BRITAIN’S LOST CITIES

By Gavin Stamp

If you travel much outside London, you cannot accept seeing that Britain’s secondary cities have been pulverized into some of the ugliest in Europe. Much of the worst of the damage was done not by the Luftwaffe, but by the British themselves in their postwar reconstruction. Indeed, many postwar planners positively welcomed wartime destruction: It liberated them to proceed with schemes they might otherwise never have had the chance to try. Some of the most painful losses — like the great palaces of London’s West End and the medieval buildings of Canterbury — were inflicted in the 1930s.

Stampeded by political and aesthetic ideologies that disparaged the built legacy of the Victorians, dazzled by the perceived imperatives of the automobile, Britain’s town governments sacked their 19th century central cities. Places like Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester, cities that had once expressed their local pride in buildings meant to endure for ages, demolished to make way for roads and roundabouts, parking lots and 1970s brutalist public buildings.

In Britain’s Lost Cities, the architectural historian Gavin Stamp records what has been lost with an impressive collection of photographs and coolly poignant descriptions.

The cities Stamp reveals were not necessarily beautiful exactly. You can see why the post-World War II generation might have found the destroyed buildings heavy, drab, and oppressive — especially when coated in soot from coal factories. But had they been spared, our wealthier era could have made good use of them — as it has made good use of what has been left behind in places like New York’s Soho and London’s Docklands. Cleaned, refurbished, opened, wired, they could have provided a humane and appealing environment for a modern economy in which design has become a product more valuable than most manufactured goods.

I wish NRO’s software allowed me to scan and post some of these pictures. The photos of Bradford — now possibly the worst city outside the former Soviet bloc — are especially heart-rending, but Liverpool’s come a close second for sadness.

Indeed, on almost page, Britain’s Lost Cities is a very sad book. Yet there are hopeful lessons to be drawn from its pages too. Only in rare cases are the losses Stamp records so very beautiful as individual objects. Their greatest value rather lay in the cityscape they collectively composed: an urban environment that could have been rendered humane, appealing, and attractive with an infusion of contemporary resources. I doubt that anyone will ever again want to build in rebuild in Victorian pseudo-Romanesque. But we can rediscover the methods of Victorian city building at its best — and in a new architectural idiom recover what was so unnecessarily discarded in the years from 1930 to 1980.