MA Architectural History The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013
Catherine St Hill Big Jim in Runcorn: Urban Memory and the Demolished Southgate Estate This is a study of a building that has been physically forgotten and edited out of the canon; the story of how one architect’s bold experiment to create ‘a new garden city’ became tainted by problems, seemingly loathed by its residents, but then several decades later reminisced about fondly with a sense of nostalgia and loss by those I interviewed. The Southgate Estate seems universally acknowledged as unsuccessful, yet it was designed by one of Britain’s most successful architects. This is about our perception of post-war state housing, and about how the absence of a building can be more of a provocation to architectural history than if it was still here today. Commissioned in 1967, and split into two phases, the Southgate Estate was conceived as a high-density, low-rise solution to the overspill of slums in Victorian terraces in Liverpool. By 1989, a little over a decade after the final phase was completed, the Runcorn Corporation went into administration, and their successor demolished the estate in 1990, replacing it with red brick ‘Noddyland’ housing just two years later. This is a story told in reverse, where a bold vision for the future was displaced for a safer vision of the past. […] The grand façades of the concrete squares with their porthole windows, inspired by Georgian terraces, characterised Phase 1
of the Southgate Estate, completed in 1975. Casabella described this stage as ‘powerful classical macrostructures that creates a stronger overall image than even Aldo Rossi’s Gallaratese Quarter in Milan’ – a view reiterated by the Japanese journal A+U: ‘The effect of the giant order is most telling when the façade is lit by raking sunlight except that the first four storeys seem to disappear entirely behind the pillars, giving the building a Rossian air of contrast that is unusual in an English building’. When I interviewed Julian Harrap, who was working in Stirling’s office at the time, he echoed this sense: “It was such a dream when it was first opened for us. It’s very grand to say, but when you see the western light falling on the concrete, and we went from square to square, it was like walking around Verona at night. We had, in our terms, created a little vision of the Bath that had been our inspiration – to create a new urban landscape in a wilderness of left-over land from a motorway, linked to what should have been the heart of the town of Runcorn.” There was something about the first phase of the Southgate Estate that had a monumentality, with its non-domestic scale and almost neoclassical order, that made the building seem otherworldly, as if it didn’t quite belong in Liverpool. Image: Demolition of The Southgate Estate, Runcorn, 1990 337