Samuel Hughes
@SCP_Hughes
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Research Fellow, @UniofOxford | Head of Housing, @CPSThinkTank | Fellow, @createstreets | Interested in architecture & urbanism | Views my own
London and Oxford
Joined August 2020
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Built at great sacrifice, Old London Bridge was by far the longest inhabited bridge in Europe. It was considered a wonder of the world, and seen with enormous pride by Londoners. Both rich and poor donated heavily to its upkeep, often leaving bequeaths 'to God and the bridge'.
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A street in King's Cross, 2008 and 2019. If you can spare a couple of parking spots, this is perhaps the simplest and best way to transform a street.
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Urban perfection of its kind in Haarlem. Mixed use, narrow streets, high plot coverage. Abundant street greenery, cars minimised, social life spilling into public spaces. Brick paving, wall-mounted lighting, no redundant markings. Simple Dutch vernacular classical architecture.
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A testament to the intense civic pride of the Victorians, that this seemed to them the approriate way to treat a municipal lamp post.
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A street in Poitiers, 2013 and 2020. Observe the profound change that paving in a local stone works on the character of the place. Another example of that care for the fabric of their towns for which France is so distinguished among nations.
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The glazing of this house is around 33% of its floor area. However, new regulations in Part O §1 allow maximum glazing of 11-18%. So *half to two thirds* of these windows would be blocked up. Do the British people really need their Government to protect them from this building?
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Haarlem, Holland. Narrow streets, abundant street greenery, brick paving, cars largely excluded. Street lighting, markings and furniture carefully aesthetically integrated. Dutch classical vernacular: red brick, large sash windows, simple facade patterns and details.
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E Fay Jones (1921-2004) was a quiet, gentle, stylistically uncategorisable architect, known for his wooden chapels in rural Arkansas. A question for Twitter: did Jones have any followers? Is there anyone else who designs like him today? Who comes closest?
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The town South Bend in Indiana has pre-approved a set of standard house designs. This aims at lowering the planning costs of simple, attractive infill development. Apparently this happens fairly often in the USA.
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Without context, I would have said this was designed by a skilled Austrian architect c. 1900, influenced by the Secession but still basically faithful to Late Historicism, sensitively interested in Byzantine, Ottoman, and Minoan (?) styles. Where does Amazon find these people?
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Antwerp Railway Station - this is a sort of waiting room. Designed by Louis Delacenserie, opened 1905. Civic pride in one of the great ages of public architecture: the city of Antwerp really believed that its citizens and their guests were worthy of palaces.
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Very simple mansion blocks in Victoria: one identical floor repeated vertically; a couple of identical bays repeated horizontally; brick, painted concrete, cast iron. 7-8 storeys, high plot use, shared gardens. Economically and technically we could build *lots* of this today.
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Pride in civic buildings: this was originally a post office. Berlin, 1881, designed by Carl Schwatlo.
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Immense quantities of this sort of urbanism was churned out by spec builders between 1850 and 1914, everwhere from Sofia to Stockholm. Then it was intensely unfashionable for half a century. Now everyone admires it, but finds it mysteriously hard to replicate. A puzzling story.
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West Croydon Bus Station, 2017, designed by TfL's in-house architect Martin Eriksson. Beautiful materials, careful detailing, thoughtful reference to Victorian and 1930s sources. Treating commuters with dignity. Why should we ever settle for less?
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New build by Sebastian Treese in Düsseldorf. Treese seems to have taken the London Victorian mansion block as his prototype, rather than the 19C German mid-rise he usually draws on. I am flattered to see my home city recalled, but also rather surprised! Does anyone have context?
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The facade of Reims Cathedral, lit with lasers to replicate the appearance of the original paintwork, albeit glowing surreally. Technically almost unbelievably impressive. Another illustration of the rich polychromy of medieval architecture. From
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Could the City of Westminster perhaps give a medal to whomever lives at No2 Chadwick Street? Some private citizen has really poured their time and energy into caring for this little corner of the public realm. It lightens my mood every time I go by.
