Brownfield of Dreams: A Look at Idling Brownfield Sites

 

 

 

Build it and they will come: idling brownfield site, corner of High St and Church St

 

Now being used as one of Slough’s many impromptu car parks, this large expanse of land situated right in the lucrative town centre has been languishing in development limbo for a number of years. The planning permissions, currently collecting cyber dust on Slough council’s website, promise a massive multi-faceted, multi-storeyed development of retail, office, hotel and residential space, but not a brick has been laid.

 

This site, and a good few others like it dotted around town, are perfect examples of the problem of idling brownfield sites in urban areas where housing and other provisions are running at a shortage.

The swiftness with which the developers despatched the existing buildings (including some locally listed survivors of Slough’s Victorian old town) is inversely mirrored by the length of time it has taken to move this plan on; the scheme was granted permission back in 2008 but has since applied for extensions. While the economic downturn years may not have been an opportune time to start a big venture, there isn’t any wider economic excuse why work can’t start now; after all, major work is happening all over the town except in these blots of cleared, static brownfield.

 

Elsewhere in Slough, public parks are being built over to provide houses and cruddy office blocks repurposed without exterior redesign as residential flats, while sites like this sleep in the sun. But these sites are more than just eyesores and wastes of space, they dishearten the resident; familiar, cherished scenes and buildings are demolished in a blink of an eye with no timely successor, implying almost a kind of contempt for the local, whose town is hastily razed but seemingly not important enough to be replanted. Annoyance at wasted land is more keenly felt when insensitive plans are being enacted elsewhere, ostensibly because of a lack of housing space, while massive, empty, idling areas taunt the local like gaps in a six year-old’s teeth. They smother town character and identity and spurn the spirit of urbanism; it’s like living next door to a neighbour who flouts a hose-pipe ban, making you feel a bit of a sucker for accepting the withering of your own plants while they ignore the concerns of the wider world and keep theirs lush and wet. Time for local government to get tough?

 

 

 

ICI office building (now AkzoNobel), Wexham Road (built 1956-7)

Designed by T.P. Bennett & Sons and built over 1956 and 57, this distinctive office complex was built for the ICI paint company, which had already been resident at the site for some years. It is designed as a tri-radial star, with three prongs stretching out with green garden in between the northern wings and parking space to the sides of the southern wing. This unusual plan coupled with its modest height (only four storeys) places it at odds with the kind of office buildings being built today– generic glass and steel cubes extending ever higher and with a cynical view of character and design, dismissive of the aesthetic considerations of the passer-by.

 

Here its moderate late fifties modernism (a style that would very quickly become mundane itself) still retains a little elegance, warmth from the use of light brick and informality from the curved line where the wings intersect and the differing angles of the wings to each other (the building’s wings do not span a rigid equilateral triangle but more of an elongated Y shape). The unassuming entrance can just about be seen on the left of the picture by the garden area. If the building has a downfall, it is the sheer area around it dedicated purely to funneling in, checking and parking cars; even a good picture needs a decent frame.

 

 

Sun Shines on an Empty Parking Lot: Car Parks and Urban Sprawl

 

 

Sun shines on an empty parking lot...

 

The consummate space-eater, as Lewis Mumford might have described it, the car park is as much a feature of Slough’s mundane industrial landscape as the smokestacks of the old factories and the glass and steel facades of the office mega-blocks. The above shot was admittedly taken out of hours when there are fewer cars parked here, but the principle still stands: car parks waste a hell of a lot of space, covering large areas that may have seemed quite normal and expected as adjuncts to industrial spaces in the past, but are now becoming ever more conspicuous as wasted area as space in the town runs perilously short.

 

Car parks such as these enjoy peak usage for up to half of the day, usually Monday to Friday, and exist as redundant space for the rest of the week. They do not perform any other function. In the bird’s eye-view of the same space (below) we see that the space devoted to simply storing cars while you’re at work dwarfs the size of the actual buildings the parking lots serve, and they’re big buildings.

 

 

Such senseless sprawl makes for a flabby and discontent landscape, distended over larger distances than needs be, and visually mundane for local and visitor alike. The sheer lack of imagination involved in car park design adds to their misery; not a tree, bush, shrub or blade of grass interrupts the tyranny of tarmac (a good metaphor for the town of Slough, as it happens), and its completely-levelled topography makes for a disheartening and endless vista, a vast sea of asphalt without any hint of dry land to comfort the urban sailor.

 

Increasingly, modern industrial and business developments (and these days even some high-density residential blocks) are taking the wise and over-due step of raising their buildings on piloti and having the cars park underneath; this is simple sense and makes for an elegant solution to minimising the space devoured by the automobile. Older developments such as these pictured (1950's offices) rarely have such provisions, as they were built when space was relatively plentiful, and during an era of unchallenged economic growth and dogma; we look back at them now as unimaginable sprawl.

