I almost always start a project with a deep dive into historic imagery - eBay postcard searches, local libraries & archives, local history publishing - often I am trying to piece together the development histories, underlying narratives or conditions that have brought the place to what it is today. Doing this work recently in a number of Outer London town centres, and in the midst of an intense and enduring heatwave, I have seen new things.

On Fore Street, Edmonton, around the turn of the last century, we see an informal arcade made out of a varied array of canopies and awnings, including ones with their supporting pillars staking a claim on the whole of the pavement space, their feet on the granite kerb.

On Ilford High Road, at roughly the same moment in history, we see commercial buildings uniformly draping the pedestrian pavement in an almost uninterrupted swathe of canvas awnings - each one provided by an individual shop but with startling uniformity, as if they were intrinsic to the commercial premises they are attached to.

On nearby Cranbrook Road, a similar swathe of awnings neatly turns a corner, providing an arc of shade leading into the residential street beyond.

On Kilburn High Road we see those same canopies neatly aligning with the timber canopy of the railway station entrance, providing an uninterrupted line of sheltered space between station platform and shops.

On King Street, in Southall, we can see that the canopies extend almost to the pavement line, slightly set back for the sake of not entangling with carriages and vans. They are not simply sheltering entrances or goods spread on the pavements, they are creating a route. We can see the awnings have been specially designed not to interrupt the movement of people.

What we are seeing, in brief, is a huge expanse of shaded and sheltered pavement, delivered by countless small businesses joining together for public benefit.

From an individual business’s point of view, a sheltered shopfront is a cool and welcoming shopfront, and (though this is rare in the photos I have compiled for this piece) also can provide a chance for highly-visible supergraphics, aimed perhaps at a passing tramcar. It also creates the right conditions for the shop’s sales area to expand onto the pavement (something today heavily licensed by local authorities) in a way that is safe from rain and sun exposure.

From a pedestrian’s point of view, a regular sequence of sheltered and shaded spaces on the busy high street is an obvious good. Back in 2012 we suggested that Barkingside Town Centre deserved such ‘free’ shelter (from both rain and sun) and the result was a new loggia, added to an existing postwar swimming pool and lining the existing public square. We had to fight tooth and nail to keep the loggia open and free after the swimming pool closed each night and to avoid automatic barriers coming down to seal it off from the public realm. Today, night and day, it is rarely empty. Since the Covid-19 pandemic much has been written about such sheltered spaces in our cities that are ‘free to use’ without a commitment to pay, and in these sepia views of familiar places we can see an entire network of such spaces. Some, like the Edmonton example, are clearly informally delivered and eclectic in their design. Others feel far more ‘designed’ and integral to the commercial buildings they adorn, and we know that behind the lightboxes and Lycamobile fascias of today’s high streets there are often complex frameworks and awning systems built into Edwardian shopfronts.

It seems obvious that our increasingly heated cities would benefit massively from a reboot of the social contract embodied in the commercial awning, and also that the benefits would not leave with the heatwave but would continue into cooler, wetter seasons where town centres continue to struggle with competition from enclosed, often air-conditioned shopping malls - look again at that covered connection for pedestrians between train carriage and shop doorway on Kilburn High Road. The proliferation of commercial, mass-market photography and postcards from a century ago stands as ample evidence that a public/private compact of huge public benefit was once commonplace, and also that our 19th and 20th century commercial buildings, viewed purely in heritage terms, were often designed to be adorned in such a way. These postcards make clear that a plain, denuded commercial elevation is more likely to be an aberration, in heritage terms, than one adorned with awning. With a shift in aspiration we might be able not only to retrofit our high streets for climate resilience but at the same time to recover some of their original spirit and character.

Sussex, August 2026.

Acknowledgements

A nod is due to Julian Lewis of East who is clearly thinking similar things, in his case prompted by a postcard from Naples.

Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

It is clearly one of the most ancient and central streets in the city, wide enough for a big swathe of market stalls, animal pens or a fair - or all at the same time.. Lined with largeish chain restaurants and shops, and the entrances to capacious 19th century arcades, there are also frequent, barely signified alleyways. In other places these might be routes through to the front doors of flats above, or simply to the rear yards of shops occupied by euro and wheelie bins. But here these hardly-there entrances are frequently gateways to a whole other city: perpendicular to the main street, linear but warren-like, these tight pedestrian spaces contain some of the city’s most beloved pubs and bars, a secondary grid of nightlife and culture tucked behind the Primarks and Starbucks of the main drag. Two cities, in effect, are co-existing here - the formal one of the postcard and the high lettable value, and the informal one where the city actually lives and plays.

Briggate is one of the most significant and ancient of Leeds thoroughfares. When Leeds became a borough in the 13th century, Briggate was the street designated as the place’s market. On either side, roughly symmetrically, 30 plots (known as burgage plots) were laid out with an equal street frontage and a long, deep rear stretching back into open fields. The idea was that each of these plots would be allocated to a local merchant who would present a dignified commercial frontage (and, crucially, at the same width as everyone else) supported by a large enough strip of land behind that frontage to produce or at least store the crops intended for sale (with additional land on the fringes of the city, in this case at a place still known as Burmantofts). The plots of land on Briggate were tightly controlled in terms of their scale - measuring 3 perches or rods by 10-18 of the same (the perch as a unit of measure is thought to relate to the length of a military pike or spear). Through this act the borough of Leeds created not only a rich, lively market place (literally and figuratively) but also a varied but repeating 3-perch rhythm of high quality commercial buildings lining it, which were the responsibility not of the landowning aristocracy but of the competing merchants.

With time and changes to the nature of agriculture, the plots behind the main commercial frontages were subdivided and rented out, creating a series of tightly-knit linear alleyways threading from Briggate to surrounding streets. In typical fashion, these ‘just off the main drag’ alleys and courts became not only a network of dwellings and commercial premises for the less well-off citizens but also the location of the city’s primary sociable spaces - its pubs, non-conforming churches and meeting houses of various kinds, with the pubs typically serving as inns and thereby providing vital temporary accommodation for visiting market traders. Looking at maps of Briggate from the mid nineteenth century - a time when all agricultural uses of the burgage plots had long been overwritten by sense, fine grain urban development - we can see a network of 27 pubs and inns, 25 of which occupy spaces ‘off the main road’ and have no significant street frontage on Briggate itself. Though the number of pubs has declined, several remain, and some like Whitelocks have a (deserved) reputation as lively, convivial public houses, still almost entirely unmarked from the ‘normal’ street grid and, most likely, all the better for it: few if any can be reached by a car, and therefore the pedestrian-only alleyways are readily claimable on fine days as part of the curtilage of the pub.

Physically, not much remains of the original burgage plots, but the hierarchy they set up between formal street and informal alley remains and thrives. For the closest possible sense of the physical quality of these spaces (other than a drink at Whitelocks), Lambert’s Yard - known as the oldest building in Leeds - is a remarkable survivor, a recently-refurbished jettied building framing a loose courtyard, all tucked invisibly behind an off-licence at the southern end of Briggate.

In terms of what we can extract today from this model, the Briggate burgages are a clear example of a simple dimension-based piece of literal ‘place making’ - the street already existed, it just needed an agriculturally-rooted subdivision to give it life. This subdivision, set out in principle by one human and a pole, led to a highly durable urban form and, for centuries, to a finely balanced competitive ‘market’ whereby individual burgage tenants each contributed their ‘3 perch-wide’ piece of the urban scene. As such the structure, though diluted somewhat over the centuries, maintained limits on how much any one merchant might literally dominate the market - a model of urban democracy. As a second lesson, the increasing, almost metabolic subdivision of the burgess plots led to a loose, more-or-less uncontrolled urban richness behind the decorous commercial facades; a richness which is still giving joy to Leeds’ citizens today. Taken together, the interlocking grid of Briggate commercial frontage and rear alleyways is a reminder that our current age of active frontages and delivery bays is overly simplistic, that front and back can, instead of working as binary opposites, be deeply complex in service of a mixed economy and a complex urban place.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/UtRWeigebKfqYaTaA

Bethnal Green, July 2026.

Originally written for The Architects’ Journal and published in March 2024.

The train from London Bridge to Sidcup runs between the allotments and back gardens of suburban London. Along the way there are occasional glimpses of suburban town centres like Bexleyheath, swollen and densified by recent development, instilling the nagging feeling that some recent regeneration in these sorts of places is at times more responsive to central London journey times than it is to the spirit of the place.

In defining London’s suburbs in this way, we risk eroding those qualities that give London’s peripheral places – of which Sidcup is a prime example – their dignity and quality of life, ultimately robbing London as a whole of much of its oft-celebrated cultural diversity and spatial richness.

What if London’s public sector were more able to support and commission projects in these outer London conditions that combine intensification with genuine investment in place, creating more reasons to be in a place rather than relying on its relationship to somewhere else?

Storyteller, a new building on Sidcup High Street, housing a public library, cinema and private-sale flats, is an answer to this question. Commissioned by the London Borough of Bexley and designed by London and Antwerp-based architect DRDH, it is remarkable not only for its design’s intelligence and generosity but also for the entrepreneurial nature of its procurement.

The site, a former Blockbuster video rental shop on a prominent but unloved corner of the high street, was acquired by the council, which then put together a hybrid brief combining a public library, a commercial cinema and nine private-sale flats, the sale of which has subsidised the project.

The building shares its high street intersection with a police station that’s no longer a police station, a bank that’s no longer a bank, and an estate agent that continues to be an estate agent.

Facing the high street, Storyteller presents a humble, glossily abstract brick frontage reminiscent of the interwar cinema vernacular and its expressively blank elevations. This elevation also ‘finishes off’ the adjacent 1930s former department store by rising to the level of its portico, giving new prominence to the street corner. A red-brick drum creates a recessive corner entrance space in which to shake a brolly or linger on the doorstep.

The side flank of the building, addressing the more traffic-heavy and arterial Elm Road, presents a much more substantial character than the one facing the high street, and one that contains and resolves the expansive windows of the ground-floor library, the windowless boxes of the upper-storey cinema, and the residential windows and balconies of the flats to the rear of the site.

Here and elsewhere, rather than attempt to ‘fix the site’, the scheme seeks to give it a new quality as a focal point of the high street, taking its cues and geometries from its neighbours and creating a new coherence that simultaneously celebrates and challenges what came before.

Internally, the building is made up of spaces that feel alternately institutional and domestic, all sharing a welcoming but open character befitting the building’s multiple programmes. A double-height café space at the front forms a lofty shop window to the high street.

Visitors pass the café on their left as they enter, finding themselves in an almost domestic space: a timber-lined lobby and staircase leading up to a cinema lobby, public room and the three small screening rooms, one of which doubles as a performance space.

Back at ground level, the timber lobby is followed by a sequence of library rooms that are progressively more private and more ‘dug in’ to the site as the road outside rises, culminating in a children’s library and a single window, facing south directly into the branches of a mature holm oak tree.

There is a certain austerity and solemnity to these main rooms but this is lifted by inhabitation and the fact that the rooms are so easily available to the public. We can get right into the heart of the plan, reaching books, toilets (including a Changing Places accessible toilet), a pick ‘n’ mix stand and work tables all before passing a reception desk, lending the whole ground floor an unusually public quality. Throughout, a complex game of size and proportion is playing out. Windows that feel inconsequential from outside are suddenly vast and expansive on the inside, maintaining a close relationship between the library and the street.

When Robert Venturi wrote in 1966 of ‘the obligation to the difficult whole’, he was concerned with finding ways by which the kind of ‘complex and contradictory’ forms and spaces he was pursuing could be accommodated within a coherent building form. His primary example of a successful ‘difficult whole’ was, interestingly, a commercial building on an urban street corner: the Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin, by Louis Sullivan. Venturi sees in the bank’s primary elevation a play of symmetries that accommodates the dualities of the building’s internal programme while also providing a symmetrical, centred composition.

Something similar is going on at Storyteller, though the spatial and programmatic complexities of Venturi are replaced here by more powerful social complexities – this is at once a commercial, civic and domestic building. There’s the popular commercialism of the cinema (popcorn machines and free-standing adverts for upcoming features abound); there’s the increasingly complex and vital public offer represented by the library; and then there’s the need to provide uplifting, good quality flats, though the presence of these will be lost to most visitors.

As a public building, Storyteller is chiefly a place to read and to work, but it is also a place for birthday parties and reading groups, a place to pay bills or access council services, and ultimately somewhere for different generations to meet. The three main groups on my visit were parents of young children attending a storytelling session, teenagers doing their half-term coursework, and pensioners chatting and browsing the bookshelves.

Sonic Youth played quietly on the café speakers, vital nattering took place around library desks, and a swarm of laden buggies sat at the edge of the children’s library. As the day rolled on, this sort of thing would be supplemented by after-work cinemagoers sharing circulation and café spaces with library users.

The building does not attempt to express the tensions inherent in such a complex programme but instead is concerned with creating an allusive, integrated and cross-programmed ‘difficult whole’ to make a hybrid public building that feels not only like a place for the communities of Sidcup to meet and be together, but a genuinely new form of public building, particularly in its UK context.

Though both client and architect are reluctant to describe it as an exemplar, given the effort involved in making it happen, it nevertheless feels like a model for how architecture with a public consciousness and an entrepreneurial state can together ‘lift’ a town centre in a way that is responsive to the contemporary needs and challenges of public life. Our communities deserve – need – more of this.

There are persistent, recurring motifs and beliefs haunting our alternative cultures. One is a deep commitment to nature, the parameters of which shift with growing environmental awareness but remain at heart the same. Another is a reverence for ancient humanity and versions of society before history - this can be seen in the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, in the ‘Golden Bough’, in the acid-drenched late 1960s and in the rave culture of the 80s and 90s. Still another is a strong focus on the child and on youth development, a belief that through new forms of education we might build new forms of community. Yet another is the sanctity of creativity and freedom of expression, and a commitment to new forms of expression, especially ones that transcend the isolated intellect toward a form of group creativity.

Broken English, a new film exploring the life and career of Marianne Faithfull premiered a fe weeks back at the Barbican Centre. Directed by Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth, the film mixes documentary footage and reminisces from Faithfull herself shortly before her death, with a fictionalised narrative of researchers working to better understand her life and times. Aside from setting out Faithfull’s significance as a musician, it also situates her as an unusually progressive and experimental protagonist of the 1960s counterculture through which she first found fame. It also hints at some of the things in her background and family history that helped to create the kind of artist she became, in the process exploring how her creative life (which ended in 2025) formed a conduit between the minority radical practices of the interwar period and the late 1960s counterculture, and indeed leap-frogged that to form her own unique form of richly collaborative, open hearted musicianship.

Marianne Faithfull’s family history was deeply entwined with some of the most experimental and progressive thinking around education and community that took place from the 1910s onward. I have written before about the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (OWC), an esoteric, fascinating group of alternative thinkers first convened in 1916 by Ernest and Aubrey Westlake as a progressive alternative to the Boy Scout movement. Related to, but distinct from, such organisations as the Woodcraft Folk and the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, and to the work of Ernest Seton Thompson in the United States, the OWC was inspired by an array of philosophies and theories, some of which today are arcane and discredited (recapitulation theory, for example) whilst others feel ever more valid and vital - most crucially, the idea that children and young people benefit from an empowered, active and often outdoor life and education, allied to a fascination with ancient religion, mysticism and prehistory.

One of the figures attracted to the OWC in the early 1920s was a former veterinary surgeon turned educationalist called Theodore Faithfull (1885-1973), who with his wife Frances had established the Priory Gate School in Wereham, Norfolk in 1919, occupying a now-demolished country house and running a ‘free’ or ‘nature’ school there, where the learning and daily structure was led by the pupils and the curriculum included a variety of outdoor pursuits centred on the healthy, sociable body. Among other influences, the Faithfulls’ work at Priory Gate was informed by the visionary thinker Patrick Geddes, who was a pioneer of both sociology and of regional planning and a key figure in the early twentieth century development of a social conscience for architecture and planning.

An educationalist called Dorothy Revel was running a youth club in Foxton, Hertfordshire at around this time and in 1923 merged this group with the OWC. At a similar time she had become Senior Mistress at Priory Gate School and had both learned from and contributed to its curriculum and theories, publishing the book Cheiron’s Cave: The school of the future in 1928 as a summary of her educational views as they stood at the time (incidentally the same year that Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper/The Threepenny Opera premiered in Berlin). Cheiron’s Cave evokes the ancient greek myth of a natural cave in the wilderness where heroes such as Achilles were taught life skills by the centaur Chiron. This outdoor learning was a powerful image for Revel and chimed with the ideas of fresh air and outdoor living that she felt were so important to healthy childhood development. Cheiron’s Cave features photographs not only of Priory Gate educational activities but also of Bedales school and OWC folkmoot events. Young people involved in these programmes are seen organising historical pageants, doing work of use to wider society, understanding how to respect and exist within nature, working collectively outdoors and so on. Revel wrote that ‘the school of the future must take as its model the oldest social institution know to man - that of the family.’ This notion of an intentional ‘family’ of learners and teachers was crucial to this evolving movement of educators and social reformers.

In 1929 Dorothy Revel married Dr Norman Glaister (1883-1961), a practicing psychologist who was also a member of the OWC. Together, they worked on two of the Order’s most lasting programmes, Forest School and Grith Fyrd/Grith Pioneers. Forest School, originally established and housed in a timber cabin on the Westlakes’ land at Sandy Balls, Godshill, Hampshire, took the progressive educational models of Priory Gate and relocated them to a properly wild and untamed location, away from the stately homes where they had first been tested and into the pine trees of the New Forest’s north-western fringes. As Forest School grew and slowly transformed from a full-time school into a camping fellowship (Forest School Camps) the Glaisters became heavily involved in Grith Fyrd (latterly Grith Pioneers), a programme for involving unemployed young men, originally those recovering from the horrors of World War 1, in productive rural activity. This, too, had its first base in the woods at Godshill before operating at a variety of other sites such as at Shining Cliff, Derbyshire, though its administrative home under Glaister was at Toynbee Hall, Spitalfields, East London. Grith Pioneers had run its course as an intensive programme by the end of the 1930s but, partly through its ownership of the land at Shining Cliff, it continues to provide access to nature today.

