WRITER  SPEAKER  BROADCASTER

I suffer from acrophobia, a simple fear of heights as opposed to vertigo, which I believe involves dizziness and a wish to throw yourself off a high place. But to find myself at parapet level on a roof for a morning is not my usual idea of a good time, especially remembering how the eagle that surmounts Dyrham, and beside which I now find myself standing, usually soars against the sky.

Dyrham at the moment is a virtual cathedral of scaffolding, balancing structural extravagance and absolute necessity. You reach it in a reassuringly solid-sided lift and step out, to walk its aisles on reassuringly firm ground, solid underfoot and suitably veiled to either side. Over the course of the year it has become an extraordinary, revealing, world apart – a domain visited by 70,000 already, thanks to a veritable army of volunteer guides.

On every side, as if in a theatre devoted to the varied and arcane skills of the 17^th century building trade, are figures crouched down over gulleys, ridges or rooftops or striding around as nonchalantly as if their feet were on the ground. This many million pound programme for the National Trust, being carried out by Bristol builders Ken Biggs and their subcontractors, is urgently replacing a failing roof, found to largely consist of 19^th century repairs, and which had begun to put the entire house below at risk.  I asked site manager Andy Nicholls about a little coloured picture tacked onto a rafter below us. Ah, he answered, that’s just to remind the workforce of where they are – working above one of the most valuable interiors in Europe.  The photograph showed a painted ceiling, potentially lost if any of them lost their step up here.

As my photographs show, the entire roof has become something like a great yard, a workshop in which lead workers are cutting, fitting, folding and inserting the new sheets alongside tilers who are preparing and laying both new and reused slates, buckets of copper nails to hand, while stone masons and conservators carry out work ranging from replacement of chimneys to the gentle cleaning of carved detail.  Elsewhere the carpenters are putting the essential corsetry into the structure, without which all the other skilled work would be lost.

If you want to help, buy and inscribe a slate. Messages on broken or fragmentary slates are proving an inspired fund raising idea and the best possible tool for public engagement.

And high above, inscrutable, stands that immense eagle, hardly smaller than myself, surveying the transformational scene with a beady eye. In the meantime, Nicholls, a man with a passion for his job, is standing in.

In 1955 young Ian Nairn took the incandescent fury of the ‘poles and wires’ campaign, begun by John Betjeman and the proprietor of the Architectural Press Hubert de Cronin Hastings (‘H d C’) and, adding a whole thesaurus of blights on the face of Britain, put it all into his own words. Laid out on the pages of the Architectural Review, blasted into life with the radical graphics and inimitable hand and eye of Gordon Cullen, the Outrage special issue woke up the nation. First came the AR readers, then those of the Daily Mail and its Fleet Street fellows, soon followed by the BBC audience and, incredibly, even the Duke of Edinburgh had used the word ‘subtopia’ – Nairn’s own word – in a speech. A movement to combat the national malaise, the mediocrity and mess of the built environment, was born.

Now the government promises a Select Committee on the Built Environment for the next term of parliament – whoever is in charge. For Nairn the outer edge of Southampton, the starting point for his illustrative journey, looked identical to the outer edge of Carlisle. He photographed both to make the point. Now the new housing in Banbury is the new housing in Chelmsford, while that around Southampton is no different to that around Carlisle. House builders, working exclusively for the private market, offer precisely what ‘the market’ wants, what people know is already available. It is an entirely circular process, in which supply and demand are identical.

So, time for someone fearless to rage against the second-rate, the imitative, the trite and to do so in words, images, graphics, on the page and online. To catch the eye and the ear and the imagination of the public. Committees of the self serving or even the well meaning will never manage to do it. This campaign needs to be ill mannered and foul mouthed, intense and melodramatic, even on occasion silly. But it must work. We have hit the nadir and the only way is up.

I just spent considerably less than 24 hours in Llandudno, a place that I had never visited. And am besotted. Just a neat, well kempt (I gather due to the good offices of the Mostyn estate?) entirely Victorian resort, wrapped round a slow bow of a bay marked to one end by a (mostly) green doorstop of land, to the other by the continuing curve, or an illusion of one, made by the pier.

