URBED was founded in Covent Garden at about the same time as the Labour Minister Peter Shaw was drawing up the first inner city legislation. It is difficult to imagine today that Covent Garden could ever be in need of regeneration but as I have written elsewhere in this blog Covent Garden in the year after the market moved out was in a desperate state and there were only a few people who could imagine it ever recovering.

At the event we heard from speakers like Alan Stones, and Tim Wacher who worked in Covent Garden in the mid 70s. They described how Covent Garden was once a place without shops or places to eat, where developers could not borrow to refurbish buildings and where the only future that policy makers could imagine was redevelopment. All this said looking out over the rooftops of modern-day Covent Garden that is one of the busiest and most expensive districts in London. After the relocation of the markets in the 1970s Covent Garden was left as a run-down, largely abandoned district on the periphery of Westminster the City and the West End. This is a geography that makes little sense in modern London. However during the recessions of the 1970s when the country was in the middle of the three day week and rolling blackouts, London was in steep decline. We were told that Covent Garden’s only saving grace was that it had its own tube station on the fashionable Piccadilly Line.

As was the way at the time, when the market moved out of Covent Garden the planners moved in. Plans were drawn up for the redevelopment of the area by the Greater London Council that would have retained the market structures, but surround them with a complex of high-rise buildings and split level walkways in the manner of the Barbican which was still much admired at the time. The plans prompted a very well-organised local campaign to save the area.

As Nicholas Falk explained at the event, URBED was founded in Covent Garden at about the time that this campaign succeeded. He and Christopher Cadell – URBED’s cofounder – had returned from the US some years earlier to explore the application of the economic and management approaches that they had learnt at the Ford Motor Company and McKinsey’s to the messy business of reviving cities. Nick wrote a pamphlet on the subject for the Fabian Society as a result of which he was invited to lunch by David (now Lord) Sainsbury. They agreed that it would be a good idea to set up a company to apply business ideas to urban problems, which was how both URBED and the new field of urban regeneration were born. David Sainsbury provided a small amount of start-up funding from his charitable trust the Gatsby Foundation and URBED rented rooms from Christina Smith (Conran’s secretary) on Irlam Street. Within a short time we had moved to Henrietta Street employed some staff and taken rooms on both sides of a corridor! 

One of URBED’s early projects was to organise a Space Exchange in which small companies looking for premises were linked with the owners of vacant buildings. A lease agreement was drawn up insulating both parties and enabling creative businesses to move into the area. This is a precursor of the Pop-up trend of recent years, born out of similar circumstances in the teeth of a recession. Nick quoted from an early URBED report on 5 Dryden Street which had been developed as one of the earliest managed workspace schemes. This was packed with small companies many renting just a single desk, incubating a whole generation of creatives who would go on to occupy spaces in the surrounding streets. These companies in turn generated a demand for cafes and bars which started to fill the ground floors of the area. Meanwhile the GLC completed the refurbishment of the Market hall opening up the huge basements by cutting away the floor and filling them with speciality shops, eateries and more bars.

Covent Garden was one of the first areas to experience this type of recovery, to see its heritage saved through creativity. This was a theme picked up in Charles Landry’s talk at the event. Looking around the room he said, ‘I never understood why you lot were so fascinated by old machinery’. However this fascination when translated into a desire to restore old buildings, was transmuted into a campaign to regenerate neighbourhoods and eventually to resuscitate whole cities. In doing this we found that heritage and creativity are great partners. Not only are creative types just the people to save old buildings, but, as Jane Jacobs pointed out, ’ new ideas need old buildings’.

Using examples from across the world, Charles showed that time and time again creativity and innovation emerge from old buildings, whether it be the former Nokia Cable Works in Helsinki, the old Phillips Factory in Enidhoven or indeed the old market buildings of Covent Garden. Why, he asked, given that conditions in these old buildings were often so terrible, does this strange alchemy occur? There are practical issues, of course, like being cheap and not having to sign up to a long lease. However Charles also though that there was something about the space that old buildings provide, that allow room for creativity and collaboration. This is something we need to better understand because there is not an unlimited supply of old buildings, whereas creativity and innovation are a ‘flexible, renewable resource’. Cities across the world have used their stock of old buildings to kickstart a new creative, innovative economy, often employing far more people than the buildings did when they were mills and factories. We need to understand how to sustain and nurture this creativity once all the old buildings have been used-up or converted to apartments as has happened in Covent Garden.