During this time, Theodore Faithfull’s eldest son Robert Glyn Faithfull (1912-1998) was a young man active in the OWC and Grith Pioneers programmes. In 1946 he married Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch, the grand-niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of the novella Venus in Furs and whose name, combined with that of the Marquis de Sade, had been combined by Sigmund Freud into the neologism ‘sadomasochism’. Eva, prior to fleeing Germany, had danced in productions by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill and had been a member of the dance company founded by expressionist pioneer Max Reinhardt, thereby deeply plugged in to some of the most radical aesthetic expressions of Europe at that time.

Glynn Faithfull and Eva Sacher-Masoch had a tempestuous and brief marriage but it resulted in the birth of a daughter - Marian Evelyn - more widely known as Marianne Faithfull. In 1950, when Marianne was four, Glynn collaborated with Norman and Dorothy Glaister on the establishment of the Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research in a neo-Gothic country house in Oxfordshire. The project, which continues to thrive today as an intentional community and living experiment, was formed to ‘explore the dynamics of people living in groups, to develop better methods of interpersonal communication and to find new ways of combining knowledge to make it more meaningful.’ This idea of the group mind is important - it appears not only in the philosophy of the Braziers Park community but also in its daily life and that of the family of organisations that framed its activities - the folk circle, collective identity, the profundity of consensus. It also, surely, gave a young Marianne Faithfull a unique experience of how a free-thinking society or community might function in the future: creativity without ego. There was also continuity with the Westlakes of Godshill, as the biodynamic gardener (and former Forest School student) Jean Westlake (granddaughter of Ernest) spent a period of time at Braziers advising on the setting up of their kitchen garden.

Marianne left Braziers with her mother when her parents marriage ended, and was educated primarily at a convent school, but spent a lot of her childhood in and around Braziers Park staying with her father—including memorable adventures climbing on the roof of the house—and in the aftermath of the infamous Rolling Stones drug bust of February 1967, Marianne and Mick Jagger took shelter there for a period of recovery.

By this point, as Broken English the film elegantly captures, Marianne Faithfull was deeply embedded in radical literary, artistic and political movements beyond being a presence in the Rolling Stones junket through her relationship with Jagger. She lucidly advocated anarchist ideas in interviews with the mainstream media, and attended performances by Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, and later in the 1980s briefly became a tutor running courses in songwriting at Ginsberg’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her childhood, partially spent at Braziers and in the company of the protagonists of Priory Gate and the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry were ideal preparation for her taking on a productive and creative role in the society that key countercultural figures of the 60s were trying to usher in. Faithfull’s musical career - which began, at her insistence, with an album of folk songs that would have been familiar to any campfire circle of the period - was marked by endlessly varied collaborations and shared authorship, including Sister Morphine which was a Jagger melody given lyrical resolution by Faithfull.

What she was perhaps not prepared for by the radical context of her childhood was the deep misogyny of the British media and establishment’s reaction to her role in the counterculture - while Jagger and Richards emerged from the 1967 ‘bust’ as folk heroes, she was portrayed as little more than a corrupted groupie, accompanied by lurid and sensational tabloid embellishments. Exemplifying the gender injustices of the period, Faithfull’s own release of Sister Morphine (as a B-side) was pulled from the shops after three days due to its drug references, but was perfectly okay two years later as an album track on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

In time, Faithfull built a musical and theatrical career characterised not only by her incredible voice and skill at interpretation but also by a distinct tendency toward collaborative creativity. Whilst it is typically Marianne’s name front and centre (as it had been since her teenage pop career) practically every record and performance is in some way a collaborative project. Highlights of this include Steve Winwood’s presence on Broken English (1979), collaborations with Anna Calvi, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and Jarvis Cocker in recent years, her sustained engagement with the work of Brecht and Weil undertaken with a strong nod toward her mother (including performances of The Threepenny Opera and The Seven Deadly Sins). Her name was less centre-stage when she played Pegleg in Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and William Burroughs’ The Black Rider (2004), a production that re-engaged her with the Beat literature of Burroughs and Ginsberg that had inspired her for decades. She also reclaimed Sister Morphine, re-recording and rereleasing it as part of the Broken English sessions, though she didn’t get a credit for writing the song until the mid 1990s.

The world that Woodcraft Chilvary, Girth Fyrd, Forest School and latterly Braziers Park tried to usher in was co-educational and built upon a complex web of ideas of equality, health and fellowship, it advocated collective creativity over individual creativity on the basis that community and fellowship are the wellsprings of meaningful existence. It was an idealised and ‘elite’ condition where radical ideas were tested in somewhat elitist and certainly isolated hothouse situations, its protagonists wildly progressive and radical within the terms of their own privilege. This radical educational context surely helped, through her immersion in it as a child, to prepare Marianne Faithfull to be the great and generous artist that she became and, at the same time, left her unusually exposed in early adulthood to a counterculture that was not so prepared for those ideas, not as socially progressive as it appeared. The creative milieu that she first achieved success within was full of radicals who were radical on their own terms and who were frequently rebelling against their own suburban upbringings - the young Rolling Stones were certainly this. Faithfull however, steeped in several generations of experiments in creativity, development and self expression, was less engaged in rebellion than in living up to, even fulfilling, the radical visions she saw and inherited during her childhood.

Spitalfields, March-April 2026.

Further Reading

Edgell, Derek (1993) The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, 1916-49, as a New Age Alternative to the Boy Scouts

Faithfull, Marianne (1994) Faithfull: An Autobiography.

Hodkinson, Mark (2025) Marianne Faithfull: As Years Go By.

Revel, Dorothy (1928) Cheiron’s Cave: The school of the future.

Westlake, Jean (2000) 70 Years A-Growing

And of course Marianne Faithfull’s fantastic recorded output, Nick Jordan and Clara Casian’s documentary on Braziers Park Intentional Community and the new film Broken English, currently in cinemas.

I have a short essay in For the Love of People, a collection of writings edited by painter Bella Bacon celebrating the significance of art to the human experience. Bella’s paintings are also a testament to this.

My piece - illustrated with a photograph by Amelia Monteiro Knight - is called The Hand in the Wall and uses the painterly surfaces of St Michael & All Angels, Berwick as a springboard for thinking again about the relevance of the hand-made, and especially the hand-painted surface, to architecture, particularly of the public kind.

On Berwick, famously adorned with paintings by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell, I write:

It is hard not to see the overall decorative scheme as an assertion of the values of this place and of our common humanity - the Bells and Grant were not practising Christians (though Bell had lost a son to war) and so their evocation of New Testament imagery is as much about art history as it is about belief, but nonetheless they achieve something universal at Berwick, a treasure trove made in the midst of possible invasion that celebrates, in highly- articulated oil paint, the people and qualities of the place in which the church has sat for hundreds of years. The work of the artists - as applied to the ancient building - creates a powerful space of communion and social history. It does not simply record place and character but asserts values and qualities in a way that reaches toward the universal but which is also highly-particular, made by hand.

And I go on to try and find a non-rarefied role for the handmade in public architecture and public space:

If the human-made will become increasingly valued and rarefied, it would be a shame if this value were simply to benefit those who can afford it - the premium handmade home, for example, rather than the one spat out using machine-generated drawings and replicated details. The opportunity, it seems to me - especially if we glance back at what was achieved at Berwick - is that we might find ways of embedding these qualities in our collective built environment - namely our public buildings and public spaces.

To read the rest of the essay, and a host of others by Sam Nati, Nicholas Tindale, Toria Eve, Keisha Frimpong, Gaia Marino, Davis Wildman-Blakely, Joel Gethin Lewis, Raphael Roy Taylor, Psychotherapist “H” (anonymous) and Toby Bayliss, head here to buy the book while you still can!

The book was put together by Bella and Jiayue Jenny Li to accompany Bella’s first solo show, Amid, held recently at Studio Point Two and in collaboration with Youth Unlocked. Bella also hangs out on substack, here!

I returned to the School of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston University yesterday to attend Bernd Schmutz’s guest lecture, Long Time Exposures. Bernd, myself and Adam Khan taught postgraduate architecture Unit 2 at Kingston between 2008 and 2011, but it has been 15 years since we were all in the building together.

Before he showed us his own practice’s work, Bernd showed us a piece of student work from 17 years ago which we taught together in a year called Public House. As a first brief of the year, we had asked our students to study, in intricate detail, a series of London pubs (tough gig right), and having surveyed them fully through a series of richly inhabited plans and sections - we asked them to propose external furniture or modifications to those same pubs. In many cases the students involved actually built and installed this furniture on site, and benefitted from an insightful and somewhat boozy crit with guest Fred Scott, who at the time was fresh from writing On Altering Architecture, a prescient study of the aesthetics of repair and adaptation.

The Public House project, incidentally, many years later led myself and Cristina Monteiro to co-edit Public House: A social and cultural history of the London pub (Open City, 2021), a book that contained several of the drawings made during that first student project. But the furniture works that ended the project have not been so widely-seen.

One group of students working on the project was lucky enough to be allocated a pub that was (and is) very close to my heart, the Wenlock Arms in Hoxton. During a particularly boisterous weekday evening at the bar, the students experienced first hand the class-crossing qualities of the ‘Wenners’, including a passionate bar monologue about the pub community from our wonderful friend Patricia Jones. They came away from that evening, after their heads had cleared, with a strong sense of the pub as a community project, and with two particular images in their minds. The first image was of a ramp, hand-made by one of the regulars to allow local (and legendary jazz pianist) Johnny Parker to navigate a level change inside the pub with his mobility scooter. The ramp sat in a corner of the pub usually, but when Johnny arrived would be brought out so he could reach the gents’ loos at a reasonable pace. The second image was of a bollard outside the pub, installed at some point by Hackney Council right outside one of the pub’s main doors. A resin replica of Napoleonic cast iron bollards, this particular bollard had somehow been damaged and had lost a whole chunk of its top.

Taking the spirit of the ramp and the ‘need’ of the broken bollard, students Liidia Grinko and Sherry Khodabaksh set out to repair the bollard to transform it into a small kerbside table for a couple of pints. The resulting addition - a coal-black cast element more precious than the bollard it was cast against, and including cast human hands ‘holding up’ the table, was not just an elegant ‘flipping’ of bollard into table, it was also a celebration of the spirit of communal repair that pervaded the pub, and an extension of that spirit into the street. It was duly affixed (for a limited season only) to the bollard and used as a convenient pint store by smokers and outdoor drinkers. The students then moved on to the design of community or public buildings that took lessons from the pubs they had studied and the furniture-sized interventions they had made.

Bernd’s lecture this week positioned the Wenlock bollard as the first move in a series of precise works of repair and reimagination undertaken by his practice in the years that followed. Since leaving the UK (and Caruso St John’s London office) Bernd has developed a singular architectural career - based primarily in Berlin - applying a rich, deep commitment to architectural character to works of close attention, constrained budget and intimate adjustment. Whether repairing a trio of rural houses or a decayed brick wall, or recovering the modernist national monument of Hugo Häring’s Gut Garkau through a staggeringly complex and imaginative series of cumulative repairs and adjustments (an ongoing project), Bernd’s work is steeped in the aesthetic and formal possibilities of architecture but also has the playful qualities of a dressmaker or craftsperson who really knows their tools: a stitch in a contrasting colour here, a patchwork repair there, with every deviation from the norm a chance for improvisation or individual flourish. Bernd’s approach to conservation is historically aware but undogmatic, paying attention to previous acts of care (c1970 in the case of Gut Garkau) which conventional conservation approaches might simply sweep away. It is not about fetishisation of the existing architecture but an engagement with it on its own terms, with a view to transforming it for the present in ways that are true to itself but which, perhaps, might never have previously been imagined.

The built environment professions are all-too-gradually waking up to the need to retool our profession and the legislation that frames it in favour of reuse, repair and conservation over new construction. Bernd’s work and teaching, from the Wenlock bollard to Gut Garkau and beyond, is an inspiring assertion of the creativity and profundity that can lie behind the act of architectural repair, and of the myriad approaches that can be brought to bear on this apparently humble act.

Thanks to all the students of Unit 2 that engaged in these briefs (especially the Wenlock ‘crew’ of Liidia Grinko, Ming-Kun Huang, Sharareh Khodabaksh and Mario Soustiel), to Bernd Schmutz and Adam Khan, and lastly to Andrew Clancy and Aoife Donnelly for welcoming us all back to KU so warmly this week.

Gut Garkau photography and drawings © Bernd Schmutz Architekten.

This month’s RIBA Journal (March/April 2026) is a special issue on craft, and my contribution takes the form of a collectively-authored summary of a roundtable exploring the relevance of the Arts & Crafts to contemporary practice - particularly when we think about labour, automation and the value of the handmade.

Here’s an extract on the relevance of the Arts & Crafts to planning:

The movement’s contribution to the origins of planning serves as a reminder of those values, and also that there is an art and craft of planning, just as much as anything else. These architects saw creating the built environment as more than the technical agglomeration of individual buildings; it is a profound collective act needing complementary but different skills to architecture.

This ‘collective essay’ is the result of an ongoing WhatsApp group I am a member of called Nerds from Nowhere, and was authored online and on our dining table by myself and friends & collaborators Ruth Lang, Cristina Monteiro, Neal Shasore, Daniel Stilwell and Hugh Strange.

The full piece can be downloaded and read here - and thank you to Chris Foges for the commission.

Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

The village is stretched out along a narrow country lane facing a large swathe of New Forest heathland. It is nearly four miles long but rarely over 50 feet wide. Heading south from the main road the heathland, vast and flat, is on our right, plus a large lake that was once a worked gravel pit, both separated from the road only by a shallow drainage ditch. On our left is the settlement: a series of houses on private plots, though the overwhelming impression from the street is of an almost unbroken hedgerow, often above head-height, with gateways, cattle grids and occasional private roads breaking its flow. Although some of the houses tucked behind the hedgerow appear to be fairly ancient and made of painted cob construction topped with thatched roofs, the majority are conventional suburban or rural types from across the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Sometimes the houses cluster together, and many more recent ones have been slotted in between - or in sub-divisions behind - existing dwellings. In one location a whole estate of interwar council housing has been slotted in, organised around a village green which is occupied by a mixture of private cars and New Forest ponies. Only a very few houses - and an extensive series of allotment gardens - have been built on the western side of the road, which is otherwise an uninterrupted expanse of heath.

East Boldre in the New Forest is a village of 800 people that closely follows the boundary line that defines the neighbouring parish, Beaulieu. Before gaining its official status and name, it was known as ‘Beaulieu Rails’, this strange name echoing the fact that the original houses were almost entirely built along the boundary fence and bank of the Beaulieu estate. The editor of the 1905 Ward Lock guide to the New Forest explains very simply how this happened:

‘The inside of the hedge was cut, and the briars and stuff thrown outside. These shot out and formed a sort of rolling fence, and so the would-be squatters kept trimming the inside and adding to the outside.’ (Illustrated Guide to the New Forest, London: Ward Lock, 1905.)

In an era before aerial photography and the Ordnance Survey, it was possible to create an entire settlement out of deliberately ‘growing’ a home within an existing boundary line, with the land around the home originally remaining unenclosed. ‘Growing’ in this context is almost literally true, as the homes would have been made with natural materials drawn directly from the environment, namely cob (a mix of clay, sand, straw and water) and thatch. And they would have been ‘grown’ quickly; folklore has it that many of these houses were built on the ‘one night house’ principle, variations of which exist around the world and which can be summarised as the right to build and maintain a dwelling if it can be completed between dusk and dawn (there are regional variations about what ‘completed’ means - it might be a defensible boundary, smoke from the chimney, or a weatherproof roof). In this way labourers employed on the adjacent private estate, or in nearby shipyards would have been able to house themselves in a settlement very literally just beyond the boundary of the employment in a way that would have been tolerated by landowners who relied upon their labour. In this way the Crown Forest, an ancient hunting ground, became a legitimate village of nearly a thousand people.

C.J.Cornish, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, summarised the condition beautifully:

‘A favourite site for their colonies was on the fringe of some great estate projecting into the Crown Forest. At Beaulieu, for instance, the boundary of the property is called the ‘Manor Bank.’ South and east of the Abbey it abuts on high flat open heaths; and there the line of division is a bank in the literal sense, a high rampart of earth separating the cultivated land and plantations of Beaulieu from the wild and open forest. To this bank, the cottages of the commoners and squatters cling like swallows’ nests to the eaves. It is said that in the old days of encroachments, custom ruled that if a house were once built, roofed, and a fire lit within, it was not in the power of the Crown to put it down. Occupation, and not architecture, was the object of the squatters, and the game of house-building in the forest was soon played with a skill born of long practice which baffled the spasmodic fits of energy on the part of the authorities. It reached such a stage of perfection that the art of building, roofing, putting in a chimney, and lighting a fire within the space of a single winter’s night was at last attained; and the curl of smoke rising defiantly in the grey of a December morning was the signal that the squatter had triumphed, and that henceforth he was irremovable.’ (C.J. Cornish: The New Forest and The Isle of Wight, London: Seeley, 1895.)

In our age of GPS, GIS and what.three.words, in which every square metre of the planet is a point on a map, every feature a vector, what can we learn from a village that could emerge and exist within the fuzzy (and furzey, as in gorse-covered) boundary of a ‘great estate’? If we can’t directly borrow the tactics of the original squatters and encroachers of East Boldre and their hedgerow ingenuity, what can be learned?

It may be that lessons from East Boldre’s encroachment within the depth of a hedgerow lie in that very fuzziness, the lack of a predetermined pattern. The residents of East Boldre managed to evolve a whole settlement in a space that was understood simply as a line by those in power - one person’s line on a map is another person’s entire existence. This was not a settlement that was ever designed, rather it evolved out of a disparity between different understandings of space. The churches and the shops came later, meeting demand.

The resulting inhabitation of the edge challenges the prevailing carpet-like nature of development typically seen in today’s rural housing, in which densely-packed clusters of houses (detached, but only just) huddle together in former fields. The form of East Boldre allows nature to predominate, not only through the ongoing presence of the hedgerow but because, as the village rarely gets wider than a single plot, the heathland and forestry around the village are never overwhelmed by housing. The settlement, in effect, continues to form a thick boundary between the heathland of the New Forest and the private land just beyond it, and a thick boundary that preserves animal movement corridors (with the exception of New Forest ponies, as reinforced by an array of low picket fences around private gardens) whilst grafting on a layer of human inhabitation to the edge of the heath that preserves the openness of the landscape. A line can become a place.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/oh4F59vtKF95SnuXA

Bethnal Green, 12 January 2026.

