John Prescott is one of the most influential people in British architecture. He shares his vision
“SUCH SPACE and light. Spectacular, eh? Look at the wood ’ere. It’s ab-so-lute-ly superb.” This is John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, speaking. In a slightly surreal moment he’s giving me a tour of his new offices and telling me all about colour swatches, the pros and cons of carpet or wood floors, and giving Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen a run for his money.
Prescott is probably the most influential person in British architecture. He’s the one who yays (or nays) the big controversial buildings, such as Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass skyscraper (and very proud of that he is too). He’s the one driving the Planning Bill through Parliament, with its delicate balancing act of making planning looser and speedier for the developers, and more community friendly for the great unwashed.
Most important, he’s the one commissioning the hundreds of thousands of new homes that the sustainable communities plan has cooked up for Britain. He could have the biggest impact on our landscape since the Luftwaffe. To some, this is a little like leaving Ronald Reagan in charge of the nuclear button.
Miserable sceptics. Governments may have shied away from architecture for two decades (the state actually building anything smacked far too much of the socialist 1960s — better leave it to the market/chance). But the housing crisis/NHS crisis/education crisis etc mean that building houses, schools and hospitals is back on the agenda, big time.
All the Government’s members have been on a crash course on the history of modern architecture, assisted by its Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Now they’re on first-name terms with la-di-da architects like FAT and de Rijke Marsh Morgan, and coolly unveiling “exemplar school” models by the likes of Will Alsop. But the class swot is Prescott. He has just become an honorary fellow of RIBA; “the DPM’s thoughts right now are very much with the vernacular,” says the press officer.
In as much as I can imagine Prescott thinking about architecture at all, I find it hard to envisage his bedtime reading involving yurts and barns. Miserable sceptic.
Like any greenhorn to a subject, and true to his stereotype, he may get the odd name wrong (“whatsisname, Calvatrari er, er”; “Calatrava” prompts one of his entourage), but you can’t fault his energy. He talks 19 to the dozen — like when John Humphrys asks him awkward questions on Iraq — about showering the land in what he’s branded architecture’s “wow factor”. And he wants to show me exactly what wow is.
For Prescott, wow begins at home. We’re standing outside the imposing, portly porticoes of his newly renovated offices — Nelson’s old Admiralty, at the top of Whitehall. “Just look at it and you think, fantastic! It has grace and style.”
The renovation isn’t bad, the type of hi-tech-meets-old that Norman Foster was doing 20 years ago. And it’s so much nicer than Prescott’s last place in Victoria. And so much nearer to No 10. So much grander.
Prescott is certainly to the manor born. “Stand at ease,” he chirps to two passing staff. “Look at that! Eh? Isn’t that . . .” A staircase renders him momentarily speechless. “Christ, that’s something, isn’t it?”
Then the pièce de résistance: the glass-and-metal atrium linking two old buildings. “The way they’ve married it together. And the press just say how much did that cost?” Miserable sceptics.
“People ask me, what is wow?” he continues, slumped in an armchair in his office. “Look. There. We’ve defined it.” He points to the back page of a new report: “‘By getting architects, town planners and developers to work together’,” he reads, “‘we have created a new wow factor’. It’s buildings that strike you and you say ‘bloody ’ ell’.”
He quotes his wow buildings: Herzog & De Meuron’s Laban Centre (“Hell, that’s an experience . . . it’s beau-di-ful”), Terry Farrell’s the Deep, Norman Foster’s Sage Music Centre, Gateshead, Future Systems’s Selfridges, Birmingham (“It’s got the bulge factor . . . it’s biowhatd’youcallit? Biosomething.” (Noises off: “Biomorphic”) “That’s it. The animals and different shapes.
“These were cities with no bloody heart. Now they’ve got a heart. We’ve stopped all them malls now outside towns. This is the first year we’ve done more building inside towns than outside. Even though I get a lot of pressure about it, I think it’s right. We want people back into our cities.”
Prescott is quite the evangelist. One architect wag wondered — miserable sceptic — if Prescott was about to found a Wowhaus. Don’t joke. Last week, the Government added to the Planning Bill a clause that says new buildings can be refused permission if their design isn’t up to scratch — “for the first time,” he beams.
