“Croydon is an ambitious town and they demonstrate it in a concrete way.”
Back from holiday and back posting…
It was great that my editor at the i newspaper remembered my Croydon connection and asked me to cover the National Trust’s Croydon Edge City walking tours of Croydon.
Check out my take on them below in full or the original here.
There isn’t a cream tea in sight on the National Trust’s new Edge City walking tour of Croydon’s architectural highlights. Croydon is a borough the size of Cardiff on the edge of South London that refuses to know its place. It has been ridiculed for its claim to have a mini-Manhattan skyline and its repeated applications for city status.
Edge City Croydon walking tour
Architectural highlights – really?
However, it’s news to me that Croydon has any architectural highlights at all – and I was born and grew up here. After all, its 1960s redevelopment has given us the term “Croydonisation” – the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the architectural ruining of a town centre. Now the National Trust is trying to convince me that I’m wrong.
We stop by the Whitgift Centre, which was one of Britain’s largest shopping centres when it covered the town in 11 acres of concrete in the 1960s. It’s still in the top 20. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described its architecture as banal, but as functioning unusually well. It is due to be transformed and enlarged by Westfield-Hammerson.
Edge City Croydon walking tour
Brutal beauty
High above us I catch a glimpse of the huge grey slab-like Lunar House, which used to sum up for me everything I hated about Croydon. Yet in the summer sun its sheer in-your-face brutalism, with its white precast concrete space-age wings on top, has a surprising beauty.
Edge City: Croydon is a week-long series of walking tours and events, which run until 24 July, that are run by the National Trust that explores Croydon’s importance as an example of post-war development. It follows the Trust’s Brutal Utopias project in 2015 that celebrated brutalist architecture in London, Sheffield and Norwich.
Edge City Croydon walking tour
Looking back
Croydon has always been an ambitious place. There have been people living here since at least Roman times, and it was given its name by the Anglo-Saxons. In the Domesday Book of 1086 it had a population of 385 and belonged to the archbishops of Canterbury. Its Surrey Street market was founded in 1276, making it the UK’s oldest continuous street market. Later the archbishops built a palace near there. Surrey Street market was founded in 1276, making it the UK’s oldest continuous street market
Today Croydon is 20 minutes by train from central London. It sits at the heart of the London Borough of Croydon, which was only formed in 1965. Its population is about 375,000; mirroring that of central London in its diversity, it is predicted to grow to 500,000 over the next few decades.
Edge City Croydon walking tour
From the riots to Ruskin Square
And yet there are many Croydons. The 21st-century Croydon is the £500m high-end Ruskin Square development on East Croydon station’s derelict goods yard and the Boxpark pop-up mall next door built from 80 shipping containers. There is also the alternative tech-city Croydon, made by entrepreneurs looking to escape the expensive rents of London’s Silicon Roundabout. Its spiritual home is Matthews Yard in the narrow streets of Old Croydon.
Then there is the Croydon of the London riots of 2011 – few people who saw it will forget the Reeves furniture store going up in flames. The riots were closely followed by the departure of Nestlé’s UK headquarters.Few people who saw it will forget the Reeves furniture store going up in flames
What had attracted my parents was suburban Croydon: the dream of affordable Edwardian villas, leafy streets and good schools. What they found instead was the rapid and large-scale development of the town centre to rival that of central London. I grew up with bedtime stories of a lost “golden age” of Croydon, when schoolboys in whites played cricket where the Whitgift Centre now stands. By the time I left Croydon in the mid-1990s I was ready to agree with David Bowie when he said that Croydon represented everything he hated.
A different view
Now, listening to the guide outside the Fairfield Halls at the start of our tour I start to wonder whether I was right about Croydon. I had always dismissed the Fairfield Halls, which opened in 1962, as a piece of mediocre council architecture; however, I could suddenly see that it is in effect a shrunken version of the Royal Festival Hall , opened 11 years before. If only I had spent more time on London’s South Bank, I might have noticed earlier. The £750m redevelopment plan for the area will see £30m splashed on transforming the ageing halls for the 21st century. I had always dismissed the Fairfield Halls, which opened in 1962, as a piece of mediocre council architecture
Dominating the town are the clear vertical lines of the 23-storey concrete St George’s House that most people call the Nestlé building. The planner had apparently asked for a really tall building and that’s what he got. At its opening Croydon’s mayor remarked that Nestlé could be excused for thinking it owned Croydon. It is empty now, awaiting conversion into flats.
Edge City Croydon walking tour
Power, ambition and drive
Then there is the mini-Manhattan set-piece view. It stretches from what was Croydon’s tallest building, past the Whitgift Centre and down to Croydon’s tallest building. It isn’t a breathtaking moment like looking back at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, but it speaks of the power, ambition and drive of the city planners to clear so much space.
“We absolutely love it,” Joseph Watson, London creative director of the National Trust, says when I catch up with him. “It is iconic of a particular post-war moment. By creating these extraordinary sculptural blocks it demonstrates what capitalism can do. Look back along Wellesley Road from the Fairfield Halls and you have that set-piece mini-Manhattan moment. Fifty years ago there was no other landscape like that in the country.
“Calling it Edge City: Croydon isn’t about a branding exercise, but tying it into an intellectual idea. Joel Garreau, in his book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier used it to describe the new kinds of places springing up on the edge of existing cities.”
It is easy to take the mickey out of Croydon
“The National Trust coming to a town like Croydon is the last thing you expect to happen,” says John Grindrod, a Croydonian who wrote Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Post-War Britain. “I was worried they were doing it for shock value, but it feels very sincere. It is easy to take the mickey out of Croydon.
“When I wrote Concretopia five years ago it was only mentioned in a derogatory way. Now the interest today is extraordinary. People are starting to recognise Croydon’s post-war heritage as a thing now it’s beginning to get knocked down. Taberner House [1967] was demolished in 2015. The Nestlé building will look nothing like it is now.”
An ambitious town
“Croydon is an ambitious town and they demonstrate it in a concrete way. This rubs off on the people here who believe they can have their own ambitions or rebel against it. The Croydon dream or the Croydon nightmare. Take your pick.”
The last stop of the tour was the top floor of the nearly empty and nondescript AMP House. Rather ironically it is used as a marketing suite for Ruskin Square. From up there I saw the whole of Croydon for the first time. In the distance were the tower blocks of central London. According to Garreau, edge cities can be defined by their sense of ambition. I see things differently now.