Arts
The street furniture fiasco
Alastair Best
One of the more off-beat entertainments in store for Londoners this Silver Jubilee Year will be a display of bollards, lamp posts, crash barriers and other items of street furniture. The exhibition will be a permanent feature of the new landscaped garden which Neville Conder and Stuart Taylor are laying out on the old Festival of Britain site, between County Hall and Hungerford Bridge. For most of us—living as we do in a miasma of dented railings, drunken road signs and overflowing litter bins—it will certainly be a n°vel experience to contemplate street furniture in mint condition. Yet for all that n seems an odd way to beautify an urban garden; we escape to our parks to try to forget that such gruesome artefacts exist. There is not much doubt that street furniture—like mass catering—is something the Bra's') do extremely badly. The corresPondence columns of The Times re-echo With the cultural shock of those just returned from Bonn, Milan, Paris—or other Places where they order these things better. Sir Colin Buchanan was the latest to put pen to Paper. 'I do not refer,' he wrote, 'to the Complex problems of inner city areas or anything like that, but simply to the architecture of buildings and the design. of everything else that is seen and used by the public, eluding the seats, the litter bins, the walking surfaces, the walls, the lights, the planting, the bus shelters . . . When I compare our standards in these matters with those of many other European countries, I conclude that we are far behind, with a great deal of our work being cheap, shoddy, commonPlace and badly put together. This is a pity, because the quality of a nation's archilecture and public design is an index . .. of its level of culture.' .„ Sir Colin was writing with the disInlisionment of one who has • laboured Mightily —and largely in vain—to improve the quality of the public environment. In his classie report Traffic in Towns he introd, uced us to the tantalising notion of the environmental area'; he has sat on committees without number, lectured and advised all over the country; he has even vetted individual pieces of street furniture tor inclusion in the Design Council's annual catalogue of acceptably designed British products. Yet after more than a decade London can only offer a hundredYard stretch of South Molton Street as s,onlething we can be reasonably proud of (and several, such as Carnaby Street and the Pathetic compromise of Oxford Street, of Which we should be ashamed), while the de of street equipment is as cheap and unimaginative as ever. Even the normally oPtirnistic Sir Paul Reilly, the director of
the Design Council, has gloomily admitted that there has been no perceptible improvement in the way in which we furnish and maintain our public places—things were probably worse than they were when the crusade started.
Why should this be? There seem to be at least three main reasons. In the first place, although there is no shortage of bodies dedicated to improving our surroundings the Civic Trust's annual directory is several pages long—none of them has any genuine power. Like head waiters (`might I suggest the cobbles and the striped awnings, sir?') they are only aciing in an advisory capacity. Secondly, very few manufacturers regard street furniture as anything more than a sideline. A lighting column—to take one example—is just a handy way of selling more steel, concrete or aluminium. Another industry makes the lamp, and it is often left to the local authority buyer to harness the two together to make the pantomime horse of the street lantern. The chaotic nature of the market—with local authorities purchasing their columns from one source and adapting them to lamps from another— actually encourages manufacturers to produce an ever-larger assortment of designs and shapes, in the hope of netting a bigger share of the market. In a single short stretch of dual carriageway near Roehampton I recently counted three different column types mated to as many different lamp designs: a neat enough illustration of the third main reason—the extraordinarily cumbersome and ad hoc way in which the streets are equipped and maintained. The clutter and chaos we see all around us is a microcosm of the disorganisation of the authorities responsible for public spaces. The putting-up of a mere telephone kiosk, Post Office engineers will tell you, entails the suffocating participation of over a dozen different departments. And anyone trying to create a pedestrian precinct soon finds himself grappling with a slow-motion stage army, with representatives of the Post Office, the Fire Brigade, the police, the gas, electricity and water boards, and various local government officials manoeuvring like unhorsed mediaeval knights, encumbered by their terms of reference. The successful pedestrianisation schemes in Britain—in places far away from London, like Leeds and Norwich—are the result of a great corporate banging together of heads.
Of course it is often possible to summon up the will-power and cash to deal with special areas in city centres—and Jubilee Year is a splendid opportunity for making loyal environmental gestures—but what about the rest of the built environment where we all live and work ? Why should that be left to the mercy of indifferent manufacturers and cumbersome bureaucrats? Surely it is possible to co-ordinate the design of street furniture so that our, litter bins harmonise with our lighting columns and our bollards with our benches? As the streets are already furnished with a great deal of standard designs why not standardise the lot?
Just such arguments as these were put forward by the planners of Milton Keynes to support their proposals for a completely co-ordinated range of street furniture for the new city. It was the first time a public body had seriously got to grips with what, in planning jargon, is known as infrastructure. Milton Keynes, the argument ran, had no true identity; it was a loose coalition of two existing towns, a number of villages and a great deal of new development, all of it deliberately variegated in character. The best way to bind it all together would be to co-ordinate the handling and furnishing of the public spaces. The mere sight of a lighting column or bollard as you swung off the Ml would be enough to inform you that you were within the hallowed confines of the Designated Area. The new designs, based on square, hollow steel sections, had a compelling rationale when brought together on a four-colour double-page spread in the Infrastructure document, but they looked rather less compelling when they began to appear, in prototype form, on the lawn outside the Development Corporation's HQ at Wavendon Tower. There were murmurs that, at a time of rapidly escalating steel prices, some of the products were simply too expensive to make (the big twelve-metre columns were especially prodigal in their use of steel); even on visual grounds, it was pointed out that the designs would look better in some places than others—and why was it necessary to impose a family resemblance on such unrelated items as benches and crashbarriers? Eventually, after several years' struggle between warring departments and outside consultants, the co-ordinated scheme was abandoned. Milton Keynes's present street furniture policy is either a rather tepid compromise or a triumph of pragmatism. Equipment is being bought off the peg where possible, and only designed afresh where there seem to be genuine gaps in the market. The choice of home-produced fare is so paltry, however, that the city's Image and Infrastructure Group have had to shop abroad for their pressed steel lighting columns, and design their own litter bins, bus shelters and benches (taking great pains to ensure that none of these objects has any family resemblance whatever). Their most ingenious stroke, perhaps, has been to develop a kit of parts which makes the erection of road signs—even by unskilled labour—a relatively foolproof operation. So if you are driving through North Bucks and you notice that the road signs are uncharacteristically smart and upright, the chances are that you are in Milton Keynes.
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