British architecture, urban planning, and decay

This is a powerful, hard-hitting essay by Theodore Dalrymple at the City Journal, describing the post-WWII destruction of Britain's stunning architectural heritage by urban planners who were high on Modernism and Brutalism and a whole lot of other "isms"s that promised utopias and kinda sorta underdelivered. Dalrymple uses his pen like a fine sword to slice and dice and skewer the grand plans of the postbellum planners. Worth reading in its entirety, but here are some quotable quotes.

On the energy with which post-war planners approached the reorganization of British cities:

"The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause."

On the typical attitudes of the planners towards the people, and on their opinion of themselves (this point is repeatedly made in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State):

"Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built … [A]s rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers."

A hilarious description of one such "successful" modernization project, the replacement of the library of Birmingham with a modern design:

"[T]he magnificent Victorian library of 1866 [was] pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie."

Writing about the most recent architectural phase in Britain, Dalrymple notes first that people throughout the country have woken up to the necessity of protecting their architectural heritage, and that the new generation of architects is less drunk on the intoxicating wines of "ism"s, but then goes on to note:

"With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship."

A remarkable essay, and worth reading in full, and absorbing.