This mini-exhibition-as-blogpost was first written back in 2011 for Sam Jacob’s blog Strange Harvest. Sam invited me to produce a guest post for his brilliant blog and I chose to combine some PhD case studies (some of which are candidates for a future Other Plans article) and photographs taken by either myself or Asif Khan from our collaborative photoblog anndd, which we began c2010 and which remarkably is still going, though very occasionally. Reflecting the age of the piece some of the camera photos are a little rough.

‘Somehow, everything must be watched; nothing must be allowed to be commonplace in the way that things just are commonplace: each project must be weighed, and planned, and approved, and only then built, and only after that discovered to be commonplace after all.’
- Banham, Barker, Hall, Price, ‘NON-PLAN: An Experiment in Freedom’. New Society 20.03.1969

Since 1947’s Town and County Planning Act(s), we in the UK have assumed that planning is something that local authorities ‘do’ for us. In the current context of financial cuts and the ideology of localism however, that looks set to change dramatically: planning departments are shedding staff, piloting premium rate streamed services, and outsourcing case officer roles to private consultants. There will be a net reduction in the amount of planning ‘done’ by local authorities.

The very notion of planning as a long-term, strategic practice is therefore up for negotiation: a situation both frightening and exciting. Frightening because of the very real danger that big business rather than the big society will fill the void, prioritising short term profit over long term worth, and exciting because the way we produce the built environment has not been this up for grabs since 1947.

To better understand this new world, it seems useful to explore spatial and material processes that do not arise out of conscious planning- things or places that derive from the ad-hoc more than the pre-planned (one of the definitions of the ad-hoc is ‘inadequate planning’). In doing so we might derive some strategies for coping with less planning and/or for working out new ways of doing it. Could it be that planning gets more efficient, better even, by knowing its own inadequacy?

The following examples form a mini-exhibition of what ‘inadequate planning’ might look like. Some are examples from history derived from research I am currently (2011) undertaking at the Royal College of Art; others are chance encounters with chance phenomena drawn from the blog aandd, which I co-author with the designer Asif Khan. Together they propose a more gradated understanding of the forces – beyond the preconceived – that shape the built environment.

Exhibit A: aandd: Slow-Strikethrough

A public message is cast in brass and set into a prefabricated panel on the pavement. After a few decades of footfall, the letters wear down so that the underlying structure of the message reverses its intended meaning. (City of London)

Exhibit B: Garden City Garden

Built versions of Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden City’ were mocked for the ‘dull doctrinairism’ of their large vegetable-plot gardens and their sprawling, health-giving avenues. However, in a perfect example of what Vincent Lacovara has called ‘the law of unforeseen planning’ they and their many copies proved perfect to accommodate the rise of the private car and of the garden as leisure space. (Letchworth Garden City)

Exhibit C: aandd: Polka-dot services

Many Portuguese houses have ‘Águas’ water service points on their front façades, usually close to the main door. These service points are a built compromise between inside/outside and the forces of gravity. (Évora, Portugal)

Exhibit D: Al-Fina

Al-fina is the Islamic legal term for the space outside a home within which water from a gargoyle or water spout must fall. When a fina is on the street, what happens there is governed by individual judgment and neighbourliness, making it a legal and literal space for negotiation, a precise limit of planning control and a contributor to the ‘soft’ grid of the Arabic-islamic city. (Muharraq, Bahrain. Images via)

Exhibit E: aandd: Shops + Scaffolding = Arcade

An urban ‘arcade’ resulting from remedial works to a new city office building and a few already-occupied shops. A collateral spatial product which, for a limited time only, will be the a very popular destination in this part of the city and an accidental resurgence of the arcade type.

Exhibit F: Nobody’s Land

Headington Quarry was a village that grew out of a quarry. Many of its houses were built on ‘nobody’s land’ – landforms created by the quarrying process. The shape of the village therefore derived from individual opportunism in relation to an industrial process, also revealing the limits of two dimensional plot boundary drawings. Headington Quarry provided much of the stone that built Oxford and is now a suburb and conservation area. (Headington Quarry, Oxfordshire)

Exhibit G: aandd: Conjoined K8s with double pitch / Miesian corners

Just as the cultivated designer can derive formal languages of architecture, so can accident and necessity. On South Kensington station, two Modernist K8 telephone boxes regain the classical Soanian grandeur of the original by gaining a pediment for drainage purposes, whilst the wear and tear of the public realm adjusts two planters until they suit Mies van der Rohe’s obsessive interest in turning a corner. (Both examples taken in London)

Exhibit H: Permitted Poundbury

Poundbury, Leon Krier and Prince Charles’ urban extension to Dorchester, is a built rebuttal to modernist town planning in favour of the, er, organic growth of the ‘traditional’ village. However, Poundbury shares the pre-emptive quality of the urban planning it critiques, as it is entirely built within a grand, phased masterplan and its design code explicitly prohibits ‘permitted development’ (PD), what that can be built without needing planning permission. If it revoked this code, and the citizens of Poundbury collectively pushed their PD rights to the max, the urban extension would grow by 30% volume and would begin to approach the organic, incremental and democratic shape it approximates but denies. (‘Building without Bureuacracy’, a speculative project by David Knight, Finn Williams and Ulf Hackauf in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.)

Exhibit I: Gum thrower & Gum Cleaner Collaborate on Pattern

In an example of unintentional public realm collaboration, vast numbers of thoughtless chewing gum users throw their unwanted gum onto the Broadgate pavement, and then a specialist gum cleaner with a jet washer turns up to remove it, in the process creating a haphazard pattern derived from daily life. Human failure transformed into ornament. (Broadgate, City of London).

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sam Jacob for asking me to write this many moons ago, and to collaborators Asif Khan, Finn Williams and Ulf Hackauf.

Spitalfields, June 2011.

Here I use cultural theory (including a brief digression into the politics of ripped denim) to set up a potential productive relationship between ‘what people build and dream of building’ and the more formal end of the planning system.

This is a text adapted from my unpublished PhD, ‘Making Planning Popular: popular agency, online discourse and English statutory planning’ (Royal College of Art 2018). The text was originally extracted for the benefit of students of ADS2: The Popular, taught by myself, Diana Ibáñez López and Finn Williams.

Popular culture, seen in relation to wider systems of power and agency in the built environment, can be understood as a progressive political tool and as a site of mediation in which power and agency can be gained. After decades of antagonism and duality-based theory (‘wemust advocate’, ‘they must participate’) which if anything has served to reinforce the division between public planning and society, it is highly overdue that we recognise these antagonisms and binaries as part of a wider (difficult) whole, and one that might form the basis of a more open, progressive system of deciding the future of the environment.

The assertion that ‘popular culture’ might provide political power to ‘the people’, is rooted in the work of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) whose idea of cultural hegemony was a way of understanding the means through which power is gained by class groups and, ultimately, how power might be gained by the proletariat in the context in which he was writing, that of the Italian Fascist dictatorship of 1922-1945. In Gramsci’s thought, the hegemony of a given political class meant that ‘that class had succeeded in persuading the other classes of society to accept its own moral, political and cultural values’ (Joll, 1977: 8,99) thereby asserting leadership. The role of the intellectual in this process, for Gramsci, is of vital importance, as the gaining and maintaining of hegemony is largely a question of education: ‘Every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily a pedagogic relationship’ (Gramsci, 1971:350), and as such it is through a process of education – a necessarily gradual one - that cultural hegemony is achieved. In terms of gaining power for the currently dominated classes, in Gramsci’s terms a ‘popular national bloc’, it is vital that the intellectuals undertaking the construction of a collective will through education do so in a way that is profoundly engaged with those dominated classes, what Joll described as the ‘test of common sense’ (1971:101).

In this way, Gramsci proposed that political leadership was not simply a question of economic power but also of cultural and moral dominance, and established a terrain where cultural production - high or low, art, literature, music - can be conceived of as having agency within a political system, and moreover having a mobility within class structures. Such thinking would lead, eventually, to Gramsci’s strong influence over the fields of cultural and pedagogical theory, particularly (in this context) after his Prison Notebooks were translated into English in 1971.

In the field of cultural theory, Gramsci’s conception of cultural hegemony allowed a generation of cultural theorists (among them Tony Bennett, John Fiske, George Rudé, Stuart Hall and Raphael Samuel) to explore the workings of popular culture and activity as, in Bennett’s terms,

an area of negotiation between [an imposed mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideology] and [spontaneously oppositional cultures] …within which… dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural and ideological values and elements are ‘mixed’ in different permutations. (1986: xv-xvi)

Through their work, the importance of popular culture in society was revealed to have been underplayed. Its depictions in political discourse up to this point had mainly been negative or abstract, portraying ‘the people’ as either passive receivers of culture or unruly rebels.

It was only in the 1970s and 80s, thanks to this generation of theorists and historians, that popular culture’s role in social and political processes, ‘particularly those bearing on the production of consent to the prevailing social order’, began to be given serious attention by sociologists and cultural theorists. Within this discourse at least, portrayals of ‘the people’ accordingly became more nuanced and precise, and the notion of popular culture as a subject of serious study became widespread, built upon foundations laid by of social historians like Raphael Samuel. Samuel’s History Workshop (1966-) pioneered ground-up social history, including oral history, in the UK, with the stated aim of making the production of history a collaborative enterprise ‘that could be used to support activism and social justice, and inform politics.’

Bennett was able in this period to retrospectively trace a lineage of practices, in the work of Gramsci, Brecht and Bakhtin, which produced ‘a new sense of “the popular” as the site of a critical and speculative intelligence’, though acknowledging that these practices had hitherto not even impacted upon mainstream politics (1986:14-15).

The emergence of popular culture as worthy of academic attention can be understood as a reaction to three related phenomena. Firstly, to the highly effective use of popular narratives in the 1970s by the New Right; secondly, as an attempted corrective to the Left’s failure to engage meaningfully with such narratives since the immediate post-war years; and thirdly, as a reaction to the growing impact, unpredictability and dynamism of popular cultural forms from the late 1950s onwards. These phenomena will be considered in turn.

The New Right gained a great deal of political ground through its use of popular rhetoric (Fiske, 1989:188) in a form characterised by its highly generic evocation of ‘the people’, in some instances weaponised against a group which might more obviously be considered of the people too. Stuart Hall, quoting Thatcher directly, offered a telling example in 1981:

“We have to limit the power of the trade unions because that is what the people want.”

Who are the people, Bennett asks? Are some of the people not trade unionists themselves? Is the government in this example really proposing to follow, blindly, the wishes of an assumed majority?

Theorists of the 1980s therefore identified the Left’s disconnect from popular culture as a crucial factor in its losing not only a political but a cultural battle in the late twentieth century (Bennett 1986:6). The Left had not only abandoned a populist discourse but did not seem to realise it. The situation led cultural theorist John Fiske, in the US, to propose that ‘left-wing theorists need to explore the conditions under which the submerged 90 percent of the political iceberg can be made to rear up and disrupt the social surface’ (Fiske 1989:162).

Alex Niven, writing in 2012, found that the ‘tragic rupture’ between Leftist politics and popular culture was still present, and had not been addressed by New Labour (Niven, 2012:67-8). Hilary Wainwright, in her studies of experiments in global participatory democracy found that, in Manchester regeneration projects of the New Labour era, voluntary groups and resident’s forums were ‘misleadingly assumed to be homogenous’, an unsophisticated characterisation of what must have been combative and dissenting popular organisations in a highly politicised context (2003:81). If the Thatcher government made the people generic for its own ends, the New Labour project kept them so.

Alongside their calls for politicians and policymakers of the left to re-engage with popular culture in order to address what they perceived as the ‘ghettoisation’ of socialist ideas, theorists of popular culture examined the reasons underlying the Left’s apparent disinterest in popular desire. Bennett (1986:9), found that Marxist conceptions of the popular are too often limited by two apparently contradictory impulses which he terms ‘walking backwards into the future’ and ‘ideal futurism’. In the first instance, Marxist theory tends toward deploying ‘historically superseded forms’ as models for the future without modifying them for use in the present. In the second instance, theories are composed to address an idealised people of a ‘projected socialist future’. In both cases, a form of Utopianism takes the place of an engagement with how things (and people) are in the present tense, and the people of today are found wanting by comparison to both the past and the future.

The third and final of the reasons behind cultural theory’s increasing engagement with the popular and with popular culture in the 1970s and 80s was that the culture itself had become hard to ignore since the technological and social advances of the post-war ‘golden age’, a turning point in the history of which were the 1968 student riots in Paris and elsewhere. For Alex Niven, this period saw the popular take on an active role as a progressive, if not revolutionary force in political and societal change, largely independent of mainstream politics in the UK and elsewhere; ‘the voiceless… finally finding a voice’ (Niven, 2012:17). This voice, for example, had a measurable impact on the growth of the environmental movement, which was born not out of governmental policy or academic research in the traditional sense, but out of counter-cultural groups (2012:37). For Niven, this alternative ‘golden age’ of an influential popular culture was nothing more or less than a moment when popular desire transcended its usual subjugation by the rich and powerful. These movements had a real if indirect role in the adoption of ideas of ‘participation’ within planning law and policy such as the UK’s ‘Skeffington’ report of the late 1960s.

But what potential does the ‘popular’ have to contribute to political change, or to become a political space? By turning to the work of John Fiske (1939-), a cultural theorist concerned with the mechanics of popular culture and explicitly with addresses the Left’s failure to engage with popular desire, I will attempt a provisional answer to these questions.

Fiske’s notion of society, which rejects grand narratives in favour of a more contradictory and fundamentally popular model, forms a useful basis on which to understand the popular and reconnect it to mainstream political processes. For Fiske, the history of Western society is characterised by ‘constant conflicts in which all victories are partial, all defeats less than total’ (Fiske, 1989:180, a conception which strongly echoes the work of both Colin Ward and Chantal Mouffe) For Fiske, this history is revealed by the (then) growing discipline of social and popular history, and he particularly cites the work of cultural historian (and Project Gutenberg founder) Robert Darnton, whose book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984) focussed attention upon the resistant practices of printing apprentices in early eighteenth century Paris. Fiske asserts that

Our social structure, our oral culture, our cultural resources are indelibly inscribed with the contradictory traces of these oppressed, but not eliminated, social formations. (Fiske, 1989:180)

These formations form the basis of popular culture, and draw attention away from the utopian impulse for ‘total revolution’ and toward a model of power redistribution based upon constant renegotiation and adjustment. He therefore distinguishes ‘popular culture’ from ‘mass culture’ – in his terms the latter is what is produced by an industrialised, capitalist society and the former is how people use or abuse that product.

Accordingly, Fiske asserts that popular culture is not a ‘stable sociological category’ but instead embodies ‘a shifting set of allegiances’ (1989:25), which give it its resistant role in societal change. He also proposes that a function of the popular can be its capacity to appropriate from the powerful for political gain. Fiske defines this technique as excorporation: ‘the process by which the subordinate make their own culture out of the resources and commodities provided by the dominant system’ (Fiske, 1989:15).

If we take the earlier proposition that the popular is a territory of adjustment and renegotiation, in a society which is also characterised by endless renegotiation, then Fiske’s notion of excorporation is the process through which elements of the dominant system enter the domain of the popular and emerge transformed. This suggests that any study of popular culture must look at, and differentiate, what is received by people and then what is produced or used out of what is received. Like Stuart Hall, Fiske proposes that such a study should ‘always start with “the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it’ (1981:228, cited in Fiske, 1989:28-9), wherein resistance, to take an example from fashion, is ‘tearing or bleaching of one’s jeans’ and containment is ‘the industry’s incorporation of this into its production system’ (1989:29).

Fiske asserts that this process allows for adjustments to the status quo, not merely a return to the balance of before. This micropolitical change must not be underestimated, concerned as it is with ‘the day-to-day negotiations of unequal power relations in such structures as the family, the immediate work environment, and the classroom’ (1989:56). He offers the of-its-time example of how Madonna might be ‘used’ by a fan in ways that empowers the fan- maybe through torn jeans again. This empowerment can impact in many powerful ways on the individual fan and upon her wider society, for instance through an impact on the relationships within the fan’s family or working life (1989:191). Popular culture cannot therefore be strictly radical and for Fiske it is best described as progressive (1989:21) or, Fiske’s critics might assert, potentially progressive. It ‘finds in the vigor (sic) and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it.’ (1989:21)

Fiske’s optimism with regard to the use of popular culture is partly built upon his definition of the wider society in which it takes place, but it is also because he is suspicious of the process by which radical change might happen. Building on the work of de Certeau (1985), Fiske asserts the importance of guerrilla tactics as weapons of the ‘weak’, in contrast to ‘open warfare’, which they will always lose. The story of the ‘use’ of Madonna is, for Fiske, one example among many of ‘individual women, in their everyday lives, constantly [making] guerrilla raids upon patriarchy’ (Fiske, 1989:20).

Critics of Fiske’s approach might assert that the products of popular culture are not necessarily empowering in the way that Fiske asserts, and that products of the dominant culture are increasingly designed to allow for a degree of excorporation within limits defined by the powerful. To this, Fiske argues that the nature of excorporation is inherently occasional and irregular. Popular culture might lie dormant or repressed for much of the time, but this does not limit its potential to transcend this condition. ‘Resistance fighters,’ Fiske asserts, ‘are law-abiding citizens much of the time’. His analysis of popular culture therefore takes practices as its location rather than specific texts or individuals (1989:45), and asserts that the ongoing process of subordination and insubordination is sustained from within the popular (1989:169).

Perhaps the techniques of popular culture are best understood as individual acts (i.e. micropolitical), though sometimes united against a common dominance. This distinguishes popular culture from folk culture, a form which Fiske finds impossible in an industrialised society anyway but which, when it was possible, had the potential for ‘solidarity’ which popular culture does not (1989:173). Popular culture can of course, be sociable and therefore collective, the Madonna fan of Fiske’s example can benefit, or not, from engagement with others with similar uses for the ‘original’.

Fiske is highly aware, therefore, of the limits of popular culture as a tool of political change, and adopts a pragmatic attitude to its use in relation to societal and political change. He nevertheless proposes a ‘reconceptualization of popular forces as an untapped social resource that can fuel… the motor of social change’ (1989:193), conjuring an image of a multitude of micropolitical actors, each individually but socially alchemising the products (or texts) of the dominant culture.

