"Shared Space" along Exhibition Road © Helen Kearney 2012

Exhibition Road, the site along which many Design Historians – being students at two institutions separated by this road – rush along, late for class, has recently been cleared of the mechanics of construction, various holes have been filled in, and bollards taken away.

It has been reopened, not only as a rebuilt road, but as a road with a publicity campaign. The official line is that the new road design constitutes “a world class streetscape – a stunning public space that can be enjoyed by all.”[1] It is not only a newly designed road and public space, but is also promoted as a venue of “shared space” between the car, the pedestrian, the cyclist, and potentially anything else that might try.

The road may represent a new understanding of urban design for “shared space”, but it also raises questions about how successful this new design may be – and, as an historian, it speaks strongly to me about the car/ pedestrian conundrum that has existed for the best part of the last century. The problem was the evident need for a city to have infrastructure ideally suited to the technological needs of the day, to accommodate the fast moving car on efficiently designed roads – but how to do this successfully whilst retaining the city as a pleasant place for the pedestrian to walk around, to experience?

In the UK, the 1960s saw the most dramatic examples of the attempts to design for this conundrum, with the 1963 Buchanan report, “Traffic in Towns” stating that the cities of Britain needed roads the standards of the American Highways, and easy access to these from urban sites – that plan included a number of unrealised schemes, including the suggestion of the building of a highway just north of Fitzroy Square, and major roads cutting through Soho. It was felt that dramatic solutions were required for a problem that would see cities become redundant in the face of fast-paced change.

Whilst the changes that have taken place along Exhibition Road are not as dramatic as some of the schemes seriously considered in the 1950s and 60s, they do constitute a genuine attempt to solve the car/ pedestrian conundrum in a way suitable for its specific location; as a major route and public space, connecting South Kensington tube station on its southern end to Hyde Park at the north, with the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and Imperial along its route.

As ever, examples from history can be a useful tool in analysing the changes in design that have taken place – in this article, I will be using the work of Gordon Cullen to consider the new “shared space” of Exhibition Road.

Cullen proposed a series of concepts for streetscape in articles published in the Architectural Review (AR) from the end of the Second World War to the early 1960s, and many of his ideas were then included in his 1961 publication, ‘Townscape’. He was writing speculatively in many cases, proposing ideas that the AR editorial team hoped would inform reconstruction efforts after the war, and the design of New Towns.

The Grand Vista © Helen Kearney 2012

Townscape theory that was proposed in the pages of the AR after the war as an attempt to accommodate European modernism within the vernacular architectural traditions of Britain; it proposed that modernist buildings and older buildings were enhanced in the eyes of the viewer through their contrast, which created visual interest. Cullen explained that the key was not the design of individual buildings but the design of them in context – he was less interested in the art of architecture than in the “art of relationship” – even comparing the experience of walking around a town with a good dinner party, in which the guests are varied and the conversation surprising. It could be argued that, in widening pedestrian areas along Exhibition Road, the pedestrian now has the space to appreciate the full contrasts of that road – such as the shift from the wonderfully Victorian V&A to the modernist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the glimpses of the green foliage of the park up ahead.

I will go on to describe some instances in which the new road design chimes nicely with Cullen’s particular type of Townscape, but firstly, I should note that the comparison is not without its problems – the most obvious being that Exhibition Road is essentially one, long, rather processional route. Cullen hated what he called the “Grand Vista”, not least as it was symptomatic of the ‘top-down’ approach to planning that was the opposite to what his sketches represented, depicting, as they often did, the urban experience from the human eye-level. He stated, “the Grand vista is worst from the ground, where it tends either to be hidden entirely by traffic, or empty and monotonous”[2]. Monotony was the opposite of good design; for him, the urban environment needed complexity, juxtaposition, and surprise. Exhibition Road, therefore, would have to make quite an effort to counter the effect that a ‘grand vista’ could have.

Pavement "Trim" © Helen Kearney 2012

Cullen paid attention not just to buildings, but to environments as a whole, and in doing this, presented ideas for “trim” – from railings to bollards to signs, and designs of roads. The Exhibition Road design has removed pavements in most places; this is something Cullen himself proposed, stating that differentiation (between car and pedestrian zones) could be provided through other means – in Exhibition Road this has taken the form of “corduroy” tactile pavements to denote where pedestrian areas come to an end; something that I imagine Cullen would have approved of, if they were perhaps a little more conservative than some of his ideas, which included that of a ha-ha between a road and a garden square, to provide a “hazard” that would delineate the spaces.

Evidence there were once railings here © Helen Kearney 2012

Railings used by Police, London 2011 © Helen Kearney 2012

However, more dramatic than the removal of pavements, I think, is the removal of the railings in the Exhibition Road area. Again, this is something that Cullen proposed too, but his article of March 1948, “Hazards, of the Art of Introducing Obstacles into the Landscape without Inhibiting the Eye”, provides another aspect to this idea. He references the fact that many railings and fences in London were taken down during the war, stating that this, “opened out prospects of a more freely flowing world.” What he is referring to specifically is the access to private gardens in squares in London that had been opened out due to the removal of their railings during the war, but he was making a larger, social point – that the world has changed, and the closing off of urban spaces to certain members of the public is no longer acceptable. The world had socially changed, and the infrastructure of the urban scene in the UK had to accommodate this; freer movement around cities was a neat symbol of social change.

As incidental as the lack of railings may seem to the visitor to Exhibition Road, the experience of supposedly public spaces in London over the past year show the force of the argument – fears about the Occupy movement have prompted owners of Paternoster Square to fill that space with railings for example, or above is an example of their use in the City during the student marches, showing  explicitly how the use of this piece of landscape “trim” can have social, segregating, effect.

What, then, does this teach us about Exhibition Road? Whilst the point about railings as a symbol of social change may be a little serious, I will end on a more light-hearted note…

The occassional pavement, or the scene of my downfall © Helen Kearney 2012

Townscape theory was largely a visual theory, it proposed urban design based on the visual delight experienced by the person walking around the city. It was important, as a visitor to an area, to engage with it, to notice the environment, be critical of it, think about it, but most importantly, to really look at it. I am now able to look more easily at the buildings along Exhibition Road, I feel comfortable to meander, I can take time, as the other pedestrians have plenty of space to go past me. However, one of the lessons of Exhibition Road is that in any area, no space can be purely given over to the meanderer. In completely embracing the concept of a lack of pavements in most part of the street, and utterly distracted by being able to really concentrate on looking at my surroundings (irony coming up…), I have – on more than one occasion – stumbled up, and fallen down, the short pavement that has been placed at the bus stops. My consolation is that Cullen, who proposed “hazards” as a good thing in the environment, would surely have enjoyed the sight.

Recommended Reading

Cullen, Gordon, Townscape (1961)

Pevsner, Nikolaus, ed. Matthew Aitcheson, Visual Planning and the Picturesque (2010)

Architectural Review articles from 1944 to the end of the 1960s