Leanne Hartly picked up on this theme, describing cities not so much as physical artefacts as but as a rich web of social connections. Cities are the original form of social media, bringing people together, building networks and contacts. She went as far as to challenge the original assumption behind URBED’s foundation, struggling to understand how you can apply rational business ideas to chaotic complex urban systems. This is why new buildings are so poorly suited to creativity. They are created on spreadsheets and designed with very clear ideas about what each space can be used for. Old buildings by contrast are spaces designed for functions that are long gone and are thus receptacles to be filled with anything you want. They are also spaces that tend to be occupied by a multiplicity of small companies, unlike new spaces that are let to single companies. This built-in interaction allows them to generate new operating systems. This is the process of regeneration and can be seen on a huge scale in Detroit where the wide open spaces of the dead city are being filled by informal networks and business. Leanne’s practices is called ‘Mend’ and she identified the process by which cities ‘mend’ themselves, that happened in Covent Garden, as the thing that planners should be striving to create.

This mending didn’t take very long. By the 1980s Covent Garden was heaving with tourists and buskers, chi-chi restaurants and expensive shops. This regeneration tide swept away many of the creative businesses that had been there at the beginning (5 Dryden Street has long been converted to apartments). The spirit of those few short years can still be found in enclaves such as Neal’s Yard but, on the whole, things have moved on and Covent Garden is an expensive, slightly faux neighbourhood, dressed up for the tourist industry. We should probably ask whether this is what successful regeneration looks like or whether something went wrong? Charles Landry started his presentation by saying that the regeneration industry has gone from rearguard to vanguard. From an irrelevant lobby seeking to hold back the tide of ‘progress’ to the cutting edge of that progress. However vanguards and cutting edges are forever pushing on – regeneration is rarely a stable state. Having been regenerated by creatives, places like Covent Garden can easily overheat, pushing up rents and values and pushing out the early pioneers. This may be the way of the world and the creative surged on to stimulate the subsequent regeneration of Camden and Hoxton, Shoreditch and now Hackney. Whether the creative industries are fed up at being moved-on every decade or whether this is how they retain their creativity is difficult to answer. The bigger question is what happened when we realise that old buildings and run down neighbourhoods really are a finite resource?

Little Germany in Bradford has a special place in URBED’s history. We first worked there in 1986 developing a strategy for the regeneration of what is probably the finest collection of late Victorian textile warehouses in the country. As a result of this in 1990 URBED secured funding to run a two year action research project (Little Germany Action) and appointed a young planner from Manchester as project manager – a certain David Rudlin.

Our 40th anniversary event took place in the Design Exchange, a council-owned managed workspace scheme in the middle of Little Germany (for which URBED did the business plan). The building remains successful but out the window the surrounding warehouses are suffering vacancy levels similar to those in 1986. As we would hear during the course of the evening, Little Germany has been regenerated at least twice in the intervening years.

It’s buildings have been cleaned and restored, its public realm revamped, its vacant floors space filled with apartments and business space and its streets animated, admittedly sparsely, with bars and cafes. The problem is that the regeneration has not really stuck. Like Sisyphus, heroic efforts have pushed the bolder of regeneration up the hill. However, whereas in Covent Garden the boulder went over the crest of the hill and careered, out of control down the other side, in Little Germany, soon as regeneration efforts slackened the boulder rolled back town to where it started. Much of the evening was spent discussing why this happened and what might have been done differently.

The 1986 Little Germany Festival – I probably got more fun later

The evening was introduced with some slides from URBED’s early work in little Germany. Our initial study had suggested that a derelict site at the centre of the area could become a new square and that this should be launched with a festival. One of the people engaged to organise the festival was Dusty Rhodes who would be speaking later in the evening. By 1990 the festival had grown into the Bradford Festival run by Dusty and his colleague Alan Brack. In a few more years this had grown to become the largest, most diverse community arts festival in England. It had a reputation for staging work that was both ambitious and accessible and was symbolic of a city that had become the cool part of the Leeds/Bradford conurbation. Little Germany Action played its part, staging events as part of the festival and hosting a three long month Summer Season in 1992. Little Germany Action combined this type of promotional event with practical actions to help bring buildings back into use. Despite having a tiny budget of £120,000 it worked and by the end of the two years vacancy levels had been reduced as new companies and uses were attracted into the area.