What if, in the place of a new song or text, we considered the ‘products’ of public planning –A4 lamp-post notification, policy, consultation, communication with a duty officer, permission or denial in the form of a letter, condition, and indeed (probably most importantly) a permitted, approved and built structure – as cultural products, forms of media/mediation?

Following Fiske et. al, and refusing to make political value judgements on the basis of the original cultural product, is it possible to imagine the popular usage and abusage of these cultural products having a micro-political progressive impact on the system itself? Does this already happen?

For sociologist Herbert Gans, the potential agency of popular activity in relation to hegemonic structures and apparata is not simply a question of recognizing the existence of those phenomena within a larger system of cultural production, it is also a question of the limits of those apparata. Considering the professionalism of the architect, Gans wrote in 1977:

Other professionals [to architects] also supply only a minor portion of the product or service over which they claim expertise… Medical aid is probably still administered more often by druggists and relatives than by doctors, just as most counseling is done by ministers, relatives, and friends rather than by trained social workers or psychiatrists. (Gans, 1977:26)

Gans situates architectural production by architects within the realm of high culture, therefore constrained by an antagonistic relationship to low or popular culture. He proposes that this relation, like in the medical profession, is substantially defined by the style and approach of the practitioner: ‘Doctors often treat patients as collections of diseases rather than people, and , like sociologists and social workers, supply their services in a technical language that puts off their patients and clients.’ (Gans, 1977:26).

Public planning can, in this light, be seen as the formal, professionalised ‘part’ of a larger system of production and discourse in which wider popular agency is also a protagonist.. The ‘discovery’ of this larger system offers a reconception of the processes of cultural production that has implications for understanding the agency of popular activity in creating, maintaining and shaping those processes: in short, the stage is set for a productive series of guerrilla raids on the ‘formal end’ of how we produce the built environment or, if the built environment industry has a large enough heart, for the formal system to open itself up to such agency in the name of a system where more people, and more diverse people, have genuine voice and power.

Bibliography

Bennett, Tony. ‘The politics of the popular’, in Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (1986) Popular Culture and Social Relations. Milton Keynes: OUP, pp. 6-21.

Coben, Diana ‘Revisiting Gramsci’ in Webber, Michelle, and Kate Bezanson (eds.) (2012) Rethinking Society in the 21st Century: Critical Readings in Sociology.

Darnton, Robert (1984) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books.

De Certeau, Michel (1985) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press

DoE (Department of the Environment) (1969) People and Planning: Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning. London: HMSO.

Fiske, John (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

Gans, Herbert J. ‘Toward a Human Architecture: A Sociologist’s View of the Profession’, Journal of Architectural Education Vol. 31 No.2 (November 1977): pp. 26-31.

Gramsci, Antonio, (eds. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith) (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Hall, Stuart. ‘Notes on deconstructing the “popular”’ in Samuel, R. (ed.) (1981) People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 227-239.

Hall, Stuart. ‘Popular culture and the state’, in Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott (1986) Popular Culture and Social Relations. Milton Keynes: OUP, pp. 22-49.

Joll, James (1977) Fontana Modern Masters: Gramsci. London: Fontana.

Mouffe, Chantal (ed.) (1979) Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Niven, Alex (2011) Folk Opposition. Winchester: Zero.

Samuel, Raphael (ed.) (1981) People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge.

Wainwright, Hilary (2003) Reclaim the state: experiments in popular democracy. London; New York: Verso.

Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

Wherever you walk, they’re there. Covered pedestrian ways, lining the streets. They might be less than a metre wide, or envelop an entire basilica, but typically they are tall and wide enough to safely ride a horse or run a tobacconist. In sheer area they form the main public space of the city. In places, they are a highly-designed and ordered repetitive structure - the most extraordinary example of this being the four-kilometre stretch of the Portico di San Luca which leads out of the historic city up to the sanctuary church of the Madonna di San Luca on an adjacent hillside. In other places, and more commonly they are evidently the work of many hands. A street might be made of a hundred buildings made by a hundred builders, but the portici will be unified. Or nearly unified, rather. Each section, built as part of the building that sits behind and above it, has a different date, scale, manner of construction. Held together by a single idea.

The porticoes (portici) of Bologna date from the 11^th century and their first, humble expression was as a way of extending a house beyond its boundary with the street - a form of encroachment that is common to cities across Europe of the period. By the 13^th century these encroachments had become a real problem, blocking access and damaging the street scene. Bologna at the time was experiencing unprecedented growth thanks to its becoming a magnet, across Europe, for students and scholars, who swarmed to Bologna to join one of its many scholarly guilds and the uniting institution, the Studium - the origins of the oldest continuously operating university in the World. The city had an urgent need to densify within its walls.

In 1288 the Bolognese government, having failed to effectively ban such encroachments (which was the typical response in other cities), instead made the bold gesture of making them mandatory for all new and existing buildings. Porticoes, typically timber constructions supporting additional living quarters for student tenants at the upper levels of existing houses, were already a commonplace solution to the rapidly growing population of the city, but the government’s legislative act regularised, standardised and enforced them. From then on, acts of construction, whether renovation or new buildings, would be required to form a portico at ground level. Heights and distances were stipulated, including precise measurements designed to to allow passage on horseback. Where an individual owned a building plot on an otherwise porticoed street, they were required to build a portico (and thereby maintain the continuity between them) whether or not they built a building behind it. The resulting network of sheltered, largely open, porticoed spaces would henceforth be maintained for public benefit at private expense, endlessly varied but united in their purpose.

The earliest examples of portici - some of which might predate the 1288 legislation - were simple trabeated or cross-braced timber constructions, and a few of these survive, including at the Casa Isolani and in Via Santa Caterina. This was the dominant mode of portico construction for centuries, but a more refined form of construction, using stone, masonry and render, came to the fore in the 15^th century, and became the dominant one following the banning of timber construction in the mid- 16^th century. These classical spaces, of vaulted arches supported by columns, have become the archetypal expression of the portici - a language that can be both humble and grand, a common, scalable vocabulary of forms that might frame a bin store or a basilica.

The result, as can be seen today, is a city of covered ways, many of them lining both sides of the street, others a single or discontinuous row along one side, and in exceptional cases forming a strong urban gesture such as framing a church or civic building. Built by thousands of different people and using an evolving but common vocabulary, they achieve variety within a unifying idea. There are over 60km of portici in the city; mostly concentrated in the city centre but with notable exceptions that travel out beyond the old city walls - including notable 20^th century examples where the principle of the portici was effectively combined with modernist urbanism (most compellingly in the Barca neighbourhood). Spanning the centuries, a pragmatic need to densify had generated a unique and beautiful urban environment and even a way of life; an extraordinary quantity and diversity of the city’s public life takes place in their shelter and shade.

It may seem that building over the pavement is a fairly negligible expansion or densification of the city. While researching the portici I wondered the same thing, so had a go at applying the 1288 legislation to the mixed-use block of studios and homes where DK-CM is based in Bethnal Green, London. The block is a mix of single, two and three storey buildings. Hypothetically, by preserving the pavement space and ground level but extending the existing buildings, at their existing height, forward over the pavement, I created an additional 25% of floor space across the whole block. Although this is of course a very basic rule of thumb, it is remarkable to imagine the impact of such an expansion on what would already have felt a dense urban environment.

12 representative portici across metropolitan Bologna - ranging from the most ancient to the most recent - were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2021. The time-span of the designation is a useful riposte to the idea that good urban form can only reside within a certain era, style or epoch. But it is the endurance and ubiquity of the type that is really special - portici large and small are the defining element of the city, and a result of an act that sought to marshall growth (rather than to suppress it) in the making of a better city.

When thinking about special, distinctive urban places, we tend to celebrate them either as works of great design genius or of ad-hoc, incidental intervention over time. St. Paul’s Cathedral on the one hand, Notting Hill on the other. The portici of Bologna assert that a simple regulatory or legislative gesture can be equally significant in the creation of character. An urban rule, far from being a mere restriction on creativity, can on occasion be the most creative act.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SbePP3ixipowT7hs8

Bethnal Green, 24 October 2025.

Oral history, and the intertwined fields of community autobiography and ‘history from below’, have obsessed and influenced me for decades. So it is a real thrill that The Architecture Foundation in London has indulged myself and Cristina Monteiro and allowed us to put together an exciting night to discuss oral history, particularly as it intertwines with architectural, urban and participation practices.

We will be joined by distinguished practitioners of the oral history method, Mary Chamberlain and Jerry White. There will be readings from their work and an expansive discussion of the relevance of this topic.

The event is at The Art Workers’ Guild on Tuesday 21 October - next week - and it would be lovely to see you there. Despite the title, we hope it is not just of interest to architects but to anyone interested in the past, present and future of places and societies. Here’s the blurb and a link to tickets.

In our era of engagement and public consultation, what can we learn from oral history practice and its deep engagement with public perception? David Knight and Cristina Monteiro, of London-based studio DK-CM, have been fascinated by oral history for many years. Join them in a discussion about the relevance of oral history with two of its finest practitioners, Mary Chamberlain (author of Fenwomen, Portrait of Women in an English Village, 1975 recently republished as a Virago Modern Classic) and Jerry White (author of Rothschild Buildings, 1980 and an acclaimed series of books exploring London’s history).

https://architecturefoundation.org.uk/speaking-out-oral-history-for-architects

Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

There are houses here, many of them, though some of them read as houses but are actually flats, and many are held together by walls. They are made of wood, painted in vivid colours and adorned in a delicate, relaxed timber neoclassicism. Their colours and details seem to follow some kind of pattern but it is hard to figure it out. Lots of the buildings on corners are blue. But not all of them. But over and above the houses are the trees, large ones like a wood, and between the houses are smaller trees - mainly apple trees - and areas of allotment. Moving through this forested place, we encounter roads but they form a soft grid dotted with cars, and most of the routes between the dwellings are informal paths, skirting between wooden boxes and the wood itself.

Puu-Käpylä is a neighbourhood of 165 houses on the northern edges of Helsinki built c1920-25. The layout was supervised by Akseli Toivonen (1887-1954) and the houses were designed by Martti Välikangas (1893-1973). There is a grid of roads, one of which carries a tram, and all of which were planned long before the working class population would have owned cars. And there is another, much richer and more complex grid of paths, travelling in undulating and endlessly complex routes around the timber dwellings, which are individual or in pairs,and often grouped around amenity blocks which originally contained washrooms and toilets. There are no private gardens, as such, though the spaces directly adjacent to the dwellings feel somewhat ‘owned’ by the houses, particularly when loosely framed by hedges, timber walls, arched enclosures and delicate wooden colonnades. Even the flats have front doors onto these spaces, making each feel both owned and shared: places for bicycles, potted plants and benches. Instead of a garden, each dwelling has an area of growing space, somewhat smaller than a conventional English allotment, detached and separated from the house and part of an informal patchwork of other similar growing spaces. Amongst these spaces now sit playground equipment, both designed and ad-hoc. Accessing each growing plot means entering the public domain of paths and routes, just like walking to an allotment would, except here the homes and allotments intermingle. When new, each allotment bore a freshly-planted apple tree. Puu means wood - both tree and timber.

Puu-Käpylä is often described as being indebted to the English ‘garden city’ movement, but if so it takes this inspiration and transcends it in nature’s favour. In the guild socialist-infused designs of Parker and Unwin, the designers who gave form and aesthetic to the ‘garden city’ project, dwellings have strong collective form - courtyards, terraces, rows of houses following a contour line and locked together through landscape, symmetry, and pedestrian ways. They often contain or frame communal gardens, allotments or leisure uses (such as a tennis club at Hampstead Garden Suburb), but in each case the dwellings are the structure, the organising principle, the frame. At Puu-Käpylä, the trees and growing spaces are the structure, and the houses sit between them, subservient yet full of character. Their arrangement is both artful (there are many lines of symmetry, of tension and balance, while the timber classicism is a carefully-contrived counterpoint to the rawness of the mature trees) and artless (patterns come and go as if the designer sets up a rhythm and then loses interest, then sets up another). The result is a place where the forest is the overwhelming thing. A hundred years on from its construction, the houses still gain their meaning and their value from the natural world that has been allowed to survive and thrive amongst them. Less a garden suburb than a forest suburb. The countryside has been let into the city and has almost overwhelmed it, held in check in part by the inhabited dwellings and part by a secondary layer of domestic agriculture.

In inner city communities where we have worked, spaces for growing are often the best or only way of building bridges between diverse communities; the shared project of growing seems to bring people together. As a result we are seeing growing programmes increasingly becoming a feature of new development, though they are often tucked away within courtyards or on the fringes. Meanwhile, the imperative to build homes is placing terrible pressure on existing allotment land and community growing projects. Puu-Käpylä reminds us that, instead of ‘letting nature in’ where it feels convenient between our buildings, we can plan a lively and humane urban neighbourhood where nature - both in its wilder, woodland form and also in a form cultivated by people - is the primary creator and organiser of place.

maps.app.goo.gl/69BQBLKVBmSp5RPk7

Bethnal Green, 30 September 2025.

I am an adult volunteer at the Woodcraft Folk, a brilliant youth organisation which is celebrating its centenary this year. I was never a member as a child but I did experience something of the ‘woodcraft’ approach across several Summers in the mid 1980s to early 1990s, in ways that positively shaped my life and which continue to mildly obsess me.

This piece of writing, addressed to my daughter (who is in her third year as a Woodie!) is an attempt to explain why I care for Woodcraft Folk, and the wider woodcraft movement, so much.

I was about your age when I found the folkmoot circle, on a shady walk amongst the pines on an otherwise sunny holiday day. Here it is, I said to myself, or words to that effect (35 years ago probably!) Here it is, a clearing between the tall trees, a circle of grey earth. With the remains of a fire at its centre, surrounded by a ring of mounded soil. It was a big space, or it felt big to a ten year old, big enough for a substantial group of people to come together in a circle. To my eyes it was an ancient parliament, like coming upon a Stonehenge or an Old Sarum. But I knew it was actually a place of the present, still used, created by people still alive or recently departed. I knew this from a booklet back at our caravan, which told me that this circle was the sacred meeting place and ceremonial court of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, a mysterious group founded in these woods some decades previously. Though I would never see this circle fully inhabited by members of the Order - as a coming together of a camp of young people - I could vividly imagine such a gathering, and I felt a strong need to join the circle. I feel it still.

For 12 or so years, starting when I was one, my family spent two weeks of the Summer holidays in a static caravan in the New Forest, one of many that stood dwarfed by tall pine trees in the woods of Sandy Balls Holiday Centre in Godshill, Hampshire. It was in most senses a typical English camping holiday, enriched by daytrips to country houses and gardens. But it was also, unintentionally, an adventure in a woodland landscape populated by traces of esoteric experiments in living and development that had, since 1919, been practiced in these woods just beneath the surface of an apparently normal - if unusually bucolic and picturesque - campsite. The folkmoot circle was just one remaining trace among many of these experiments.

At that time, Sandy Balls Wood had been in the ownership of the Westlake family for 70 years, first purchased by anthropologist Ernest Westlake in 1919 as the ideal testing ground for a range of ideas that he and his son Aubrey were then exploring. These were, in turn, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (OWC), Forest School, and Grith Fyrd.

The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry was a child-orientated organisation (cousin to the Woodcraft Folk, Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, and more distantly the Boy Scout movement) that would use Sandy Balls Wood as both camping ground and sacred site over several decades. Inspired by the writing and activism of Ernest Thompson Seton in the US, who sought to enrich the mental and physical health of children and young people through exposure to nature, the Order set itself up to provide just those experiences to urban children and their families. Where Seton had idealised indigenous American practices, the OWC idealised pre-modern, pagan-infused and Arthurian forms of fellowship, drawing on the writings of, among others, William Morris and Edward Carpenter. It was infused with both Christian and pagan imagery and theology.

Forest School was a pioneering (and in 2025 still thriving, as Forest School Camps) initiative to reconnect children with nature. Latterly recognised as Ernest’s ‘great inspiration’, it proposed a bed-and-board education programme within the forest for urban children. In a series of timber buildings scattered throughout the wood, Forest School made its first hesitant steps toward a ‘natural’ pedagogy, a form of education where contributing to the life and workings of the school community was fundamental to the education offered.

Finally, Grith Fyrd was a programme to rebuild the health and vitality of young men brutalised by the First World War through residential camps in self-built green timber buildings. This latter idea was the brainchild of Aubrey Westlake, son of Ernest, who inherited and developed his father’s ideas and gave them practical expression, Ernest having died in a road accident only a few years after purchasing Sandy Balls.

Each of these experiments in living left a trace in the thickly-wooded landscapes of Sandy Balls Wood. My Summer holiday explorations of them, undertaken half-consciously over several years of childhood, gave me access to a world of ideas that is incredibly precious to me - ideas around how we might live and learn better both with nature and with each other. It has informed all sorts of things, from how I design to how I spend my free time and the forms of pedagogy I believe in. As well as an informal education of ideas it was also one of aesthetics, with the traces of the Westlakes’ project offering schooling in craft, heritage, a certain kind of empirical mysticism and above all a love of the natural world that emphasised humanity’s proper place as one with nature.

There were six particular traces of this remarkable world when I holidayed in Sandy Balls in the 1980s and early 1990s. Let me explore each of them with you in turn.

CARAVAN

Standing amongst our workaday static caravans, each clad in a very seventies symphony of brown and cream, was a far more ancient and romantic caravan - a horse-drawn ‘gypsy’ caravan or vardo painted in a vivid yellow and with a distinctive ‘bulls eye’ pattern of concentric circles on its lower door. Steps had been placed where the horse would once have been tethered, allowing children to climb the steps and climb inside the van, indeed climb into the bunks, smell the extinguished stove fire, peer through net curtains and relish the compact, incredibly efficient wooden interior, all painted a delicate pale green. I was one of those children, and found the caravan’s neat, elevated interior impossibly romantic. I would have stayed in there for days (and nights!) if allowed. The van was a mobile dollshouse you could climb inside, and imagine it rolling away on its adventures; an intricate, finely crafted interior of compartments and built-in furniture.

