Architectural wonders
Norman Miller
Maybe it’s because London is finally too big for comfort that everybody suddenly seems desperate to move to the south coast of England. But where to buy? No one seems quite sure. The lure of the seaside is tempered with the worry that they’ll sink their capital in somewhere that’s fast fading from fashion. Well, here’s one cunning way of making sure that you invest in the right place — chose a place that some fancy architects have deemed up-andcoming enough to build there.
There’s the new seaside caff in Littlehampton for instance, the East Beach Café. Set to open in June, it is hardly your typical greasy spoon. In fact, you may need a cup of tea and a sit down just to get over the look of the building, which takes its inspiration from the warped mottling of a plank of weathered driftwood. A rippling shell made from sliced metal sections is currently being artfully rusted with hosings of seawater to provide a suitably coastal patina. A wide glass frontage gazes across the adjacent beach and ocean.
‘The seaside at Littlehampton has a raw beauty,’ says the architect Thomas Heatherwick. ‘Rather than make something swanky and shiny, we decided to make something that almost looks like it’s from the sea.’ ‘It’s an iconic building,’ says Jane Wood, who commissioned Heatherwick to create the rusty gem after buying a previously rundown café on the site in front of her seafront house. Wood sees the building as a key marker in the regeneration planned throughout Littlehampton. ‘Thomas’s design will enhance a wonderfully unspoilt English seaside town,’ she says.
Iconic building? Seaside location? Regeneration? Does this sound familiar? When Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum rose by the waterside in the previously unheralded Spanish port of Bilbao in the late 1990s it marked a turning point. The influx of cultural visitors has driven the transformation of the ugly duckling of the Basque coast into a cultural destination which no longer has to cast envious glances at neighbouring San Sebastian except in the matter of gastronomy.
For the Basque coast read the south coast. The East Beach Café is just one of the new architectural wonders giving this stretch of the Channel a 21st-century architectural makeover, and Gehry is part of the game here too.
A few miles east along the coast from Heatherwick’s rusted masterpiece in Littlehampton, the veteran Canadian architect (now 78) is bringing his distinctive style to Hove. Like Bilbao, Hove has always lived in the shadow of its more glamorous conjoined neighbour Brighton, in spite of its claims to be an altogether classier place; as the old joke goes, confuse the two and Hove folk will quickly supply the terse correction: ‘Hove, actually.’ When plans were first announced for Gehry’s project — a pair of bold crinkle-cut seafront towers flanking a gaudily coloured sports centre — they immediately sparked a vociferous campaign from locals who felt the buildings were out of keeping with the surroundings.
Gehry, on the other hand, claims his design is actually a direct homage to the location and its history. ‘A particular image of an Edwardian woman captured my imagina tion,’ he says, referring to a photograph spotted on a fact-finding trip. ‘The movement of the dress as she promenaded along the seafront provided the inspiration for the historical references and sculptured forms in the design.’ So, the creases of a billowing Edwardian dress scaled up to 80 metres high. Nice.
While the Nimbys raged, polls showed 80 per cent of locals were happy to see a project that will give Britain its first — and given his age, perhaps last — major Gehry building. It could also be seen as sticking a towering two fingers up at Brighton, as if to say, ‘Look how cool we are now.’ Hove’s neighbour, however, has its own new baby waiting in the wings. Like Gehry’s project, the i360 has come through a lengthy battle before finally getting the green light in March. Designed by David Marks and Julia Barfield, the i360 is — like their renowned London Eye — an observation platform, though one that is higher than and quite different from its cousin in the capital.
Spearing into the Brighton sky to twice the height of the city’s current tallest building, the i360 has been dubbed a ‘vertical pier’. And with views stretching up to 25 miles, you could call this a visionary creation in every sense. ‘A conservative estimate is that 500,000 people will come to the i360 every year,’ said Rachel Clark, general manager of the West Pier Trust, the organisation behind the project.
The setting of the i360 at the shore end of the derelict West Pier provides a sharply modern counterpoint to the twisted iron remnants of the old Victorian pier destroyed by fire in 2003. Happily, the new building will help fund work on its 1860s companion more a matter of removing tangled ruins on the beach itself than of tampering with the beautifully ravaged metal island just offshore. What the thousands of starlings who perform acrobatic manoeuvres around the old pier each dusk will make of the i360, mind you, is anyone’s guess.
Further west, another observation tower can take credit for kickstarting the current south coast architectural flourish. When the Spinnaker was completed on the Portsmouth dockside in late 2005, the BBC immediately plastered it over their regional TV credits as the area’s most striking symbol. Standing 170 metres high — three times the height of Nelson’s Column — the white metal structure curves beautifully above the city’s historic dockyard like a billowing sail on Nelson’s HMS Victory below: a perfect platform for naval-gazing, in other words.
Back in Brighton, you wonder what the rakish Prince Regent, later George IV, would have made of it all. As someone who in the 1820s was happy to let John Nash mix liberal dashes of Indian and Oriental exoticism with Regency opulence in the marvellously eccentric Royal Pavilion, he’d probably wonder why anyone would make a fuss. Cup of tea in Littlehampton, anyone?
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