But it wasn’t to last. Within a few years the council had taken control of the festival and effectively killed it, although it dragged on for a few more years. Little Germany slipped back into decline and the city fell further and further behind Leeds. Later the area would be designated as an Urban Village manage by David Sougall who was also in the audience. This also succeeded in raising the area for a short time, but again it didn’t last.

The Little Germany Festival 1990

Marc Cole in his presentation tried to explain why this was with reference to his time as director of development at the Bradford UrbanRegeneration Company (URC). His conclusion was that while Bradford might not have had the best of luck, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s woes were also partly self-inflicted. When the URC was set up the council’s response was not to welcome the additional resources but to bemoan the imposition. The population of Bradford have not really bought into the city centre, the Asian community in particular being more engaged at the neighbourhood level. The political class, until recently were drawn from the surrounding towns and the active citizens channelled their efforts into campaigns like that to save the Odeon. The city’s flagship project, City Park which is now seen as a symbol of Bradford’s recovery, was almost refused planning permission, as a result of which it failed to secure Lottery funding. Even when it was developed, following heroic efforts by the council, the opening was marred by a demonstration by the ‘Save the Odeon’ group. Across town a large part of the town centre was demolished for the Westfield Shopping Centre that then stalled at the beginning of the recession and was mothballed for five years. Meanwhile very few of the thousands of apartments proposed on the 2000s were ever built and those that were have in some cases since halved in value. In such circumstances working in Bradford can be a thankless task.

Many of the people in the room had been engaged in this thankless task for many years. Dusty Rhodes has been involved in the Bradford creative community since his time as technical director at the Bradford Festival. his company Raise the Roof now provides staging, lighting and technical support for outdoor events. Dave West worked for the council for many years an now works on the regeneration of Little Germany albeit without sufficient resources. From the audience Simon Green spoke as former council leader while Nigel Grizzard, who was also involved in the first festival, has since works as an expert on the refurbishment of mills. There was a sense in the discussion that everything had been tried in Little Germany and a that nothing had really worked and nothing ever would.

Kate Dickson injected an external perspective, citing textile towns like Leipzig and Roubaix as well as her own experience as director of the Ancoats Building Preservation Trust. She showed that quarters such as little Germany can be brought back to life in much less auspicious circumstances. Dusty and Nigel recalled a discussion back in 1980s when they suggested that Little Germany be filled with creatives. There were (and indeed still are) enough artists and creative businesses in Bradford to fill every vacant inch of little Germany. Had it been done back then, the the area would have been regenerated years ago, regardless of what had happened around it in Bradford. It is not however too late, those creatives are still around. As Little Germany is reconnected to the city centre with the opening of the Westfield Shopping Centre, the regeneration of a thousand creatives is still possible and far more likely to succeed than big capital projects, or apartment schemes.

Psychopolis performed by the Dogs of Heaven as part of the Bradford Festival in 1991

The Birmingham event as part of URBED’s 40th anniversary celebrations was held as part of the Academy of Urbanism Congress in Birmingham and the main speaker was Sir Albert Bore. The topic for the discussion was the Highbury Initiative an event organised by DEGW Architects and URBED in 1988 and since credited as being the point when attitudes to the planning of the city changed.

Sir Albert started by remembering the extent to which Birmingham had been in the doldrums  in the late 1980s. For much of the 1950s and 60s it had been a boom city, prospering on its advanced manufacturing base and even outstripping London’s growth for a time. However a city that was good at making things was ill-equipped to deal with the devastation of the manufacturing sector precipitated by the Government’s monetarist policies of the early 1980s. The city of Birmingham lost more jobs that Scotland or Wales and found itself with an unemployment rate of 25%. The council came to the conclusion that it needed to restructure its economy and the sensible place to start was the City Centre.

