Britain's Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp - Times Online

What the Luftwaffe began, arrogant, philistine town planners finished off. Now a new study names the guilty men, Stephen McClarence says

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Stamp describes today's Bradford, one of the 19 cities whose fate he chronicles, as a pale shadow of “the dense, complex and lively pre-war city recorded in old photographs”. Seething with elegant outrage, he hits out at planners who have vandalised so much of its almost exclusively Victorian fabric.

They sent in the bulldozers and wrecking balls, replacing arcades, markets and warehouses with buildings that were either dreary or dreadful and which systematically squandered the city's dignity. “As in other cities,” he writes, “the inadequate and unnecessary postwar rebuilding of Bradford now seems a criminal waste of money, energy and materials.”

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Until the 20th century, he points out, change in cities “tended to be piecemeal, occasional and organic”, even though Victorian railway companies ruthlessly slashed their lines through anything in their path.

The religion of the motor car changed all that. Councils dismembered their cities to build ring roads, flyovers and car parks. They used any excuse for demolition — that old buildings had a limited life; that Victorian architecture was at best unfashionable, at worst sinfully ugly; that the mess left by Luftwaffe raids needed tidying up.

The Nazis became convenient scapegoats for plans already under way. Coventry's medieval Butcher Row was razed in 1936, four years before the first bombers flew in. It had become, the Lord Mayor sniffed, “a blot on the city”. Planners in Canterbury welcomed the wartime destruction and set about their own.

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Naming names, Stamp tells a tale of neglect, incompetence, philistinism and sheer bloody-minded malice, encapsulated in a comment by Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer and Surveyor of Birmingham from 1935 to 1963: “I have never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past,” he said in 1957. “As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement, provided we keep a few monuments as museum pieces to past ages.”

City after city was blighted with modernist buildings that, in an almost totalitarian way, were obsessed with function and efficiency and often looked like multistorey car parks, even when they weren't.

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Keith Waterhouse summed things up in 1975 in two sentences that will resonate with anyone who has ever sat narcoleptically through a local council meeting: “I would put most of the blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.”

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Their legacy is the desperate sense of loss engendered by Stamp's book, with its 200 stylishly presented archive photographs. I lost count of the number of pictures of smart, historic, charming streets captioned: “Every building in this photograph has since disappeared.”

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