(pictured: The 200m Brunswick Centre, **the only completed fragment of a mixed-use megastructure with housing above retail, with parking below, intended to extend a further 400 m to the Euston Road)
We've studied parts of London where things have gone wrong, and with multiple challenges. In contrast, Bloomsbury had no low-lying land, railways, factories or rookeries: its public realm is possibly the best in London.
Could it, with its perfect balance of formality and leafiness, and a track record of promoting creativity and debate, provide a model for future intensive housing development?
To find out, we're going to meet at Holborn Station, and see all the area's garden squares, in roughly chronological order, starting with Bloomsbury Square itself, which now conceals a spectacular continuous double-spiral car park, Russell, the largest in London in its time (1800), and Bedford, the best preserved (1775).
Did living around squares like these really give the Bloomsbury Group such a feeling of staying together and keeping in touch that they started a revolution in art, literature, sexuality, and social arrangements whose effects are still felt today?
What was it about this area of big houses, subtly divided at half-levels, with many rooms and views of nature, that brought the Group here and made them want to stay?
University College, in 1825, now branded as 'UCL', gave the area its intellectual character, but it also intruded its architecture (including the 19-storey Senate House) and demolished, among many others, all but 6 of the original houses in Torrington Square, leaving it a mere 'space between buildings'.
And as we move on through Gordon and Tavistock Squares, university departments and large institutional buildings have changed the perfect scale of the residential spaces, but we’ll see the best of the early UCL interventions (some now themselves Listed Buildings and being refurbished), and the latest, said to be exemplars of good design and sustainability.
The Bloomsbury Group, had it survived, might just have designed the Brunswick Centre (pictured above). An early example of a megastructure, that is, a building combining several functions, and of low-rise, high-density housing, it grew out of work by Sir Leslie Martin(then Professor of Architecture at Cambridge)with students in 1953, and was based on his ‘stepped section’, with two 'A-framed' blocks of flats facing each other across a ground level retail podium, over two levels of basement car-parking.
Opposite, the houses of Brunswick Square (1795-1802) are lost, but those in its mirrored twin, Mecklenburgh (1804-25), have been described as ‘the last perfect example of Georgian architecture in London’***.
Only the south side of often-overlooked Regent Square (1829) survives, and it leads to Argyle Square (completed 1849), which retains a faint echo of the grace of its earlier siblings, at a much reduced scale, and is a stone’s throw from King’s Cross, where our walk terminates in 'The Parcel Yard', the Fullers' Pub and Restaurant in the station'
*Torrington Square no longer works as a garden square.
***The Georgian Group, in 1938, when proposals to redevelop the square were proposed.