The van had been brought to the woods by Ernest Westlake, who had purchased it from fellow Quaker - and Sussex-based ship owner - Robert Penney. Westlake had various adventures in the van and when it was finally brought to Sandy Balls (where it lived from c1919 until finally sold in the 2010s) it became a bedroom and play space for the many children and their relatives who made permanent or temporary home at Sandy Balls through Forest School, the OWC or simply (like me) as holidaymakers.

Jean Westlake, Ernest’s granddaughter and a resident at Sandy Balls, wrote a history of the caravan that records its long and complex history, including its arrival in her own family. Through this I discovered crazy coincidence number one: Robert Penney, the van’s previous owner, had in the early 1900s employed your great- great- grandmother Sarah Pullen as a housemaid at his large house, Highcroft, in Dyke Road, Brighton. Sarah met her future husband (your great- great- grandfather) John Knight at Highcroft - he was the milkman! And Penney’s ships all had Shoreham-by-sea - my home town - as their home port. I wonder if Sarah romanticised the vardo nearly a hundred years before I did - she would surely have encountered it.

In the 1960s the van had been restored at Sandy Balls by Sidney Finch, a local artist and cabinetmaker who lived at the estate from 1955 onwards. Finch was an active presence in the Sandy Balls of my childhood, a lovely man who ran ‘clay play’ sessions with kids on home-made throwing wheels using clay extracted from the very ground of the woodland around us. I still have one of the pots I made at one of these sessions (it is unpainted, with a flared rim) and remember vividly the pleasure of throwing a pot in the open air, surrounded by pine trees. Finch had been a friend of the artist Augustus John, habitue of the Fitzroy Tavern (crazy coincidence number two: the first pub I ever visited in London, and the beginning of an obsession with London pubs in general), and who was notable - beyond his art - for his advocacy of the Roma way of life, particularly as practised in the New Forest. This way of life, which had been unusually well-fostered by the ancient laws of the New Forest, was at the time under profound (and ultimately fatal) threat, ending an informal existence that had benefitted and framed the lives of generations. Later on as a young adult I would spend three years exploring contemporary Roma living practices across Europe, developing a conviction that our society insists far too hard on a single, sedentary form of acceptable life. A conviction that was influenced quietly by the yellow caravan that I had visited year in, year out as a child. By its interior and by its stories.

When the Westlake family finally sold Sandy Balls to a commercial holiday chain in the 2020s, the caravan vanished and I would occasionally hunt for it online. I even visited Sandy Balls and vainly tried to track it down through conversations with bemused staff. Then, a couple of years ago, unmistakably, it surfaced: being thoroughly restored (again) by another craftsperson, Ange Davies. In 2025, restoring a door panel, Ange accidentally uncovered a hidden, beautifully hand-lettered panel, concealed for nearly sixty years in the tiny waggon, which read: ‘This caravan believed built around 1870 in Reading Restored 1967 by Sidney Finch’, and on the other side a newspaper cutting about Finch’s teaching of abstract art at a local school. Finch died in 2013 aged 95, but his act of care on the ‘Reading van’ is still tangible.

BUNKHOUSE

Closer still to our regular static caravan spot was a small, circular crinkly tin building known to everyone as the Duck House. Painted green and black, it stood at the centre of a grassy clearing surrounded by modern caravans, slowly rusting away, and permanently locked, unlike the gypsy caravan. It was possible, however, to peer through the grimy windows and net curtains at a small circular room lined entirely with bunk beds. Thanks again to the writings of Jean Westlake, we know that the building was originally a military bunkhouse used during World War One, and this was the story I was told as a child too, but I imagined those bunkbeds occupied by Napoleonic rather than 20th century soldiers.

But of course the Duck House wasn’t at Sandy Balls because of the military, it was there as another expression of the OWC ethos. An early member of the Order, Dr Rose Turner, purchased it as army surplus and erected it in the woodland as a camping hut for the ’Duck Tribe’ a group of 12-15 year-old girls who camped regularly at the site as part of OWC activities. The ducks had vacated this beautiful little building, which echoed and clanged when you knocked against it, long before I came across it, and at that point it belonged to Martin Westlake, grandson of Ernest and an enthusiastic leader of joyful barn dances at the holiday centre.

The Duck House, rusting away in the 1980s, has now vanished without trace, its site lost. As a lightweight dwelling, industrialised but homely, its character and charm echo in me, as does the spirit of reuse and adaptation with which Dr. Turner turned army hardware into a progressive space of learning and nature exploration. I see the Duck House in every interwar community reading room, Clarion cycling clubhouse and tin tabernacle I come across.

RIDGE

A mile east of Sandy Balls, on the other side of Godshill village, stands a perky black-tarred timber structure, a tiny room with yellow window frames standing on cross-braced stilts and looking south across the heathery heathland of the northern New Forest. This is the most visible and perhaps characterful part of a small complex of agricultural and domestic buildings, all somewhat handmade and ramshackle, that make up the Ridge, a smallholding purchased by Ernest Westlake somewhat before he bought Sandy Balls. The room raised on stilts was intended as a study and writing room (I can’t imagine a better one) for Ernest’s use, but it was eventually passed on to his daughter Margaret and her lover Tom Charman, a charismatic wood carver and performer who had lived in the anarchist Whiteway Colony. They founded a pottery at the Ridge and had two children, Christopher Pan and Danae, and in the 1950s a caravan parked at the Ridge was home, for a while, to Juliette de Baïracli Levy, a herbalist, pioneer of holistic medicine and author of Wanderers in the New Forest (1958), a further connection to Romani culture.

Christopher Charman and his life partner Kate continued the pottery and built it into a thriving small business, though it very much felt like a vocation over a commercial concern when I visited, a repetitive working life of slowly finessing and refining a craft. Christopher in his memoir noted that he first wanted to become a potter at the age of 10, roughly the age I was when exploring the Charmans’ craft-infused home on excursions from Sandy Balls. The Charmans’ life if craft extended the home-made sensibility of Sandy Balls out into the heathland of the New Forest. I found the showroom at the Ridge, with dozens of nearly-but-not-quite identical pots neatly arrayed, impossibly pleasurable as a kid, not to mention back-of-house glimpses of kiln, studio and domesticity. The pottery made at the Ridge has a casual charm to it that conceals great skill and craftsmanship, and slowly, pieces of pottery made at the Ridge drifted into my parents’ and grandparents’ houses as gifts. And now into ours.

I later found out that after decades of craft together at the Ridge, Christopher and Kate died in the same year, 2023. As of 2025, the stilted writing room and pottery appear to be undergoing a careful restoration, their yellow window frames vivid again.

CAMP

The Grith Fyrd programme, which attracted great press attention during its 1930s heyday including from Aldous Huxley, brought dozens of young men to Sandy Balls wood as part of a programme to heal them through exposure to nature and the practicing of woodcraft. This was an offshoot programme of the OWC, conceived by Aubrey Westlake following pacifist, internationalist and cooperative principles just as the OWC did. The members of Grith Fyrd (‘peace army’ in Old English), over the course of several years, slowly built a small settlement of structures at Sandy Balls - known as Greenwood Camp - and then latterly at Shining Cliff Woods in Derbyshire. Their structures used green timber felled in the surrounding woodland and prepared by hand by camp participants.

I found Greenwood Camp once on an excursion through the woods with my grandparents, who as usual were on holiday with us. This may have been the same adventure as my discovery of the folkmoot circle, either way it was the day when the flying ants took flight; the ground was seething with them. The camp felt abandoned and unloved, but the structures were still sound, their timber frames had been minimally planed so they had some of the feeling of Scandinavian or North American log houses. Maybe it had just been a few months since they had seen life, and all they needed was a lit fire and a good sweeping-out, but to a suburban kid used to a scrupulously tidy life and house they were vestiges of a lost civilisation.

The Greenwood Camp, and the Grith Fyrd programme that created it, both long departed, offered an idea of self-build long before the term existed, and they exist as memories and as principles for a different way of practising development: a model of architecture that places agency and skill into the hands of the individual.

HOUSE

The Westlake family moved permanently to Sandy Balls Wood in the 1930s, first occupying a timber bungalow originally built as part of Forest School (with the gypsy caravan parked alongside), but in the late 1960s a modernist structure was built as a permanent family home, known as Sandy Balls House and with a fine view over the Avon valley from a high point on the estate. This was tucked away from the wider camp site and became the last home of Aubrey and Marjorie Westlake.

From its roots in the progressive ideas of fellowship espoused by Ruskin, Carpenter and Morris, and indeed its harking back to pre-modern (‘chivalric’) versions of England as portrayed in Pre-Raphaelite art, the OWC in the 1920s and 1930s moved into more controversial territories thanks in part to a subsequent leader, Dion Byngham (not his original name!) - an associate of the poet Victor Neuberg and of famous occultist-about-town Aleister Crowley. Byngham’s advocacy of paganism (and of naturism) brought the Order into scandal and crisis and it was banned from Sandy Balls by the Westlakes in the 1930s, though it would return decades later, thanks to the efforts of Aubrey and Marjorie’s children.

On the sole occasion in my childhood that I ‘found’ Aubrey and Marjorie’s striking modernist house - a humble but well-crafted cousin of Serge Chermayeff’s influential Bentley Wood in Sussex, it was in a decaying condition, Aubrey having died several years previously. At the time this expression of postwar design confidence felt like the saddest thing at Sandy Balls, and at a stroke modernism and ruin were forever aligned in my mind. Though I haven’t been back, the footprint of the house appears to still exist, though shrouded by trees, as ever it was, from the rest of the estate.

NURSERY

To the left of the main gate to Sandy Balls Wood stands a small timber house known as Sandemans, after its first resident. It had also served as part of the small campus of Forest School premises for a period, but during my visits it was the home of Jean Westlake, granddaughter of Ernest and a member of the OWC. At Sandemans Westlake had built her own paradise in the midst of the more complex familial paradise of Sandy Balls, a biodynamic garden and nursery known As Ytene Gardens, providing vegetables to wholefood supermarkets in London and elsewhere.

Though formally trained as a horticulturalist, Jean Westlake’s most significant legacy is probably the small pile of books - mostly hand-written and hand-drawn - that she self-published, which tell the stories of her family, the parish of Godshill and Sandy Balls wood in particular. Her writings are the reason I can piece together my own stories of this place and its narratives, and her stories are the reason I wanted to do so - the only folkmoot circle I ever witnessed was one conveyed in an intricate pen drawing in her hand. Her drawings convey the magic of the structures and practices of that wild and magical place whilst her writing conveys a deep respect for natural and human history, as well as a subtly-conveyed sadness at the changes wrought by the later 20th century on the estate.

The subsequent history of Forest School and Forest School Camps is also interesting. In the days when it occupied timber chalets at Sandy Balls - Sandemans among them - Forest School had as its headmaster Cuthbert Rutter, who had formed a conviction that a more nature-orientated education would be invaluable to urban children having seen the conditions experienced by working class East London children whilst working as a master at a school in Bethnal Green. In response he developed a pedagogical programme for both girls and boys that would see around half of all education happening out of doors, and with woodcraft values of cooperating with each other and with nature at its heart.

Crazy coincidence number three is that the school Rutter worked at before Forest School was on Teesdale Street, directly opposite the building where we have had our office for 12 years or so and a couple of minutes’ walk from your own primary school!

After several years at Sandy Balls, in its array of humble timber buildings dotted through the woodland, the school moved to a new site in Norfolk before World War Two, then closed down after the site was requisitioned by the army, never to reopen. Instead, many former tutors, wanting to see its goal of bringing children’s learning back into direct contact with nature survive in new forms, formed Forest School Camps, using the occasional camp rather than the ‘permanent’ school as the means of achieving their goals. This initiative continues to thrive today.

A compelling series of social experiments played out in and around Sandy Balls Wood throughout the twentieth century, embracing health, pedagogy, woodcraft, the relationship between humans and the wider natural world, agriculture, faith and myth. New ideas of human development and of society were given the opportunity to flourish, fail, and flourish again amidst the tall pines of the wood. And they left behind a legacy of stories and evocations, ready to be found. These traces were scattered all about me in the Sandy Balls Wood of my childhood. In fact there were dozens of them, but I think the six I have described get to the heart of the picture I want to convey. Some traces are still there, including the remains of a circle, whilst others exist only in my head, having to a large extent claimed my imagination as a child and never quite let it go.

Images are a mix of holiday photographs taken c1985 by my grandmother Joan Keates, a postcard c1930 and c1983 illustrations made by Jean Westlake. The photograph of the Ridge at Godshill was taken by me in the early 2020s on a return visit, and the memorial to Aubrey Westlake on a later return visit in 2025.

Arquitectura Popular em Portugal (1961) was an architect-led study into vernacular buildings practices across rural Portugal, built upon six years of fieldwork and documentation. Undertaken under the auspices of Portugal’s right-wing Estado Novo regime, it deftly and subversively challenged regressive approaches to community and housing advocated by the government of the time, whilst apparently operating to support exactly those approaches. It deployed architectural research as a political tool to generate new possibilities for a regional architecture in Portugal, operating in the midst of oppressive and dangerous political circumstances.

The Estado Novo (or New State, 1933-1974), the most enduring dictatorship in Europe, was led for most of its existence by António de Oliveira Salazar. Salazar’s regime overtly developed a paternalistic, tradition-focussed notion of Portuguese culture rooted in the idea of ‘fatherland’^[1], and generated policies which maintained an increasingly arcane status quo in an atmosphere of repression and coercion. With the aim of retaining what were deemed as essential traditional values of family and rural existence, the regime limited economic, cultural and social development, whilst anything beyond a basic education was firmly restricted to an ‘educated strata’. ^[2] The government focussed much of its energies on Portugal’s colonies to the detriment of other international relations^[3], creating a country which could (ironically) stand ‘proudly alone’^[4] on the world stage. This isolationist stance, ‘turning its back on Europe’^[5] would ultimately lead to catastrophic colonial wars and the regime’s 1974 downfall.

The Estado Novo’s approach to architecture took on a variety of characters during its lifetime. In its early days, an internationalist and broadly modernist architectural culture was allowed to thrive. However, as the regime developed, a new aesthetic began to emerge that combined patriotic and nationalist forms with smoothed-out quotations from modernist, classical and vernacular idioms, all wedded to what was intended as a uniquely Portuguese ‘national style’ – what became known (after the brand of cigarettes) as ‘Português Suave’ – Portuguese smooth.

In development terms, having originally been suspicious of collective housing for its subversive political potential,^[6] the Estado Novo eventually came to align itself with town planning ideas that sought to de-densify existing cities and rehouse citizens on the fringes of the city: low-rise blocks of watered-down modernism on the peripheries of cities, leading to social segregation and vacated urban centres; an anti-urban stance which merely widened the scale at which subversion could be controlled.

In parallel with this modernist trajectory, however, the architectural language of the ‘educated strata’ took as its inspiration the much earlier ‘Casa Portuguesa’ movement. Led by the architect Raul Lino, this movement had proposed a ‘return to the ‘inner soul’ of ancient Portuguese vernacular architecture and landscape’,^[7] which for the most part saw fruition in the form of highly decorated, overtly-patriotic detached dwellings which combined modern methods of construction with self-conscious applied decoration in nationalist and ruralist idioms – highly romanticised versions of Portuguese identity and culture. In the hands of Lino and his followers, this approach had led to a number of eclectic private houses at the turn of the century, but its later appropriation by the elite of the New State led to it becoming a kind of ‘half-remembered’ tradition, a ‘debilitating eclecticism’^[8] filtered through the preferences and aspirations of the rich, and dovetailing neatly with Salazar’s traditionalist tendencies. A pattern book of accessible, superficially-ennobled vernacular. This increasing tendency fed into (and arguably reached a climax with) the Exposição do Mundo Português (Exhibition of the Portuguese World) exhibition in Lisbon, timed to celebrate the anniversary of Portugal’s founding in 1140 and to celebrate Portuguese identity and political autonomy (albeit one fundamentally dependent on the state’s colonies). The ‘nationalistic ‘climax’’^[9] of this exhibition – at which simulated (and highly romanticised and problematic) versions of regional and colonial popular spaces were built and ‘staffed’ by actors and performers - helped to reinforce the idea that there was one single ‘national style’ for architectural production under the Estado Novo. What had been a fairly eclectic context was increasingly stifling and restrictive. The new architecture that emerged out of this context, a collage of totalitarian scale and folk evocation, perfectly expressed Salazar’s vision for Portugal. Aesthetically, socially, and politically, the country severed itself from the discourse and fashions of its European neighbours, and become literally its own world. In architecture as well as in other forms of cultural production, the ‘fatherland’ would provide its own language, without recourse to developments beyond its borders.

The architectural legacy of this era was therefore both inconsistent and divisive. While the reality for the majority was the ‘choice’ of increasingly decaying rural or urban housing stock or an imported modernism on the urban fringes, the reality for the privileged was a hyper-nostalgic, fantastical evocation of traditional architecture located in affluent coastal suburbs, out of reach for the vast majority.

In 1947, with the culture of the Mundo Português still dominant, two texts were published which signalled the beginnings of a progressive architectural response to this repressive context. The first, by architect Francisco Keil do Amaral in an editorial in the influential Lisbon magazine Arquitectura^[10], proposed a scientific, ‘systematic’^[11] study of Portuguese regional architectures. In the wake of this, Fernando Távora published the essay ‘The Problem of the Portuguese House’ in Cuadernos de Arquitectura ^[12], channelling the frustrations of a generation of architects by directly opposing the bastardised ‘Casa Portuguesa’ of official (and elite) taste, deriding the faux-traditionalism of the Estado Novo ethos, and upholding the right of Portuguese architects to look beyond their own soil for inspiration. Távora wrote that ‘It is neither fair nor reasonable for us to ignore, in pursued ignorance, the works of the great masters of today.’^[13] Furthermore,

The past is a prison from where very few know how to easily and productively escape; it has great value, but it must be looked at not in relation to itself but to us… The authors of these ‘portuguese houses’ have forgotten and still forget that the traditional forms of the art of building do not represent a decorative whim or a baroque manifestation.^[14]

In what would become a critical tactic in the coming years, Távora took a stance which aligned itself with the government’s focus on popular tradition whilst deriding the superficiality of their approach- notably focussing attention on the ‘authors’ of the works rather than the approving state. His essay laid the foundations of an approach which would come to have an enormous influence; combining as it did an awareness of Portugal’s architectural heritage with contemporary international discourse. Távora stated that:

The study of Portuguese Architecture, or construction in Portugal is not as yet done. A number of archaeologists have written about and dealt with our houses but, as far as we know, none of them has given a contemporary sense to this study thus making it a participating element of new Architecture.^[15]

Távora asserts the disjunct between the pseudo-literate historicism he saw all around him and the actual vernacular traditions of the country (and regions) in which he operated, and also links architectural research with architectural production, This call to action, alongside Keil do Amaral’s editorial, were the opening shots in an guerrilla architectural assault on ‘official taste’ that would play out over the coming years.

