In her editorial for AT323 Isabel Allen reflects on how policy from 2008 has impacted the city, most notably with the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea (VNEB) in southwest London.
Read the Digital Issue of AT323 online, for free, here.
Back in 2008, Design for London transformed the courtyard of Somerset House into London’s Largest Living Room, a facsimile of a cosy suburban living room, but at an outlandishly large scale. Gargantuan sofas, chairs, bookshelves and lamps sat on an outsize carpet. The aim was to create an informal stage set for the launch of the London Festival of Architecture. It was photogenic, punchy, populist; the kind of quick-hit one liner that politicians like.
It was also intensely idealistic; part of a wider mission to welcome London’s diverse population to the capital’s lesser-known public spaces. An invitation to anyone and everyone to linger in the courtyard; curl up on a sofa; eat a sandwich; feel at home.
A textbook Ken Livingstone project. But just a shade too late. London’s Mayoral elections took place just before the launch. Ken was out, Boris was in. As Design for London’s communications director, it fell to me to brief Boris Johnson before he gave a speech at the opening event. Having been warned to keep it apolitical, upbeat and short, I settled on ‘It’s a witty re-interpretation of public space.’ He raised a sardonic eyebrow and murmured ‘Is that right?’
As history has so eloquently taught us, Johnson is not averse to populist one-liners. But he likes them big and brash: the Garden Bridge; Boris Island; Anish Kapoor’s tangled red steel tower.
There is a depressing inevitability in the fact that, under his tenure at City Hall, London’s Vauxhall Nine Elms and Battersea Opportunity Area, identified by the Livingstone regime as ripe for redevelopment as a new inclusive neighbourhood, morphed into a cacophony of shouty statement tower blocks; a triumph of showmanship and market forces over enlightened city planning.
But there is at least a certain satisfaction in publishing Allies and Morrison’s Keybridge scheme (p38), an attempt to mediate between old Vauxhall and the turbo-charged development of recent years. And to reinstate the principles of well-mannered urbanism, inclusivity and civilised restraint.