The Highbury Initiative was originally billed as the City Centre Symposium and was set up as a forum to explore how this transformation might take place. It was organised as an Urban Design Action Team (UDAT) a technique that was popular at the time and which had been championed by DEGW as a way of facilitating urban change. The format involved a mix of senior people from the city together with external experts and involved both discussions and practical work over an intensive few days. In Birmingham the symposium ran over a weekend and included all of the senior players in the city alongside experts such as Amsterdam’s chief planner, the engineer who designed the Pompidou centre in Paris and the traffic engineer Don Hillebrand from the US. The event was facilitated by URBED and DEGW who also provided briefing material and wrote up the results. The weekend started with a walk around the city centre followed by a meal and then for the whole of Saturday and Sunday participants were locked away in Highbury Hall which is why the resulting report later became known as the Highbury Initiative.

The Highbury Initiative

A dusty slide of the concept for the city developed at the Symposium

URBED’s 40th anniversary event in Brighton took place in the conference room of the Jury’s Inn hotel. The large windows on two of the room’s walls looked out onto the roads and buildings that we masterplanned 15 years ago – rendered in bricks and mortar almost as it it were a 1:1 model. The last building was under construction at the time of the event, being built on the site next to the station, which is still known as plot J after our original regulatory plan.

The URBED team looking at the 1:1 model

As masterplanners we tend to look back with a degree of envy on John Nash. In the early 1800s he masterplanned (and saw built) much of Brighton for the Prince Regent, as well as large parts of London – this in the days before computers, telephones or even trains. Most modern masterplanners can never hope to have such an impact on our cities. As Rob Cowan tells us, 90% of master plans are never built  (he may have made that statistic up but it has the ring of truth). It is therefore unusual, if not unique, for a modern masterplanner to stand within a plan that has been built exactly as originally designed. It is even more extraordinary that this should be the case with URBED’s first ever large scale masterplan. At the time we were naive and assumed that this happened all the time. The Brighton event as part of URBED’s 40th anniversary procession around the country was an opportunity to explore how this remarkable situation had come about.

The original model of the masterplan from 2000

The site as it was in the late 1990s

The New England Quarter is built on the site of the locomotive works and sidings that once stood alongside Brighton Station. By the 1990s the upper part of the site was the station car park while the lower part was a series of yards and second hand car lots. A local developer QED had tried to get planning permission for a Sainsbury’s Supermarket and had been refused, had been to appeal and seen the appeal thrown out. In the process the scheme had stirred up a vociferous and well-organised community campaign under the banner Brighton Urban Design and Development (BUDD). In 1999 BUDD created an alternative scheme for the site drawing on the idea of the Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood that was being promoted by URBED at the time.  It was as a result of this that URBED became involved, initially as advisers and then as our first ever masterplan. The community absolutely hated us for it!

The event was addressed by Pam Alexander, former Chief Executive of the South East of England Development Agency and now non-executive director of Crest Nicholson who with Bio-Regional developed one of the buildings within the masterplan. Her main point was that the conditions by which a masterplan such as the New England Quarter are realised no longer really exist. The planning system does not give developers the certainty that they need to invest in projects on this scale. The only people who can take on the risk are a few large developers and house builders who aren’t prepared to commit themselves to eat sleep and breath a scheme in the way that Chris Gilbert has done for the last 15 years on the NEQ. It shouldn’t be this difficult to create great urbanism but unfortunately it is.

Chris Gilbert described how the scheme was made possible by Sainsbury’s. It was they who funded all the work required to bring the scheme forward as well as investing in the new infrastructure. This wouldn’t happen today because supermarkets are not as valuable as they were in the 1990. The scheme is essentially built as it is because Sainsbury’s would have done anything to get their supermarket, put housing in its roof, bury its car park in the basement, indeed build a whole mixed use Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood around the store designed by an unknown and inexperienced masterplanner called URBED.

Chris hadn’t realised quite how inexperienced URBED were. He might have been sceptical about our ideas in the early days, and only gone along with them because of community pressure. However he soon became a convert and ended up developing some of the most radical homes himself and promoting the involvement of BioRegional. The plan was based on the idea of moving New England Street by looping it around the lower part of the site. This create a site for the Supermarket and the surrounding housing that was developed as a first phase by Sainsburys and Barratt Homes. The 40,000sqft store is built into the hillside so that its western side is underground and the central pedestrianised street through Phase 1 runs over its roof. The car park is beneath the store and the service yard is beneath the apartment block to the north such that the supermarket is virtually invisible.

Chris Gilbert explained that once the  initial phase was underway, his focus turned to the other six other plots created by the masterplan that were to be brought forward by different developers. A decked car park was provided for the station, a language school acquired a site to build a private college while Jury’s Inn built a hotel. The only hiccup came with the sale of block J next to the station. This had been necessary to provide cash flow, but did mean that he lost control of a crucial site and was as surprised as anyone when the developers, the Beetham Brothers submitted proposals for what would have been Brighton’s tallest building. It was fortunately refused and Chris eventually managed to buy back the site and to promote the development that is now on site, in line with the original masterplan.

Nicholas Falk standing on one of the new streets within the masterplan

Nigel Green also spoke of his experience at coordinating the council’s response to the site. Their response to the refusal of the supermarket and the community campaign was to prepare a planning brief for the site. This however made the council a focus for opposition as much as the developers (and their master planners). The community were by the council what they wanted on the site and came up with several hundred suggestions. However there was little acceptance that the site was in private ownership and that uses needed to be viable and Nigel regretted how bad tempered the discussions became. There was debate about whether the adversarial nature of the process damaged the scheme or caused the developer to look at it differently. Today there remains some opposition although other members of the community accepted that there worse fears hadn’t been realised. There was a sadness that much of the housing is unaffordable to local people although it was good to see that residents had set up a ‘Friends of the Greenway’ group which shows that community spirit is developing.

One of the best parts of the scheme is One Brighton, developed by BioRegional on a triangular. Poona Desai described how the scheme was developed with their architects Fielden Clegg Bradley. The site has allowed them to apply their 10 One Planet living principles in an urban location and they estimate that they have achieved a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to a normal scheme. Unfortunately however the biomass CHP plan that had been planned to serve the whole development didn’t happen because the plant was refused planning permission by Brighton Council (despite the local councillor being Green).

A number of people at the event suggested that schemes such as this could never happen again. The planning situation is too uncertain and the risks too great without a strong financial backer such as Sainsburys. This makes you wonder about the masterplan that John Nash saw implemented in Brighton that runs for more than a mile from the Level (just to the east of the New England Quarter) down past the Royal Pavilion and culminating in the Pier. If we are going to build on the lessons of the New England Quarter we need to find a way of masterplanning that doesn’t rely on the deep pockets of a small number of large developers but which can unlock the creativity and enterprise of hundreds of small developers, as Nash’s plan did.

Unlike the other locations in URBED’s 40th anniversary tour of the country, Hulme was never an URBED project. The redevelopment of what was billed at the time as the biggest council estate in Europe has however been a huge influence on our work even if we were never employed to work on it.

The Homes for Change scheme

As I explained at the start of the event, Hulme was where I worked as as a planning officer prior to joining URBED in 1990. It was also where I lived and where I together with others such as Charlie Baker and my wife Hélène he helped to set up the Homes for Change Housing Cooperative. This was subsequently used as a case study in URBED’s 21st Century Homes research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and formed the foundation for the Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood or SUN Initiative that was to become a central part of URBED’s philosophy for much of the 1990s and 2000s culminating in our book published by the Architectural Press.

In David’s initial presentation he traced the history of Hulme from its origins as a hastily erected neighbourhood of by-law housing build on the boggy land (which is what Hulme means) south of the industrial city. This was a neighbourhood of more than 100,000 people and boasted a high street on Stratford Road with a thousand shops and pubs that was the rival of the city centre. The 1960s saw this swept away in Manchester’s slum clearance programme to be replaced with 6 large council estates and thirteen tower blocks while the shops of Stretford Road were replaced with an embattled shopping precinct of eight vandalite-clad lock-ups. The finale of this great redevelopment was the completion of the Crescents in 1972, great sweeping blocks designed by the architects Wilson and Womersley, modelled on Bath and named with no sense of irony after the architects John Nash, William Kent, Charles Barry and Robert Adam.