Távora quickly established himself as a key figure in Portuguese architectural culture, and at the same time became, in the context of the regime, unusually visible internationally. He represented Portugal at the CIAM congresses and designed new urban quarters along Athens Charter lines.^[16] He was present at the founding of Team X, and took part in their growing dissatisfaction with the orthodoxies of the early modern movement and advocacy for an architecture of raw materials and real life. This dissatisfaction was reflected in the designs he was producing at the time, particularly a municipal market (1953-59) in Vila da Feira, a town in northern Portugal just south of Porto. The design was brusque, materially rich, and attuned to the particularity of its place and its public. Távora would later describe it as ‘not only a place for trading things, but for trading ideas, in an invitation for people to meet.’^[17] The divisive, anti-subversive architecture of the New State was being quietly but profoundly subverted, partly through reference to what Távora knew or believed to be actual Portuguese patterns of life and building, and partly through reference to international architectural culture, most crucially the polemics and practices of Team X.

In 1955-6, whilst Távora was collaborating with his protégé Álvaro Siza Vieira on masterplanning a new park on agricultural land in Matosinhos^[18], Salazar’s government clamped down decisively on free speech in Portugal. The P.I.D.E., the New State’s secret police, was at the height of its activities, and the publicly assertive stance of Távora’s earlier essay, risky but possible back in 1947, rapidly became unthinkable without contemplating a spell in jail or other sanctions. New tactics would be needed in order to oppose the (still increasingly) stifling orthodoxy of the regime, and the long-mooted ‘Inquiry’ into regional architecture, proposed by Keil do Amaral and Távora as a means of implicitly critiquing the vagaries of the ‘official taste’, was formally initiated by the National Union of Architects (SNA). Remarkably, and significantly, the Inquiry was state-funded, the SNA having persuaded the Minister of Public Works^[19] that an investigation of Portugal’s rich architectural traditions could only be of benefit to the country’s sense of identity.

From 1955 to 1961, a team of eighteen architects covered a total of 50,000 kilometres for the sake of the Inquiry, “by car, or scooter, on horseback or on foot”,^[20] to document Portugal’s vernacular architectures, returning to compile and edit their 10,000 photographs and accompanying material into a summary volume published in 1961 as Arquitectura Popular em Portugal. The architects worked in regional teams, with one ‘lead’ architect and two assistants, and each region was allowed to follow its own methodology, building up to a methodologically heterogeneous but politically and aesthetically consistent portrait of popular architectural construction and development.

In 1958, Humberto Delgado, an attaché to the Portuguese Embassy in the United States, stood against Salazar for the Presidency of the Republic. Though in retrospect this appears suicidal,^[21] Delgado had wide popular backing, with public demonstrations taking place in both Lisbon and Porto and support from across the political spectrum, including sections of the Catholic church.^[22] Delgado was defeated, but his campaign generated a flood of civil unrest over the following years, whilst opening up the possibility of resistance at higher levels. The civil disturbances included mutinies, an attempted coup, a galvanised Communist party which proposed a programme of ‘national rebellion’, continuing mass demonstrations, and an increasingly militant student population.

1961 saw the publication of both the ‘Programme for Democratisation of the Republic’, a pioneering and coherent attack on the authority of the New State and, more quietly, Arquitectura Popular em Portugal. Echoing Távora’s words of 1947, the introductory text plainly stated the Inquiry’s critique of the national style and opposition to established hegemony:

There is no existing ‘Portuguese Architecture’ or a typical Portuguese house… It is not enough for a city dweller to put on a pair of roughly woven trousers, a pair of clogs and to hoist a hoe onto his shoulder to become part of the rural environment… To become integrated, or to belong, is [a] much more profound and serious concept. In no way is it a mere mode of dress for either people or buildings.^[23]

The introduction goes on to state that ‘from the study of local Portuguese Architecture lessons of coherence, honesty, economy, skill, function and beauty can, and must, be learnt,’^[24] emphasising the authors’ intention that the Inquiry would take on a propositional role in the creation of new architecture, a process that they knew had already begun, at least in the practice of Távora and Siza, and also declaring allegiance to the perceived values of progressive architectural cultures beyond Portugal’s borders. In Távora’s case, projects like the summer house at Ofir (1957-58) and the Quinta da Conceição tennis pavilion (1956-60) reflect a decisive break from his earlier internationalist modernism, a break echoed in the younger Siza’s designs for the Boa Nova tea house (1958-63), Quinta da Conceição swimming pool (1958-65) and Matosinhos Parish Centre (1956-59). These projects are characterised by a subtle interplay between an appreciation of international contemporary architecture, which brought its own historical precedents (the importance of Wright and Aalto have been well documented)^[25] and an awareness of vernacular building traditions that plugs directly into the work of the Inquiry. In Távora’s tennis pavilion, particularly, it is possible to read this interplay in material form : in the fixings that tie timber rafters together, in the democracy of the open, tiled floor, and in the rough junction between heavy granite and finely finished concrete. But in larger projects we can see it (unsurprisingly) at an urban scale – in Siza’s parish centre and swimming pools especially, each of which can be read as both a single building or project but also as an somewhat informal, communitarian approach to organising buildings in relation to each other. In these works, the ideology of the Inquiry, stretching back to the polemics of 1947, was being explored through building and through organising buildings, ‘taking history as an operational instrument for the construction of the present.’^[26] The fieldwork was becoming architecture and urbanism, at least in the work of two of its authors - Távora and Siza - but its influence and impact would be far wider.

In common with many of their contemporaries across Europe and beyond, Portuguese practitioners of the late 1950s felt a sense of inheritance from the first generation of modern architects: what Peter Smithson has beguilingly called a ‘moral overlap’^[27] wherein the early ideals of Corbusian modernism could be revised in accordance with new ideas of particularity of place, people and construction. However, whilst their contemporaries were most commonly free to live up to this perceived inheritance, Portuguese practitioners found themselves increasingly constrained aesthetically and poltically. For anyone opposed to the paternalism of the Estado Novo, a choice between orthodox pastiche for the rich and an authoritarian parody of modernism was hardly a choice at all.

With this in mind, two dominant tendencies can be traced. The first was the urgent perceived need for an architecture of ‘today’ - appropriate to its time, place and people – and the second was the conviction that the ‘history’ propagated by the state was a false one that needed to be challenged through both research and design. The Inquiry served to combine both of these urges or needs into a single academic and aesthetic statement. By working on a regional basis, in terms of both organisation and methodology, the Inquiry proved above all else the diversity of Portuguese vernacular culture, and therefore the inadequacy of any attempt at homogeneity, the inevitable failure of any kind of imposted ‘national style’ in the face of extraordinary regional diversity and nuance. Time and again, the Inquiry proved that there is no single ‘essence’ to Portuguese architecture, but many. ‘There are far greater differences between a village in the province of Minho and a “monte” in the Alentejo than between certain Portuguese and Greek buildings’^[28], the introduction states. Such evidence advocates for a locally-inflected form of architecture and stands against the imposition of generic rule systems, whilst remaining committed to a wider, globalist aesthetic and political project.

The design and aesthetic of the published version of the Inquiry belies its cultural and aesthetic allegiances, and positions it as both a work of documentation and as a progressive aesthetic statement. The book’s multiple volumes are a composition of text, richly-detailed plans, sections & mapping, and highly-composed monochrome photographs.

The drawings are freehand (consciously so), and frequently present the plan and section of each building as an inhabited space, with particular attention paid to artefacts, occupation, and texture. Daily life is thus related directly to built form. The maps emphasise how the particularities of a roof or doorway can relate to the regional qualities of the place, as for example in the section covering the Douro river valley, where time is spent describing the valley’s qualities and economic relationships in relation to the scale of a dwelling. Their combination of archaeological precision and attention to lived experience would influence a whole tradition of architectural representation, for example in the work of Geoffrey Bawa, who had a copy of Arquitectura Popular on the bedside of both of his homes.

The photographs – high in contrast, richly shadowed and textured – emphasise the texture and formal drama of the buildings and spaces they aim to capture, in a way that – among many resonances – particularly echoes the (then) contemporary photographic work of Eric de Maré^[29] in the UK and Sweden, whose photography of historical functional structrues like grain stores, fishing net sheds and warehouses also emphasised their formal and functional richness over and above any more romantic qualities (albeit ending up with photographs that are highly romantic too).

Salazar’s regime took rural values, or its conception of them, as sacrosanct. Again, the Inquiry deftly aligns itself with the regime’s ideology and takes an almost exclusively rural sample. ‘Many Lisbon people are closer to New York than Mirando do Douro’^[30], states the Introduction to the Inquiry, but the implication here is that rural life was being contaminated by the towns; state radio, propaganda, and the superficial ‘culture’ pedalled by the New State. More importantly, a focus on rural existence made explicit the relationships between individuals, families and communities: mutual independencies and associations that the New State sought to destroy through both propaganda and urbanism. In this too the work evokes and embodies the regional focus of Team X.

Above all, the Inquiry published as Arquitectura Popular took a huge risk in subverting the state orthodoxy; A risk that was highly literal one given the practices of a state quite happy to imprison and punish anyone who might step out of line. ‘Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,’ wrote the authors of Learning from Las Vegas only a few years after the publication of Arquitectura Popular, ‘Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.’^[31] If the agenda at the heart of ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ was to question, through fieldwork, certain orthodoxies of the modernist project in architecture, then that of the Inquiry was a similar questioning of the aesthetic orthodoxies of the Portuguese state. Fieldwork – looking at what already exists - as a tool for challenging and enriching aesthetic culture.

Though it did not bring down any governments (the Estado Novo would finally fall in 1974, leading among other things to a reinvigorated approach to housing the urban working class, led by many of the same figures who had delivered the Inquiry) Arquitectura Popular was the means by which architects, traversing academia and practice, could directly but subversively oppose the aesthetic and political conditions of the dictatorship under which they lived. This opposition retains lessons for architectural culture and practice today; as an example of architects using their core skills to develop a research practice which takes contemporary culture and state apparatus as tangible artefacts to be engaged with, queried and reworked through close attention to the world around us.

Spitalfields and Esmoriz, 2009 and 2025.

This essay was originally written as a paper for delivery at Field/Work, the 6th annual Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference, held in Edinburgh in 2009. Images illustrating this piece are all taken from the original Arquitectura Popular em Portugal publication. Thank you as ever to Cristina Monteiro for the discussions and fieldwork over decades that have informed these thoughts and countless others.

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^[1] As evidenced in the New State’s motto, ‘God, Fatherland and Family’.

^[2] Mitchinson, Phil. Worker’s History – Portuguese Revolution 1974. Socialist Appeal, May 1994. http://www.marxist.com/History-old/portugal74.html Accessed 19.11.2009.

^[3] This colony-focussed policy is exemplified by a propagandist map, ‘Portugal is Not a Small Country’, published in the early years of the New State. This map overlays Portugal’s extensive colonies onto a map of Europe, and compares their total land area favourably against those of Spain, France, England, Italy and Germany combined, thus emphasising the role of the colonies in Portugal’s economic and political significance and justifying the New State’s vision of an autonomous republic.

^[4] Attributed to António Salazar in Lloyd Jones, Stewart. ‘Portugal’s History Since 1974’. CPHRC Working Papers, Series 2 Number 1, November 2001. www1.ci.uc.pt/cd25a/media/Textos/portugal-since-1974.pdf Accessed 19.11.2009.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, and João Arriscado Nunes, Reinventing Democracy: Grassroots Movements in Portugal, Oxford: Routledge, 2006. pp. 53

^[7] Fernandes, José Manuel. Portuguese Architecture in the 20^th Century. Paper delivered to the International University of Catalonia, 15.02.2005.

^[8] Frampton, Kenneth. Álvaro Siza Complete Works, Milan: Electa, 1999. pp. 11. Frampton relates this tendency to the earlier Heimatstil period of the Third Reich.

^[9] Fernandes, José Manuel. Portuguese Architecture in the 20^th Century. Paper delivered to the International University of Catalonia, 15.02.2005.

^[10] See Frampton, Kenneth. Álvaro Siza Complete Works, Milan: Electa, 1999. pp. 11

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Távora, Fernando. ‘The Problem of the Portuguese House’, in Luis Trigueiros et al., Fernando Tavora, Lisbon: Blau, 1993. pp. 13

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Trigueiros, Luis et al., Fernando Tavora, Lisbon: Blau, 1993.

^[17] Ibid. pp. 58

^[18] See, for example, Trigueiros, Luis et al., Fernando Tavora, Lisbon: Blau, 1993; Rui Morais de Sousa et al., Álvaro Siza 1954-1976, Lisbon: Blau, 1997.

^[19] Though, in prior attempts to gain state funding, appeals to the Institute for High Culture (itself a revealing title) had proved fruitless.

^{[20] Var.,} Arquitectura Popular em Portgual, 4^th Edition. Lisbon: ODA, 2004. pp. 407

^[21] Indeed Delgado was later murdered in 1965, with the P.I.D.E widely believed to be the culprits.

^[22] For example, in 1959, the Bishop of Porto wrote a letter to Salazar criticising the people’s lack of freedom, and was duly exiled from the country.

^{[23] Var.,} Arquitectura Popular em Portgual, 4^th Edition. Lisbon: ODA, 2004.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] See. for example: Frampton, Kenneth. Álvaro Siza Complete Works, Milan: Electa, 1999.

^[26] Source unknown; attributed to Alexandre Alves Costa.

^[27] Spellman, Catherine, and Karl Unglaub, Peter Smithson: Conversations with Students. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

^{[28] Var.,} Arquitectura Popular em Portgual, 4^th Edition. Lisbon: ODA, 2004. pp. 403

^[29] Richards, J. M., The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings. London: The Architectural Press, 1958.

^{[30] Var.,} Arquitectura Popular em Portgual, 4^th Edition. Lisbon: ODA, 2004. pp. 404

^[31] Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 2^nd Edition. Massachusetts: MIT, 1977.

Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

Tucked slightly away from the road, the settlement is a cluster of one- and two-storey stone and brick dwellings organised informally like rose petals around a central, large dwelling, which after a time transformed into a pub, the hamlet’s only non-domestic building. Instead of being organised along lanes or streets, the homes appear to have grown on the back of each other’s plots, somewhat like cell division, and the whole settlement of homes is encircled by an unmetalled road that wraps around and thereby contains it. Nowadays, each dwelling has its own vehicular entrance from this road but once upon a time the routes between dwellings, between dwellings and the pub, and between every building and the wider fields and allotments, were once simply about walking from plot to plot, with no connecting tissue or public space between them in the form of lanes or footpaths. The hamlet is simply individual dwellings and plots, sometimes sharing a party wall, clustered together against adversity.

Juniper Hill is a small isolated hamlet on high Oxfordshire land in the parish of Cottisford, on the very edge of the county’s boundary with Northamptonshire, and when originally settled it nestled in a swathe of Juniper bushes, very few of which now survive. As a settlement it originates in a pair of houses built for the poor of the parish by the local Overseers of the Poor in 1754, on Cottisford Heath, then common land in the possession of the Tusmore Estate and Eton College. This common land was a vital asset to the local farming communities as it provided space for commoners’ rights to be exercised -grazing and foraging for example. Later, another two poor houses were added, and by the mid nineteenth century, there were four freeholders at Juniper Hill and potentially around 25 other dwellings, all built as ‘squats’ or encroachments on the land in a way that was most-likely tolerated by local tenant farmers because their inhabitants’ labour was vital to the local economy. In 1848 the ultimate land owners of Cottisford Heath procured an order to enclose the lands and remove them from the commoners’ use, and were met with violent resistance over a period of several years, until things came to a head and a team of 20 men were dispatched to threaten the demolition of the settlement itself, an act of repression which ultimately led to a compromise between landowner and villager. The squatters were ‘given’ the right to harvest that year’s crop and also 14-year leases on their dwellings with a nominal rent payable, with ownership stated as reverting to the landowner at the end of that period, and additionally both allotment grounds and a recreation ground were provided to villagers. There is no evidence that these leases were ever brought back into the landowners’ hands, and the cumulative evidence suggests that the landowners in this instance, whilst determined to exercise the principle of enclosure, also to some extent depended upon or otherwise wanted to retain the labour value of the Juniper Hill residents.

It appears that the central house (could it have been one of the original poor houses around which the hamlet grew?) had become a pub a while before the 1880s, allowing each resident of the hamlet to walk across their own plot (and potentially those belonging to a couple of their neighbours) in order to reach the pub’s doors of an evening. The pub’s name, the Fox, is almost certainly in tribute to George Fox, one of the original squatters who had built his own home at Juniper Hill in the 1840s.

The reason why we know so much about Juniper Hill is thanks to the writer Flora Thompson, whose work Lark Rise to Candleford (in fact a trilogy of novels published in a collected edition in 1945) fictionalised Juniper Hill as Lark Rise (a name actually taken from one of the local fields). Thompson’s work was published at a particular moment, when fears about technological progress, social transformations and indeed global war all led to a fascination with rural traditions that were seen as passing into history. Though Thompson herself always presented her work as fiction (albeit lightly fictionalised, with the protagonist named Laura and clearly based upon herself), her deftly-written work captured the national mood and frequently – even to this day in some quarters – has been presented as documentary or memoir. Barbara English’s 1985 essay in Victorian Studies unpacks the difference between factual Juniper Hill and fictional Lark Rise, exposing the more turbulent battle between squatters and landowners that Thompson had somewhat smoothed over. For decades, those seeking a picture of nineteenth century rural life found a consoling and deeply humane narrative in Thompson’s writing, indeed they still do, but they would not find the more traumatic and violent narratives that actually underpinned the existence of the settlement of her birth.

