Lichen it or Lump It: Concrete Civic Architecture

The Council Offices that I pass by are a classic example of sixties architecture; confusing layers of the building placed at right angles to each other like a gigantic game of Jenga. Everything is square, grey, concrete. The University of East Anglia’s campus, of which I'm familiar through being a student there, was designed by Sir Denys Lasdun, whose other notable works include London’s South Bank complex; all “Brutalist” architecture. The UEA campus reminds me of the council offices that I now pass regularly. The students there provided their own laconic judgement on Lasdun’s design by naming their student newspaper simply, “Concrete”. Lasdun’s design tried to incorporate a ‘plaza’, modelled on the similar Italian plazas; bright, open and clean with citizens lounging about in the sun. Concrete in non-mediterranean climes, however, isn’t bright and clean. In Leicester’s wetter, colder climate it goes a dark grey, mottled with lichen and pollution, looks dirty and grim.

Leicestershire's council was troubled enough about the ‘concrete effect’ to embark on a recent intensive cleaning exercise in order to restore some lighter lustre to the Battleship Grey that had taken hold. It coincided with the arrival of a new sign which has troubled me ever since. It simply says something along the lines of “working in partnership with Chegdu, Sichuan Province, China” or similar. I am by instinct an internationalist, ‘a citizen of the world’ to quote Keats, and encourage communication with other peoples. However, given China’s appalling human rights record, I am troubled that the administration of my elected representatives are 'working in close partnership' with an institution that who denies the same freedoms as we. I wonder if there would have been more of a local furore if a sign had gone up working closely with Saddam Hussein’s regime, or Apartheid South Africa, or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? Is twinning eroding barriers or validating oppression, I wonder?

This blog was supposed to be discovering beauty in an apparently drab, urban environment. So, with this in mind, I should add that there is a actually beauty in this 'brutal' building. Its imposing, grand and harsh concrete lines, set incongruously like an alien spacecraft that has landed amongst landscaped grounds, rises out of the mists on an early January morning in a sight that inspires rather than depresses. And in that moment one sees a glimpse of something that may have been in Sir Denys Lasdun’s mind’s eye all those decades ago but has been utterly lost to many ever since.