Portsmouth rarely finds itself listed as one of the country’s architectural leaders, but the city has won a fan in designer and television presenter Kevin McCloud. He called Portsmouth’s architecture of towering concrete council offices and postwar pedestrianised shopping areas “beautiful” and “heroic” and even put the city on par with the grandeur of Georgian Edinburgh.
McCloud is campaigning, with the support of English heritage, to get the modernist centre of the city, which had to be rebuilt after severe damage during the Second World War, protected.
Postwar Plymouth has been compared to medieval York or Georgian Bath, and it is hoped that the entire centre of the city will become a designated conservation area.
Plymouth was a major British port and Naval base which made it a prime target for German Bombers in the Second World War. It is the only British city that has been almost entirely rebuilt.
Sir Patrick Abercrombie drew up the plans for the city, and several banks, churches and department stores were built using his plan. They are seen by many as great examples of 1950 architecture.
But the bid is not without its objectors; even Plymouth City Council has written off the Civic Centre as “cheap and nasty”.
Mr. McCloud, however, believes that the unloved civic centre was “heroic” and paralleled to the UN headquarters in New York.
“The centre of the city really is high quality and beautiful, it is carved stone, it is proper work. It also dates from a time from which we don’t have much. It rare that you get, out of something as devastating as the wholesale bombing of a city centre, the hand of genius.”