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One of the differences between these facade is that in L, most of the windows are flush with the wall plane, whereas in R they are set back. It seems to me that R is much happier: revealing the depth of the wall gives it texture, strength and grandeur. What do others feel?
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5-6 storeys, high plot coverage, continuous build line, 80:20 residential-to-shops. Arcaded ground floor, simple rectilinear facade pattern, stock brick with cheap stucco ornament in a loosely Renaissance style. Mature plane trees, subdued tasteful street furniture.
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Louvred shutters are incredibly effective at keeping interiors cool, they have negligible carbon cost, and most facades are visually enriched by them. An idea for the next generation of New London Vernacular?
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Much to like in the Govt scheme to expand Cambridge, a city with acute housing need and a devastating shortage of laboratory space. It would be entirely possible to add a dense, car-independent, traditional quarter - and, somewhat amazingly, it seems this is what they want to do.
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It is said that 'Friends' played a role in the urban renewal seen globally since the 1990s by giving a whole generation a vision of inner urban life as high-status, convenient and desirable. Untestable but plausible, in my view; another reason to remember it affectionately.
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Regulations were recently introduced requiring a minimum window sill or guard height of 1.1 metres. My colleague
@RobertKwolek
at
@createstreets
just spotted this new build, apparently an early example of the small squat windows this will generate. Behold the norm of the future.
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One of the lovely features of the Dutch urban tradition is the use of brick paving, treating the street as an architectural unity rather than as isolated buildings amidst rivers of asphalt.
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Another recent development in Ludlow, on the site of a 1950s extension and a car park. All homes car-free. I struggle to find anything I would change. How many other car parks might be similarly transformed? Architect James Wareham.
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Four Shrewsbury households, adding immensely to the felicity of their street by filling their 30cm setback with pot plants and climbers. I wonder if there is a way of incentivising this deeply civic behaviour.
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One of the strangest stories of architectural history is that many of the key innovations associated with modernism had *already happened* in the Galician city of A Coruña in the C19: all-window facades, 'membrane' curtain walls, 'graph paper' repetition.
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The Government wants to build new towns. In a paper for
@UKDayOne
,
@KaneEmerson
and I propose a huge new town at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line and the planned East-West Rail. We believe this may be the best greenfield site in England. Here is why.
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Remarkable urbanism on a remarkable site: Orvieto, Umbria.
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Apparently this was an alternative design for the site of Brunel's great suspension bridge. A rather peculiar design aesthetically, but for those preoccupied with humane ways of integrating density, it has its charms.
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Observe how (1) the wall plane is slightly recessed around the windows, visually grouping them; (2) the bricks are laid vertically between the windows, so as to read as a beam and not as homogeneous wall surface; (3) the ground floor is grooved to resemble larger stronger blocks.
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Warsaw Old Town, 1945 and today. Reconstructed through a vast national effort - in a country that had just lost 20% of its population. The Polish reconstruction industry became so skilled that it later played a notable role in rebuilding Germany's historic centres.
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The Cathedral of Tbilisi, finished 2004. Georgia's GDP per capita in that year was $1400.
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Britain has many thousands of disused parking alleys, a paradigm example of inefficient land use. In our new paper with
@createstreets
,
@bswud
and I argue for letting local communities convert these into inhabited mews through a version of street votes.
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The street bridges of Paris, all cleared long ago, partly to improve traffic circulation. I continue to wonder if we should revisit this spectacular practice, now that we often need less space for vehicles and more for dwelling.
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Change on a Glasgow street, 2008 and 2018. How do we want to live?
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I recently posted the image R here. The chef of the 'Ti Bisou' creperie in the picture has just sent me L image - the *same street* a few decades ago! Apparently residents led the transformation. A reminder of what is possible.
