Since my previous post about Rousham and the threat to its historic garden, I have been finding out more about the plans for a new town on the old Upper Heyford aerodrome just north of Rousham.

It is currently a small-scale rural development of less than 2,000 homes, which has been marketed as ‘A modern take on the traditional countryside village’. The developer, Dorchester Living, currently has permission to add a further 1,135, houses.

Then, the government identified the site as a potential new town which would mean not a small village development, but a town currently planned to be 9,000 houses, to be enlarged in due course to 13,000. This means that the development will expand beyond the aerodrome into the surrounding agricultural land to its south-west, which has been bought for purposes of commercial development by New College, Oxford (they were left the local village, Upper Heyford, by their founder, William of Wykeham).

In other words, a relatively manageable small-scale development is being expanded into a new town without adequate advance planning about the infrastructure which will be required, including a new railway station, and, so far as I can tell, much thought about the differences in style and character between the design of a new rural village and a new town.

Most new housing development is in the vicinity of an existing city, but Upper Heyford is currently in the middle of unspoilt countryside.

The current proposals risk damaging the ecology of Rousham Park, which has remained essentially unchanged since William Kent landscaped the gardens at the end of the 1730s. However much the architects might like people to walk to the station, many will want to drive. There will have to be a big new car park. The gardens of Rousham look out over a medieval bridge which will have to be widened. The fields in the distance will sprout 6-storey new housing developments and wind turbines.

Without major changes, what is currently planned will destroy the character of Rousham.

Here is a picture of Rousham as now:-

And here is a picture of the new town:-

I have just taken delivery of a new bicycle, the result of a happy accident when a neighbour, Paul West, discovered that I am a long-standing enthusiast for Pashley Bicycles:-

It’s a Pashley (again), based on a Guv’nor, which is what I ride on at the moment, but specially customised for metropolitan riding: five gears; painted a tasteful shade of autumnal olive-brown; an upright instead of drop handlebars; and a bell to repel the runners on the towpath by the canal.

Not surprisingly, I look fairly cheerful (it was nice and sunny on the day of the photoshoot):-

It’s my only exercise:-

This is a gentle reminder for those who have not booked for my book launch at the Wigmore Hall next Thursday that tickets are still available.

I am pleased that so many of you have and look forward to waving from the stage.

It’s being live streamed as well for those in Tasmania.

https://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/booking/60776

Winter has come to the jewellery room:-

I sadly wasn’t able to attend this year’s prize-giving for the Berger Prize, a prize given annually for a work of art history, and so have only just heard that it was won by Eleanora Pistis for her brilliant, scholarly investigation of all aspects of early eighteenth-century Oxford – Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford.

It’s a book that I greatly admired for its uncovering of the huge range of proposals for the development of Oxford beyond those that were actually built, including the Clarendon Building, All Souls and the Radcliffe Camera, and for its understanding of the complexities of architectural culture, as much about the dons who commissioned the buildings as the architects who designed them.

A good win !

I have been reading Holly Smith’s Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain with the utmost pleasure.

It conveys the ambiguity of the early history of tower blocks.  It turns out that Osbert Sitwell was an early, and most unlikely, enthusiast for high rises from San Gimignano to Manhattan and was quoted in support by Dame Evelyn Sharp, the formidable Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government; and the book which promoted the benefits of new housing developments in Sheffield, including Park Hill, was illustrated with a drawing by John Piper, the editor of the Shell Guides.

I have always viewed the failure of Ronan Point as an emblem of the failure of modernism, equivalent to the blowing up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis which Charles Jencks used as marking ‘the death of modern architecture’.  But here it appears as the failure of local government and the pressures on the construction industry to deliver new housing at speed.  I like the comment by Sam Webb that ‘blaming Le Corbusier for this is like blaming Mozart for Muzak’.

If this early history of high rise housing is to some extent familiar from histories of the period, the later account of community action in London and Liverpool is not.  It demonstrates that while families generally disliked being in high rise, there were plenty of people who were perfectly happy, providing the buildings were well maintained.

Unfortunately, what comes out most forcibly, not least from the concluding analysis of what led to the Grenfell Tower disaster, is that councils, and not just Tory ones, are often cavalier about maintenance and ignore the warnings of potential fire and its consequences.

In an admirable way, it complicates the narrative of high rise, by historically informed analysis.

https://share.google/ZWuVMjLYnyywC7gAd

I stopped off in Thaxted to see its wonderful, empty, light church where Conrad Noel was the Red Vicar, flying the red flag alongside the flag of St. George.

There is an exceptionally fine bust of him by Gertrude Hermes, dated 1938:-

I read about Charles Moore Place on the Modern House website and thought it looked interesting: not that I want to buy a new house, but that it is possible to design so called ‘executive homes’ with thought and care.  As it happens, it is surrounded by multiple new build estates, which are much more standardised and just as expensive. 

So, I can only applaud the developer-cum-contractor, Rooff, and the architects, Sergisson Bates for taking so much trouble in the design of a building type which, certainly architecturally, benefits from good quality construction, scrupulous design and fresh thinking:-

https://share.google/vPdmvOeTBria6HNRX

I sadly missed the launch of the book Provenance in Architecture: A Dictionary at the Warburg Institute last Friday, but have been dipping into my copy whenever possible over the weekend (I contributed the entry on Craft).

It is essentially the handbook to an approach to architecture which focuses not on authorship or style, the traditional concerns of architectural history, but the trajectory of buildings through their history, not just through an examination of the complexity of their origins, but their subsequent life through changing ownership, use, adaptation and, sometimes, destruction. It is an intellectual history as much as an architectural one: very Warburgian in ethos.

Each of the entries is not really an examination of a linguistic term, but a mini-architectural or thematic case study, so it is much more readable than the average dictionary.

Uwe Fleckner, the Director of the Warburg Haus in Hamburg (and much else) and Mari Lending of the Oslo School of Architecture have done an astonishing job in commissioning, editing and overseeing the book, which has been handsomely produced by Hatje Cantz.