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Figure 1.7
The Byker Wall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
Ralph Erskine. Designed originally to shield the low-
rise housing from the noise of an urban motorway
that was never built, the Byker Wall has become the
dominant symbol and landmark of the Byker
redevelopment. It is mainly lived in by elderly
residents who enjoy magnificent views across the
valley of the River Tyne.
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publication, cities were becoming shaped less by
public projects and more by privately financed
designs. Private developers had little interest in
polemical positions, and chose instead to build
housing of the most conservative and traditional
kind, dwellings that were guaranteed to sell in the
marketplace.
This return to smaller scale, and more traditional
development led to an unexpected consequence in
British inner cities – the suburbanization of the cen-
ter during the 1980s. It was less a matter of density,
which had already been substantially reduced by the
towers and slabs of urban renewal, and more a matter
of image. The immediate origins of this change can
be found in the 1970s with substantial reductions in
public home-building programs and the energy crisis
of 1974, ‘which made inner urban areas more attrac-
tive to the middle class’ (Holyoak: p. 60).
Private developers were quick to sense this oppor-
tunity, and bought up land cheaply in the central
areas, either abandoned industrial sites or unloved
areas of the 1960s era housing, already severely dilap-
idated. Developers, and the architects who worked
for them, did not share the high-style modernist aspi-
rations of their public sector colleagues at City Hall.
Instead, they had a range of house designs that sold
well in the suburbs and were economical to build. It
was therefore easy for private builders to construct
large numbers of these commercially popular but
uninspired and low-density (by English standards)
houses that made the suburbanization of inner city
areas complete. Combined with Britain’s growing
political conservatism during the 1980s, and
… the emphasis by the Thatcher government on
placing private and family interests above the col-
lective, led to inner urban areas coming to look
more like slightly compressed versions of the sub-
urbs; rows of neovernacular two storey houses,
each with a small front garden with a car parking
space, but with little in the way of communal
resources – house production rather than city
building’ (Holyoak: p. 62). (See Figure 1.9.)
The 1980s found British cities without a coherent
strategy for revitalization, with neither the private
nor the public sectors being able to grapple effectively
with the problem on their own. One government
response during the Thatcher years was to diminish,
or in the case of the Greater London Council, destroy
the power local authorities had over development in
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES