This decade has a lot to answer for, not least in its pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap attitude towards irony. Irony 40 stories high. Irony smeared across Britain. The architecture of the 1980s, the era of the high-corporate, financial service and call centre office postmodernist style has left a strange trail across British cities. Ubiquitous and genuinely charmless, these buildings don’t garner the same hatred ascribed to 1960s social architecture whose presence is generally so much more monumental, utopian, literally concrete. In contrast, 80s architecture sits on the periphery of city centres, having abandoned all social and architectural ambition of improving its surroundings, retreating inside an awkward, faulty revolving door at the end of a patterned brick paved car park. (more…)

I am sad about the demolition of the Tinsley cooling towers. Their destruction is a loss to Sheffield. But it is not the death of all culture, nor part of some battle of civic innocence against the forces of corporate rampage. Blaming the city of Sheffield, blaming the power company, blaming the government or anyone else is not at all useful at this point. If we want to end up with anything more than a sense of bitter helplessness, we have to understand that there is a current culture of inability to understand and articulate the value of our landmarks, icons, opportunities and more. If there are not to be more lost cooling towers, giant icons or just loved places in the future, the culture has to change. The issues which surround the demolition of the cooling towers are relevant to the whole idea of regeneration in Sheffield and beyond.

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