But how do you put wow into new housing? I spy copies of Channel 4’s makeover show Grand Designs circulating in his corridors (“This one’s got a lovely prefab on it,” beams the press officer) Prescott, though, is in charge of the biggest grand design of all: the makeover of Britain. The old place has to change: “The most difficult thing is the culture. Britain is a conservative culture. Planning has done a lot of good things, but it’s got too damn conservative. There’s a tremendous blame culture.”
Housebuilders? Aside from the good guys — “Bellways, Countryside” — he says that “the industry has got too comfortable for too long. We’re building soulless housing estates, for God’s sake, which are row, row, row, row, row. Some of them are like prison camps. We must raise our game.”
To what? One person’s wow is another’s yuck. Just before Christmas, Prescott spoke at the Prince of Wales’s Traditional Urbanism conference, laying into the 1960s and “concrete monstrosities”, and praising to high heaven Poundbury and urban villages, as if HRH was pulling his strings.
Last year, prompted by the Prince’s Foundation, he visited Seaside, the slightly creepy, traditional-style model town in Florida that starred in The Truman Show. Then he announced developments of 30,000 homes in Ashford and 70,000 in Milton Keynes.
So is Britain’s green and pleasant land about to be smothered with ye olde pitched roofs? “Absolutely not.” No Noddy boxes? “That’s what we don’t want, traditional, semi, row . . . a square box thing. No.”
He cites the Millennium Village, his “legacy” by the accursed Dome, on a brownfield site, all energy efficient with decent enough modern design. Sustainable communities, he thinks, mean old and new living together in perfect harmony. He wants, ahem, a third way, to be megaphoned to the world in the sustainable communities summit in Manchester next year.
“Traditional values in a modern setting. I’ve often used that in politics and it’s exactly the same in design.”
His own offices are, he feels, a metaphor for the kind of Britain he wants to build. And fast. Seaside, Poundbury and the Millennium Village were built with design codes whereby developers have to adhere to rules specifying every detail, from materials to roof heights, so they can fast-track through planning.
A new development in west Northampton went through in just six weeks. The Millennium Village, mind, is proving slower to build.
Prescott has his eyes on prefabrication: “Like cars. You get one model. Where there’s changes is where you position the lights, how they look different. When I look at how many houses are built on the Continent like that . . . And good design. Good quality. I’ve tried to say to (the developers), ‘You’ve got to do more.’ They say: ‘It’s investment .’ Well, I’ve put in £250 million.”
In fact, Prescott is full of good news. He talks Pollyanna-ishly about new Government-backed developments such as Allerton Bywater in Yorkshire, where incoming yuppies have bonded sweetly with the existing former coalfield community over the cricket pitch at the miners’ social. Or east Manchester, where residents have revived rundown terraces. “It wasn’t the council. They did it. If you can capture that kind of community spirit . . . I lived in back-to-back in Rotherham as a kid. It was the happiest place I could be. They weren’t slums.”
He wants to please everyone: the trads, the mods, the developers, the community, the architects. He wants high density. And low. Brownfield and green. Old-style and new.
So, is the Government actually getting it right? Maybe. If so, it’s thanks in part to Lord Rogers of Riverside. During Cool Britannia, Rogers, as Government advisor and author of the Urban White Paper, could do no wrong. But these days he’s persona non grata and vocal in his criticism of the Government’s sloth in delivering its urban renaissance.
Prescott sighs. “He’s a big exponent of the bloody blame culture. Rogers did a great job for us, but he’s a moaner. I’ve done more things that Rogers wants but he still moans.”
Of course Prescott loves wow. We all do. But, as in any makeover show, it’s the people who quietly hold the purse strings who have the real power.
Can he get the Treasury to consider, say, tax breaks on brownfield land or reducing tax on renovating old buildings (it’s cheaper to demolish than restore right now)? It’s unlikely, but Gordon Brown’s Barker review is trying to find ways of tempting developers to shell out for good design, brownfield development, social mixing, prefabrication.
“When we invest in these communities, the land around it shoots up,” says Prescott. “The private sector runs in and buys all the land up. It’s about time we got some of that value back. I’m a great advocate of public and private, but not public subsidy to get private profit. I’ve got to say to them, ‘I’ll give you three years to get on programme. If you don’t I will intervene’.”
But, in any makeover show, talking tough is the easy bit. Making it happen is when the real graft begins.
