A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley

in the context of consumer capitalism. If we condemn the malls without being very careful about how we go about it, we line up with the likes of Paul Kingsnorth, those who care more for the destruction of village shops than the collapse of industrial civilization.

      I still hate it. Some of my friends helped build it, you know. Indulging in a bit of manual labour to save up money for their gap years. The first time I ever went to WestQuay I was shocked by it, not least because of the fact it coincided with the destruction of St Mary’s Street—and in their Waterstone’s I found a copy of the Monbiot book which has a chapter on this very topic. I read the entire chapter in there as a minor, piffling protest. Before WestQuay there was Colonel Seifert’s Arundel Towers—two office blocks surmounting a car park, a slide of which I have been known to use as illustration in discussion of the destruction of modernism in Britain. I remember it faintly; the strangeness and intrigue of its multiple levels and the Dog and Duck pub more than the twin towers. The break with Arundel Towers’ approach to urbanism was hardly total.

      In terms of how it interacts with the landscape, WestQuay is as aggressive and forthright as any 1960s public building. It incorporates a deep slope, multiple levels and entry points, and two major walkways bridging the roads that the developers couldn’t obliterate. Unlike some of its postwar precursors, such as Castle Market in Sheffield (of which more later), there’s no pleasure for the walker in traversing all these different ways of getting from A to B. This isn’t merely because the earlier building is picturesquely lived-in and dilapidated, but because it’s not seamless: you feel the movement from one place to another, you are able to enjoy it in some manner, and the spaces contain places where you could stop and think rather than be induced to consume at every possible moment. But it is a remarkably complex building, including within itself a deceptively small street façade to Above Bar, the high street it destroyed, a glazed viewing area as part of the food court, and a John Lewis store reached via (internal, hardly palpable) walkways. Inside is what the mall’s website describes as a ‘focal point’, a descendant of Gruen’s ‘social’ spaces, where the lifts and escalators are all clustered, giving a frictionless impression of constant movement. The gestures at contextualism are present, correct and pathetic. At the end which faces the Medieval Walls, the architects have given it a complimentary and functionless watchtower, and the shiny, plasticky cladding is infilled with rubble to be In Keeping (something which was also employed by Leon Berger in his tower blocks at St Mary’s and Shirley). This rubble is mostly at ground-floor level, where it is part of sloping walls, thick enough to withstand a blast or a ram-raid. It has a symbolic function quite aside from the pomo ‘reference’ to the medieval wall: to deter anyone who ought not to be here.

      

      WestQuay car parks

      WestQuay’s social condenser

      What makes it particularly malign is what happens at the back. Behind the walls and behind Above Bar is a large patch of wasteland²⁰ and WestQuay’s service areas, which take up a massive amount of urban space. They are made up mostly of multi-storey car parks, but also of the series of retail parks that accompanied the main mall—three of them, all themselves with attendant massive car parks. Needless to say, this is not a nice place to walk around. The entire area, a mile or more, is simply not for pedestrians. Although this might be expected on the Kentish hinterland of the M25, it bears repeating that this is right in the centre of a city, in an era when government white papers have endlessly rambled on about the walkable city. This centrality is part of its justification: it keeps people in the city. But the economy is exactly that of an out-of-town mall: reached by car, actively discouraging leaving the malls and venturing into the city around, uninterested in the possibilities of the city itself, and leaving the other side of town, the side that is not shopping mall, to rot. One upshot of this is the weekend violence along Above Bar, another is the continuing disintegration of St Mary’s. But service industry jobs were indeed duly created.

      WestQuay does make an effort in certain respects, and this effort makes it all the more tragic. You can promenade around it, as you can along the city walls. Yet there’s a spectacular incoherence to it all. Each part seems disconnected to the other, aside from the wipe-clean white cladding, and it’s never pulled together through any design idea of any sort because it’s simply impossible to do so. You simply can’t make a building like this into something legible unless the architects are exceptionally talented and/or conscientious (apologies to all at BDP for the implication that they may be neither). We can see here how over the last decade a Modernism of a sort has continued, not as a coherent ideology, an aesthetic or a formal language which embraces and intensifies the experience of modernity, but via the element of it lamented by urbanists and sentimentalists since the 1920s. This is a landscape where the car is dominant, where the idea of streets, walking, any element of surprise, are comprehensively designed out. Conversely, the only way to rediscover some kind of element of excitement in these spaces is to walk around (not inside) them, precisely because the planning itself does not want you to. You see things. You don’t see people, but you see intriguing things, some sort of autonomous logic of commerce almost without leavening or prettification. (I say almost because some of the car parks are faced in brick, the vernacular of some language or other.) Like the Western docks, WestQuay is an inhuman space where capital no longer needs to present a human face, where it thinks nobody is looking.

      

      Marchwood Incinerator

      What is appropriate about WestQuay, though, is the way in which it joins onto the container port almost imperceptibly. The roads in the Western Docks are called First, Second and Third Avenue. Follow them and you might reach the Millbrook Superbowl, where you can play that most American and blue-collar of sports, ten-pin bowling. Go back the other way along the approach to the M27, and the containers become an organizing principle. Stacks of containers full of goods on one side, stacks of containers full of people buying goods on the other, each in the form of coloured or corrugated boxes. The elegance of the principle is perfect and some enterprising post-Fordist is bound to combine the two sooner or later, completing the circle by transporting people in those boxes too, using them for transportation, shopping and living all at once. Sure, there are no windows in these things, but put in a few branches of Costa and nobody will complain. Then, untouched by human hands, the containers could be dropped in Dubai or Shenzen, the cruise ships of the twenty-first century. Just across the water from this container city is a gigantic incinerator, designed by Jean-Robert Mazaud. A perfect dome, not Rogers’s deflated tent, silvery steel, not Teflon. It turns rubbish into electricity, and it shines with sinister optimism.

      Chapter Two

      Milton Keynes: Buckinghamshire Alphaville

      Milton. Keynes. Surely it’s partly the name that explains why this is the most famous and/or notorious of the several New Towns designated and built by the Labour governments of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. Combining John Milton, poet of the English Revolution and of Paradises Lost and Regained, with John Maynard Keynes, the reformist economist who helped prevent a second revolution, it marries epic national poetry with careful reformism: the perfect Old Labour combination. Alternatively, it conflates Keynes and Milton Friedman, respectively the economists of the postwar consensus and of the post-1979 apotheosis of capitalism now collapsing around our ears. This seems highly appropriate given that Milton Keynes, a pet project of the Harold Wilson administration, was largely realized under Margaret Thatcher and hence became known as Britain’s token ‘successful’ new town, its charms (principally, its shopping mall) advertised on television right through the 1980s. It’s a crushing disappointment to learn that the name just comes from one of the villages incorporated into this town—or rather this ‘non-place urban realm’, being the term (borrowed from the American sociologist Melvin J. Webber) that the planners used to describe the dispersed, indeterminate motorcity they were