As well as the natural embrace of the landscape, Llandudno has a modest taste for excess – ironwork porches, balconies and sometimes both combined that are as good as any I’ve seen.

And on top of this, it boasts a building that would not look out of place on Pall Mall, but this while being built as a gentleman’s club in the heyday of Wales’s largest seaside resort also doubled as a bank (which, in part, it remains) and a zany 1930s covered colonnade which winds up and away above the pier, towards a cable car, Happy Valley and much more. To be celebrated.

Here’s a version of my May piece for Building Design – which provoked some interesting comments. My book Factory, which came out in 2003, was a journey through the architecture of industry but BMW Leipzig was still to come.

After 1989, the haemorrhaging of employment in the former GDR, particularly in heavy industry, drew BMW’s attention east, and the Leipzig area was identified for the site of the company’s newest manufacturing centre on home soil. Production began nine years ago and currently employs around 6000.

In the city recently, with an afternoon to spare, I set out on the trail of the BMW works. They lie several kilometres out, slung low and grey amidst seemingly endless fields of vivid green and yellow, wheat and rapeseed. Wanting to see for myself a Zaha Hadid building larger than the Vitra fire station (the first ZHA building I visited) or the Serpentine café (the most recent) getting there without a car turned out to be quite a trek. It’s well out in the horizontal Saxony countryside, the local bus taking you via a small, untouched villages, one with a war memorial (a simple plinth with a helmet on it) on the central green. Then, all at once, you arrive.

It could hardly be less like VW at Wolfsburg where the works are the town. Here, out in the fields, amidst extensive car parking (but few BMWs), is a mesh of single storey, single process plants (press, body and paint shops, followed by assembly) all tied together by Zaha Hadid’s nodal Centre Block. Here the sweep and brio of the design reflects the ambition of the factory, which aims to clean up (in every sense) with a new generation of electric vehicles, BMW i3 and, next year the i8, while still continuing to manufacture conventional vehicles.

Hadid’s svelte reception area, through the turnstiles of which some of the workers were coming at the end of their shift, appearing from the furthest reaches of the immense site, is a metaphor for modernity, efficiency and clean industry. Overhead, bathed in blue sub-aqueous light, the silvered carcasses of BMWs roll quietly along on two levels, in opposite directions, a kind of Sorcerer’s Apprentice framed by the immensity of the structural concrete. In silent choreography the car shells rhythmically, and yet not entirely predictably, appear and disappear along unseen tracks. Add electronic soundtrack and it would be a fantastic performance piece. It is, self evidently, a very expensive front of house but how many other companies, even in electronics or other 21^st century production facilities, can so succinctly offer an image of the processes occurring off stage?

BMW Welt, their spacey distribution centre in Munich was designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au and opened in 2007. Here in Leipzig, BMW describe ZHA’s Central Building as showing just how ‘different industrial architecture can look’. And that’s the point.

Even briefly glimpsed, (we missed the English language tour, two and a half hours of it) the endless revolving cars overhead are mesmerising. I doubt many of the teenage boys gathering for their tour will have seen Charlie Chaplin’s disturbing Modern Times – probably just as well. BMW has worked hard and with consummate skill to present and mediate modern industry within contemporary society. How many major companies, in the UK or elsewhere, would even dare to try?

In this month’s Building Design column I mull over the idea that we used to take the amenities and facilities in our towns and cities for granted.  Now some survive, most are struggling but some have sprung back to life, spurred on by local effort. I enlist an eloquent cheerleader, the late Sue Townsend, who wrote, with suitable defiance, in the Observer in 2005 that “I’m a child of the municipal. Everything good had this word carved above its grand entrance.”  In Leicester, where she was born and lived all her life, “there were municipal libraries, majestic solid buildings with beautiful entrances, windows and doors, oak furniture and bookshelves. Then there were municipal baths, which had a swimming pool and what were called slipper baths – private bathrooms for those without baths and hot water at home…There were municipal parks, which were delightful places in which to take the air. A brass band played on summer evenings…”.

