Endpiece

Going to Coventry

Joe Holyoak

In UD130 I wrote about Albion, the proposal for a garden city in the Black Country which a team from MADE, the West Midlands centre for placemaking, submitted for the Wolfson Prize. It started as a subversive gesture, and we got more serious as we progressed. We were delighted to be included in the awards, albeit down at the bottom, one of two classified as ‘Other interesting entries’. Some credit, but no prize money. Ours was the only completely brownfield proposal to be included in the awards.

I thought that Urbed’s entry was a very worthy winner, and that the criticism of it in the Guardian by Richard Rogers was unjustified. Rogers was condemning the idea of building outside the city on greenfield land. He was perhaps justified in criticising the premise of the Wolfson competition (and by extension the government’s garden city proposals), but I am certain that David Rudlin would endorse the principle of brownfield first. His Wolfson proposal included the densification of the existing settlement as well as its extension.

In October I was hoping to see Rudlin in Coventry, where he was working with a group of architecture students on a project called City Arcadia, organised by a local enterprise called Artspace. On the floor of an empty shop unit in City Arcade, a part of the comprehensive redevelopment of Coventry’s centre after the 1940 Blitz, they built in four days a 1:1000 scale model of the city centre in plasticine. But David was elsewhere on the day I dropped in, engaged on other important business – becoming a grandfather.

The idea of the project was to model the enormous changes that Coventry has undergone in the last century. They started by building the 1906 city, with its extensive mediaeval street plan, in terracotta-coloured plasticine, and then modelling successive changes to the fabric in different colours. Each change was recorded in stop-frame photography, which will be edited into a film. The devastation of the Blitz was reproduced by lifting off large areas of plasticine buildings, which were then dumped around the edges of the model. Donald Gibson’s pioneering post-war city centre precinct redevelopment was built in their place.

I don’t know whether Artspace were conscious of this, but the project was reproducing Gibson’s working method. In describing his plan (which was actually designed before the war started), Gibson later explained ‘We worked unofficially on a plan for the central area; our wives joined in and it was more or less done on the carpet at home in the evening’.

I was in Coventry to look at a new development in one of the few surviving bits of mediaeval street pattern, Far Gosford Street, just outside the ring road. It’s a place called Fargo Village, where a 1904 car components factory has been converted into shops and studios, occupied mostly by designer-makers of different kinds. The enterprising developer is Ian Harrabin, and his architects are the Birmingham practice Bryant Priest Newman. They have worked together previously in Coventry on Electric Wharf, the conversion of the city’s first power station into flats and workspaces.

Fargo Village is grassroots urban regeneration. The old industrial fabric is left raw and shabby. The new parts are done mostly in oriented strand board (OSB), a utilitarian material more usually seen boarding up the windows of empty buildings. But it is done with style, and it has become a popular new place in Coventry in the few weeks of its existence. Unglamorous architecture like this does not usually win awards, but it’s a kind of development that makes sense in our economically straitened times, and I find its rawness and directness quite stimulating.

URBAN DESIGN 133 Winter 2015 Publication Urban Design Group

As featured in URBAN DESIGN 133 Winter 2015

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The City Arcadia model under construction

 

The events space at Fargo Village

 

Joe Holyoak is an architect and urban designer, working in masterplanning, site planning, area regeneration, historic conservation, and community participation.

He is also on the Editorial Board of the URBAN DESIGN journal.