The Fox public house closed in the late twentieth century, becoming a private home, but the other houses, the fields of allotments and the recreation ground remain. The ‘rose petal’ housing plots also remain as a compelling piece of rural urbanism, a beguilingly informal ring of homes clustered around the pub – not too close, not too far. Aside from providing a history of English land enclosure in human-scale microcosm, Juniper Hill also stands as a compelling example of a settlement arising out of necessity (that of agricultural labour) and being largely tolerated and accepted on this basis – this uneasy tolerance was a normal state of affairs both before and after the crisis of enclosure, as suggested by the fact that the leases were seemingly never reclaimed. The result was a peculiar, informal and emergent form of settlement, eloquent about the kinds of community structures and forms of association that people are able to form when left to their own devices.

maps.app.goo.gl/D2KMTnBtVE2CeR9b7

Bethnal Green, 18 July 2025.

Acknowledgements

Aside from Flora Thompson’s writing I am indebted to Richard Mabey’s biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, and the essay "Lark Rise" and Juniper Hill: A Victorian Community in Literature and in History by Barbara English, an essay in Victorian Studies , Autumn, 1985, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 7-34, published by Indiana University Press.

A goal which is indefinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception… Each epoch, each generation, each life has had, and has, its own experience, and en route new demands grow, new methods.

This was one of Colin Ward’s favourite passages from the writings of Alexander Herzen. Ward shared with Herzen a belief in the politics of the present. His vision for a better society was radical but his means of exploring how to get there were pragmatic. In developing his notion of anarchy as a theory of organisation, Ward used the tools of the historian and the sociologist to gather together examples and case studies from the observable world and from history. He then used the tools of the planner, the activist and the educator to intervene in the present.

When forced to condense Ward’s influence on my practice it is this willingness to marry observation with action that keeps coming back. His work rejects the Utopian anticipation of a revolutionary moment, instead it reminds us again and again that the roots of a better society are present in today’s one, in such things as our lifeboat services, voluntary associations and everyday interactions.

Colin Ward’s work has influenced me in many ways but I think of him most often when teaching, a context where we are trying to encourage architecture students, however hypothetical their projects, to engage fully and critically with the messy and problematic realities of housing, equality and spatial justice as they stand today in the UK. We want them to use architectural skill as a tool to imagine ways out of current injustices, observing society as it is in order to find or develop for how it might be.

Ward did just this. He looked with clarity at all sorts of contemporary phenomena in building his arguments for a society without coercion, from the fluid and self-organising subcultures of Milton Keynes’ music scene to post-war mass squats and the politics of allotment culture. Of course, he never found perfect models, instead concentrating on the experiments, gained grounds and moments of possibility that seemed to unlock, piecemeal, the potential for a better society. He called these phenomena (people, practices, or places) ‘seeds beneath the snow’.

I’d like to describe two of these places to you now. The first is Bungalow Town, visited by Ward and Dennis Hardy for ‘Arcadia for All’, their landmark study of self-build plotland developments. The second place is the Laindon plotlands and their evolution into Basildon New Town, the central subject of a lecture Ward gave at the ICA in 1976 called the ‘The Do-It-Yourself New Town’.

Bungalow Town is important to me because it happened in the town where I grew up. It sprang up in the early twentieth century as a collection of bungalows built informally on the shingle beach of Shoreham in Sussex. The bungalows were often made out of retired railway carriages from the nearby Lancing Carriage Works, where my grandfather worked, bought cheap and hauled across the river mouth by horses. The residents of Bungalow Town had a Bohemian reputation as many of them were associated with a natural light film studio built on the beach in 1914.

Over time, the architecture of Bungalow Town grew more ambitious, with many structures, such as a crenelated castle over five storeys, stretching the definition of ‘bungalow’, but at the same time the overall settlement grew increasingly ‘normal’, gaining telephone lines and made roads, perhaps it was even becoming respectable.

By the time Ward and Hardy visited, and when I was growing up down the road, Shoreham Beach was unrecognisable as the eccentric settlement it had been up until World War Two. During wartime, 75% of the beach had been cleared, ostensibly to create a more easily defensible coastline, and even before the outbreak of peace the local council was determined to prevent the old plotland structure from re-appearing. It failed to do so several times, facing an increasingly militant local community across a Whitehall table, until in 1947 the Town and Country Planning Act was passed by national government.

This new act, which created the planning system as we now know it, effectively nationalised the right to build, on the assumption that most significant development would be state-led, and to enable this it allowed local councils to compulsorily purchase any land needed to fulfil their local development plan.

Shoreham Beach was the first place, nationally, to be compulsorily purchased using these new powers, and the first to receive a ‘plan’ for its state-led redevelopment, even though the plan wasn’t even complete when the purchase was undertaken. This process initiated the version of Shoreham Beach we see today, a quiet and pleasant suburb, its many oddnesses mostly ironed out, barring one or two surviving railway carriages.

Bungalow Town’s tradition of alternative living has been exiled from the beach itself, but survives in the form of a long line of house-boats, many of them repurposed military craft, which cling on, just about, to the muddy banks of the Adur. Successors to the railway carriages, in construction and in spirit.

As a child I found this lost, bohemian civilisation fascinating. I began my researches into Bungalow Town at age 12 and have never really stopped, slowly evolving my interest from a fascination with living in trains to a more politicised interest, framed absolutely by Ward & Hardy’s book, in what drove the local authority to stamp it out. I continue to be fascinated by this very particular ‘seed’ of joyful, ‘informal’ settlement and its deliberate snowing under by an embryonic planning system predicated on the superior knowledge of the professional and the professional class.

Indeed this moment has become a fundamental one in my PhD, ‘Making Planning Popular’. For me the great tragedy of 20^th century planning in the UK is that the moment when it was most popular, most discussed on street corners and in the press, was the very moment when planning took a decisive shift away from the popular gaze and became something solely done for us by the state, an extreme position which is now of course being spectacularly eroded, not by popular activity but by the free market and by the ideology of austerity.

Laindon, in Essex, presents similar themes to Bungalow Town but with a radically different outcome. It emerged as a settlement at roughly the same time, one of several sites along the London to Southend railway line which were a short train ride from East London and where the cost of farm land was affordable thanks to agricultural depression. Aggressively marketed by local estate agents, who would put on sales parties in local hotels and didn’t check too closely the sobriety of the purchaser, the plots were mostly purchased by working class East Londoners, initially as sites for holiday chalets but increasingly hosting permanent homes.

Laindon offered all the joys and pains of plotland communities everywhere. It allowed a hitherto-urbanised working class access to incredible personal, familial, environmental and constructional freedom, though its residents suffered from both a lack of infrastructure and the disapproval of more established country-dwelling neighbours. Infrastructure was provided by a form of mutual aid, with each plotholder undertaking to provide a single line of concrete pavers at the front edge of their plot, allowing a wheelbarrow of groceries or children to traverse the whole estate no matter how muddy the tracks got.

Laindon’s self-organising character is typical to the plotland phenomenon. What makes the place remarkable though, for Ward and for myself, is that the decision of several thousand working class Londoners to move to the Essex countryside, prompted by a range of socio-economic forces and over a period of several decades, eventually led to the area becoming the only post-war New Town to be actively asked for by its county council.

The post-war New Towns, in tandem with green belt legislation, and forming part of the radical reformation of planning represented by the Town and Country Planning Act, were meant to ‘solve’ London’s sprawling development pattern. London would ‘stop’ at its 1939 limits and would be rationally reorganised, whilst the New Towns would spring into being in orbit around London, beyond the newly-designated Green Belt, and would provide well-organised new settlements instead of an uncontrollably swelling capital. Because this was a big, region-spanning idea, the selection of sites was made nationally, and often paid little attention to local concerns. At Laindon however, Essex County Council recognised the potential of the New Towns programme to address the problems they perceived in the communities at Laindon and to fund the infrastructural improvements that they felt obligated to provide.

They got their way, and the various plotlands of Laindon were integrated in the formation of a place called Basildon New Town. The Masterplan for Basildon was tasked with stitching together new and old settlements to make something ‘better’ out of the disparate plotlands and scattered historic villages. In some parts of the new town, former plotlands were absorbed into the new development pattern and provided with better infrastructure. Streets would be metalled, services provided, and New-towny architect-designed housing used to fill-in empty plots.

In other locations, plotlands were not tidied up but tidied away. At Dunton, where several hundred familes lived, the plotland was gradually disassembled and its residents moved away, in order to create a 500-acre nature reserve. Now a single house, appropriately called The Haven, sits in the nature reserve and serves as a museum. The grassy streets retain their grid layout. Anderson shelters, gas ovens, foundations and garden gates can be found in the bushes, and the network of concrete pavers is occasionally visible between grass street and hedgerow. Back garden apple trees have become public assets.

Dunton for me is an incredibly poignant reminder of the possibilities of popular building activity in the interwar period. Its many and varied residents have gone but the romance of the site as a place of freedom is still palpable, still suggests possible futures.

In ‘The Do-It-Yourself New Town’, Ward celebrates Basildon New Town as a momentary triumph of responsiveness rather than determinism in state planning, a moment of spatial justice in which the state far transcended the now well-trodden ideas of participation & engagement and actually followed popular desire and popular building. Ward frames a partial view of a better and more responsive state, of a coercive political model flirting with its own obsolescence. As a parallel narrative to Bungalow Town, its radicalism is clear.

Ward found much to celebrate in the making of Basildon but he was also an advocate of the entire postwar New Towns programme. It is initially hard to reconcile this advocacy with Ward’s clearly stated Anarchism, that is, until we better understand his own particular reading of anarchist theory.

In Ward, there are no abstract Utopias or pure victories. There is instead a permanent state of struggle and negotiation. In his words,

the conflict between authority and liberty is a permanent aspect of the human condition and not something that can be resolved by a vaguely specified social revolution. It recognizes that the choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions occurs every day and in every way, and the extent to which we choose, or accept, or are fobbed off with, or lack the imagination and inventiveness to discover alternatives to, the authoritarian solutions to small problems is the extent to which we are their powerless victims in big affairs.

For Ward, the New Towns programme was a sustained period where state ambition, in the form of the evolving Welfare State, formed an alliance with a radical tradition of left libertarianism in reading and producing the built environment, a tradition in which the Garden City was the archetypal urban form and Patrick Geddes & Ebenezer Howard were the key figures. This was a period to be exploited, and as ever, Ward put theory and observation into energetic practice. His ‘Do-It-Yourself New Town’ essay was written not primarily for academic consumption but as a piece of advocacy for a very real but eventually abortive project, to allocate two of Milton Keynes’ emerging grid squares as self-build communities: state-provided self-build. The proposal involved postponing detailed planning approval in order to allow residents’ finances and constructions to happen slowly, as time money and energy became available, and in open-ended ways. Labour would be given time to become capital.

Ward was interested in bringing about a freer society by exploring the state, undertaking what he described as ‘the progressive development of its imperfections.’ He undertook much of this work in the context of a state that was expanding, and the question now, perhaps, is whether these ideas, these searches for seeds beneath the snow, have any relevance now the opposite is happening, a shrinking state and an overwhelming neoliberal project.

For me their relevance is stronger than ever, and I’m sure Ward would have found cause for optimism in today’s groundswell of cooperative, mutual and third sector forms of human association, which despite frosty conditions are a measurably growing influence in our communities, in housing provision, and in emerging forms of design practice. This groundswell is a reassertion of social processes from a time before the sidelining of the libertarian left. The seed is not strong but it is there, and the work of Colin Ward has played, and will continue to play, a central role in its growth.

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Other Plans is an occasional series of essays, each of which explores a particular alternative method of ‘doing’ spatial planning drawn from history. Each essay ends with a speculation on the use of this ‘other plan’ in the present or near future.

It’s a grid where nothing quite lines up; a rectilinear piece of nineteenth century town which might almost have been rationally-planned with a ruler and straight edge, except… No street leads into another. No street corners are set at ninety degrees. No block is the same size as another. The structure that we might expect – street, front garden, house, rear yard, industry, rear yard, house, front garden, street – is endlessly remixed in seemingly random combinations. Some terraces have generous front yards – and nothing at the back. Some terraces have front gardens separated from the dwelling by a narrow public alleyway. Some streets are wide enough for two-way traffic, others barely wide enough for two-way pedestrians. Some terraces have no frontage onto a street at all. The height averages at 2-3 storeys but varies wildly. And just as it feels like we have established a pattern or a rhythm, suddenly a whole block, as long as a whole street, is occupied by a single industrial use. Not tidied away in the centre of a block, lined or protected from the street by terraces, but just there, filling the block.

Brighton’s North Laine is nineteenth century industrial urbanism overlaid, piecemeal, over a pattern of agricultural land division that had survived since feudal times, and which now survives in the grain of the town. Running steeply down from one of Brighton’s sub-downland slopes, the North Laine was once one of five laines or fields that the worthies of Brighton either farmed themselves or, increasingly over time, divided up in the form of narrow feudal strips for leasing to tenants – the word laine in this context does not describe a thoroughfare but is an Anglo-Saxon word to describe a tenancy or loan. Those narrow strips, known as paul-pieces, were arranged to run parallel to the contour, parallel to the slope, as a way of shoring up the steep agricultural land against soil erosion – like an endlessly sub-divided Douro valley. Each repetitive sequence of paul-pieces was known as a furlong, and these ran counter to the contour, from top to bottom, and between them, also counter to the contour, ran leakways – evocatively-named drainage channels and access tracks. The result of all this was a highly-structured agricultural landscape that not only effectively managed erosion and the flow of water but also, just as importantly, managed individual financial power – the structure meant that no single tenant could claim all of the best land. The best they could manage was a cluster of paul-pieces within a furlong: what became known as a yardland.

By the early nineteenth century the North Laine as a place of agriculture was slowly being overwritten by new industrial uses – industrialised brewing, industrialised milling, industrialised dwelling and industrialsied servitude. Some paul-pieces shifted into terraces of dwellings or commercial premises rapidly, others survived as market gardens for nearly a century, but one by one they shifted from garden to town; gradually developing into rows of terraces, and as their size and angle varied with the terrain and there was no overarching masterplan the hierarchy of streets emerged incrementally, leading to that compelling casual grid where no corner or relation between streets is alike. Similar, but not alike. That’s the success of it – the variation is not wild or extreme, the rules are clear, it’s just that they were laid down for market gardens and then interpreted as a piece of town, with early (1820s) public health legislation forcing, usually but not always, sensible streets in between the paul-pieces, though often the clustered yardlands survived which again contributed to the subtle variations in grid alignment. The leakways of running water became the key lateral streets; what we walk, cycle or drive down now as Trafalgar Street, Gloucester Road, North Road, Church Street. Ironically, though the area’s history as a place of growing survives in street names (Kensington Gardens, Spring Gardens, Frederick Gardens), the furlongs got to the point where they were entirely built-out, and though the networks of streets and leakways make for a highly-successful series of public spaces there is no garden or park of scale. Everything, except for a few industrial uses, was developed at the scale of the terraced house or shop, leading to a repetitive but endlessly varying loose grid in which you always know where you are.

Today, a few biggish lumps of programme have been cut into the grid, not always unsuccessfully: a swimming pool, a library, offices, car parks. These are a reminder that the fine-grain North Laine represented everything that conventional post-war planning practice set itself against , and so of course a raised, multi-lane highway was proposed in 1968 to carve through the centre of it, north to south and terminating in a car park, only being shelved in 1973. The opposition to this scheme (which coincided with outrage over the Greater London Council’s plans for Covent Garden and the publication of the Skeffington Report, which embedded consultation into the planning process) was the impetus behind significant community efforts to designate and preserve the character of the North Laine in a way that we still benefit from today. House prices have predictably soared, even in (or maybe especially in) the terraces with no direct street frontage, but the area’s economic distinctiveness remains more resilient than most, retaining its street and flea markets, its venues, its long-running comic shop, timber yard and legendary food cooperative.

The character of the North Laine, formally informal or informally formal, is the direct result of two ideas of land-division co-existing, or rather of one idea of land-division bending its successor to its will. Underneath, but persisting, we have a feudal, distributed system of agriculture, carefully tuned to the movement of soil and water, and the balancing of individual and collective interest. Overwriting that, yet still defined by what it replaced, we have what would have been a highly repetitive 19^th century urbanism, reflecting the inward rush of the labouring classes into the city on the trail of industrial capital, squeezed into that feudal system. What might otherwise have been relentless is instead, as a result of this co-existence or overlay, one of the most satisfying and distinctive pieces of urban form in England.

Since we can’t repeat either of the economic conditions that shaped (and still shape) the North Laine, what can be learned from it in terms of how we might make a town? One is that the overlaying of these two ideas (market gardening vs. dwellings for artisans/servants/fabricators) led, for over a century, to what must have been a brilliantly rich and complex patchwork of dense urban housing and urban agriculture, a quilt of dwelling and growing that feels both beautiful and highly relevant to today. But the main lesson, and the one still visible today, is perhaps that those inconvenient land ownerships, topographic peculiarities or obstructions, those things that apparently frustrate and distort the repetitive grids of our highly-systematised housing products, might just be the disruptive ingredients that turn relentlessness into specificity. To create a piece of town like the North Laine means letting the logic of ‘what’s already there’, however inconvenient, change your plans.

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Spitalfields, 23 June 2025.

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I am an atheist standing in a Sussex parish church. The church, a cool interior illuminated at present solely by sunlight passing through mottled glass, stands on a manmade mound adjacent to a long-demolished Norman manor house, to a long sold-off neoclassical rectory and to a still-thriving farm. The mound strongly suggests a pre-Christian place of worship or gathering existed here before the church did; it seems likely that, after that place of worship or gathering, there came another early Christian space, and then in the fourteenth century the church reached more-or-less its current form; an assembly of downland flints, pulled from the hillside and composed into cruciform. I am standing alone; this whole assembly of structure, decoration, motif and narrative is all, for the moment, dedicated to me, an unbeliever, to my inner peace and peace of mind. The fact of this feels wildly generous and disproportionate. But highly welcome.

