Owen Hatherley, architectural commentator on buildings in Greenwich

 

I always was a bit of a sucker for modern buildings –‘modern movement’, ‘brutalist’ or whatever you happen to call them.  I was therefore very pleased to see yesterday morning sitting on my doorstep a package with a huge great book in it - 500 pages - and it’s called Modern Buildings in Britain and it claims to be a gazetteer of just that. It’s not an exhaustive guide and quite honestly I can think of lots more great buildings which are not in the gazetteer –but –even so.....

It’s by Owen Hatherley who over the past 20 or so years has got himself a reputation for incisive comments on architecture and culture and has written many books and articles on it all and I don’t expect him to be polite. I thought it might be interesting to look at the sites he has listed in the book Borough of Greenwich -- some are industrial and some aren’t. It’s not a long list but it’s a lot longer the most places – I think the book has more sites in Greenwich in it than it has does for the whole of Kent!

In the first part of his introductory article he describes what we would know as the St.Mary’s area of Woolwich and the stages of development of housing there since the Second World War. I remember that whole area perhaps 20 years ago having a terrible reputation for ill health - all those men with low life expectancy, lifetime smokers and heavy manual jobs.

Owen starts by introducing us to Woolwich in suitable style. He describes how the area suffered heavy bombing from the Luftwaffe despite one of its major employers being Siemens. And also “The other major employer was once the largest mechanised industrial concern on the planet –The Royal Arsenal - the place where the weaponry was built that made it possible for an island in between the North Sea and the Atlantic to subjugate over a quarter of the globe”.

The building of new homes in the area from the 1940s was part of the County of London plan but Woolwich had some sort of exemption and was allowed to build its own council housing. This was of course a much smaller Woolwich than it is today when they took over Greenwich in the 1960s.  They were very proud of this housing scheme and I have a booklet which they produced to tell us about it.  Owen describes how the estate was designed and built and how the resulting flats are ‘full of light’.  Green spaces were carefully placed around the estate and now, 70 years later, the results are ‘verdant’ in summer. He says ‘what makes this modernism specifically is a new conception of space - there is an openness which has been created by people deciding that precedent doesn’t matter’.  He goes on to describe in some detail successive additions through later stages of development and, although he doesn’t say so, on the whole it’s downhill all the way. Some later stages have already been demolished and more is going the same way.  He says that by the 1970s ‘there had been a major change in planning ideologies, rather than open spaces ... little houses are tightly packed around pedestrian pathways to create a sense of community”.

Perhaps we should look at some of the other Greenwich Borough sites which are in his gazetteer – what about industry?   The main industrial site he includes is not really a building. It is the Cemex aggregate works at Angerstein Wharf. My impression of this site is that buildings there come and go and I’m not sure if what Owen has seen there is what is there now, or what was there in the past. However, I quite agree with him that the whole landscape there of huge temporary buildings with various gantries, chutes and other structures on the riverside is both dramatic and interesting.  He likens it to work by Vsevolod Meyerhold - whose ‘provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre’

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I don’t know if Owen is aware that Cemex is a Mexican company and I wonder if that makes any difference to the arrangement of their site at Angerstein? He notes the survival of the riverside path  that runs beside it  and adds ‘you can get a close up view without feeling  you didn’t ought to be there’. I would also draw attention to his distinguished predecessor, Ian Nairn, who in the 1960s  also drew attention to the drama of the Greenwich Riverside path-although most of what he saw and loved has either gone or been sanitised.

The other site Owen lists on the Greenwich riverside is far more monumental - the Thames Barrier. ‘The last great monument of a London wide local government architects department’ –he means the often hated Architects Department of the Greater London Council, which, I agree, had their moments.  He says ‘it’s on the level of the best Victorian designers - the results are effortless and understandable to the uninitiated and haltingly beautiful’. I think we could all agree that the barrier is special but it is also something most of us now just accept and  don’t really look at - which is a pity.

