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From the Newsletter- January 2005 |
LETTER to the EDITOR From Roland Harmer
DEVELOPERS AND PLANNING
A recent comment set me thinking. Were developers so wonderful, I was asked, that I thought that light shone out of them from unmentionable places?
So, are developers intrinsically bad?
It is easy to label them so, it certainly saves thought, argument and judgement.
However the forces of change and developers have brought the city to a state of perfection in many places. It is these states of perfection that we now, rightly, fight hard, often against developers, to preserve.
Consider the Avon Gorge. More than thirty years ago there was a proposal to build a large hotel that would have altered this famous Bristol and British scene. It was reading Tony Aldous’s articles about this in The Times, whilst living in far away Cambridgeshire, that I was introduced to various planning debates that were to rage for many years more. The Avon Gorge Hotel extension proposals*1 became a national cause célebre.
However, part of what makes the Gorge so special, is the speculatively built Windsor Terrace, which when it was built, was a dramatic intervention. To quote the new Pevsner ‘These buildings are not only a neo classical pastiche but also they are badly done’.*2 Now we look upon Windsor Terrace as an urbane piece of architecture. And this is not to overlook the most dramatic intervention of them all, the Suspension Bridge!
A more recent fight has been the battle over the proposal for a large building adjoining the southern side of the ss Great Britain site. The first proposals, had they gone ahead, would have diminished the historic ship and upset the townscape. The proposals were rejected at a public inquiry. Newer proposals are much kinder to the ship, and they promise to make fine architecture, but they are still large and are now subject to a second public inquiry.
The public inquiry of 2002 and other developments have revealed that the setting of the ship would have looked vastly different before 1940 when the Engine Factory, a 15 metre high (45ft) building, on the ss Great Britain site was demolished in the Blitz. Further the nearby MacArthurs Warehouse was much higher before a fire in the 1930s. And, of course, the ship only arrived in 1971.
So the argument, by the Civic Society and others, is not for the preservation of something ancient, it is for the preservation of something quite recent.
What seems to be happening is that we have a constantly evolving city and the Civic Society along with others, spot a fine piece of good townscape forming - a happy genus loci. Before it dissipates we shout FREEZE, hold it, we like that - just as it is!
Part of the genus loci of the area around the ss Great Britain and Canons Marsh is the large skies and low horizons*3, something rare and special in a city, which has provided a serene backdrop for the ship. It is this magical piece of townscape that we are about to lose - what are we going to gain in its place?
It appears that this process is not based on any absolutes or hard and fast rules but on a judgement. Judgements that we have to make.
In a world of concrete, steel, brick and glass, of reams of paper and endless meetings, it seems to come down to a gut feeling.
Roland Harmer
Tel: 0117 924 5638
email: rolandharmer@btinternet.com
*1 See the chapter The Grand Spa Hotel, page 62, in The Fight for Bristol, Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb.
*2 Windsor Terrace:"Its rampant disorder is, in its way, as instructive as all the perfection of Bath and an object lesson in how not to build a terrace" see the new Pevsner pages 217 and 218.
*3 The demolition of the Tobacco bonds, in one of the biggest post-war explosions in Europe, and their replacement by the horizontal Lloyds TSB building was, in part, to enhance the low lying nature of the area.
Filling in the docks - A magical place becomes ordinary: already the bowl of the docks is filling in. The intrusive ‘The Point’ block of flats and ‘feature building’ tower breaks the skyline and the Crest Nicholson development will be higher than the Lloyds TSB building. The ss Great Britain Trust’s proposed new Engine Building will blot out much of the view of the ship.