Shared local pride, immediately tangible in decent amenities, quality communal facilities and congenial neighbourhoods, was not, for her (or me) a dose of sterile nostalgia but a wake-up call.  Like the busy blogger Municipal Dreams, she was capturing the ubiquity and quality of good municipal provision.

If municipal pride was sometimes flawed, more often it was magnificent.  Take the remodelled Manchester Central Library, the dome covering the intact but now acoustically transformed central reading room still belted tightly by a band of lettering, conveying the resounding words from Proverbs,  “wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”   Vincent Harris’ 1934 exercise in (mostly false) grandeur is now afloat in a skein of interwoven levels and functions, a working by Ryder Architects that includes everything, and more, that might be expected from a state of the art public library.  That makes two expressions of civic grandeur, eighty years apart, but still under one roof.

Here, as in the newly rebuilt libraries in other major cities, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Birmingham too, a shift is signalled but not a change of direction. Considerations of public accessibility and shared values have been recast, with communal organisations and charitable trusts shouldering their share of the responsibility and drive, alongside the local authorities.

In Southwark the swimming pool (and adjacent sports hall) in Camberwell (see at the top of the piece) has recently been magnificently transformed after a local campaign group secured extra funding through the Olympic Legacy programme.  With its proud foundation stone (1891) listing all those who were responsible for setting up and building the Camberwell Public Baths, it’s now a monument standing equally for Victorian civic pride and 21^st century communal energy and imagination.  

British city authorities now distance themselves from the heavy-footed civic paternalism that so easily shaded into autocracy.  Yet the saga of the Red Road tower blocks is a useful reminder of the hubris lurking in the shadows. Fifty or so years ago Glasgow, in common with most other major cities, dealt with its monumental housing and transport problems with a series of ‘swift and gigantic solutions’ in Ian Jack’s neat phrase in the Guardian.  What he terms ‘misplaced civic grandeur’ was the driving force behind the construction of the Red Road blocks, springing from the same arrogant mindlessness that suggested that their demolition on a world stage in front of billions of viewers might be an appropriate popular spectacle. 

Bull-headed certainty drove the idea (now scuppered) that the combustion of many hundreds of recently vacated working class homes would be a televised global cultural happening  – a sort of vacuous version of London 2012 and Pandemonium re-imagined for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The last minute change of heart, a response to immense local outrage, is a sharp reminder that the very best municipal enterprises exemplified sustainable values even more than sustainable buildings. 

Readers of these words will never again flick through their copy of Building Design magazine each week. After many decades (I first wrote for the title almost forty years ago) it will no longer be on the page, disappearing to the online world, behind a paywall. What I have written is no longer a column in the physical sense, a way of seeing text on the page, an article in print.  As wood pulp gives way to the screen –computer or tablet or phone – and there’s less and less reading material stacked up on our desks or breakfast tables, we’re all forced to look elsewhere for reading matter.

Take the growing fascination with ghost signs – those gable ends or forgotten walls that offer wonder cures or dry goods in shadowy blocked lettering, evocative reminders of forgotten remedies, vanished businesses and obscure commodities – and which lift a dull stock brick elevation in a nondescript street to new heights of interest and, who knows, might even ensure its preservation.  In France they are ubiquitous; in my family, because of my daughter’s name, we passed the long hours of holiday journeys counting the gentian blue and acid yellow Suze signs on walls in every French town and village.  The digestif still exists, but it is the signage that is as inextricably part of France as old Citroen garages.

 In Egypt, the writing has always been on the walls.  The glorious mysteries or, for the initiate, the histories and myths represented by surviving hieroglyphics are evidence of lives and beliefs of extraordinary complexity.  Whether they blanket entire surfaces or simply pepper the intervals between the figures of pharaohs, their consorts and their cacophony of deities, the marks were a coded pictorial language for the few, largely dedicated to a world beyond this.

It was not until the final years of the 18^th century, that European travellers (and ‘collectors’) began to be brazen enough to carve their own names and dates onto the walls, often high up on the then engulfing sand.  Napoleon’s men used the revolutionary calendar, while the circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni (who shipped Sethi I’s sarcophagus carelessly back to London and  into the basement of Sir John Soane’s Museum) simply wrote his name a little larger than anyone else.  

