Big and bad. Why there is something darkly appropriate about this year’s Carbuncle Cup
If you ask me, there is something darkly appropriate about this year’s Carbuncle Cup. For the first time, Britain's most unwanted architecture prize goes to two projects at once.
The Filigree in Lewisham, a massive build‑to‑rent slab that felt more like a shipwreck than the flagship it was advertised to be even before its residents had to be evacuated after a serious flooding incident, serving as a poignant reminder (not that we really needed one...) of how carelessly we continue to build homes.
And the Astley Warehouses in Wigan: four 18‑metre‑high sheds, likened by locals to monstrous cruise liners, jammed up against their back gardens in a suburban neighbourhood.
It is this second choice that feels particularly timely, for Astley is a textbook example of what happens when boxes – logistics sheds, data centres, you name them – that are heavy on footprint but typically light on jobs, and lighter still on jobs with real prospects are allowed to stand in for “development” and almost any kind of “investment” is treated as progress.
Such schemes are remaking urban peripheries and small towns in the UK, Europe, and beyond at rapid pace and tell us a good deal about planning – the very institution that is supposed to protect the public interest, yet allows eyesores like Astley to sail through (the last maritime metaphor for today, I promise!).
Here, formally no one broke the rules, indeed an independent audit found that Wigan Council’s decision followed “standard national procedure”. The scheme ticked all the right boxes, land brought “into productive use”, floor space delivered, investment secured – even if the developer’s consultation was deemed “inadequate”, leaving residents with “no meaningful opportunity” to shape a project that would radically transform their everyday environment.
And Astley tells us something else too, about our economy, our politics, and their discontents, for it gives concrete shape – four gargantuan, featureless sheds on the edge of town – to a politics so desperate for something called “growth” that it will live with almost any form it takes, however much damage it does.Does it have to be that way? I don’t think it does. But it is high time we made that case more forcefully:
by pushing for architectural, planning and design standards that ensure that infrastructures we need act as better neighbours;
by fighting for a planning system that ensures that wrong projects in the wrong places do not get built in the first place; and
by rethinking local/regional development so councils do not feel compelled to approve schemes they will almost certainly come to regret.