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It was recognised very early on that Hulme was not fit for the purpose for which it had been designed, namely to house the families displaced by the slum clearance. The council started moving families out after a child fell from one of the walkways within a few years of the crescents being completed. The vacated flats were let to anyone who wanted them and those that were not let were squatted. It filled up with an eclectic mix of students, artists, criminals and drug dealers alongside older residents who hadn’t been moved out. For a brief period it became Manchester’s Christiania or Kreutzburg home to the city’s waifs and strays but also the seedbed of its regeneration (see my post on the regeneration of Hulme). It was in Hulme that the local television presenter and impresario Tony Wilson took over an old bus drivers social club to create the Factory. Within ten years this had spawned Factory Records and the Hacienda Club that made ‘Madchester’ he coolest music city in the world for a brief summer of drug-fuelled love in 1989. It is not to great a stretch to trace Manchester’s recovery from the brink of collapse, the growth of its media and creative industries, even it being chosen as the BBC’s northern base, to the anarchy that reigned in Hulme in the 1980s.

It was for this reason that many Hulme people resisted the plans to redevelop the estate for a second time in the 1990s. In Brian Robson’s presentation he pondered the lessons that can be draw from this redevelopment, responding in particular to questioning from the floor that had been critical of the city council’s roll. He recounted a story from a few years after Hulme when councils across the county were asked to put forward proposals for New Deal for Communities funding. Brian had been involved with Bristol’s bit which involved a series of workshops with community groups across the city. In Manchester by contrast the decision was made in a half hour meeting that decided that East Manchester was next in line for regeneration. The Bristol process took months and succeeded at setting every community in the city against each other, it may have been the right thing to do but it wasn’t the most efficient. This sums up Manchester, it gets things done and is very single minded but isn’t interested in building consensus and only really listens to voices that agree with its policies. This may be the attitude that built the original Hulme in the 1960s but it also got it redeveloped and has undoubtedly been successful in the regeneration of the wider city. This is the dilemma of the benign dictatorship.

The council’s vision for Hulme was to create an urban quarter to apply the lessons that the leadership had drawn from their visits to Barcelona as part of Manchester’s doomed bid to host the Olympics. It is hard to understand today how widely this was opposed in the early 1990 by highways engineers, housing associations, the police and a number of tenants groups. It was at this time that Charlie Baker set up the Hulme Community Architecture Group and was engaged to work with the tenants of Hulme 2 which was the first estate to be redeveloped. The techniques that he developed with David Rudlin including plasticine modelling and possibilities slide shows have been central to URBED consultation techniques ever since. The two of them were subsequently commissioned (not as URBED) to write the Hulme Guide to Development. For a brief period this was applied to the whole of the city while a city-wide document was drawn up. These urban design policies have changed the way that development takes place in Manchester (in the face of fierce opposition, at least initially). The reason, once more, is Manchester’s political muscle and its deafness to opposition, even when it comes from its own officers.

Hulme at its lowest point was also a place of great opportunity. URBED set up its Manchester office in the Work for Change, the workspace element of the Homes for Change building and grew to become the global brand that it is today! However Fay Selvan told an even more remarkable story of the Big Life Company a social enterprise with 300 staff and a £4m turnover that grew out of community initiatives in Hulme. This started life as a small operation supporting drug users and other vulnerable people through redevelopment. Through force of will and no little entrepreneurial flair, it persuaded the NHS to give it the contract to run the area’s new health centre and later built the Zion Health and resource centre and taking on the Big Issue in the north. It’s most recent initiative has seen it take on two new academy schools and to grow into the city’s largest social enterprise.

Of the music, media, urbanism and social enterprises that have transformed Manchester almost all have their roots in a short and very dark period of Hulme’s history. It is a case study in Jane Jacob’s idea that even at their lowest moment, cities contain the seeds of their own recovery. URBED can claim no credit for any of this. However this is also our story since URBED’s Manchester office, which is now our main office, grew from the same soil and the story of Hulme and Manchester has been a huge influence on our work making us the company we are.