Opinion - Public Spaces

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Any country's public life owes a debt to its history – and so should its public spaces, writes Patrick Lynch.

As well as banishing theatre, festivals and religious and secular displays of public life, Oliver Cromwell also banned Christmas. In effect, the Roundheads banned public space. Consequentially, according to Cambridge historian Peter Burke, Britain lacks any post- Reformation public spaces – unless you count Horse Guards Parade, which is a military parade ground. Trafalgar Square had a statue placed in it to limit its use as a centre for public protest, and we still use it awkwardly today – a powerful reminder of the intense relationship between state and religious power, legitimised by imperial naval heroics. The proper ornamental function of monuments is to remind us of things, their iconography intimating mood if not precisely how to behave. This is a necessary aspect of the decorum of architecture in cities: without architecture you have no sense of the history of humanity, everything happens at once, and there is no order to our time. We are simply harried by work and bullied by regimes that deny us the serious pleasure of playfulness and a sense of the ironic and theatrical in our lives.

You don't need to read Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to see the links between PFI and the destruction of what Mrs Thatcher refused to accept was called 'Society'. As Piers Gough pointed out when the Scottish Parliament won the Stirling Prize in 2005, a Polaris submarine costs a lot more than a decent seat of national government. Which perhaps illuminates a glitch in national attitudes towards architecture, confusing it with product design; that is, with something designed to become obsolete and disposable. While this might be true for some buildings, public life doesn't simply disappear because of technical progress. Perhaps this is not just the delusions of the post-war generation high on technology and Oedipal revolt and the thrill of making money: maybe the British just don't do public life in public, apart from perhaps in the pub?

Josep Lluís Mateo's hardlandscaping for the villageof Ullastret, near Girona,Spain (1982-85)

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I'm thinking of the bizarre proposition by Swiss firm Vogt Landscape Architects to remove cars – and the statue of Churchill – from central London's Parliament Square. I can understand the first as a rather drastic solution to a perceived security problem, although removing everyday public life from a public space seems the best way to kill it. But the decision to remove Britain's greatest war leader from the epicentre of democratic life, something that he will forever be associated with, is yet another example of the confusion of aesthetics and technology with meaning, something that dogs our understanding of public architecture and is an example I think of Cromwell's legacy.

In contrast, Josep Lluís Mateo (professor at Zurich's ETH and ex-editor of Quadrens) 'rearranged' the Spanish town of Girona, adding a new stone pavement that acts as a stage in front of the church for festive displays. The elegant juxtaposition of new and old elements, of walls and ground surfaces, clearly marks the new from the old, and yet alludes to the historical continuity of change and adaptation. Perhaps in these settings modern architecture takes on its most effective purpose, which is not to destroy what is ancient in favour of an image of the future, but to renew the past favouring the present.