Square dancing at Barking Central

27 November 2009

Barking Central is a project about which I hold significant misgivings, but the fact that it has been built at all is fairly miraculous. Its origins date back to 1999 when the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham held a competition to find a developer who would transform an area in front of Barking Town Hall, then occupied by a surface car park, an expanse of under-populated paving and the town’s decrepit 1960s library.

It was won by Urban Catalyst with a proposal, drawn up by Avery Associates, which promised to unite retail, housing and a new library in two enormous curving structures. The prospect of this Nash-like vision being realised in what remains one of London’s poorest boroughs was always an improbable one. Sure enough, the architect was soon replaced and its successor tasked with developing a more piecemeal and thus deliverable scheme. However, this new team’s efforts were found wanting both by the borough and by the mayor’s newly formed Architecture & Urbanism Unit, prompting a second change of personnel.

The new architect, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, developed a scheme comprising four buildings ranged around a new public square, each accommodating a significant quantity of housing. The ground floors of the three smaller buildings would be given over to commercial activities while the fourth would be constructed directly on top of the retained structure of the existing library. This building was assigned to a first phase of works, which commenced in 2003, only for the developer to run into financing difficulties, leading to the contractor abandoning what was then little more than a concrete frame. It remained in that state for over a year until a new developer, Redrow, agreed to continue the project in a rather bruisingly value-engineered form. Now, having completed the first building two years ago, Redrow is at last on the point of finishing phase 2 — a full decade after the redevelopment of the site was first proposed.

The near-completed scheme invites doubts both about the constraints that were imposed on AHMM — notably the decision to retain the library — and about a number of the architectural decisions the practice subsequently made. And yet for all that Barking Central does feel like a real and particular piece of city. A new heart for this rapidly changing community, it is characterised by a rich variety of activities and conceived at a truly urban scale. That is certainly a tribute to AHMM’s talents but perhaps even more so to those of Muf, the practice charged with developing the design of the new square. Its work has already been recognised by the award of the 2008 European Prize for Urban Public Space but it is only with the recent completion of the square’s second phase that we have been able to experience the practice’s full vision for the site.

Credit: Muf Architects

The double-height colonnade.

I have described the project as a square but it might be more accurate to talk of a series of adjacent territories. The AHMM plan prescribed a T-shaped footprint, one wing of which runs parallel to the principal facade of the town hall, while the other is framed by the new buildings. To these two spaces, a third is added in the form of a double-height arcade which extends along the front of the library. Muf has provided all three with a high degree of particularity, while cultivating points of still greater intimacy within each one.

Of the three territories, it is appropriately the forecourt to the town hall that is the most conventionally civic in expression. A field of uncluttered pink granite, it is primed to be colonised by events ranging from majorette demonstrations to the announcement of election results. The brick town hall was designed in the thirties in a manner that might be described as neo-Georgian, were it not for its enormous and almost baroque clock tower. The one part of the building to which Muf makes direct reference is the wide flight of steps that leads up to the front door. It has installed a replica of this feature on the opposing side of the forecourt, an element that can be employed either as stage or seating depending on the nature of the event under way.

The eight storeys of AHMM’s phase 1 building railroad down from the high street before halting — rather too close to the town hall for comfort — on the western edge of the forecourt. It is at the base of this towering facade that the principal entrance to the library is to be found. The building doesn’t quite stop there, however, slipping a two-storey wing — an extension of the library — past the side of the town hall, thus providing the forecourt with a defined edge to the south.

As with all the new buildings’ elevations, the facade presented here is nothing if not excitable. While the vocabulary of each of AHMM’s buildings is distinct, a common — and to this observer, highly resistible — set of stylistic devices is employed. Key among them is the arrangement of windows and balconies in hopscotch rhythms and their further articulation through the use of an extraordinarily lurid colour palette. Given that the scheme’s 472 apartments are packed in at fantastically high density, offer shoebox space standards and are frequently single aspect, the frenzy of facade activity rather belies the meanness of the buildings’ internal arrangement. One is left with the sense that the architect has allowed itself to be cast as a variety of Butlins Redcoat, ladling on the jollity in an attempt — both tyrannical and hopeless — to keep the poverty of the underlying conditions from mind.

