Singing Streets of London
by Michael Hebbert, School of Planning and Landscape, University of Manchester (michael@hebbert.com), March 1st 2000
Eila Campbell grew up in Hampshire but became a lifelong Londoner when she joined Birkbeck College in 1938. Most of her time - she died in 1994 - was spent at 61 Belsize Park Gardens within earshot of Haverstock Hill, Adelaide Road and the Euston main line. She disliked the silence of the countryside. The background music of this city was part of her life. Her principal academic specialism was the historical study of map-making and interpretation. Her long involvement with Imago Mundi, first international learned journal of cartographic history, began in 1947. In 1972-3 she saved it from crisis after the withdrawal of its Dutch publishers, becoming editor and chairman of its board of directors. Her associate, secretary and publisher was Harry Margary of Lympne Castle Kent, a name familiar to many from the London Topographical Society reprints of the street plans of John Ogilby, William Morgan and John Rocque, which hang on our walls - the corridor at Birkbeck College, the staircase at University College London - as a daily reminder of the living history embodied in today's A-Z. So it is not inappropriate that the third Eila Cambell Lecture should be about the streets of London - Singing Streets of London.
There was some discussion about the title of this lecture. Was there meant to be a definite article or a preposition? Singing or swinging? A man from Swansea rang to enquire whether it was about nineteenth-century street performers - alas no. But I will begin with a modern busker's favourite, the 1969 folk revival number 'Streets of London':
Have you seen the old man in the closed down market
Kicking up the papers with his worn-out shoes
In his eyes you see no pride
Hand held loosely by his side
Yesterday's paper telling yesterday's news.
Have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London
Dirt in her hair and her clothes in rags?
She's no time for talkin'
She just keeps right on walkin'
Carrying her home in two carrier bags(refrain)
So how can you tell me you're lonely
And say that for you the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind.
The trip in this song is an encounter with people who have fallen through the net. Their troubles put your own into proportion. Something in the streets, in singer Ralph McTell's words, makes you change your mind. And so it certainly can, for streets - unlike shopping malls (of which London has rather few) - are public places, shared by every walk of life. But this evening I am less concerned with those disturbing encounters than with the unsung experiences we may suppose Ralph McTell has also enjoyed the past 35 years as a London resident, a regular at his local pub and on the terraces of Fulham football club. An ordinary London life, and very pleasant too. As more sheet music copies of 'Streets of London' have been sold (apparently) than any other tune in musical history, Ralph McTell could elect to live elsewhere. Like many other artists, this is where he prefers to stay.
And it is not hard to see why. If I metaphorically take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London, even the wards of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney whose statistical profile puts them at the bottom of the urban deprivation index, we will see shopping parades without vacancies; many new businesses; much ethnic business; life on the pavements; shutters up early and down late. In one of those clips of conversation that a cyclist overhears at traffic lights (they might have been talking about varicose vein surgery or the rules of cricket, but let's assume it was relevant), I heard a young American exclaim to her companion:
It's great! you can walk - and it's OK!
Of course it isn't always - Eila Campbell was mugged in a London street in her late years. But London has relatively less street crime than Britain's other large cities, just as it is has better mortality and morbidity rates, more pedestrianism but fewer street accidents. London is for its size a liveable city, and this lecture explores one aspect of that liveability, the connective tissue of streets. Like Ralph McTell's song, my lecture has three stanzas.
- The first looks in a general way at streets and what makes them OK.
- The second considers the streets of London, recapitulating an argument from my 1998 book London More by Fortune than Design.
- The third part is based on current work under a two-year Fellowship from the Royal Commission for The Exhibition of 1851, based in the department of Geography at Queen Mary & Westfield College: its theme is 'urbanism' and the present rediscovery of the conventional street by developers, architects and town planners.
Richard Roger's Urban Task Force confirmed what many of us had suspected, that if you spend time and look hard at the best contemporary urbanism in Europe and America, you see something to make you change your mind about the way we do things here. So this lecture on the streets of London ends on a dissonance for our new leadership to resolve.