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Believe it or not, these are largely 1950s office blocks, built after the area was wrecked in the war. Finely woven pedestrian urbanism never became impossible, though it did become rare. Middle Temple in London, architect Edward Maufe. They are of course unlisted.
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It is generally assumed that making ornament is labour intensive. This leads many to think that the rising cost of labour in modern societies led to the decline of ornament, as it was outcompeted by smooth machine-made forms. Here, public buildings from the 1900s and 2000s.
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Cádiz, another example of the extremely closely woven urbanism of premodern Iberia. Said with only slight exaggeration to be the oldest city in Europe.
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People sometimes say beautiful buildings have to be made of, or at least faced with, natural materials like wood and stone. Much as I love those materials, this is surely mistaken. The strength and refinement of metal and glass can yield buildings that are undisputedly lovely.
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Happy to be back in Paris after many months away. 7ish storeys, high plot coverage. Limestone facades, richly detailed in eclectic styles. Much carefully integrated greenery, unlike in many Parisian streets. Granite paving, restrained street furniture, cars 'as guests'.
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Baku, Azerbaijan. Air conditioning units housed in ornamental latticework boxes, with a material matching the facade. This seems to be standard practice in the Azeri equivalent of conservation areas.
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Small-scale densification in Wandsworth. Notice how much better builders are getting at traditional vernacular: attempts at this sort of thing from the 1990s or even 2000s are usually a little painful, but this is very decent work.
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Las Catalinas, a car-free seaside town in Costa Rica, built over the last fifteen years. Built in the local vernacular, reportedly chiefly of local stone and wood, covered with traditional lime plaster and terracotta tiles.
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Estate regeneration at le Plessis-Robinson, a ‘banlieue’ of Paris. Begun in 1989 and continuing today, replacing asbestos-heavy postwar blocks. Mixed use, mixed tenure, medium density.
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It looks likely that Britain is going to have some new towns. Many people think that all new towns are dysfunctional white elephants. This isn’t true: well located and well designed new towns have succeeded throughout history.
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Vincennes, 2008 to 2021. Note the care taken over paving materials, so characteristic of recent French street design - granite setts and limestone flags, laid in simple beautiful patterns without attention-seeking gimmickry.
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For centuries, the English and Dutch norm has been to leave brick exposed, whereas almost everywhere else in Europe and the Middle East, it has been to cover it with plaster. Why is this? Is it 'just culture', or is there some difference of climate or available materials?
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For decades, cities have *required* that much of their surface area be used only for parking cars. This is incredibly wasteful. Paris and New York have begun to let people use public space more sensibly. I argue in
@BDonline
that we should follow suit.
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Downtown Columbus, Ohio, 2009 to late 2010s. Startlingly good infill on surface parking sites.
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Strand pedestrianisation underway. A building site at present, but already delightful to stroll through a space that has been choked with cars through all my memory.
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Regulated signage in Glasgow Central Station. All the familiar names, but without the effect of being visually shouted at from every direction. A wise decision by the station authorities that should be emulated elsewhere.
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An interesting transformation here. All they have done is introduce some carefully sited relief panels, and slightly remodel the three corner bays. The result is no masterpiece, but certainly a much happier piece of street architecture. In Oslo, via Arkitekturoproret.
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Why shouldn't our lamp posts delight us? Berlin, Unter den Linden.
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Colmar in Alsace. Dense urbanism can not only be beautiful: it can even be bucolic. Familiar themes: narrow fronts, active facades, pastel colours, 3-5 storeys, close urban weave, gentle greenery. Note again the strange magic of the urban waterway.
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Kotor, Montenegro. Narrow streets, 3-4 storeys, high plot coverage, stone paving, mounted lighting, no cars. Note the rugged simplicity of Montenegrin vernacular: rubblestone masonry, free composition, minimal ornament. Beauty from materials, solid building & pedestrian urbanism.
