Blueprint joined the first Urban Pioneer session, led by the Architecture Foundation’s Tom Keeley and Vincent Lacovara, native Croydonian and leader of Croydon Council’s Urban Design Team. Alluding to the parallel claims of the ancient city of Rome, we took a tour of the Seven Hills of Croydon – if Roman hills can be re-imagined as multistorey car parks, of which Croydon boasts seven to Birmingham’s meager six. All the better to view the historical hodge-podge of buildings, which are both like and unlike anything else in Britain’s cities.
A suburban town with incorrigible urban aspirations, Croydon’s continual struggle for city status has combined with a succession of planning exceptions from the mid-twentieth century onwards, leading to incredible and incongruous architectural experimentation: from Seifert’s No. 1 Croydon Tower (a.k.a the 50p building, a.k.a. the Thrupenny bit building – due to the resemblance of its distinct polygonal footprint) to the space-inspired Lunar and Apollo Houses, and the much-loved but ultimately doomed Whitgift Shopping Centre.
The group of students have been thoughtfully blogging to record and reflect on the rich sessions with the likes of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Preston is my Paris and other stakeholders and operators in the locality.
Lacovara is also a founding partner of London-based architecture practice AOC, who will be hosting another session with the young Pioneers. Led by Daisy Froud of AOC, they will be investigating narratives of place and storytelling, in advance of their task of creating a publication summarising their experience. For one special edition, the Pioneers will relaunch the Suburban Press, originally a pseudo-Situationist art collective & imprint, set up at Croydon College in the early 1970s by punk impresario Malcolm Maclaren and king of D.I.Y-or-die aesthetic, Jamie Reid. Hopefully the 2013 redux will harness some of the incisive intensity of the original zine, but tweaking it to reflect the very real current and future concerns of Croydon town centre.
Though many of the Pioneers grew up in the environs of Croydon, most are unsurprisingly unaware of the histories behind the buildings they walk past every day. As future stakeholders and shapers of their local environs, many of their observations are astute, incredibly poignant and almost certainly instructive. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on their recordings, at http://croydonurbanpioneers.tumblr.com/
This iteration of the Urban Pioneers Programme is sponsored by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, with additional sponsorship for the Croydon Urban Pioneers from Westfield and Hammerson.