The streets and what makes them OK
Let's begin with the streets - the point of the singing will become apparent in due course. Here is the architect Rick Mather in a recent interview about his masterplan for the South Bank:
The principles with a city are always the same: you start out with the street and with an active frontage on the street. You have a reasonable density, so it's convenient for people walking, and you have a variety of different types of accommodation...Streets are precious and wonderful things, particularly ones with lots of people on them, and they should be nurtured and reinforced by the public face that the buildings around them present.
None of Mather's statement is self-evident. That streets are precious and wonderful; that they should be nurtured and reinforced is a new and still experimental idea. Conventional wisdom for at least the past half-century has regarded them as an anachronism. The South Bank walkways have an interesting place in the history of alternative conceptions of urban space - they were Britain's first attempt to provide free-range pedestrian access upon a streetless elevated deck. Perhaps they should be listed! But the preference at the turn of the new century is for a simpler and ancient conception of urbanism: a town plan formed out of interconnected thoroughfares, and a street formed out of the joined-up front elevations of buildings. The virtue of this conventional configuration of the built environment, as learned the hard way from comparison with non-street alternatives, it that it is both a corridor and a room, a thoroughfare and a place in its own right. The passage of traffic along the thoroughfare brings activity, active frontage attracts pedestrian footfall and the passing vehicle. For buyers and sellers of goods and services the physical setting of highway, pavement and facade allows display, comparison and mutual scrutiny to precede face-to-face dealing. The same qualities underlie the much greater web of noncommercial transactions - civic memory, the social capital of neighbourliness - that mean for the stranger and the resident that you can walk, and it's OK.
The street is a universal phenomenon, and yet our understanding of it remains curiously limited. The one outstanding attempt at a systematic theory of the urban street was by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, a best-seller and a seminal book, though the seed fell on stony ground. I certainly don't recall seeing a question on Jacobs in 27 years on the examination boards of British planning schools. Jacobs, who has no degree and takes 'a scunner towards credentialism', has always refused to engage with academics and we seem to have reciprocated. Ditto town planners, a profession whom she harshly descibes as 'brain dead' because of the way planning codes and standards have worked against old streets and made it impossible to build new ones. Her main concern with the hollowing out of the North American city is not architectural loss or environmental damage but the destruction of the inventive economic life of close-grained, busy streets, which in her opinion it was the task of town planning controls to nurture and reinforce.
Nobody could deny the literary power of Jane Jacobs' book but her many critics, mostly male urban professionals, discounted it as the romantic viewpoint of a middle-class Greenwich Village dweller, a bohemian and a sentimentalist. More than one review drew attantion to the marijuana haze in local hostelries. Roger Starr of the Citizen's Housing and Planning Council of New York took particular exception to Jane Jacobs's use of the metaphor of the ballet of the sidewalk to describe a day in the life of Hudson Street. It reminded Mr Starr of pre-war musical movies starring the singer-dancer Grace Moore. In 'Mooritania', as he called it, everyone was always ready to down tools and strike up a tune:
The appearance of Miss Moore, blonde and furred, on the stoop of a brownstone house was enough to provoke her neighbours to frenzied song: Western Union boys would vault from their bicycles; shopkeepers run from their customers; hack drivers and policemen quit their warring - all to gather spontaneously in the street where they could be led by a carefree pretzel peddler in choral support of Miss Moore's impromptu vocalizing...Until I picked up Mrs. Jacobs' book, the toil and trouble of my life had made me forget all about Mooritania. But Jane Jacobs, I discovered, lives there.
Starr wrote in a spirit of ponderous ridicule about Jane Jacobs' stage-set metaphor of a polluted inner-city slum district. But her image of the street as a dramatic microcosm is a good deal older than the Grace Moore movies. Modern theatrical history begins in Renaissance Italy with the fixed scenogaphy of comic, tragic and rustic streets, and the tradition remains alive and well in the outdoor lots of Coronation Street and Albert Square. Jane Jacobs' analysis of the soap opera of Hudson Street, where indeed she lived, is so far from sentimental that some of her 1961 reviewers found it odd for a proclaimed urbanist to give so much attention to the management of crime and violence. Nor was there any sentimentalism in her understanding of traffic, business turnover and property rents, issues - incidentally - quite familiar to Eila Campbell whose parents ran a series of shops in the Bournemouth region based on the principle of developing trade and selling at a profit: 'their luck was uneven', notes her brother Peter Campbell. Jane Jacobs' argument was that part of the luck in business success or failure can be found in the fixed setting of the street, and the human behaviour it permits, encourages or prevents. Her aesthetic metaphor of dance-drama is not romantic evasion but a way of describing these elements of structure, rhythm and response that enable pretzel-sellers to make a living in the real-world Mooritanias.
