Are we the enemies of true beauty?

Nov 20 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

A new, finely-illustrated book details Britain’s civic destruction and, Liverpool included, it’s not a pretty picture. Peter Elson reports

THE sight of Gavin Stamp’s elegiac new book on my desk, with its jacket photograph of an elegant classical-style street leading up to a magnificently domed building, led several colleagues to ask about its location.

Was it some unknown Baltic state or eastern European city lying forgotten behind the former Iron Curtain, or obliterated during the war?

The answer is the city is Liverpool and, as Britain’s Lost Cities shows, the building is the Custom House, which indeed was a partial casualty of war, but also of the City Corporation.

It is equally an example of what happened all over Britain in the late 1940s, but, being in Liverpool, naturally was a bigger and more appalling architectural catastrophe.

The Custom House – 1828-39 – was a fabulous Georgian building designed by one of our finest architects, John Foster Jnr, and was only marginally overshadowed by the smaller St George’s Hall.

Wartime incendiary damage gutted its upper storeys and vanquished the dome, but such was its construction quality that a new interior could have been inserted into its shell.

The Corporation was determined it should go, and, in spite of high-level national opposition, unanimously voted for its demolition. Today, it would be regarded on a par with the Pier Head’s Three Graces.

Yet this is but one example of the incredibly Philistine destruction wrought on Britain’s cities over the last 80 or so years, a sorry mess that runs from Plymouth to Dundee, Exeter to Edinburgh.

This has often been perpetrated by professional people apparently qualified to know better than ordinary men and women, who are gloomily left to cope in the resulting urban desert or concrete brutalism they never wanted.

There is not one photograph in Dr Stamp’s lavishly illustrated book that portrays a townscape actually inferior to its modern replacement.

Every picture shows a built heritage that would be an asset to any conurbation, but practically every last stone or brick shown has gone, branded obsolete.

Dr Stamp not only supports the common belief that post-war planners, architects and, possibly worst, civil road engineers did more damage than Hitler’s bombs, but demonstrates how these schemes were already under way before the war.

“I’m trying to tell the real story of the destruction of Britain’s cities. This started before the war, the Blitz merely accelerated it,” says Dr Stamp.

“Putting the Custom House on the cover makes this point. Demolished to relieve unemployment, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that it could have been restored to relieve unemployment.

“It was substantially intact after the incendiary bombing. The walls and the drum of the dome were still in place. There would have been no problems rebuilding it.

“The Georgian Group, led by Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh, led the anti-demolition protests right after the war, but the city council would not be put off demolition.”

Nearby the Custom House, another superb Georgian building was the Goree Piazza, with its wonderful stone-vaulted pavement arcades. Also incendiary bomb damaged, it too survived the war but not the peace, demolished early in post-war years.

“Sadly, I’m sure that Goree Piazza would probably have been swept away in the 1960s in the street-widening and ring-road schemes,” he says.

Elsewhere, the stories are also really depressing and confirmed what he vaguely knew. In Coventry, the real damage was done before the war.

“The great medieval streets went in 1936-7. Modernism is only part of the national picture. There was also the growing and eventual dominance of the motor car,” he says.