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.
Britain’s Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp (Aurum Press, £25) is a brilliantly researched survey of the damage done by the Luftwaffe, politicians and town planners to civic architecture from Plymouth, Portsmouth and Canterbury to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. His text, as well as the numbingly evocative photographs, presents an agonising portrait of loss. Witness Coventry. In 1933 J. B. Priestley noted: “It is genuinely old and picturesque \ half-timbered and gabled houses that would do for the second act of the Meistersinger.” Seven years later the City Architect wrote the bombing was “a blessing in disguise. The jerries cleared out the core of the city, a chaotic mess, and now we can start anew”.
The galling toll of loss includes a mass of fine civic and commercial architecture that lent dignity and grandeur to provincial cities, much of it by distinguished architects such as Lockwood and Mawson and Charles Fowler, whose magnificent arch-roofed Lower Market in Exeter was destroyed in 1942. In Glasgow it is the postwar damage that torments, of street after street of stone-fronted Georgian houses as well as the gloriously spiky 1882 Grand Hotel destroyed in 1968 to make way for the sunken motorway that cuts the city in half. Greek Thomson’s A-listed Queen’s Park Terrace was demolished by the City Council in 1980-81. Plymouth is especially painful, where noble bomb-damaged terraces survived into the 1960s before being cleared to conform with the Abercrombie plan.
They're gleefully demolishing the old 'slums' along with some very fine buildings, to make way for the new 'Arndale' centre, and shopping precinct. Four centuries of architecture and heritage in the skip!
If it doesn’t immediately transport you to the towers of San Gimignano, it certainly hints at Alsop’s Tuscan vision.
The Barnsley sandstone rainscreen also helps to evoke the Tuscan palette.