Musical metaphor has never been far below the surface in subsequent writings on streets. Jacobs' fellow New Yorker writer, the sociologist William Hollingsworth Whyte (who died last year) spent a good deal of time photographing, filming and measuring public spaces to understand how we like to sit, stand and move out of doors. In another seminal text of the new urbanism, City - Discovering the Center (1989), he makes a detailed plot of the number of sitters, spacing distance and length of sit on some popular ledges around Seagram Plaza in Manhattan. It occurs to him that the all-day ledge chart with its dots and dashes looks like a player piano roll, a work by Conran Nancarrow perhaps. He looks forward to hearing its music played vivace. Jane Jacobs' disciple, the San Antonio journalist Mike Greenberg, knows jazz theory and shows a brilliant eye for sidewalk detail in his book The Poetics of Urbanism. Noting in passing Goethe's metaphor of architecture as frozen music, he develops over almost 20 pages - the length of this lecture - the analogy of street and music: the stride (25 to 30") as the basic pulse or metronomic beat, building bays (6-10') as the measure, a facade as a phrase, a long wall a drone, a neighbourhood for a movement, and the whole experience of walking from home to shops and back as a dance rythmn of strong and weak beats, accents and syncopations, staccato attacks and legato passages. When our own Urban Task Force report Towards an Urban Renaissance wants to describe what it seeks in city streets it uses the word 'vibrancy' in preference to the 'vitality and viability' of official government policy documents. Vibrancy might be a sexual metaphor - another image of movement and response - but the word is most used of the vocal chords, the vibrating column of air, the expression of human personality in song. Vibrant streets are streets that sing.
The streets of London
And so to London. Samuel Johnson, writing in 1753 on the intricacy of the divisions of labour within this city's economy, opens with the image of a newly arrived rustic, stunned less by what he sees but by what he hears, the multiplicity of cries in the streets. In pre-industrial London the singing was actual, loud and all-pervasive. Each trade had its melody: chiropodists, woodcutters, corksellers, ropemerchants, chimney sweeps. The measure of the city's greatness was a dawn to dusk polyphony in the open streets. Handel said it was a source for some of his best tunes and Orlando Gibbons a century and a half earlier transcribed it into madrigals, to the accompaniment of a consort of viols, beginning before dawn
God give you good morrow my masters, past 3 o'clock and a fair morning
and continuing until midnight
12 o'clock
look well to your lock
your fire and your light
and so good night
by way of eighty cries, including New fresh herrings, Rosemary and bays - quick and gentle, Buy a new almanack, What coney skins have ye maids? Will ye buy any straw? Hard onions hard, Ripe onions ripe, and the irresistible
Sweep chimney sweep
Sweep chimney sweep
Sweep chimney sweep misteress
With a hey derry derry derry sweep.
From the bottom to the top
Sweep chimney sweep
Then shall no soot fall in your porridge pot
With a sweep derry derry derry sweep.
Tudor Cheapside was a real Mooritania in which every trader was a soloist and every Jack and Jill within earshot a member of the chorus, inwardly registering the music and what it offered. This urban vernacular musical tradition could not survive the invention of shop windows, chain stores, billboards and mass consumerism and was already in steep decline at the turn of the twentieth century. From the 1880s up to the Second World War, as London street singers tailed into extinction, readers of the Musical Times used to send reports of sightings and transcriptions of their cries, one of the last (1934) being the haunting modal call of the Mitcham lavender sellers which Ralph Vaughan Williams had used in his London Symphony of 1919. No doubt the occasional Any old iron? and clang of a bell can be heard somewhere today in the 600 square miles of London's streets, and street traders still create a din of symphonic proportions in the great open air markets of Romford and Walthamstow, even if it is hardly tonal. But my point is this - the music in the Jane Jacobs sense, the Mike Greenberg sense, is alive and well.
