ABSTRACT
The first conclusion from this book is that the best urban places in the UK and Ireland are a match for anywhere in the world. We have neighbourhoods and urban places that stand comparison with the best in Europe. We have streets and squares that are beautiful urban spaces, teeming with life and vitality. We have creative quarters that have been regenerated and brought life back to our towns and cities. We have extraordinary urban interventions that create a little bit of magic that lifts the spirit and lodges a town or city in your memory. However, at the scale of the settlement the picture is not quite as rosy. The Cities section of this book is the only one that allows us to make a comparison between the cities of the UK and those on the continent. London, Dublin and Edinburgh were shortlisted in the first year of the Academy’s awards, which is not surprising because they are the three cities in the British Isles that really do stand comparison with the great cities of the world (although in very different ways). In this book we have the provincial cities of Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and NewcastleGateshead set alongside 11 continental cities, only two of which are capitals. If we are honest, the British cities still don’t come off tremendously well in the comparison. This is despite the huge improvements that have taken place in the last few decades. Manchester and Glasgow in particular had collapsed in the late 1970s and, while they did not quite plumb the depths of modern-
day Detroit, they were not far off. All four British cities have undergone a tremendous renaissance but, while all include quarters that are as good as any of the European cities, they still have a long way to go. Walk a few hundred metres from Manchester’s Northern Quarter, Glasgow’s Merchant City, Newcastle’s Grainger Town or Bristol’s Harbourside and you will be confronted by intrusive roads clogged with traffic, vacant sites, modernist housing estates and dereliction. It is not that the regeneration of these cities is a facade, but that so far it is yet to reach large parts of the conurbation. Walk a little further in each of these cities and you will encounter truly terrible suburban housing estates, and a nowheresville of sprawl, retail parks, industrial estates and motorway junctions. There is still much to be done. This might be a little unfair because in the visits to European cities we were only shown the best bits. The periphery of cities like Bordeaux is, if anything, worse than any British city in terms of sprawl and ugly out-of-town retailing. However, the cores of all of the continental cities in this book contain much larger areas of continuous urban vitality and form than the islands of urbanism in British provincial cities. This is even true in places like Hamburg and Freiburg that were largely destroyed in the war. Most of these European cities have extensive networks of urban streets containing a diversity of street life, enclosed by buildings of scale with active ground-floor uses. It is simple stuff, and once existed in British cities as well as those on the continent. But Britain had the misfortune to live through a period of planning in the 1960s when we thought that there was a better way of building cities based on the theories of the modernists and the traffic engineers. We destroyed our urban fabric and, having done such damage, the re-creation of good, simple urbanism is really difficult.