Muf’s work adopts a more tentative relationship to the bright myths of regeneration, to the point that it can be interpreted as a sly critique of the surrounding scheme. On the north edge of the town hall forecourt it has installed a large freestanding wall, the expression of which is facade-like but quite at odds with the character of the adjacent buildings. Constructed by the master bricklayers of Barking College, it takes the form of a pseudo-ruin, lavishly bedecked in all manner of curious architectural salvage and rapidly becoming engulfed by plants. This magnificently romantic proposition disguises the delivery yard of an adjacent supermarket and looks back towards the hyper-modern facade of AHMM’s library with eyebrows raised.

Credit: Muf Architects

The steps to the arboretum mimic those of the town hall.

The feature might be best understood as a kind of stage-set, conceived with the aim of expanding the range of fantasies that Barking Central has to offer. Within the colonnade of the library building we find another. Here, Muf’s interventions take their scale from that of the double-height zig-zag columns with which AHMM has supported the building above while employing an imagery that is vividly domestic in origin. Thus the floor has been laid out in a black and white terrazzo chequerboard, like a superscaled version of the garden path of an Edwardian semi, while lights encased in enormous gold reflectors — an existing design by Tom Dixon, which has here been adapted for external use — have been suspended above. There is a rather Alice in Wonderland quality to this inflated household imagery but a logic too — the colonnade does, after all, provide the entrance to the 200 apartments above.

As I have said, the wisdom of retaining the existing library structure isn’t altogether obvious. The building takes the form of a two-storey bar which bridges between the high street at the east of the site and the town hall at the west. By following this orientation, the structure built above has lumbered a substantial number of its apartments with a single north-facing aspect, while casting the third and largest part of the square into shadow for much of the day. Muf’s response to this latter quandary is inspired. It has installed an arboretum, comprising trees ranging from flowering cherries at the town hall end to swamp cypresses at the other. Transforming the relative absence of light into something approaching a virtue, this bosky grove also tactfully filters some of the hyperactivity of the surrounding facades from view.

It proves to be a wood populated by moments of fairytale magic. Each copse of trees has been ringed by a silicone graphite balustrade, sporadic posts of which are cast in imitation of branches. At one point this system is exchanged for a low concrete wall, but here too it has been cast to suggest a palisade of unhewn timber. There is even a drinking fountain, carved in stone in the form of a tree stump — an image that brings to mind the proposal by Archigram’s David Greene to install artificial logs in the

countryside, where users could access an electricity supply. Free wi-fi perhaps represents the real-life realisation of the Archigram dream of a permanently plugged-in society and the square has been equipped with that too. The practice’s ambition is that the space might serve both as an extension of the library’s reading room and as an outdoor living space for the residents in the surrounding apartments. To that end, benches have been installed and augmented by a number of highly idiosyncratic pieces of furniture designed by students from the Royal College of Art.

The notion that a public space might accommodate such a lavish provision of bespoke design is, at least in this country, pretty much unprecedented. It raises the question of whether it is all maintainable, but I don’t see why not: the detailing is robust while the high level of traffic through the space should prove a vital deterrent to vandalism. Perhaps, most crucially, the space hasn’t neglected to charm its users.

Indeed, of the disappointingly few projects to have emerged from former mayor Ken Livingstone’s now abandoned 100 Public Spaces programme, Barking Town Square is surely the absolute standout. Against the advice of the Oxford English Dictionary, I am going to venture to call the sensibility at work a polytopic one. While legible as a single, collective entity, it is also a space that accommodates an extraordinary variety of local incident. If we look to public space to be a territory in which different activities, communities and indeed, fantasies can take up occupation side by side, this is a project that meets that ambition beautifully.

Credit: Muf Architects

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Original print headline - Square dancing

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