Demolition

Published 18 August 2003

Heritage I - Is restoration necessarily a good thing? A new BBC series asks us to vote on which historic building should be preserved. But what would we most like to see destroyed?

J G Ballard, Palace of Westminster
The self-importance of MPs and the undue weight we give to politics would be erased if this vast fake gothic pile were levelled to the ground. The Lords could be left buried in the rubble, and the Commons rehoused in a structure whose traditions mean more to us - the Millennium Dome, say, or Bluewater retail park.

Edwina Currie Portcullis House
It is hideous. It looks like an upturned cockroach, black and shiny on top with innumerable little legs waving in the air. There is something definitely subhuman about it. The committee of MPs that commissioned it thought the roof would be of burnished bronze; the architect offered to scour the surface with Brillo pads. What is far worse, however, is that MPs waited generations for decent working conditions, and the result is not only expensive (roughly £1m per MP using it) and an appalling eyesore, but is, by all accounts, a terrible place to work in. I've been there only a couple of times, but everything seemed wrong. The atrium is a terrible waste of space in a part of London where space is as rare as an honest politician. The wood, glass and steel hint at good breeding but look more like Ikea than Harvey Nicks. And because the whole thing is a hermetically sealed capsule into which not a sound penetrates from the outside world, and in which everyone breathes a great deal of everyone else's recycled hot air, it epitomises precisely what is wrong with parliament.

Alain de Botton, London riverside developments
Like so many Londoners, I am angered and offended by the new riverside developments going up all along the south bank of the Thames from Barnes to Battersea. What is particularly sad is that these buildings are going up after so many architects have chewed over the failures in their profession during the past 50 years. And yet, it seems, absolutely nothing has been learnt. Also, tragically, while a bad novel doesn't bother anyone, a bad building stands for 500 years and enrages constantly. Most of all, one is so aware of what could have been done by a sensitive and half-intelligent architect. It is baffling why "new building" remains almost synonymous with "horrible building". It wasn't always so. Think of Venice.

David Dimbleby, BBC White City
This monstrosity is not the BBC Television Centre doughnut, haunted by those who have never found their way to the exit, but the steel-and-glass erection to the north. When I went for the director generalship of the BBC in the late 1980s, I resolved to cancel this project, which was then in the planning stage, as my first act. Sadly, I was not appointed DG, the building went up, and the full horror of it was soon apparent. Pompous and useless, it earned its sobriquet, "Ceausescu Towers". I think it must have been an off-the-peg design for an insurance company or a building society which the BBC picked up on the cheap. It certainly was not designed for broadcasting. The air-conditioning did not work at the weekend, and none of the windows opened. We suffocated in summer and froze in winter. How such a building could be built by an organisation that is meant to stand for quality and originality is a mystery.

Margaret Drabble, Tower Bridge
One of my least favourite buildings is Tower Bridge. It looks as though it is made of fibreglass, and maybe it is. I don't like the slightly menacing, false Disney-gothic effect, and the scale of it makes the poor Tower of London look ridiculous. I know it has to be big, but it looks like a parody. I've had a grudge against it ever since it featured several decades ago on the jacket of the first of my novels to appear in the US. I couldn't think what it was doing there, as none of my characters ever went anywhere near it. My publishers said it was meant to represent London life in the Swinging Sixties, but it looked more like a suicide threat to me.

Roy Hattersley, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London SW1
It looks as though it was designed by Damien Hirst. All - or at least most - of its guts hang outside the main body of the building. No doubt there is some utility in having the heating ducts, the air-conditioning pipes and what looks like the working parts of a medium-sized power station exposed to public view. But I suspect that they are statements of style. The conference centre is up to date and proud of it. It is also in the most important location in London. Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament form the other two points of a Westminster triangle. The centre's battleship-grey front is only dismal. The pipes are the new brutalism gone mad.

Darcus Howe, Southwyck House, Brixton, London SW9
John Major was on the housing committee that approved this block of flats. Not only would I like to see it destroyed, I would like to see it blown up so that the whole of London could see the mushroom of smoke and the flames, so they'd know that its like would never be seen again. From the outside it looks like a prison - I am sure this was in the architect's head when he designed it. I have friends who live there, and I refuse to go round to see them.