In the 21st century graffiti, like the ghost signs, carries another level of  significance altogether. Take the streets of Cairo as they bring the story of Egyptian politics up to the present, with a bump. Banners are strung across street corners, blank walls and hoardings coated in a dense collage of posters from yesterday, the day before yesterday and tomorrow (I refer to a figurative timescale) telling a story which is far from easily told nor anywhere near resolved.  Some, the more slick versions of pre-election publicity (although as I write the date is not yet fixed, nor the presidential candidates named), proclaim military intelligence chief General Sisi as the heir to strongman Presidents Sadat and Nasser.  Elsewhere graffiti includes black stencilled palm prints – the menacing sign of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood – or red scrawled Arabic messages which translate into wishing Sisi the worst of all possible fates.

This is a review sent to me by Stephen Kay, in which he discusses televised architecture in general and Ian Nairn in particular.

Cardiff City Council wants to demolish the Coal Exchange. Recently sound enough for the Fire Officer to allow it to be used as the superbly historic and richly patinated venue for the audience to gather at the end of National Theatre Wales’ performance odyssey around Bute Town, it has now become so dangerous as to require demolition. What would Ian Nairn have said of this proposed act of civic vandalism?

Mention of Ian Nairn no longer provokes the question of who he is, or was. An article by David McKie in the Guardian saw Gillian Darley’s seminal volume “Villages of Vision” back in print. Darley and McKie have now collaborated on a book reviving Nairn;  “Ian Nairn; Words in Place.” And on Thursday night a number of the usual suspects contributed to a BBC 4 programme “The Man Who Fought the Planners”. Drawing on Darley and McKie’s book, this programme certainly have included much of Nairn’s views and many outings on camera, but transcended architecture to look directly at a human life.  His strengths and his ability to fuel ways of looking at townscape, to shamelessly judge and compare elements of the vernacular, the traditional, the modern, and the utterly valueless were as honestly pictured as his sad decline into an extended alcoholic. Hagiography or academic analysis it was not, profoundly moving human drama it certainly was.

Nairn’s appearances were a surprise to anyone not having seen him before – it wasn’t Betjeman or Pevsner on screen. He had more in common with an actor displaying existential angst, a performer interpreting his reading of Jack Kerouac by driving a Morris Minor into a scrapyard. Former colleagues and fellow writers remembering him were one or two soloists, and sometimes a male chorus. Whilst Bill Patterson’s stately narration was offstage, Gillian Darley’s contribution was sustained, not only in a studio or library but at places Nairn had been filmed, period footage juxtaposed with today.

BBC 4 currently has a wealth of architecture, ranging from 1980s archive, through semi-hagiographies of “Brits That Built the World” to Jonathan Meades, whose programmes the BBC Media Centre announce as “lavish and sometimes surreal collage.” The archive BBC coverage of contemporary architecture had a budget that ran to commissioning music from Hans-Werner Henze, the semi-hags sink to supermarket or hotel lift music. The Darley/McKie book is published by Five Leaves Press, which raised the question of whether the programme would be accompanied by the music of Nick Drake. It wasn’t, but perhaps some of it should have been. From both men acute observation, both similarly idiosyncratic, sometimes elided delivery, and both great talent ended too soon. At the chime of a city clock Nairn may have delivered his opinion, the clock in many a bar slowly and sadly tolled his decline.

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Now that the transmission date of The Man Who Fought The Planners: The Story Of Ian Nairn has been confirmed as February 20th at 10 pm, on BBC4 (where else?!) I thought a picture or two of the very very chilly shoot last February might entertain Nairn fans. My contribution to Kate Misrahi’s film consisted of a lot of clambering up and down chares (the steep alleys that still link the city with the quayside, see above), quite a bit of standing on the castle roof, avoiding puddles of melting snow and looking out over the railway tracks (see immediately below),  and a nice long sit in the Lit and Phil (the Literary and Philosophical Society library, below that) where the major part of the interview took place. My co-author of Ian Nairn: Words in Place, David McKie did similar stints, both outdoors in the snow and indoors in the town library,  in Wigan.