 

Incidentally, there’s no shame in the humble multi-storey; mundane and uninspiring they may be, but if done correctly (see this post, for example) multi-level car parks can be unobtrusive solutions to high-density parking needs. By using a subterranean level, a ground level and utilising the roof as more open-air space you can effectively triple an area’s parking capacity with only a single-storey building. Drivers (who tend to be habitual moaners anyway) may whinge at the extra time taken to park in multi-storeys, but this is a small price to pay compared to the benefits of relieving valuable space in an already crammed town; there’s certainly no excuse for business/industrial parking not to follow these templates.

 

 

 

 

A Walk around Tamarisk Way & Pendeen Court, Cippenham

 

 

 

Pedestrian entrance to social housing complex at Tamarisk Way, Cippenham

 

The only thing missing from this happy vista is a regular patrol of greatcoat-wearing guards barking orders in German accompanied by Alsatian dogs straining at the leash. The dingy architecture, the humourless symmetry of the buildings, the joyless communal lawns, the unnecessarily fenced entrance all serve to give this complex a charming concentration-camp vibe that can only mean one thing: social housing. And indeed, this development does contain a high proportion of council-rented flats.

The small, prison-like windows look out onto a shared lawn area that boasts a couple of scraggly bushes and stunted firs but no mature, full-size trees; all that’s missing is a watchtower and barbed wire. There are no benches or any area to stop at. As nothing is to be ’wasted’ on these people, there’s no garden, or even any allowance for residents to create their own. There aren’t even any flowers.

The blocks are identical in size and style, with little discernible divisions between where one flat ands and the next one starts. There is no variation in elevation or angle. The brickwork is doom-laden and the building entrances as unceremonious as a gas-bill. The dark window frames, a favourite of 1980s house design, add to the barracks-like feel and the general despair of the place.

 

Well, you’re not here to be entertained: the rules of social housing are in full effect, with individuality replaced by a levelled, communal underclass identity, with no visual stimulation or aesthetic quality that would make you want to linger, and a bland, institutional feel that belies any attempt at social support or mobility and heads for a kind of collective punishment instead. Like a kind of lower-class social POW camp, there is to be no escape. (*Bang!* thud.)

 

 

(Above) Taken from the communal lawn area at the centre of the development. With only the flat grass patch and the joylessly-squared hedge (somebody put it out of its misery, please!) to flatter the eye outside, the residents instead beam in aesthetic pleasure from afar using their satellite dishes. No birds do sing, no kids do play… The green space might have been a bit more lively, but the small sign on the right gives the usual ‘NO BALL GAMES’ order, which is a kind of shorthand for ‘no kids’, ‘no frivolity’ and ‘no fun’.

The depressing nature of the buildings continues undiminished, and even the merged gable in the corner doesn’t break the monotony-- if anything it makes the place look slightly creepier, as if two unwilling entities were forcibly merged into the same space, an apt metaphor for social housing if ever I heard one.

 

 

The other side of the communal lawn. The complex looks a little worse for wear, despite only being built around 1990.

 

 

 

Pendeen Court complex, Tamarisk Way

Many of Slough’s vulnerable end up along Tamarisk Way, including the homeless or about-to-be-homeless. The area sees its fair share of crime too, with local crime reports over the last decade giving Tamarisk Way as the address of people variously convicted of dealing Heroin, knife possession, kidnapping and beating, robbing, and in one disturbing case, terrorizing neighbours with loud music, threatening behaviour and by posting excrement through their letterboxes. A couple of years ago the local playground lost some of its equipment to arson.

The council-owned flats are far from charming too. Residents in Pendeen Court complained earlier this year that they had been without hot water for five days, with one couple adding that the squalid flat they had been moved into had a broken toilet seat, broken pipes and “blood all over the floor by the cooker in the kitchen, lifted tiles, a broken cupboard that is thick with black mould underneath”.

 

Meanwhile this family lives here at the mercy of the council with the threat of being moved across the country to Doncaster dangling overhead, as the council has difficulties in housing people in Slough-- a symptom suffered before by the victims of Slough’s housing crisis (the last time this was reported in the local press the affected people were offered housing in Leicester, which at a mere hundred-odd miles away seems practically next door when compared to Doncaster ).

 

All this will come as no surprise to anyone viewing this area; it looks punitively depressing and that’s exactly the intended effect. Like all social housing it is partly a punishment, perhaps designed to encourage people not to linger on the public purse but more likely designed simply as a reflection of the way people at the lower end are supposedly to be viewed, with their need of charity resented and their social backgrounds loathed, worthy of contempt and undeserving of solace. It is a place designed to contain the undesired and the uncherished, with poorly-furnished flats for poorly-furnished lives and an architecture as grim and merciless as the forces that toss these people around like so much human flotsam.