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Cosier than Corbusier
By TERENCE BENDIXSON
IIKE other kinds of girdle, London's green ,.,belt is meant to be an aid to glamour, but it also has a violent effect on the guts of the body inside it. Where else in the world, apart from the special case of Hong Kong, can a major city government be setting out to build homes for 60,000 people on a low-lying marsh formerly thought suitable only for testing explosives and coping with sewage? This may be an austere but it is not an untrue description of the site of the old Woolwich arsenal and the Erith Marshes on which the Greater London Council is to build a riverside town within the built-up fabric of London.
Kenneth Campbell, the GLC's chief housing architect, takes a more romantic, John Piperish view of the place. He talks of the sandpipers, the wind that rustles through the rough grass, the huge ships that pass majestically up the Thames, and thinks it could be a magnificent place to live in. Plans of this town-within-a-town' published last week suggest that he is right.
Probably this is because Woolwich-Erith is one of several plum jobs that are attracting imagina- tive designers to the GLC—others are turning Hendon Aerodrome into a bright new suburb,
renovating Covent Garden and the probability of designing a yet to be announced new town.
They are rekindling some of the fire of fifteen years ago in the old LCC architects' department. Certainly the architects have dominated the design of Woolwich-Erith. A great snaking and undulating cliff of flats runs along Thames-side that will give spectacular views of the river and its shipping to large numbers of flats. A further arm of high buildings runs away from the river beside a main road from the hinterland. This dominating architectural skeleton should pro- vide the town with a landmark visible from everywhere—in strong contrast to the inverte- brate quality of the new towns or traditional suburbs in which it is all too easy to get lost for lack of reference points.
However, these linear buildings at Woolwich- Erith are more than just landmarks. Like the linear sequence of circus, terraces and crescent at Bath, they are places to live in, dominated by a grand design that is grand in planning and architecture. They will also have built into them main footways into the heart of the town, thus refining the ideas put forward ten years ago at Park Hill, Sheffield, one of the most notable pieces of post-war architecture in Britain. Needless to say, people and vehicles are carefully segregated at Woolwich-Erith, as they were at Park Hill. Bath's classic solution of making them share the same space is the one aspect of that grand design which has not worn well.
Within the arms of the high buildings that enclose the marshland site and protect it from the north winds, the GLC architects have spread out a pattern of terraced houses with gardens and low clusters of courtyard houses. Gone, thank goodness, are those sterile stalagmites called point blocks that lack homeliness even in a park-like setting. The brilliant and appallingly influential vision that Le Corbusier put forward in his plans for Paris in the 1920s has at last been utterly rejected.
It is only necessary to compare the London
County Council's justifiably famous Roehamp- ton neighbourhood of the early 1950s with this new scheme to see how architecture has de- veloped in this country in the past fifteen years, and begun to acquire a philosophy and per- sonality of its own. Various people have been saying that British architecture is likely to be the most influential force in Europe in the next decade; the design for Woolwich-Erith lends weight to the argument. Compared, for instance. with the Brands ensembles going up around Paris, and still striving after an unrelieved Haussmannesque monumentality, London's new marshland community is likely to be a very cosy place indeed. And cosiness, as Nikolaus Pevsner long ago pointed out, is almost the quintessence of Englishness.
Although a large part of the scheme is still only tentative, work will begin on the first stage this year. Furthermore, hundreds of trees are already being planted to screen the site from its unmentionable eastern neighbour—the ter- minal of one of London's regional rectums; this used to go by the superbly honest name of Southern Autfall, but is now called the Cross- ness Sewage Works.
The first stage contains two of the types of housing that will be used throughout—houses with small private gardens grouped around public courtyards and linear housing. These will form the very end of the arm of high buildings that stretches away from the cliff on the river bank. Because they are at the extremity, they are not piled up high. There are garages at the bottom and two layers of maisonettes on top. At the first-floor level there are also groups of small flats for the elderly, and running the length of the building is the footpath leading to the town centre and its adjacent yacht harbour.
Far from being squeezed out like toothpaste, this linear building, which will eventually be a mile long, has a continuously changing cross- section. The path built into it passes alternately along colonnades, across small squares, under and between the houses themselves. Like Michael Neylan's Harlow houses, about which I wrote recently, this is an exercise in providing spaces scaled to human sensitivity. The alleys and squares are of such a size that a passer-by might notice the colour of a single brick, smell the smell of fresh coffee, or burnt toast, turn a sharp corner and be surprised by the view. This is the very opposite extreme from the equally ex- citing but utterly different scale of a motorway that will also cross the site, discreetly shrouded by banks of earth and trees.
The timetable for building the Woolwich- Erith new town is the incredibly short one of fifteen years. It will be a tremendous achieve.: ment if it can be done, but with Britain's popu- lation. increasing at the rate it is, nothing less is acceptable.
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