City’s skylines are seeing the good, the bad and the ugly

From ‘the slums of the future’ to the ‘Dalek’, the buildings designed during the property boom often provoked strong reactions from the general public.

The industry went into overdrive in the middle of the last decade. At one point, Leeds City Council was dealing with 8,000 planning applications a year, according to civic architect John Thorp, 2,000 more than Birmingham, which was also undergoing significant change.

“Responding at that speed is challenging,” he said. “I don’t regret it, but it’s always better if you have a bit more time to consider things.”

The result of this frenzied development ahead of the financial crisis, according to Owen Hatherley, author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, was the loss of identity for many cities as developers replicated the same “woefully unimaginative” designs across the UK.

Bridgewater Place in Leeds, an office and residential building which was built in 2007 and nicknamed the Dalek, was designed to be an iconic building for the city. Mr Hatherley said: “It looks very cheap but at least it has some personality.”

Mr Hatherley said the blame lay with the developers rather than the architects: “Architecture is too important to be left to private property developers. There now has to be some return of the public architecture,” he said.

Stephen Prosser, regional director at developer St Modwen, said there were some issues with other developers around the authenticity of their buildings. “Getting buildings to work well in this context is very difficult,” he said.

“Some buildings achieve it and others do not. For me, placing buildings designed to look great in warmer climates and bathed in sunshine doesn’t always work in Leeds – but it’s all subjective and what some people don’t like others do.”

The worst buildings, Mr Hatherley believes, are the thousands of apartments, which were branded “slums of the future” by architect and broadcaster Maxwell Hutchinson.

“Housing in the 1960s got a lot of criticism,” said Mr Hatherley. “But they were always built for people to live in with minimum space standards and each block had a certain amount of sunlight guaranteed. They are now built to maximise as much profit as possible at the expense of space and light.”

Sky Plaza in Leeds and St Pauls Tower in Sheffield are two of the worst examples of residential design, he said. In his book, he described Sky Plaza, Leeds’ tallest building. “Here grey cladding and a green lift tower seem almost calculatedly c**p,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, St Paul’s Tower, which had to deal with the collapse of its sponsor City Lofts in 2008, faced controversy over a change in cladding, whereby a cheaper glass was proposed by the administrators and rejected by the council, stalling the project. Mr Hatherley said: “Over the course of the year, we watch an impressively elegant concrete frame morph into a desperately tacky high-rise”.

Karen Escott, academic leader for planning and regeneration at Sheffield Hallam University, was more diplomatic. “The idea of St Paul’s Tower was to attract people to city centre living. It was an interesting concept for the city but whether the design was quite right is for others to judge,” she said.

The development of Sheffield focused on replanning the centre as a series of thematic quarters.

Ms Escott said: “Sheffield has been largely successful in changing from an industrial city into one that focuses on the service sector. The masterplan has also been very successful in moving people around the city.”

Dr Lindsay Smales, senior lecturer at the school of built environment at Leeds Met, agrees: “The good thing about Sheffield is that although it doesn’t have any great buildings, it has thought about the spaces between the buildings and invested money in that. It would have been nice to be able to do that in Leeds but the city centre wasn’t as desperate for that change as Sheffield.”

He added: “I think there has been a lot of positive development but mediocre architecture.

“Most of the flats by the waterfront in Leeds are of poor quality but at least Clarence Dock has some coherence and was designed around a master plan.”

He added: “I have high hopes for Leeds Arena. It looks like it will be an interesting iconic design which is what we need.”

Mr Hatherley admitted not all the new buildings in Leeds and Sheffield were bad. He described Leeds Metropolitan University’s Broadcasting House development, which won the 2010 Best Tall Building in the World award by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, as “half decent – as best as it gets in Leeds” while of Persistence Works in Sheffield, a purpose-built fine art and crafts studio complex, he said “at least it does something vaguely useful”.

Mr Thorp said Candle House apartments at Granary Wharf in Leeds was another example of successful development during the boom. He said: “Broadcasting Place and Candle House are the best examples of how you can change the skyline positively.”

The spaces that are ‘forgotten’

Perhaps just as interesting as the buildings that were built during the boom are those that weren’t.

Leeds and Sheffield are pockmarked with building sites that will never see the light of day. The most high profile victim of the financial crisis was the Lumiere skyscraper in Leeds. Sheffield is tackling the issue of these so-called ‘forgotten spaces’ with a competition, run with the Royal Institute of British Architects, to encourage artists, designers and architects to come up with ideas to transform the city’s derelict and disused areas.