Another entry takes three sites all together as ‘a miniature modern town at the bottom of the hill overlooking the Thames’. This is the two ex- cinemas and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society building at the junction of Powis Street and John Wilson Street in Woolwich.  The two cinemas have always been accepted as amazing - in particular the Granada with its astonishing interior - ‘a shimmering Gothic stage by the Bolshoi Ballet’s old designer, Theodore Komisarevsky’. It’s now a cathedral and, as Owen says, they were saved by two West African churches which have been prepared to look after the buildings and improve them while keeping their architecture integrity. I know these churches work hard for their congregations and try to reach out to help society in general.  I very much remember one of the old cinema conversions coming up at a Planning Meeting with representation by a silk robed bishop plus a large group of elderly ladies hanging on his every word. I hope they remain and continue to care for these eccentric buildings. Down the road a bit,  is the old Co-op department store. It  looks very good now if a bit different to what it used to – but never mind.

And then we have listed the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich's 1939 revolutionary modernist town hall – partly sold off in the early 1970s when there was a majority of ex-Woolwich councillors on the new London Borough of Greenwich. Owen describes it as ‘a public building of great decency and monumentality’  and also ‘ an essay in anglicised modernism that combines the very thirties municipal detailing .....That  anticipates some of the ideas of the Royal Festival Hall’. It is such an important and beautiful building that we should be proud of but in fact it is just neglected. To quote Owen again ‘a straggly dilapidated succession of disconnected things’. The bit sold off in the 1970s has just got planning consent for flats and the Borough Hall is standing, unused, with talk of selling it off to whoever. No longer ‘a beacon of municipal pride’.

Another site in the book is the monumental St.Saviour’s church in Eltham - which I know nothing about so I won't comment. Most of the rest of the sites are housing.

One of the housing sites listed is particularly interesting - and I also want to ask for help for anyone who knows about it. These are the houses in Genesta Road, Plumstead, built  by those who Owen  describes as ‘the hard-line left-wing modernists of Tecton’.  And so how did that get into Plumstead? The architects were Berthold Lubetkin and A.V.Pitchowski  - émigrés to London in the 1930s.   ‘Tecton’ is best known, apparently, for the Penguin Pool at London Zoo but they did much else - all sorts of revolutionary flats and houses in places like Clerkenwell and Hampstead. Generally I really like their stuff a lot and I should stop making cheap and sniffy remarks about them. On Genesta Road Owen comments ‘it is interesting how the layout uses high modernist ideas for totally domestic terraced house purposes rather than a ville radieuse  of  flats and public open space.’   People live in these houses and they are regularly part of  the ‘Open House’ days and I wonder if the occupants know any more about them  -  like who commissioned them?   Why were they built there?  Why were they built at all?

The other sites he describes are all housing. He has a long look at some of Blackheath Span Land..  He also picks up on the Vanburgh Park Estate in Westcombe  Park. I’ve known that estate for a long time and I’ve known people who’ve lived there – and they all seemed very happy with it.  They are all very interesting flats and houses but my remit here is ‘industrial’.

He looks at the first phase of the Greenwich Millennium village by Ralph Erskine. I could say I a lot about that but probably shouldn’t .  I’m pleased to see that he praises the ‘purpose designated nature reserve’ –the Ecology Park - which is easily the best thing on the Peninsula. Another site he notes , but one barely in Greenwich, is Charlotte Turner Gardens. He calls the Greenwich section ‘a Red Viennese housing estate with Hanseatic balconies’  while round the corner in Lewisham it’s  ‘intimate but not cutesy’.

So, finally, we get to Thamesmead which I also won’t go on about. Owen centres his piece on its representation in the film Clockwork Orange. I remember going to see the first buildings there designed for the Greater London Council and they were exciting and different.  A week earlier we had seen New Ash Green – which Owen has also included in the Kent section. As newlywed house hunters we opted for a 19^th century three bed terrace, where I happily remain.  Sorry.   First stage Thamesmead  was well worth going to look at, All those interesting early areas have gone but what Owen is saying  is that for all buildings the real test is how you live in them and use them.

Outside of Greenwich is the rest of England which Owen describes but staying in South London for a moment we should note the section on the Royal Festival Hall with a quick nod to long term Blackheath resident, Peter Moro.

 I hope I haven’t gone on about all this  too long.  I said I was a sucker for modernism. Others  may not be.  Before Owen was famous he came and talked to Greenwich Industrial History about his ideas – but now?......  Congratulations, anyway.