Which part of the country would you rebuild and ‘start again’

nanna8

I was listening to this topic on talkback radio this morning in the car. It was interesting to hear the responses. Several would like the main square in Melbourne, Federation Square, removed and substantially changed. I tend to agree with them and another one is a foul big brown glass building they have erected in the middle of our local town. No thought for any architectural design or fitting in with the rest of the buildings whatsoever. I shudder every time I pass it.

Good morning fellow night owl!

Boring and unadventurous as it is, I'd rebuild all of the roads around here because they're shocking and full of the most humongous potholes!

I'd rebuild the Premier Inn in Dumfries because the layout is terrible and you have to walk MILES! 🤣

Hi SeaWoozle, I feel I have to 'fessup' and say I am in a different timezone here. When I wrote that it was around 9.15 am. I once went to Dumfries in the late 60s, it was a nice town then.

Smart motorways. They should never have been allowed.

I'm looking ahead to when the population has plummeted and nature takes back her own. What is now farmland was once covered in buildings during the time the Romans occupied the land. After they left, the stone was used elsewhere and the buildings disappeared.
The same thing will happen not too far in the future and all these new houses will be but a memory.

Once we have completely destroyed ourselves - not far off - our time on this planet will be represented by the tiniest layer in the substratum - so small in fact it will be barely noticeable.

And that is how it should be given the way we have treated the earth, ourselves and all the species on it.

Yes WWM it’s distressing to realise how much damage we’ve done to this wonderful world in such a very short time.

I think my hometown of London is an amazing feat of architecture, the way the very old mixes with the ultra modern. I'm happy for that to evolve more. Nowhere else has pulled that off in the same way. Glass is my favourite material.

I definitely don't want every available natural space covered in construction though, I don't call that progress.

Joseann I agree with you totally. I love that in one London street you can travel in architecture from Tudor to Georgian through Victorian to last year.
In contrast, my youngest daughter loves central Paris for the homogeneity of layout and building.

Curtaintwitcher

I'm looking ahead to when the population has plummeted and nature takes back her own. What is now farmland was once covered in buildings during the time the Romans occupied the land. After they left, the stone was used elsewhere and the buildings disappeared.
The same thing will happen not too far in the future and all these new houses will be but a memory.

That's if they last that long. Can't see them standing as long as say Stonehenge, or Tower of London.

Unlike Joseann. I would flatten the core of the city of London.

When I started work in the City in the mid 1960s, despite the bombing The city was like a town with rows of buildings with numbers where one bank was immediately next to another and this seemed to exemplify the integrated financial system we had where unbridled money making wasn't the only thing in everyone's mind.

Since then the old city has been completely erased and replaced with great big trophy buildings, all designed by top architects and with absolutely no regard for the broader picture of how everything fits together. Lots of huge areas of concrete 'plazas' where the wind whipping round them is never less than Force 6 and the temperature cold. the city of London is now an unintegrated whole, a monument to regard and totally disregard for the common good.

A new financial district was built at Canary Wharf, and while I have not been there often, one does get a much more conforting feeling of the area being an integrated whole, where it is comfortable to walk.

But the old City of London, I mourn its passing.

Curtaintwitcher

I'm looking ahead to when the population has plummeted and nature takes back her own. What is now farmland was once covered in buildings during the time the Romans occupied the land. After they left, the stone was used elsewhere and the buildings disappeared.
The same thing will happen not too far in the future and all these new houses will be but a memory.

We won't be here though, will we. Lovely that you can think of human demise . The only way that will happen is a nuclear war, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

The time is coming, I fear, when a total re-think of our whole way of life will be forced upon us. The whole world is a shambles and dear old 'Great' Britain already does not exist. I remember having just this conversation with my Grandmother 60-odd years ago. I felt then that we needed to scrap everything and start again, but she said that the pendulum had swung as far as it could and would soon swing back again. She may have been right, but it does feel at the moment as if it's at its nadir. (I hope I'm right and that it doesn't have even further to fall!)
I know this isn't really what OP was talking about though! The thing I would get rid of is the Parliament Buildings in Edinburgh - to my eye that building is a monstrosity!

I love the skyline of London looking towards St Paul's as seen from walking over Waterloo Bridge, haven't been up there since Covid but hope that all the new building doesn't eventually obliterate some of the views of the old.

My husband told me when he first went to work up in the city he was quite thrilled to know he was near the excavated Temple of Mithras, but that whole area has changed a helluva lot in recent times.

I don't know what I'd rebuild though, I gather Croydon's a bit of an eyesore these days due to the building of yet another Westfields, do the London environs need another one? there are already two and those sort of vast shopping malls suck the guts out of high streets and make them look incredibly depleted and not pleasant places to be from what I read

For the immediate future though potholes, so hazardous!.

I certainly wouldn’t look forward to a plummeting population. I think that is a cruel thing to wish for. They did their best with Covid I suppose but couldn’t quite manage it, thank goodness.

Mamardoit

Smart motorways. They should never have been allowed.

Hear hear!!

Mamardoit

Smart motorways. They should never have been allowed.

Yes! Awful things. And half the time it's not like you can even have a better journey due to all the roadworks!!

Not a particular part of the country but every 1950s - 1990s ugly building that was built with a 30 year lifespan, in particular schools.

Built-in obsolescence should never apply to buildings, especially schools.
Surely they can be built solidly but with an interior that could be altered as needs change?

Some stupid idiot thought that the centre of Plymouth should be drastically altered, to give it more of a Mediterranean bistro cafe look and started by chopping down all the mature trees!
Thankfully he got the chop too.

nanna8

I certainly wouldn’t look forward to a plummeting population. I think that is a cruel thing to wish for. They did their best with Covid I suppose but couldn’t quite manage it, thank goodness.

I think it could be managed with contraception etc.

Who would want to be a woman in an area of the world prone to famine or conflict, trying to feed yet another baby that has been thrust upon her?

Oh dear, think I'd better log off before I blow a gasket!!

Smart Motoways, Agree! Too many lives lost on those for sure.

A lot of sixties buildings were awful and ugly, even though some of the more iconic architecture from that era has been re-branded as "mid century" when I first heard that term from some of the younger generation in the family, I wondered what the hell they were referring to, mid century conjured up the 19th century in my mind 50 and 60s was how I referred to that era. Anyway, suffice to say a lot of it was great slabs of ugly concrete.

I’m not going to nominate anything because to one person, what may be an eyesore can be a thing of fascination for another.

I rather like urban and industrial landscapes. They are a necessary part of human existence and demonstrate era-defined design. I find myself drawn to “brutalist” architecture and love the Barbican in London but I know that others hate it.

As an aside, is anybody watching the latest series of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the the Year ^which is featuring the city of Liverpool as one of its locations? The mixture of different buildings and architectural styles is fascinating ^and presenting quite a challenge for the artists.

The TV series Life After People is well worth watching. It’s on the Sky History channel. Without human intervention, the urban landscapes we are familar with would soon start to decay, through weather and and bird waste mostly which is very corrosive, but it would take around 10,000 years for virtually all traces of human existence to disappear.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the first episode of Life after People, it's speculated that the only thing that might survive after 10,000 years are the Egyptian pyramids.

nanna8 World population is alreay programmed for a rapid fall over the next hundred years. The only thing making it grow at the moment is people like us living longer than our parents and grandparents.

For most European countries, including the Uk, plus Japan, China and India the birthrate has fallen below replacement level. It aky and jaoan were the first countries to reach this state and nothing they do has succeeded in increasing it.

'Italy and Japan.'