Townscape

For over thirty years before his death in 1994, Cullen was a busy consultant completing influential studies, masterplans and urban design projects, such as for the new town for Alcan Industries (1964–68) and, later, the Isle of Dogs in London. His formative years, however, were spent as part of an influential group led by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, the eccentric proprietor of the Architectural Review (AR) where in 1946, Cullen was appointed Art Editor. From there he joined forces with luminaries such as painter John Piper, Hugh Casson, architectural director for the 1951 Festival of Britain, writer Nikolaus Pevsner, and iconoclast Ian Nairn, author of Outrage and scourge of ‘subtopia’, those places Nairn derided for their loss of individuality and spirit of place.

The term ‘townscape’ dates from a 1949 AR article by Hastings. Over the years that followed, Cullen’s artistic work for the magazine - including the monthly Townscape column and many other articles - provided rich material for the dense assemblage of photos, plans and free-hand illustrations that characterised the book. The collective gathered around Hastings sought to revive the picturesque, an aesthetic mode of regarding the world that was cultivated in the 18th century by an elite with a taste for foreign travel. While often associated with landscape, as Richard Williams points out in his study on the origins of townscape, the picturesque has also long been accepted as a mode of perceiving the city, with its visual power acting as a means of assuaging urban anxieties.

In the context of the post-war era and the end of Empire, Townscape reinterpreted the picturesque as symbolising an English allegiance to freedom and liberty, an alternative to the monumentalism of the Beaux Arts tradition. However, as Williams notes, the AR’s egalitarianism existed simultaneously and in tension with a conservative ‘aristocratic world-view’, where the city as an aesthetic object acted as a source of spectacular pleasure for the privileged observer.

Through numerous case studies of the streets and publics spaces of places such as Shepton Mallet and Basildon, and including Liverpool Cathedral precinct and a re-imagined London Bankside, Cullen explores the ‘art of relationship’: ‘Bring people together and they create a collective surplus of enjoyment; bring buildings together and they can give visual pleasure which none can give separately’. Cullen advocated an artistic approach to using environmental ‘elements’ including buildings, trees, water, traffic, advertisements and so on, each of which was to be woven together in such a way that drama was released.

In Townscape, the environment is apprehended ‘almost entirely through vision’ and not only acts as a means of navigation but also evokes our ‘memories and experiences and emotions.’ The key components are Serial Vision - the experience of the city as an uninterrupted sequence of views that unfold like stills from a movie, Place - designing for experience according to the position of the body within the environment, and Content - the colour, texture, scale, style and character. Collectively they add up to the fabric of a place, with Cullen presenting a methodology for urban visual analysis and design based on the psychology of perception, the human need for visual stimulation, and notions of time and space.

Cullen’s interest in design as a means of deepening emotion differs from the current fad for ‘urban memory’ as a means to recreate community, and design peddled as a way to boost emotional ‘well being’. Unlike today’s purveyors of urban design therapy, Cullen simply expressed the confidence of the age that emotional connection with places was important, and that through their skills, designers could enhance the experience of a place.

Half a century on, a striking aspect of the book is the assurance and self-belief it exudes: Cullen is at ease expressing his worldview via photos and sketches, interspersed with short bursts of explanatory text. This is a marked contrast to today when designers feel the need to justify their work via cold scientific assertions of its ‘value’, whether carbon, community or cost related. Townscape seems at odds with such imposed policy-based formulas for evaluating design. As Norman Foster points out in David Gosling’s Cullen anthology, Cullen was notable for ‘his untiring jabs at bureaucracy’. Instead he struck a blow for freeing the imagination, arguing that ‘we have to rid ourselves of the thought that the excitement and drama that we seek can be born automatically out of the scientific research and solutions arrived at by technical man’.

As is suggested by the use of an English dinner party as a metaphor for the city, Cullen’s was a rather bourgeois outlook which was often disdainful of the modern world and mass culture. Emerging industries, modes of distribution - and indeed work generally - were ignored, save for the odd pylon or isolated power station that appealed as aesthetic objects. Instead, the privileged world of play – emphasised through the exotic and the surreal - took centre stage, in the form of quirky signs, oblique pieces of urban furniture, or juxtaposed statues. In Townscape’s attempt to address social anxieties of that age, a certain deviation from good manners was encouraged as a means of reinforcing the rules. However, Cullen’s attempt to create a ‘pleasant degree of complexity and choice’ that ‘allows the individual to find his personal path’ seems generous compared to current deterministic attempts to shape behaviour.

Townscape had an important influence on the way towns were perceived and, gradually, remade - although, ironically, Cullen would later express disappointment that his work seemed to have inspired a ‘superficial civic style of bollards and cobbles... traffic free precincts’. Yet there are undoubtedly many who remain, like Norman Foster, ‘entranced by the magic of those sketches’. Arguably one reason for Townscape’s continuing appeal is that many of its imaginative designs are now beyond the scope of what is permissible. Difficult sites - for example, near water or on steep hills - are now regularly deemed offlimits, either due to environmental controls such as onerous flood risk assessments, or because current mores deem that nature must be protected from human intervention rather than enhanced through it.

Ironically, given that Cullen’s ‘urban sets’ might be criticised as rather twee, Townscape seems to capture an age when cities were less sanitised, when nooks and crannies could be planned into a place without Secure by Design inspired instructions to secure it through floodlighting or clear it of the wisteria inhibiting a sightline. Culturally, a level of ambiguity within urban environments remained acceptable, meaning books could still contain images entitled ‘mystery’ and captioned with just a hint of daring, albeit with the requisite dig at modernity: ‘From the matter-of-fact pavement of the busy world we glimpse the unknown, the mystery of a city where anything could happen or exist, the noble or the sordid, genius or lunacy. This is not Withenshawe’.