Show caption Patrick Abercrombie’s postwar plan for Plymouth city centre ‘retains a spirit of hopefulness and dignity’. Photograph: Nick Randall/Shutterstock Architecture Conserving Plymouth: the city that dared to dream Even as the blitz reduced the historic Devon port city to rubble, plans were afoot for major reconstruction. Now its remarkable hybrid city centre has been designated as a conservation area Rowan Moore Sat 16 Nov 2019 12.00 EST Share on Facebook

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It’s a recurrent yearning, after an urban catastrophe, to rebuild better than before, to take the opportunity to clear away the mistakes of the past. Phoenixes tend to get mentioned, and their well-known ability to rise from ashes. Often it doesn’t work out as planned. Vested interests muscle in. The exigencies of recovery take over from high ideals. Christopher Wren’s thwarted attempt to rebuild London along more rational lines, after the great fire of 1666, is only the most celebrated such failure.

Plymouth, though, lived the dream. It rebuilt following a plan that was drawn up while the war that devastated its centre was still raging. “Out of the disasters of war,” it was declared, the plan would “snatch a victory for the city of the future”. “With the return of ‘community’”, it was hoped, “will come the spirit of companionship unknown to the youth of yesterday who vainly sought it in the car or the cinema.”

Bomb damage in Plymouth, c1940. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

As time passed, the rebuilt centre became unfashionable and neglected, but its essential elements remained. Earlier this year, with the encouragement of Historic England and the Twentieth Century Society, it was made into a conservation area, the first time that a postwar city centre of this kind has been honoured with a designation more often associated with Georgian and Victorian streets and squares.

Plymouth was as hard hit by the blitz, in proportion to its size, as any city in Britain, losing 1,000 civilians and suffering a never-reported number of military and naval deaths. Its centre was so badly damaged that it was fenced off from public view, like a racehorse about to be put down, lest citizens be demoralised by the sight. But even as the rubble was being cleared, a new and orderly plan was prepared by Patrick Abercrombie, the leading planner of his day, and the city engineer, J Paton Watson. With the support of such eminences as Lord Reith, the father of the BBC acting in his wartime role as first commissioner of works, and the city’s lord mayor, Lord Astor, the plan was approved in 1944 and put into practice after the war.

As a major port squashed into hilly Devonian terrain, Plymouth had been dense and crowded. In the 19th century it was reported – on what evidence I don’t know – that it had the worst slums in Europe apart from Warsaw. Abercrombie’s plan brought space and air. A boulevard, Armada Way, would run north-south from the railway station to Plymouth Hoe, the promontory where Francis Drake was playing bowls when the Spanish Armada was spotted. It would be 200ft wide, enough to make room for a garden running down its middle.

Plymouth’s modernist civic centre, 1962, by Jellicoe, Ballantyne & Coleridge. Photograph: John East

The new centre was laid out on a grid of right-angled streets. Traffic was consigned to a ring road, leaving Armada Way and its tributaries free for pedestrians. New buildings were clad in Portland stone. Art was integrated into the architecture, and the design of landscape and street furniture were harmonised with the buildings. The plan, following the orthodoxies of the time, consigned activities to different zones – commercial, cultural, residential. There is, curiously, an ecclesiastical quarter, in which are gathered the places of worship of different denominations.

It’s customary, when discussing town planning of this era, to reach for the adjective “utopian” and allude to the urban fantasies of Le Corbusier. Such labels don’t fit Plymouth exactly – it was as much a case of taking principles that had been applied to colonial cities such as New Delhi and Canberra and bringing them back to the mother country. The architects employed in the early phases were not so much young radicals as established names striving to move with the times. The last work of Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of red telephone boxes and Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, is a Catholic church in Plymouth. Later, younger architects got to do bolder buildings, such as the sublime concrete vaults of the Pannier covered market, by the unsung local firm of Walls and Pearn, or the civic centre, a bold, 14-storey slab poised above low podium.

Abercrombie’s plan wasn’t perfect. His zoning, for example, leaves an under-inhabited centre that could be improved by bringing more homes there. But its bones are good. It retains a spirit of hopefulness and dignity that has survived the wear of time. Combined with historic fabric that survived the war – narrow streets running down to the original harbour, baroque gateways adorning robust 17th-century fortifications – it makes Plymouth into a remarkable hybrid city, unlike any other in the country.

The Pannier covered market hall, 1960, by local architects Walls and Pearn. Photograph: Marc Hill/Alamy

Its designation as a conservation area hasn’t been universally welcomed. Why, went one response to the council’s public consultation, do “we need to preserve featureless concrete boxes”? But for Richard Sroka, chairman of the Plymouth Civic Society, the centre offers “attention to detail and a feeling of space”. It’s a place where landscape and the composition of the whole count for as much as the design of individual buildings, which are exactly the qualities that a conservation area should protect. The designation should mean that a bit more love and care are devoted to the spaces between the buildings – that the fountains and planting around the civic centre, for example, which is due to be converted into flats by the developers Urban Splash, are returned to their original glory.