If the title makes you think this will be all about the big, shiny, funny-shaped public buildings (“icons”) that we all got used to from around the mid-1990s until the end of the 00s, be prepared for something darker, much more illuminating and rather sad. Chirpy though Grindrod’s prose style is, replete with pop references and hip asides, what he chronicles is the accelerating decline of the UK since 1980 as expressed through what we build. Prepare for a jolting ride that starts with Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation, which killed off the majority of new social housing, and ends, pretty much, with the horrific inferno of Grenfell Tower. A system out of control, everyone involved crossing their fingers and trying to avoid blame.
Along the way, we got some pretty good buildings and a vast number of awful ones. Since I write about architecture for a living and am of a certain age, reading this book is like seeing my whole career flash before my eyes. This is all the stuff I experienced and a lot of the people I met, in real time. Much of it is what the (15 years younger) Grindrod experienced, too. And yet, in the moment, you don’t always understand the undercurrents. Why are things done the way they are? Why was there that all-but-forgotten 1980s and 90s architectural obsession with out-of-town business parks and superstores? What made us think that architectural postmodernism was either normal or inevitable? What was that white helicopter in the Barratt Homes ads all about?
Since Ian Nairn began his increasingly emotional journeys through British towns in the 1950s, various authors and broadcasters have followed hopefully in his footsteps, from Iain Sinclair via Jonathan Meades to Owen Hatherley. All good in their vastly different ways, but there’s one thing they tend not to do: quiz the actual people involved in making our towns and cities. This is where Grindrod’s chatty learning-worn-lightly style scores. He seeks them out, interviews them, enjoys their company, structures his book round them.
There are a few big names. Michael Heseltine, speaking freely of the Thatcher and Major years, is one of the stars of the book while Mike Davies, the genial greybeard architect sidekick of the late Richard Rogers, who always dressed entirely in red and designed the Millennium Dome in two weeks flat in 1996, is another. He got it built rapidly for a bargain £43m: it was the 12 “zones” inside, including Zaha Hadid’s typically ambitious Mind Zone, that cost the big money. I’m impressed that Grindrod makes the connection between this educational Expo and the never-built “WonderWorld” – a proposed rival to Disney’s Epcot in Florida – planned for the former steel town of Corby in 1982 by Derek Walker, the architect who laid out Milton Keynes. “This theme park is based on the idea of educational fun,” stated its brochure, chillingly.
I find Grindrod’s less well-known interviewees more revealing, however, such as Carla Picardi and Sara Fox, the American project managers who got the huge Canary Wharf business district in London’s Docklands built. “Let’s just say that if finesse, subtlety and diplomacy were required it was Carla, and if the door needed to be kicked in it was me,” says Fox.
That was unbridled capitalism: big tax breaks, virtually no planning control. Come the New Labour years, it was all about cultural regeneration, bankrolled by the national lottery and EU money. Consider Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, an early example of a Lottery-funded Millennium project, in a Gateshead that also built the Baltic art gallery, Sage concert hall complex, a Stirling prize-winning opening bridge across the Tyne, hi-tech factories. Big successes on the whole, but not for a key part of the population – the former mining community.
They didn’t want those kinds of jobs, they didn’t see that any of this was for them, and they got their revenge, as Paul Collard, the ex-ICA man who repositioned the postindustrial north-east as a tourist destination, recalls sorrowfully here. European money be damned. “This was the community that voted solidly for Brexit: it was how they bit back against everything … that’s our failure, really. We didn’t find a way of making it work for them.”
• Hugh Pearman is an architecture critic and former editor of RIBA Journal. Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