“SUCH SPACE and light. Spectacular, eh? Look at the wood ’ere. It’s ab-so-lute-ly superb.” This is John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, speaking. In a slightly surreal moment he’s giving me a tour of his new offices and telling me all about colour swatches, the pros and cons of carpet or wood floors, and giving Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen a run for his money.
Prescott is probably the most influential person in British architecture. He’s the one who yays (or nays) the big controversial buildings, such as Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass skyscraper (and very proud of that he is too). He’s the one driving the Planning Bill through Parliament, with its delicate balancing act of making planning looser and speedier for the developers, and more community friendly for the great unwashed.
Most important, he’s the one commissioning the hundreds of thousands of new homes that the sustainable communities plan has cooked up for Britain. He could have the biggest impact on our landscape since the Luftwaffe. To some, this is a little like leaving Ronald Reagan in charge of the nuclear button.
Miserable sceptics. Governments may have shied away from architecture for two decades (the state actually building anything smacked far too much of the socialist 1960s — better leave it to the market/chance). But the housing crisis/NHS crisis/education crisis etc mean that building houses, schools and hospitals is back on the agenda, big time.
All the Government’s members have been on a crash course on the history of modern architecture, assisted by its Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Now they’re on first-name terms with la-di-da architects like FAT and de Rijke Marsh Morgan, and coolly unveiling “exemplar school” models by the likes of Will Alsop. But the class swot is Prescott. He has just become an honorary fellow of RIBA; “the DPM’s thoughts right now are very much with the vernacular,” says the press officer.
In as much as I can imagine Prescott thinking about architecture at all, I find it hard to envisage his bedtime reading involving yurts and barns. Miserable sceptic.
Like any greenhorn to a subject, and true to his stereotype, he may get the odd name wrong (“whatsisname, Calvatrari er, er”; “Calatrava” prompts one of his entourage), but you can’t fault his energy. He talks 19 to the dozen — like when John Humphrys asks him awkward questions on Iraq — about showering the land in what he’s branded architecture’s “wow factor”. And he wants to show me exactly what wow is.
For Prescott, wow begins at home. We’re standing outside the imposing, portly porticoes of his newly renovated offices — Nelson’s old Admiralty, at the top of Whitehall. “Just look at it and you think, fantastic! It has grace and style.”
The renovation isn’t bad, the type of hi-tech-meets-old that Norman Foster was doing 20 years ago. And it’s so much nicer than Prescott’s last place in Victoria. And so much nearer to No 10. So much grander.
Prescott is certainly to the manor born. “Stand at ease,” he chirps to two passing staff. “Look at that! Eh? Isn’t that . . .” A staircase renders him momentarily speechless. “Christ, that’s something, isn’t it?”
Then the pièce de résistance: the glass-and-metal atrium linking two old buildings. “The way they’ve married it together. And the press just say how much did that cost?” Miserable sceptics.
“People ask me, what is wow?” he continues, slumped in an armchair in his office. “Look. There. We’ve defined it.” He points to the back page of a new report: “‘By getting architects, town planners and developers to work together’,” he reads, “‘we have created a new wow factor’. It’s buildings that strike you and you say ‘bloody ’ ell’.”
He quotes his wow buildings: Herzog & De Meuron’s Laban Centre (“Hell, that’s an experience . . . it’s beau-di-ful”), Terry Farrell’s the Deep, Norman Foster’s Sage Music Centre, Gateshead, Future Systems’s Selfridges, Birmingham (“It’s got the bulge factor . . . it’s biowhatd’youcallit? Biosomething.” (Noises off: “Biomorphic”) “That’s it. The animals and different shapes.
“These were cities with no bloody heart. Now they’ve got a heart. We’ve stopped all them malls now outside towns. This is the first year we’ve done more building inside towns than outside. Even though I get a lot of pressure about it, I think it’s right. We want people back into our cities.”
Prescott is quite the evangelist. One architect wag wondered — miserable sceptic — if Prescott was about to found a Wowhaus. Don’t joke. Last week, the Government added to the Planning Bill a clause that says new buildings can be refused permission if their design isn’t up to scratch — “for the first time,” he beams.