When Jane Jacobs visited London in 1967 and made a speech in praise of the city what she emphasised were not the physical attributes of King's Road, Carnaby Street, Abbey Road and the other spaces of swinging London, but the inventiveness of the business service sector, the ancillary enterprises, the feeder economy. London's ability to produce new things had won it in her estimation 'a longer period of uninterrupted, self-generating economic growth than any city in the world'. Thirty years later her point was being made once again by the creative explosion of the design, arts fashion and media sector all around the arc of dense inner-city streets from Whitechapel to Clerkenwell. What had started as a passive relocation trend amongst miscellaneous businesses priced out of the West End developed during the 1990s into a series of specialised market quarters with their own locational pull. Activity seeded in railway arches and derelict industrial workshops demonstrated Jane Jacobs' argument about the economic importance of old buildings and her principle of diversity as the source of innovation - a principle now formalised and tested by urban economists under the theory of dynamic agglomeration economies: and her emphasis on the street as a transaction space is vividly illustrated by the huge crowd of media types who spill out on a summer evening all over Charlotte Road, depriving cabbies of what used to be a nice quiet short cut round the Shoreditch bottleneck.
A media quarter on the fringe of a banking and financial district has parallels in other global cities. The wider phenomenon of the London street network is truly distinctive. The story of its creation was most famously told the Danish architectural historian Steen Eiler Rasmussen's 1937 book London The Unique City. The street plan is the product of more than 300 years of speculative expansion without the restraint of physical walls or administrative limits: expansion especially along the old roads leading from the valley floor to the ring of towns on the rim of the London Basin - Dartford, Croydon, Kingston, Uxbridge, Watford, Barnet, Epping and Romford, routes along which everything joined tentacularly, consolidated and backfilled on a web of travel by omnibus, commuter train, tram and at last underground and tube to make a dispersed, low density, many-centred metropolis. In one of the Father Brown stories, G.K. Chesterton describes Valentin, head of the Paris Police and 'one of the most powerful intellects in Europe', sitting glumly on the yellow omnibus as it grinds northward from Trafalgar Square:
The long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into length after length like an infernal telescope. It was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the universe and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnel Park.
Londoners enjoyed their excursions out of town but shared Valentin's glumness about the length of time it took to get there. Despite the efforts of H G Wells, the metropolis never came to terms with its own size as would the later hundred-mile cities of Los Angeles, Tokyo or Shanghai. Social reformers continually called for controls over the growth of the metropolis, an impossibly romantic notion in a free-enterprise economy, which was suddenly made feasible by wartime rationing and administrative centralisation. Thanks to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, the geographical moment when interwar low-density sububia had infilled the nineteenth-century commercial radials to the rim towns was fixed in perpetuity as the definitive shape of London.
The phenomenon of the green belt and its effect on the outer metropolitan area have been thoroughly studied by geographers. Less attention has been paid to the effects of containment on London itself. Once so prodigal in its growth, London has enjoyed 50 years of restraint. The green belt, a good in its own right, has also been good for the city, breaking the old taken-for-granted connection between upward and outward mobility, and accelerating the reuse of its huge (and still unexhausted) stocks of derelict land. What interests us tonight is the way it has revitalised those infernal telescopic streets, keeping bus routes and train networks viable where in cities of lower density and looser texture they have died. This outcome was unintentional. It was no purpose of green belts to give a new lease of life to the turnpike roads: on the contrary they were part of a larger package of policies which included the deliberate and complete removal of the old shop-lined radial streets and their replacement by planned order of urban space with traffic here, pedestrians there, retailing in precincts, manufacturing on industrial estates, other business in commercial zones, and everything separated by foliage, density reduction and pastoralisation being the key. Jane Jacobs was dismayed at the prevalence of garden-city thinking when she visited in 1967. For her, London's continuing economic success depended on keeping - as, more by fortune than design it did keep - the relatively high density and compact street environment in which, as she put it, 'every sort of problem comes to a head' .
