Rebuilding the City: 1951 and Now
July 3rd, 2011
In spite of the mens’ final at Wimbledon the function room on Level 5 of the Royal Festival Hall was all seats taken to hear several well known experts on architecture and housing speak to the assembled along with a lesser known figure of equal importance being Jean Symons, clerk on site during the building of the Royal Festival Hall.
Paul Finch was chair, and introduced the meeting allotting each of the speakers fifteen minutes each, starting with Jean Symons who spoke from notes very movingly about her time on site and the scenes that surrounded her.
Elain Harwood was next and spoke from the lecturn with slides about the history of the site on the South Bank and the plans both before the war for the site, and how it developed afterwards.
Owen Hatherley spoke about the buildings along the river and how New Labour had failed to take advantage of the opportunity to turn these to public housing but allowed the developers to run riot such that the Thames is now a ribbon development of private flats. He also made a clear distinction between social and council housing.
This was towards the end of his talk and he was keen to ensure the audience understood the crucial difference between the two and indeed cited some councils who had built some new council houses in the period since Gordon Brown had enacted the legislation to allow councils once again to build, mentioning Barking and Dagenham as one such.
Paul Finch was asked about Churchill Gardens by Kate Macintosh who was in the audience (“Kate Macintosh, a retired architect”) and he talked about having been brought up there – (“my parents still live there”) and how the young Powell and Moya were given tremendous respect, having won a competition, by Westminster Council, in a way that would not happen today.
The tennis? http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/jul/03/novak-djokovic-rafael-nadal-wimbledon-final