I have never found the door to this church locked. On one memorable winter evening I arrived here along after dark, looking for a place of stillness and silence but expecting it to be closed, and was able to stand alone in its darkness. On other occasions I have attended a funeral here, a pantomime, a Hallowe'en ghost story, a nativity service. Each of these attendances has offered something of a transcendent experience, of reaching out to community or to the universe or to something else beyond. At their deepest the feelings that pass through me at these moments are of profound connectivity: to place, to the people around me, to a moment in time that is precisely placed in a vast continuity. There is a (not entirely accurate) sense that this space has remained unchanged as vast changes have taken place outside its doors and at the foot of its mound. Though its fabric has been subject over the centuries to deep change, as have the principles of worship that have defined its purpose, it feels like a space that has weathered change and maintained some kind of elemental character. It has certainly, like multiple other sacred buildings in this part of Sussex, been a place of significance prior to the arrival of Christianity, like the dolmen-turned-chapel we find in São Brissos, Portugal.

Though rallying somewhat after the impacts of Covid-19, church attendance in England is dwindling and has been for some time. Around the country, in communities of many types, congregations are both shrinking and aging, and the future of many of the 16,000 anglican parish churches in England looks bleak. Nearly 80% of these structures are listed, and of these a disproportionate number are Grade I listed, such that they benefit from very high levels of scrutiny and attention in terms of their conservation and preservation. So whilst their future as places of worship often feels extremely fragile, their future as standing stones, containing some programme or other, is relatively secure, albeit facing deep challenges in terms of expertise and finance. The question preoccupying me, in the wake of some recent conversations about the churches in my immediate community, is whether or not, in the face of existential crisis, the parish church might yet find new relevance and purpose whilst retaining its qualities as sanctuary, as sacred or transcendent space.

Even if we ignore the collective or community nature of a church and think of it in art historical terms only, as a work of art containing other works of art, the loss to the public of this experience, of access to its memories and stories, is tragic. But it is also tragic as a loss of public collective space, especially when these are in increasingly short supply.

This is a key reason why conversions to office or residential uses are typically unsatisfactory; such conversions may retain fabric but they forever seal it off behind closed front doors and security passes. By comparison, conversions to restaurants, bars or performance venues, though the loss of sanctuary is the same, feels relatively positive - the space and fabric remain collective. The Good Union brewery in Cambridge, New Zealand, is one international example of a colonial-era church finding new life as a brewery tap and restaurant that retains the collective nature of the building. But we are unlikely to ever stand alone and at peace in a restaurant dining room, or rather it will be a very different kind of peace. The space has remained collective but it has not remained sacred, and I am increasingly sure, even as an unbeliever, that this is a profound loss – not just to the practising Christian community but to society at large.

Our built environment, urban and rural, is littered with listed churches that are no longer places to gather, just as they are with listed pubs that are no longer places to gather. In each case, we have preserved the fabric but we have not preserved the practice. One might argue that the practice we are talking about is dying out or declining, and therefore physical preservation is the only answer, and this might broadly be true. But the progressive counter-argument, in my view, is that the practice is simply changing. The need to gather remains, to find solace and sanctuary in the public realm, but is these needs are changing and evolving in ways both subtle and profound. Accordingly we need conservation and adaptive practices that acknowledge and support these changes.^[1]

This opens up the possibility of retaining the fundamental qualities and functions of a parish church whilst offering up the potential of other uses driven by social, economic and cultural considerations. In doing this history is comforting, and Ronald Blythe in the 1950s was keen to fold together the church’s centrality, both sacred and profane, to Suffolk village life:

‘The nave [of Aldeburgh church] is broad because, in pre-Reformation days, the nave of a church did duty for all the due functions of the parish… There are records in Aldeburgh to say that ship-auctions were regularly held in the nave as well as theatrical performances given by travelling players. A spacious nave was also essential to the proper management of a procession.’ (Blythe: 1957)

We know that, prior to the Reformation, churchyards were a vital public open space, that church naves served as market halls, dining rooms and spaces of entertainment. We know that medieval churches brewed ale on site as both a means of generating income and as a way of delivering safe hyrdration to parishioners. We know that it was believed that church bells warded-off thunderstorms, so the tolling of bells was not only a call to prayer or mourning but also an active participant in our attitude to weather. We know that village halls, vital as they are to so many communities, are a relatively recent innovation, representing the tidying away of certain secular or community uses from the church itself. Alec Clifton-Taylor, the poet of English architectural materials, saw all this in the mid 1970s:

‘If we do not like to see the churches unused, yet feel no call to use them ourselves, I can see only one possible way out, which is to go back to the pre-Reformation custom of employing the nave for secular and recreational purposes – anything from a parish meeting to a play or a concert, from a film show to a festival of light music – and reserving only the chancel for sacred uses.’ (Clifton-Taylor: 1986)

Many of these uses have begun to creep back into our churches. But is it simply a question of the sacred making way for the secular? Are there qualities in the parish church that might be useful to us all in ways that transcend mere programme?

Recently I had the chance to work with a group of young creatives in Bristol, who thanks our collaborators Rising Arts Agency were working with us to create a vision for the city’s harbour. In contrast to other respondents (more ‘established’ voices perhaps) who provided a fairly conventional mainstream narrative using words like liveliness, vibrancy and activation, several of these younger respondents spoke instead about the need for spaces of emptiness and freedom in the contemporary built environment. Places where ‘you don’t need to pay’ but which nevertheless offer things like peace, shelter, respite or companionship. Vibrancy is all very well, it was implied, but who wants to be ‘vibrant’ all the time? Sometimes - in fact quite often in our era of social media and accelerated doom scrolling - what we need is simply time and space with ourselves and with those we love: family and community. It was through these words of advice that we as designers began to articulate the need for quietude, openness and unprogrammed space within the harbour. Thinking back on that discovery, I wonder how many of those young people would consider a local parish church to be a space that can provide the qualities they sought in the harbour? Or how much the building and its practices would need to change before they could? As a society we are coming alive to new forms of feeling welcome, connected and resonant within a space, and the parish church as frequently the most ancient receptacle of collective identity and memory in our community, stands ready to be a protagonist of this process.

I recently listened (via podcast) to the brilliant contemporary folk collective Goblin Band performing in the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great in London. Accompanying a performance of the song ‘Down in Yon Forest’ (often known as ‘All Bells in Paradise’, ref. Roud 1523), a member of the group explained why as a group of non-Christians they particularly sought out St. Bartholomew as a place to perform and record:

‘It's just another framework for connecting with the universe basically, and one that is shared with the whole of society, more or less, in the past, where it was more of a dominant framework… if you can't appreciate that that was the way that people could connect with each other and the universe and the complexities of that, good and bad, then I don't think you stand a chance at really grasping the history of the place that you're in.’^[2]

Churches, even comparatively new ones and in common with other places of worship, are adept at capturing stories and histories and harbouring them until a later generation is ready to receive and reinterpret them - ‘stone tapes’ of collective memory. Song is only one of many tools of connection, means of grasping, in this context, especially as song has literally resonated through these buildings throughout their lives. If Goblin Band can build new connections with the universe through their occupation of St. Bartholomew the Great, then surely there are a multitude of other forms of inhabitation through which people of all faiths and none can find resonance, sanctuary and transcendence in the parish church, in ways both gregarious and solemn, and in so doing give these ‘sacred monuments’^[3] renewed social purpose.

Bibliography

Blythe, Ronald (1957) The Parish Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

Clifton-Taylor, Alex (1974) English Parish Churches as Works of Art (Second Edition 1986). London:Batsford.

Davies, J. G. (1968) The Secular Use of Church Buildings. SCM Press.

Strong, Roy (2007) A Little History of English Country Church. London: Jonathan Cape.

With thanks to Ngaire Digby, Cristina Monteiro and Dr. Neal Shasore for conversations that prompted this piece, particularly in relation to the church of St. John the Evangelist at Newtimber.

^[1] . In this regard we should celebrate the work of the Churches Conservation Trust and the Friends of Friendless Churches, both of which strive to maintain the churches in their care as spaces for public and community life.

^[2] From ‘Folk on Foot: Goblin Band in the City of London’, 16 May 2025

^[3] As they were memorably described by William Morris in his letter to The Atheneum of 10 March 1877, a key text in the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

It is said that if you dig the soil in London or St Albans you will know when you have reached the 1st century AD because the soil is suddenly charred and blackened - this is the layer of the city that was burnt to the ground by Boudicca. Similarly, going through the history of many of Britain’s coastal or rural settlements, you will know you have reached the years around World War 1 by the sudden presence, in historic postcards, photographs or maps, of a sudden rash of popular, handmade timber constructions - typically on previously underdeveloped land: farmland, woodland or coastal.

The working classes of the British Isles had been divorced from the rural environment by the pull of the industrial revolution - which centralised work and access to capital in urban areas - and by the push of land enclosure, the combination of which severed historic relationships of the rural poor with the land and established a new hierarchy of town and country. When I trace my own family history I find a multitude of rural labouring poor scattered loosely across the Sussex and Suffolk countryside, before a massive exodus into the growing urbanity of Brighton in the early to mid nineteenth century. The impacts of this shift were complex and multiple, but in this context the key shift was into industrialised dwellings - the ‘back to backs’ and repetitive brick terraces that would swiftly, by the turn of the twentieth century, become demonised by early town planners and progressive architects. 

While those planners and architects were conceiving of solutions to this industrialisation of dwelling and settlement (chief among them the Garden City), the working classes themselves were finding their own solutions, particularly in the wake of World War I and an array of other transformations, among them the popular expansion of rail travel and rapidly falling agricultural land values. The resulting settlements were what we now call ‘plotlands’ - land that was unfavourable except for its rural location, divided up into small plots and sold, chiefly to working people and mostly under the banner of holiday or weekend leisure plots. What actually happened, of course, was that whole towns emerged, and in an era before organised state planning they emerged in significant numbers. They’re there in advertisements within the pages of the popular press of the time, they’re the shacks that serve as a pivotal setting in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding and in agit-prop pageant plays by E.M. Forster, they’re the rhetorical ‘octopus’ of uncontrolled development that informed the birth of rural preservation movements and indeed of the very idea of state planning.

Architecturally, these buildings were works of improvisation, DIY craft and opportunism, often relying on existing, ‘as found’ structures such as tramcars or railway carriages (there is a record of redundant bathing machines being used as dwellings in Woodingdean, just outside Brighton), and otherwise made using materials that could be carried on trains out from the East End of London or under the arm whilst pedalling a bicycle. Their architecture, though often formally inventive and aesthetically complex, was ultimately humble, thrifty and often vulnerable to tide and weather. At its worst it could be overwhelmingly twee or sentimental (the ‘English sunrise’, ‘Dunroamin’), but that’s what you get when popular taste is allowed to explode. But seen as a whole - as a layer in the land like Boudicca, they represent much more than these aesthetics and formal concerns - they stand for a much greater explosion of working people out of the urban realm and back into the countryside, a popular reclamation of the rural that was swiftly and lastingly suppressed. Built in the humblest possible way, and united conceptually and materially with shacks, shanties and popular settlements across the world, these simple buildings represent a massive act of reclamation and restitution which, through their own agency and through resistance to it, changed the landscape of England utterly, ushering in the suburban world that we still to a large extent exist in.

In England, thanks to post-1947 planning legislation, this handmade architecture typically had two fates: demolition or surreptitious survival. In places like Shoreham by Sea, a vast settlement of bungalows made from former railway carriages was substantially destroyed using early compulsory purchase powers (written about at length here), leaving only scattered survivors including the pebble-dashed church. At Dunton, part of Basildon New Town, every plotland home was demolished incrementally except one, which now stands as an unlikely plotland museum in the centre of a nature reserve thanks to the enlightened efforts of conservation volunteers. In places where such destruction was not fully seen-through, examples tended to survive through blending in to the wider ‘normal’ settlement, by ‘becoming normal’ themselves and slowly obscuring or replacing their original tectonic and aesthetic qualities with more mundane or typical forms of cladding, window or roofing panel. And in the context of ever-worsening inequalities and increasingly insane land and property values across much of England, survivors of the period that continued happily on as dwellings are increasingly likely to be swept away in favour of more substantial and higher density dwellings. At Shoreham, when I was a child it was an (admittedly niche) game to try and identify houses that had railway carriages somewhere embedded within them, given away by tell-tale rhythms of windows or occasionally even by original golden lettering: ‘LB&SCR’, ‘third class’. These have now all been swept away; and sadly the loudest preservationist protest has come from the railway history groups and is concerned with preserving not the social history of the settlement or dwelling but rather the original railway carriages. Brilliantly, one such carriage, fully restored to its original 19th century form, is now doing good service on the Bluebell Railway heritage line. As a one-off this is a glorious twist of material fate but it also shares with the demolition imperative the idea that these homes were somehow an aberration or mistake, something best undone or overwritten.

In Essex, as elsewhere, there was so much rural plotland development that controlling it proved to be such a massive headache that large areas remain today. We can see the plotland origins of places like North Benfleet in their unmade roads and loose, gridded urban form, but most of the houses and other buildings have slowly crept toward ‘becoming normal’ - often brick and render masks much older timber frames underneath. And the social potential of the plotland, enabling people to run smallholdings or businesses on their plots as part of the grain of their community, remains real and valued. The sweat equity invested in making these houses in the first place, from scratch and by hand, has paid off, even if at the expense of some of their original character. But so be it.

In places like Sweden and Russia, the idea of a rural retreat, remains real and widely accessible, such that there are vast areas of this sort of development spanning class boundaries and spatial and architectural quality. In England, by contrast, this idea was deliberately stamped out in the postwar period by a process that was highly elitist and classist - ‘the plotholders both get the view and spoil it’ was a contemporary complaint by an established landowner. If, as a child, I would go railway carriage spotting on Shoreham Beach, then today I roam suburban roads on bank holidays and via Google Streetview on the same mission, and the fruits are sweet but few. Here a bungalow built like a colossal verandah shading a long, grand railway carriage. Here a thatched carriage serving as an agricultural store. Here a tramcar repurposed as a home, still serving as such all these years later. Here a bungalow built by the Clarion Cycling Club (motto: ‘fellowship through cycling’) to serve as a clubhouse to further expand access to the countryside to anyone able to cobble together a bicycle. Surviving structures remain united by what they originally stood for - a reclamation of landscape by those who had previously been denied it, taking construction (at the scale of both dwelling and community) into their own hands and exploiting the wider, seismic social transformations of the day, effectively rebooting the urban/rural divide in favour of the masses.

At Dunton and Laindon in Essex, the simple rule - in the absence of public sector involvement - was that every plotholder would lay a single row of paving slabs at the front of their plot in order to build a filigree network of dry pathways across the fields. Residents would use wheelbarrows and prams customised to run on a single wheel to convey goods from the ‘proper’ road to their plots. These forms of collectivised popular construction - where the simple timber dwelling becomes multiple - bring the plotland story into dialogue with other global forms of alternative development - they are cousins of the colonial settlements that took place in New Zealand, for example (the ‘fencibles’), or in Brasil. They are of a piece with the ad-hoc structures not only of the Russian dacha but also of the English allotment shed and the pigeon loft, serving a similar role as refuge and respite. They are closely related to the types of dwelling and settlement structure that Mississippi John Hurt, Dolly Parton, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley all emerged from in the United States- leading to the one-off preservation of these special examples when all other examples have been long-since cleared away. They are of a family with intentional radical communities of the same era, such as the anarchist colony of Whiteway in Gloucestershire (where every dwelling except the already-standing farmhouse was originally of light timber construction). Or the Sanctuary in West Sussex where Vera Pragnell divvied-up woodland in her ownership amongst a wildly varied community of drop-outs, creatives and those pursuing alternative lifestyles, among them the writer Laurie Lee. Or the greenwood bunkhouses of Grith Fyrd and Forest School Camps, where young men damaged by war were trained to build dwellings and exist in harmony with nature, healing their lungs as they went (the results of whose labours were still standing when I was a child and are now long gone). Or the very similar structures developed by the Woodcraft Folk in places like Cudham or West Hoathly in order to give urban children the gift of the countryside. Or the decorative timber vardo caravans of the Roma tradition, intricately crafted and yet lightweight enough to be pulled day-in, day-out by solo horses. Or the post-WW1 hutting movement that led to whole neighbourhoods of woodland dwellings for ex-servicemen in the Scottish countryside. Or to the long, ancient tradition of timber-framed dwellings in Sussex, Kent and elsewhere - examples of which are now subject to the highest levels of conservation and heritage designation. Or, to the northern Portuguese fishing towns whose timber palheiros, endlessly rebuilt and with their long timber foundations reaching deep into the sand, resisted redevelopment along more conventional lines well into the twentieth century. All of these familial connections are subjects of drawings I have made in recent years, which aim to commemorate, memorialise and recall these structures and their quiet radicalism as they otherwise drift from view and social memory. I try to use a form of drawing that echoes, I hope, the simplicity, clarity and optimism of the original construction.

The game of ‘handmade house spotting’ is getting increasingly hard to play, the joy of finding new subjects for a drawing increasingly challenging. Examples of the type across the UK are frequently lost without ceremony, and without regular painting and maintenance, such lightweight timber structures decay rapidly: built by hand, they require regular attention by hand as well. In the intervening decades, ‘self-build’, when not acting under the radar against tremendous odds, has drifted into becoming a rich person’s game: Grand Designs culture, the granite worktop and the uPVC bi-folding door. This social and material drift gets perhaps to the heart of the significance of these structures beyond their architectural curiosity, to the core of why we need a more concerted and strategic effort to preserve them alongside other twentieth century structures. They are a tangible but shrinking reminder of one of the most significant and contentious transformations in the British landscape - a popular reclamation of rural and coastal beauty, undertaken by the working classes on their own terms, with their own hands, and with a renewable and low-impact material. A reclamation that has lessons to teach us in the present, and which echoes still in our culture, quieter each day.

Acknowledgements

This piece is indebted to social histories written by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, and by Ken Worpole, and to invaluable documentation made by Stefan Szczelkun, to the countless local amateur historians who have documented these places, and finally, somewhat perversely, to the narratives of writers and campaigners including Virgina Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clough Williams-Ellis and others who looked on the shanty with eloquent horror.

I explored the Russian dacha with Cristina Monteiro and Ishbel Mull in this essay for The Architectural Review, the Portuguese palheiro with Cristina Monteiro, the pageantry of Forster with Ruth Beale, and have written more or less constantly about Bungalow Town in Shoreham particularly here at The Spring Line but also here and here.

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