Almost exactly a year ago I received a present, the Blue Crow Brutalist Map of London (I actually ordered it for myself, but let’s not spoil the romance). And, after setting myself another hair-brained challenge to visit all 54 building in 12 months, just over 365 days later I can happily report I successfully visited every building on the map in time, plus a few others for good measure.
Originally - to align this new adventure with my other loves, eating and drinking - I was planning to tie in my visits to the buildings with restaurants nearby, and then write all about it all on
Pies and Fries, my (not very accurately named) food blog. A wonderful conceit you (probably don’t) say. And you would be right. For a start, where do you go to eat in Thamesmead? (FYI we ended up having Morley’s Chicken – and a blazing row – while lost in Plumstead). Then there was the saveloy by Shad Thames, and the fry up in Catford. An adventure, sure, but hardly the pinnacle of haute cuisine.
Secondly, architecture and eating out are two rather disparate topics and as the concrete crept more dominantly into my life, it seemed more and more incongruous to sandwich these hulking forms between lobster brunches or pub crawls around the Isle of Portland - despite Portland stone featuring prominently in some famous Brutes.
So I came to the decision to set up this blog to document all the ‘building things’ in one place – along any other random musings – to spare my current handful of loyal readers (Hi, Mummy P) from indigestion. Unless you like burgers and Brutalism, in which case your cup truly runneth over.
I might quote a few facts, there might be a few figures (who doesn't love a pointless stat), but mostly it’s just a concrete geek and her opinions (others are available). Feel free to join in, whether you agree or not, and I hope that through this journey you might start to find exposed aggregate as fascinating as I do.
But anyway, before the buildings and other boring stuff, here’s a bit of my Brutal background:
While I’m now happy to admit the sight of a flyover or motorway bridge or chimney of a power station makes my heart beat a little bit faster, my introduction to Brutalism was not an easy one. After moving from North West London to the foot of the leafy Chilterns as a young child, there wasn’t a great deal of exposed concrete in my formative years - although I had managed to develop an obsession with the Tinsley cooling towers in Sheffield, glimpsed from the M1 as we drove to see my Aunt and Uncle in Leeds every Christmas.
So when I did properly encounter the hulking majesty of roughcast as a teenager, it all seemed rather stark and incongruous compared to my childhood dominated by Tudor beams and Victorian cottages. The shock of the new in the words of the fine art critic and polemicist, Robert Hughes.
And newer isn't always better - my first real memory of Breton brut was visiting the Southbank Centre in my early teens and thinking how dated everything looked and how if (or, as an ambitious 14 year old,
when) I was in charge, it certainly wouldn’t look so blocky, so hulking, so drab.
I vividly remember seeing the blue sign of the South Bank Centre (the same one I swoon over now) with its sloping slab serif ('Egyptian') capitals, and the rutted, grey surfaces of the Haywood Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall (which no doubt matched the English weather) and feeling strangely despondent that this would inform a visitor’s impression of the finest city in the world as they headed south over the Thames (god forbid they should get as far as Elephant and Castle, another latent love that I hadn't yet realised).
Fast forward a couple of years and my opinion had already begun to change, inspired, in no small part, by my burgeoning interest in the theatre; At the time I was lucky to have some passionate/mad drama teachers who were happy to take coachloads of stroppy teenage girls ‘up to town’, and many of the plays we saw were at the National Theatre and the Barbican - two hulking brutes of modern architecture that began to slowly change the way I felt about the Modern style.
This burgeoning interest was also helped along by my newly developed B&H habit and getting my first proper crush (who was fortuitously also in the same classes as me), so I consequently spent much of my time on these trips shivering on balconies, overlooking the Thames or the central lake respectively, while smoking fags, quoting the Smiths and looking cool. Well, the former two at least, although I also got the girl, so I can’t have been that insufferable…
Maybe it was first love, maybe it was the nicotine rush, but slowly my addiction began to take hold. Although - despite going to University to read for a English/history of art and architecture degree and living on a marvellously 60’s windswept campus on a hill (my room was far right middle row, above) - I still hadn’t had the prescience (or courage, in an era rife with brutal-bashing) to diagnose myself thus.
It’s only now, looking back through awkward photos of me outside, the magnificent, Boston City Hall in my early twenties, or the various pictures of brutal gems I have amassed, unthinkingly, over the years – snaps of 102 Petty France, hurriedly taken on my way to be married; the ‘Wilco Towers’ in Chicago, taken on my honeymoon; and the Undercroft on the Southbank, where I found the pillars more interesting than the skaters; not to mention all the underpasses and cooling towers and various pictures of housing estates and shopping centres in South East London – that I’ve finally confessed that concrete runs deep.
Serendipitously, and further cementing my passion, part of one of my first ‘proper' jobs involved working down in the basement at County Hall in Aylesbury. Fred Pooley’s (the building was later nicknamed Pooley’s Folly) bristling paean to modernism, it’s a building that still dominates the skyline for miles around, towering onimously over the original County hall - a Palladian style building, completed circa 1740 - directly opposite.
Yes, the lift provision is woeful, the heating knackered and the open space between the reference library and the shopping centre bleaker than Siberia in a whiteout, but what majesty in its the concrete and Rubislaw granite cladding, especially when the setting sun shines against the rows of convex windows.
Luckily my self-realisation has coincided nicely with a mini-resurgence of the style, Brutalism not being the dirty word it was twenty years ago; partly, perhaps, being due to the alarming rate that many of these mid-century modern buildings are now being razed. The new Central Birmingham Library may glow in the sunshine, but all that glitters is not gold and I already miss John Madin's brutal hulk, finally demolished in 2015, above.
Demolition is a cause to which I may show more sympathy – not all Brutalist architecture was created equal, and form must follow function to be truly Modern anyhow - if a surfeit of charmless Lego blocks, seemingly devoid of any more practical merit than those buildings they replace but seen as more 'aesthetically pleasing', weren’t springing up in their place. There you go; first mini-rant over....
Still, swinging balls aside, with all this reinvention and reappraisal - and the reassurance of the style through the neo-brutal such as the Tate Modern's Switch House extension, above - it a wonderful time to be Brutalist, with a plethora of blogs, books and Instagram accounts (I'll be adding favourites to my sidebar when I get myself organised) that celebrate concrete in all its many varied forms. There are also plenty of opportunities to take tours, attend talks and get political.
So if this is your bag – and if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing it is – and with many beautiful behemoths still unlisted and in danger of redevelopment, there's never been a better time to get involved with organisations like the
c20 Society and the
Modernist Society to help celebrate and preserve the Brutes for future generations.
If nothing else, I hope this blog might help inspire a little more attention (and a little more love) for some of these beautiful buildings. And don't just take my word for it, go and visit them for yourself - in many cases while you still can. It’s all very well reading a rambling pontification, complete with blurry photos, in a dusty corner of the internet, but nothing really beats the joy of being lost in the freezing drizzle while trying to find a municipal car park in Tower Hill, or subliminating as you trek around a Hackney housing estate in the high heat of summer. Just ask my long-suffering wife...
Here's to that inner concrete geek - brutal can be beautiful
Next up: The Brutal Tour begins…
