CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 9 Letter The writer’s voice Always return From Bob Kindred MBE Prompted by the observation in Context 185 (page 3, ‘New life for Smithsons’ school’) about fundamental failings from the outset of the lauded, Grade II*- listed Hunstanton School by Alison and Peter Smithson, I have recently been re-reading parts of the monumental 736-page Modern Architecture Since 1900 by William J R Curtis. The book was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion (1984) by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for making ‘an outstanding contribution to the study and knowledge of architectural history.’ Apparently, it had also been considered one of the five most significant books on architectural history published between 1982 and 1984. I was struck by the seeming failure by Curtis to have visited many of the key buildings he was so lyrical about, including Hunstanton, and Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester University Engineering Building (also Grade II*), where I have had direct experience of rectifying its huge construction faults. One building that almost immediately started falling to bits, the other that leaked like a sieve. Perhaps architectural historians should revisit more buildings that they so enthusiastically champion to observe their functional failures before promoting them as exemplars? Bob Kindred From ‘Cooling towers are a powerful presence in the landscape – and deserve to be saved’ by Otto Saumarez Smith, Apollo Magazine, 24 February 2020 The Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire is one of the most beautiful places in England. Tourists visit it as the ‘Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ and as a Unesco world heritage site. I suspect many of them are surprised to find these historic industrial attractions embedded within such a lushly Arcadian landscape, in which the River Severn carves through steep wooded hills on which dark reddish-brown brick buildings precariously perch. There isn’t a hint of the satanic here; indeed, it is barely urban. Although the focus of visitors is exclusively on 18th- or 19th-century sights, the landscape they experience is in large part a result of a forgotten late 20th-century history. Ironbridge is one of a number of former settlements swallowed up within the sprawling new town of Telford, which was designated in the 1960s to take overspill population from the West Midlands conurbation. The area’s long history of industrial exploitation and subsequent decline had left a blighted hodgepodge of disused mine shafts, derelict pools and abandoned colliery spoil mounds. The new town would transform this unsightly and dangerous mess into what the development corporation called a ‘Forest City’. The landscape plan for Telford harnessed the vigorous forms left by dereliction, merging them with massive projects of earth moulding, tree planting and new grassland. Using its own nursery, the development corporation planted more than five million trees, resulting in approximately 80 sq metres of woodland for every resident of the new city. Telford healed but did not erase the industrial past, as places such as Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale were restored and celebrated as an integral part of the new town project… Visiting Ironbridge for the first time, I clocked that I was in a new town only when I saw a signpost to Silkin Way (Lewis Silkin was the Labour politician most associated with the early new towns). Telford gave thousands of people a decent place to live, and was an astonishingly ambitious and ecologically sophisticated response to deindustrialising landscapes, but these achievements are forgotten because they are largely invisible. You can’t see the new town for the trees. ‘One of the most beautiful places in England’ (Photo: Ironbridge Gorge Museum)
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