever. That's what sprang to mind. So it's a challenge to do it in a way that, um, you know, that you can do this well and do it in a progressive way because that could equally turn out to be heavy handed, I think, but, but I think it's possible.

London as the center of empire

1:00:12London is a strange city and I live 70 miles away from it and visit it very seldom and find it a peculiar place. And I've been thinking recently about it as the center of the British empire and how a city and a people of a city manufacture something like that. Where I live, there is this subset of people that they call DFLs, which means down from London. Yeah. And the DFLs come down and buy up the cheap houses and do them up very nicely. And, uh,

1:00:43it feels very colonial. We call it gentrification, but it feels very colonial. And I find that kind of fascinating in itself that perhaps colonialism is the animal natural to London. It's what it does. Yeah. It's what it does. And it did it for a period of time across the globe and now it does it internally. I don't know if that's a rather controversial point, but I guess what's happening in London with this constant renewal and it seems to have accelerated since they've had mayors, each of whom wants to make some kind of indelible mark on the city, much like La Défense in Paris or

1:01:19build the biggest building, erect the biggest building, um, seems to be a bit of a fetish. But is this book that you've written, is it in a way, uh, a plea for a more sensitive approach to London's existing fabric? And, and if it is, and if it's taken seriously, what might it indicate as a better way of doing things? I think it is in that spirit. I mean, I didn't conceive it explicitly that way, but it is in, in that spirit as a better way of, of doing the, I'm going to fall back on what I said

1:01:53before. I think about, um, you know, uh, doing a small bit to try and engender, uh, uh, more understanding sympathy and knowledge of, of the city as something more than this behemoth that is, um, throwing its weight around, um, not just in, in Kent or Essex, but you know, the whole of the United Kingdom, uh, and beyond, because, um, at another level, you know, there are those millions of people

1:02:25that are, that, that, that whose weight is not being thrown around, who are part of this kind of miracle of a, of a, of a city of, of the size of London, not just London in this respect, but, you know, how would one ever design and organize, um, the, the day-to-day continuity of something as complex and multi-layered, uh, and, and difficult, uh, as London. And so, um, I take your point about the,

1:02:58um, you know, the nature of the beast. It's become that way, was the center of, of empire and the, my whole mindset that went with it, the institutions that came with that, um, and so forth. And there, there is a, there is a, um, I mean, even though I grew up only 70 miles from, from, from like 72, actually, as they seem to remember, um, uh, there is, uh, culturally something that's so powerful

1:03:29about London. Um, but beneath that, um, there are all of these, um, you know, you would say ordinary lives perhaps, or one would say ordinary lives, um, in, you know, myriad ways that, uh, that are not part of this, um, empire, not part of this empire mindedness, not part of this, um, where the metropolis and you're not, um, that, that is fascinating. Um, and it's, that you don't have in a kind of

1:04:04medium sized provincial city, um, uh, the same way that way it all meshes together. The, the, the, the metaphor that comes to mind always is, you know, the metabolism of something so big and complex as London. And of course the demolition is part of that metabolism, you know, the remaking of, you know, you can easily slip into a biological analogy here with, you know, uh, cellular, renewal or something, but, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, incredible city.

Closing thoughts and poetry

1:04:41It's an incredible city indeed. Paul, that's a good point to finish on. Thank you so very much. Thank you. My privilege. My wishes now come homeward. They're gallopings in vain. Logic and lust are quiet. And again, it starts to rain falling asleep. I listen to the falling London rain. That's Louis McNeice going almost full Louis McNeice in a bit of his poem, London rain. But does it really mean anything, Louis? Thank you to Paul for the conversation. Thanks to Catherine Powell, the Yale University Press for the book and intro. Please see the podcast description for links to the book,

1:05:14to Paul on Grokipedia, for goodness sake, and to podcast subscription options. And thanks for listening. Thank you.