Will Hutton, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1
The Guardian and Observer are two great progressive newspapers that have reinvented themselves over the past decade and are genuinely forward-looking. But the building they occupy at 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1 exemplifies all that is worst in British architectural ambition. Drab, featureless, unambitious, graceless, technologically inhibiting and grossly overcrowded, 119 Farringdon Road should be dynamited tomorrow and replaced with a building that would inspire and uplift the papers' readers and writers alike.

Jonathan Meades, Portcullis House and the Guggenheim, Bilbao
The sententious populism of Restoration prompts the idea that maybe the BBC should be demolished. But even if the "ideas" that come out of it are dismally base, Television Centre is worth preserving as a rare, if tardy, example of the Festival of Britain idiom. Two buildings that should go are:

a) Portcullis House, Westminster. The prodigal waste of public money is exacerbated by the risible roof line, which resembles distended grabs from the funfair game that invites the gullible to pick up worthless gewgaws. This may be apt, but it doesn't mitigate the structure's sheer ugliness.

b) The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Designed by Frank Gehry, it is an unresolved, three-dimensional logo. Its only purpose is cosmetic - to have its photo taken and thus put that rust-bucket city on the map. It has proved to be a terrible example to every other European city with regenerative aspirations. "Send for Gehry" has become the mantra of imaginatively bereft regional development agencies.

Brian Sewell, Barbican, London EC2
I would destroy the Barbican. It is the biggest heap of ugliness imagin- able - extensive, intrusive, characterless, unfunctional. There are no bricks, but every brick should be metaphorically destroyed. It is a miserably bad complex. The residential part is especially terrible. Because the rooms are so small, the doors have to open outwards. They act as cheese-cutters when you walk past, or suddenly swing open when you are peeing.

Fiona Shaw, Centre Point, WC1
One of the unhappiest buildings in Lon-don, it emanates misery up Oxford Street. It has such failure attached to its damp concrete and seems like a bullying wall between the West End and the City. It offers nothing but wrinkled negativity. If it were gone, there could be a flowing courtyard welcoming the West End into Bloomsbury. Urban tales have grown around its rat population. That could be revolutionised if it were gone.

David Watkin, Department of Architecture, Cambridge
The 1958-59 addition to the Cambridge School of Architecture by Colin St John Wilson has all the hallmarks of its depressing period: it is brutal, graceless and unworkable, with a flat roof, concrete floors and ceilings, and walls of abrasive exposed brick. It is a brutal fist shaken in the face of the stuccoed Regency houses of Scroope Terrace, into whose charming garden it aggressively intrudes. The lecture room has giant swing doors so that latecomers cannot enter unobtrusively. I have shown slides of its interiors to students in schools of architecture in America and asked them to guess their function. They failed, thinking that one would hardly want to house animals in such rough, dark spaces.

Ann Widdecombe, Island block, SE1
I do not have many instincts towards vandalism, but if I were ever to blow up a building it would be that ghastly monstrosity at the south end of Westminster Bridge. Ugly, dilapidated, unused (and no wonder), it epitomises all that was horrendous about architecture in the second half of the 20th century, while at the other end of the bridge Big Ben towers proudly over buildings that look as attractive today as they did when they were built centuries ago.

A N Wilson, Knightsbridge Barracks
The Household Cavalry daily delight visitors and Londoners alike with their fine horsemanship and beautiful, Teutonic uniforms. They deserve a barracks of Schinkel-like austerity and grandeur. Instead, they and every sighted individual who traverses Kensington Gore have to put up with Basil Spence's true monstrosity of a barracks. London has the least considered, and most obtrusive, collection of sub-modernist buildings of any capital city in the world, but the Knightsbridge Barracks is one of the ugliest. It is a terrible eyesore, spoiling not only that corner of Knightsbridge, but any walk across the park which inadvertently takes it into view. A prime case for demolition.

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