Perhaps the most important problem to come to a head in postwar London was its transformation from a largely monoglot and entirely white city to its present state of multicultural diversity. Thirty years on, we can see that the racial prophesies of the late Enoch Powell were right on the figures but absolutely wrong on the facts, because they assumed no human community could absorb such demographic shifts. But London has done so, and part of the reason is environmental and can be found in the economy of its streets and the permeability of its districts. In particular, those main road frontages laid down in a hodge-podge by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ribbon development and condemned by the planners of the mid-twentieth century have taken, as I wrote in More by Fortune than Design, a wonderful new lease of life,
surviving to provide hundreds of miles of premises which are, by definition, visible for trade and physically accessible, mostly small scale and largely unencumbered by the zoning restraints which apply to non-conforming uses within residential areas. A bus ride in any direction from Trafalgar Square takes you down a radial corridor with certain common characteristics: low vacancy rate of premises, high degree of flexibility and functional mixture, frequent occurrence of specialist retail districts (often linked to adjacent workshop industry and import-export warehousing), a preponderance of small-scale ownership, and an overwhelming preponderance of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Rasmussen said the English were not so much a nation of 'shopkeepers' as of 'self-confident tradespeople'. That applies particularly to the new English [I should have said the new Londoners] who colonise the mixed-use corridors which survive and flourish all the way from the City fringes to the edge of the green belt.
We still know surprisingly little about these processes. In work in progress at the Bartlett, Manos Stellakis has illustrated the potential with a study of business activity, building improvement and relocation of just one group, the Greek Cypriots, along one corridor, the 29 bus route. It could be replicated hundreds of times over. Aggregate information on small shops, independent businesses, and ethnic ownership is tantalisingly scarce - you would never guess or glimpse their importance in the daily life of the city from the old Statistical Abstract for Greater London or its successor, London Facts and Figures.
The blind spot was exposed a couple of years ago by Professor John Shepherd here at Birkbeck College. His South East Regional Research Regional Laboratory, SERRL, always sends a Christmas card showing statistics from an unexpected angle. 1998 was a two-colour card of shops in London. In green it showed retailing as conventionally defined and incorporated into the official policy framework for London, an evenly spaced distribution of discrete nuclei, London's 'shopping centres'. But what dominates the card, in red, is a radically different pattern, evoking the historic pattern of London's expansion. It was an original plot, by SERRL, of the actual locations of London's shops and services, scanned in directly from the postcodes of trading addresses in the Yellow Pages. Since the data are unavailable, you must overlay in your own minds what you know about the ethnic profile of business in any particular district. Mooritania is alive and well in Leyton High Road. Behold the singing streets of London!
Urbanism and the present rediscovery of the conventional street by developers, architects and town planners
Now, we have had half an hour about what is right about the streets of London. I want to devote the remaining time to what is wrong. The question is huge and could be addressed from many angles, with traffic and transport at the top of the list and noise, pollution, litter and policing close after. What follows reflects my current period of reflection with the support of a fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, on the topic of 'urbanism'.
This concept runs deeper than style controversies between traditionalists and modernists. It reflects an international rediscovery of those basic principles which, as Rick Mather says, are always the same: the street, active frontage, reasonable density, variety of building use and ownership. If we get these things right, the urban economy can take care of the rest. The new urbanism is still an emerging movement. The underlying ideas have already proved controversial in contemporary Berlin and could soon become so in the US presidential campaign. In the draft plan for inner Berlin of 1997, Minister Peter Strieder gives a lucid explanation of the city government's philosophy of urbanism: it parallels the 1993 Charter for the New Urbanism, newly published in book form as an accessory for Al Gore's baggage train.
More telling than any written arguments are the multiplying practical demonstrations that street space can once again be made to resonate. The new urbanism proves itself in three distinct situations:
- First, in the reordering of street space and a new arbitration between all the rival claims on the canyon floor: traffic flow, pedestrian movement, cycling, signage, lights, service equipment, vegetation. From the transformation of the Champs Elysées to Boston's Big Dig, this is the new golden age of the urban boulevard.
- Secondly, the new urbanism shows itself in an increasingly robust and uncompromising attitude towards building design. Whether you are a star architect or a provider of crude commercial box space, and whether you are building in Munich or Milwaukee, your elevations should contribute to the street, and that requirement is often codified: so much window space, so many doors, such transparency. For as the Charter for New Urbanism says: 'A primary task of all urban architecture...is the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use.'
- Thirdly and most ambitiously, the new urbanism is revolutionising the approach to new urban tissue. The density of town extensions and greenfield projects is tightening, highway requirements are narrowing, the street is being reinvented. Once again, the tendency is generic, from Mukuhari New Town in Tokyo Bay to Bois-Franc on Montreal island, from Bussy St-Georges outside Paris to Kirchsteigfeld outside Berlin. And what of London? Let me take the three aspects in turn - streetsscape, building design and town layout.
