Recently in RIBA Category

Was rather diverted by a feature in the Sunday Times at the weekend about "infill" houses.  Well! This is a most welcome arrival in the Sunday supplement mainstream. Some rather uplifting images were shown and, better still, comes the news that Boris has a gleam in his eye to build 30,000 new homes in the capital on GLA land (go, Boris!) while the HCA are looking at a scheme to deliver a (more modest) 1,250 homes across the UK. 

The RIBA, joining in, have launched a competition to unearth places as hitherto not worthy of development, working on the principle that it is those who live and work locally who are best placed to know. How wonderful! And there are websites that inform more: urbfill.com or the RIBA site at architecture.com. 

This reminds me that for some time I have been meaning to blog about the Steel House in Hart Street, Edinburgh, which I saw for the first time last autumn (when out for a stroll with the lovely June Barnes) and which is clearly very famous in architectural circles having won several awards. 

Levered into a sort of "in-between space" (where there was a garage or a shed at the end of the back garden of a Georgian House) I was captivated by it architecturally but - more to the point - was far more arrested by the sheer resourcefulness of the thing. 

Edinburgh's New Town is an uplifting place and is built to generous scale and nobody in their right mind would suggest that this generosity should be compromised, so the Steel House shows the way: if it can be managed in Edinburgh then don't tell me that many (most) of our town centres could sustain (absorb) extra units of housing, if sensitively and appropriately handled.

Grant Shapps made rather a splendid speech at the RIBA yesterday (alright, alright, so I admit I wasn't actually there but I received a copy - independently - from three of my best moles!). He began by 'fessing up his political apprenticeship as a candidate in the council elections for the Borough of Brent in 1994 (which, needless to say, is very Handy-Harry since I am hoping he will come to our assistance in South Kilburn!).

In 1994, the ward that Mr Shapps's was contesting was dominated by the Chalkhill Estate, which (just like the South Kilburn Estate) was built in the late 60's and comprised of the notorious "Bison Blocks" (or dirty great slabs of concrete, to you and me). The design of the Chalkhill Estate was based on that of Park Hill in Sheffield (Park Hill was back on the telly yet again last night, did you see?). The blocks were linked by 'Walkways in the Sky'.

                                                 Park Hill, Sheffield

Mr Shapps tells a charming story thus: "One day I came across an elderly man who had lived in his sixth floor Chalkhill flat since it was built. 'The milk float used to come up in that lift and then drive along this 'Walkway in the Sky' to deliver bottles to my front door,' he explained as we chatted in the draughty walkway outside his flat. And there it was. For the briefest of moments I fleetingly recognised what the architect of the Chalkhill Estate must have had in mind as he sketched out his utopia in the sky."

Hindsight is an exact science and one of the things that the more puritan element of the urban regeneration lobby sometimes forget is that some of these mistakes - on a monumental scale admittedly - but mistakes, honestly made, were by people who knew no better. In our current climate of political correctness and litigation and paranoia it is almost impossible these days to publicly admit you made a mistake, and that is indeed a most terrible shame.