But how do you put wow into new housing? I spy copies of Channel 4’s makeover show Grand Designs circulating in his corridors (“This one’s got a lovely prefab on it,” beams the press officer) Prescott, though, is in charge of the biggest grand design of all: the makeover of Britain. The old place has to change: “The most difficult thing is the culture. Britain is a conservative culture. Planning has done a lot of good things, but it’s got too damn conservative. There’s a tremendous blame culture.”
Housebuilders? Aside from the good guys — “Bellways, Countryside” — he says that “the industry has got too comfortable for too long. We’re building soulless housing estates, for God’s sake, which are row, row, row, row, row. Some of them are like prison camps. We must raise our game.”
To what? One person’s wow is another’s yuck. Just before Christmas, Prescott spoke at the Prince of Wales’s Traditional Urbanism conference, laying into the 1960s and “concrete monstrosities”, and praising to high heaven Poundbury and urban villages, as if HRH was pulling his strings.
Last year, prompted by the Prince’s Foundation, he visited Seaside, the slightly creepy, traditional-style model town in Florida that starred in The Truman Show. Then he announced developments of 30,000 homes in Ashford and 70,000 in Milton Keynes.
So is Britain’s green and pleasant land about to be smothered with ye olde pitched roofs? “Absolutely not.” No Noddy boxes? “That’s what we don’t want, traditional, semi, row . . . a square box thing. No.”
He cites the Millennium Village, his “legacy” by the accursed Dome, on a brownfield site, all energy efficient with decent enough modern design. Sustainable communities, he thinks, mean old and new living together in perfect harmony. He wants, ahem, a third way, to be megaphoned to the world in the sustainable communities summit in Manchester next year.
“Traditional values in a modern setting. I’ve often used that in politics and it’s exactly the same in design.”
His own offices are, he feels, a metaphor for the kind of Britain he wants to build. And fast. Seaside, Poundbury and the Millennium Village were built with design codes whereby developers have to adhere to rules specifying every detail, from materials to roof heights, so they can fast-track through planning.
A new development in west Northampton went through in just six weeks. The Millennium Village, mind, is proving slower to build.
Prescott has his eyes on prefabrication: “Like cars. You get one model. Where there’s changes is where you position the lights, how they look different. When I look at how many houses are built on the Continent like that . . . And good design. Good quality. I’ve tried to say to (the developers), ‘You’ve got to do more.’ They say: ‘It’s investment .’ Well, I’ve put in £250 million.”
In fact, Prescott is full of good news. He talks Pollyanna-ishly about new Government-backed developments such as Allerton Bywater in Yorkshire, where incoming yuppies have bonded sweetly with the existing former coalfield community over the cricket pitch at the miners’ social. Or east Manchester, where residents have revived rundown terraces. “It wasn’t the council. They did it. If you can capture that kind of community spirit . . . I lived in back-to-back in Rotherham as a kid. It was the happiest place I could be. They weren’t slums.”
He wants to please everyone: the trads, the mods, the developers, the community, the architects. He wants high density. And low. Brownfield and green. Old-style and new.
So, is the Government actually getting it right? Maybe. If so, it’s thanks in part to Lord Rogers of Riverside. During Cool Britannia, Rogers, as Government advisor and author of the Urban White Paper, could do no wrong. But these days he’s persona non grata and vocal in his criticism of the Government’s sloth in delivering its urban renaissance.
Prescott sighs. “He’s a big exponent of the bloody blame culture. Rogers did a great job for us, but he’s a moaner. I’ve done more things that Rogers wants but he still moans.”
Of course Prescott loves wow. We all do. But, as in any makeover show, it’s the people who quietly hold the purse strings who have the real power.
Can he get the Treasury to consider, say, tax breaks on brownfield land or reducing tax on renovating old buildings (it’s cheaper to demolish than restore right now)? It’s unlikely, but Gordon Brown’s Barker review is trying to find ways of tempting developers to shell out for good design, brownfield development, social mixing, prefabrication.
“When we invest in these communities, the land around it shoots up,” says Prescott. “The private sector runs in and buys all the land up. It’s about time we got some of that value back. I’m a great advocate of public and private, but not public subsidy to get private profit. I’ve got to say to them, ‘I’ll give you three years to get on programme. If you don’t I will intervene’.”
But, in any makeover show, talking tough is the easy bit. Making it happen is when the real graft begins.