Streetscape
In the matter of streetscape London starts with the disadvantage of being a British city, for as a general observation we have some of the harshest street environments in Europe, and some aspects of the problem such as the density of outdoor advertising, are at their most intense in the capital. After the abolition of the GLC a national quango, the Royal Fine Arts Commission, commissioned a study which found as follows:
Too much of London has become dirty, degrading and depressing. Underfoot litter abounds, scattered by people and the wind...Meanwhile men, women and children, for whom the city exists, are squashed onto pavements narrowed by guard rails, bollards, grey poles etc...Visually streets have become a nightmare, a situation which is compounded by a proliferation of yellow lines, yellow flashing signs (usually dirty), estate agency boards, graffiti and flyposting
Thirteen years later another quango, English Heritage, has commissioned another study of the same problem. The report, to be published next week, can point to a few examples of improvement and one outstanding transformation - the Strand by the City of Westminster working with the Civic Trust. But the general picture is one of steady deterioration. Streets for All contains the astonishing and dismal statistic, based on empirical survey, that more than 70 per cent of street furniture in London is unnecessary, duplicated or redundant. That may be an underestimate in the case of this recently completed mews (sic) development in SE23: it has 20 houses, 20 road signs. The clutter crisis is about quality as much as quantity. Central government has scaled up the size of traffic signs on trunk roads, and introduced a new and fast-breeding species of telematic signs which straddle the pavement like elephants. Telecoms and cable control boxes have multiplied under the permitted development rights of the supply companies. The advertising industry's fastest-growing product has been the free-standing back-illuminated nine-sheet pavement poster. Parking revenue has multiplied, and so have its control notices. The centrally appointed Traffic Director for London, who runs the Red Routes for an annual consideration of £21m, has assaulted the main roads of the capital with signs - 13,600 at the last count and rising steadily. Many stand on their own poles, or lean drunkenly - we learn from the Traffic Director's Annual Report for 1998-1999 that his contractors had to repair, adjust or replace no fewer than 6,589 of them over the previous 12 months - that's 48 per cent of the total population. So street life is tough for London's signs, but it's tough for us all in what English Heritage calls this:
chaotic jumble of traffic signs, bins, bollards, guard rails and street furniture in a variety of different designs set in a sea of garish paving...Chaotic and cluttered streets...a symptom of a community in decline with low self-esteem...
Building design
While the street environment deteriorates, what about the buildings which frame it and give it life? The general level of architectural respect for urban context is good in London, because its streets set a strong morphological rhythm, and its high land values and property prices encourage modern developers to do as their forbears did and build right up to the pavement. Besides, some notable patrons of street architecture are active in the capital, such as the Mercer's Company and Peabody Trust. But let me focus on the continuing problem of architecture that does not fit. Our only interest is the seam where the building joins the pavement. Remember Rick Mather: architecture must show a public face on the street. In two words, that means windows and doors. No orifices, no voice, no singing.
In the United States, Holly Whyte began to campaign against blank walls in the 1970s and, by the time of his death in 1999, could see many authorities had put in place code requirements which make modern buildings behave as buildings traditionally behaved, 'forthrightly addressing the public realm'. Here we do not use prescriptive codes but rely on more emollient methods of guidance, critique and encouragement. In its elegantly worded observations on important planning applications, the Royal Fine Art Commission (founded 1924, replaced in 1999 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) returned time and again to the issue of a project's failure to face outwards a contribute an active frontage to the street. Responsiveness to street context was one of the issues which John Gummer as Secretary of State for the Environment managed to write into national planning policy just before the 1997 general election, advice which the present DETR will soon amplify with a comprehensive national manual on urban design. The London boroughs already have a shelf full of advisory material on the topic, and some at least have set out clear and constructive policies about the expected contribution of building to street.