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Monumental architecture in stone rising above vernacular fabric in brick, a symbol of civic and spiritual ideals standing over private interests. This is not the only beautiful way of siting great architecture, but to me it is perhaps the most moving.
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Intensification in South Tottenham. Since 2010 the council has allowed houses to add 1.5 storeys subject to a strict design code, after sustained local advocacy. Uptake has been high: in a generation the whole area will be 3.5 storeys. Might this be useful for other communities?
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The genius of bricklayers on view here. A wonderfully ornamental effect is achieved almost entirely through ingeniously combining 228*108*54mm cuboids of baked mud. No sculpted mouldings, no fine imported materials, just brilliant and thoughtful craftmanship.
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Gangi, Sicily. 4-5 storeys, narrow streets, good paving, integrated street lamps, no setbacks, continuous build line, minimal cars. Limestone rubble masonry, ashlar dressings, louvred shutters, shallow balconets, pantiled roofs. Simplicity and repetition are not the enemy.
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St Edmundsbury Cathedral. The walls of the nave are C15, but most of today's cathedral dates to 1959-1970, and the tower was added in 2000-2005. One of the masterpieces of English Gothic, created in our time.
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The courtyard garden is an intrinsically beautiful form that is also spatially highly efficient: gardens surrounded by housing, rather than houses surrounded by gardens. In an age that cares about both greenery and density, perhaps they should be revisited.
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The city of Paris requires that the upper storeys of buildings be slightly set back. The reason for this is to preserve light for the street, but a common and pleasant side effect is to introduce a two-tier roof garden, flourishing above the cornice line.
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Municipal swimming pools from 1900s Berlin, designed by the great and forgotten Ludwig Hoffmann. Notice how Hoffmann has integrated the pools into Berlin's dense urbanism, screening them behind street architecture and lighting them through clerestoreys. Dignified and efficient.
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This facade is made of terracotta, i.e. pottery. Some eleven thousand square metres of 'Gothic moderne' ornament, mass produced in moulds without a single stroke of a chisel. Another illustration of how technology and ornament are basically friends, not enemies.
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Hypothetical before-and-afters for Le Corbusier's Voisin Plan to demolish and rebuild central Paris.
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European cities used to grow *very* fast. This plan governed Berlin's development between 1862 and 1900. The population grew from c600,000 to c2.7 million. Berlin urbanism of this period is now broadly respected, and its building regulations were partly reinstated in the 1990s.
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Some people think there is a maximum window-to-wall ratio, above which buildings are necessarily ugly. This seems mistaken to me: here, the wall surface is dissolved into piers and lintels, but it is still lovely. Many glass facades may be ugly, but this isn't glass's fault.
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Cowley, 2017 and 2023. Without claiming that the 'after' building is one of the wonders of the world, this is absolutely the right approach to urban supermarket sites - surely there are opportunities for pursuing it more widely.
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Proposed 1860s skyscrapers, which only narrowly missed being built. Before lifts and steel frames, (fairly) tall buildings were structurally possible but not very useful or efficient. But maybe a few Gothic skyscrapers would have affected how the English feel about the genre.
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Bern, Switzerland, one of the world's most remarkable cities. Like much of the best urbanism, it is partly the product of exceptional constraints on outward expansion imposed by the its site and its former fortifications.
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'Architecture is windows', somebody said. Not true, of course, but these pictures, of a hospital renovation in Iceland, certainly recall the dictum.
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This is neither a church nor a mosque, but Streatham Pumping Station, built in a characterful eclectic style in 1888. It is still used for its original purpose. The most mundane function need not stop a building being an ornament of its neighbourhood.
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Leiden, the Netherlands. 3-4 storeys, narrow setted streets, fine grain, gentle greenery, few cars. Simple Dutch vernacular architecture, the closest continental cousin of our Georgian style. Only the lateral walls are load-bearing, allowing distinctively large windows.
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Another lovely Central European city - Ljubljana. Notice in the photos on the right here the integration of urban greenery without large gardens or 'green walls'. Plot use here approaches Spanish levels, but streets are somewhat wider.
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I might quibble with a few of the details here, but broadly this is a superb little development in Stamford, designed by Morris Homes and ADAM Urbanism.
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Haarlem, a beautiful town, beautifully cared for. 2-4 storeys, narrow streets, no setbacks, few cars, slender frontages, good paving, abundant 'gentle greenery'. Simple classical vernacular architecture: good brick, large tall windows, all joinery painted black and white.
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Syracuse, Sicily. 2-4 storeys, fine urban weave, narrow frontages, 'gentle street greenery', semi-exclusion of cars. Street lamps supported from walls. Vernacular of pastel stuccos, limestone classical dressings, wrought ironwork, shallow corbelled balconies.
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@RobertKwolek
@createstreets
@boys_nicholas
@ConHome
The reasoning apparently is that windows will be opened more often as the climate warms, leading to an increased risk of people falling out of them. One wonders how the French have survived all these centuries with their warmer climate and famously low sills!
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One of Britain's urbanistic curiosities: a terrace that originally had front gardens, subsequently built up as one-storey shops. Is this unsightly or charming?
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New York c. 1900. Four key features: no cars, much high-rise, streets, and richly patterned architecture. It is easy to believe today that these four features cannot go together: but they *did* go together, and with what astonishing results.
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Mass-produced, repetitive, boxy, spec-builder housing of the early C19. Approaching perfection of its kind. It is worth reflecting on how this happened.
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A YIMBY parable. A Mrs Hutton was reluctant to sell her New York mansion for redevelopment as flats, so she struck an unusual deal: the entire mansion was facsimile reconstructed on top of the skyscraper, and she continued to live there. It remains visible above the cornice line.
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The extraordinary greenhouses at Laeken, near Brussels, 1870s. The architect, Alphonse Balat, loved and worked in the old styles too, believing that metal and glass would vastly enrich them, not replace them.
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Orléans. Besides the terrific architecture and urbanism, note the excellent paving, wrought iron lamps hung from buildings, muted signage, minimised cars, and sensitive colouring of trams. Behold a great city treated with proper care by those fortunate enough to inherit it.
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New builds by
@BenPentreath
in Chichester. Note how the windows are set back from the wall plane, creating a sense of depth and solidity. Knapped flint with brick 'dressings'; sound proportions; careful detailing on the arches, railings and doors. Simple but very pleasing.
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One could pass a whole day watching the spire of Chichester Cathedral in changing light; and the day would be far from wasted.
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Saint-Malo in Brittany, 3-5 storeys plus double mansards, high plot use, narrow streets, continuous build line, few cars. A strong simple vernacular: granite masonry, tall small-paned casement windows, simple unmoulded surrounds and string courses.
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Neasden Temple, London, completed 1995. Built on the site of a disused truck warehouse. Surely this is the greatest work of postwar British religious architecture.
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A start-up called Urban Umbrella has begun manufacturing more elegant, slightly Gothic scaffording, aiming to reduce the visual disruption of refurbishment on the streetscape. Seems like an interesting idea. Suggestions for further versions or refinements?
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Much fascinating discussion in Peter Matthew's book 'London's Bridges'. Image from:
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A reminder of the extraordinary 1960s scheme to demolish the great public buildings of Scott, Brydon and Gibson and replace them with a gigantic brutalist complex. It came *very* close to happening.
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In praise of Shrewsbury. A medieval street network with a mixture of timber-frame and Georgian buildings, typically of 2.5 to 4 storeys. Stone paving, wall-mounted lighting, slender frontages, a dense network of alleys and courts.
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Serried rows of 7-10 storey warehouses might be thought to be inevitably ugly, but here in Hamburg they have a rare and powerful beauty, even a kind of romance.
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