But as Francis Tibbalds emphasised, in a study of the quality of London's streets just before his untimely death, urban design has to judged by its outcomes. If we followed W H Whyte's suggestion, measured blank wallspace and calculated an empirical index for a cross-section of London streets, we would find that in many contexts the trend is upward. And worryingly for the Urban Task Force, the blank wall count is rising fastest in areas of high density development such as the Docklands. Density does not itself guarantee urbanity. On the contrary, London's vigorous monoculture of apartment blocks with ground level parking is extending the dead realm of streets that do not sing.
The blank wall problem is not evident in Madrid or Paris or Copenhagen. Developers would simply have to go back to the drawing board until they had figured out a way of presenting an active frontage on the thoroughfare. For Hans Stimman, building director of the city of Berlin, rebuilding the relation between plot and street, architecture and Stadtraum, is the beginning and the end of his task. Attitudes are less clear-cut in London's town halls. One borough development plan puts the placing and grouping of buildings in relation to the street halfway down a schedule of 13 design considerations that includes not prejudicing the amenity of neighbours, fumes, smells, smoke, ash, dust, soot, grit, disabled access, public art, off street servicing, carparking, the land use needs of children and carers, and the positive benefits of landscape and nature conservation.
The inclusion of landscaping in this list betrays a general British confusion about the place of vegetation in the street environment. For Herr Stimman it has none unless it is a tree, but blank walls with a dingy selection of shrubs in front are often offered by developers and gratefully accepted by London boroughs as a street amenity and - who knows? - a little step towards 'sustainability'. The basic issue here is that urban design policies, where they exist, often sit alongside entirely contradictory principles, policies for soft landscape, rules that require set distances between buildings, rules against overlooking windows, requirements for parking spaces, and in absolute contradiction of the idea of a boulevard, highway engineering standards that prohibit frontage development upon main thoroughfares. It can be no surprise that developers fail to respond when the regulatory framework is so ambiguous.
Town layout
The lack of will is all the more evident in the third aspect of contemporary urbanism, the layout of new urban districts. How is London using its huge - and continuing - windfall of brown land from sea gas, de-industrialisation, and port modernisation? The answer is instantly evident from the A-Z pages of east and south-east London. The city's largest new urban development sites are a sequence of quasi-suburban environments structured and dominated by the highway engineer. Dual carriageways define and separate a series of monofunctional development plots. Vegetation and back fences line the distributor roads, the feeder roads, the access roads. Only inside the development enclave, the pod, does building face building, and then often in a grotesque caricature of urban picturesqueness.
Thus we have the worst of all worlds - undersized homes with paltry gardens - or none - in a setting of oversized infrastructure. There is no recognition of the general lessons to be learned from London street patterns, and no acknowledgement or attempt to join up with the tissue of immediately adjacent streets, not even in the Millenium Village, the supposed national prototype of twenty-first-century living on Greenwich Peninsula. How different it would look if we had extended the familar tissue of Charlton, Greenwich and Blackheath across the gas lands, in the Dutch manner. The most conventional solution would have been the most prophetic.
Having waxed lyrical about London's streets in the first part of this lecture I promised to end on a down beat, and Red Routes, blank walls and a trip along the Thames growth corridor are a very effective way of doing that. But they are not quite the end of the story. The difficulties London has experienced are not unique, they can be paralleled anywhere in Europe or North America where people are now trying to breathe new life into the discarded, rediscovered form of urban street. What came naturally in 1900 requires supreme will and ingenuity in 2000. The greatest obstacles are institutional: the vested power of the highway interests, specialist developers, financial institutions, the recreation industry and the environmental lobby. The fact is producers and users of urban space have grown very comfortable with the conventional twentieth-century arrangement, the Thamesmead approach. It gives each of us our own domain. The urban street, on the other hand, is a promiscuous space: everything must rub against everything else - that is the difficulty, but also the source of its resonance.
One of the important contributions of Lord Roger's Urban Task Force has been to squarely address the issue of institutional resistances and consider how it might be met. Their report looks particularly at the aspects of finance, the legal framework, and professional training and values. But there is another aspect too: local leadership. In the last resort the institutional impasse cannot be broken by quangos, Ministers, or national urban design initiatives, it has to be of the place, local. In the cities of Barcelona, Grenoble, Berlin, Milwaukee, Chicago, the breakthrough for the new urbanism occurred in the Mayor's office.
Remember how the Whittington chapter of mayoral history began with voices in the air? We want our new Mayor to hear and respond to the singing streets of London.
