In London, planners like to pretend that the 1960s never took place, and that modernist architecture from the time is a drunken tryst that everyone should forget about. Swinging London? Carnaby Street? The Chelsea Drugstore? No. Planners would have none of it. It’s Downton Abbey and BBC period adaptations of Jane Austen (Bridgerton for those trying to pass as edgy or cool).
In the last 15 years, there has been a diligent effort by planners and architects to homogenise our cities to resemble an idealised past that never was. Under the planners’ tutelage, a concerted campaign to exorcise what they have condemned as heretical has erased mostly modernist architecture that dates from the 1950s-1970s to be replaced by indistinguishable new developments that are almost always clad in brick (slips):
This architectural, nay cultural, campaign can be described as brickwashing. Brickwashing, in essence, entails cladding any new building with brick to confer upon it a veneer of respectability. Brickwashing means that a building can be sterile, austere and spartan, as long as the building is clad in brick. Brickwashing means that a building can contribute nothing of value to urban space and city life, yet be deemed laudable by the planners. Brickwashing means that a building can be even out of scale, vandalising the city’s skyline, as long as its brickness makes it contextual, venerable, and level-headed. Brickwashing has become the last resort for specious reading of context and lazy design. Brickwashing is the “get out of jail free” card and the joker card and all the clichés in between. In fact, brickwashing is the ultimate cliché in architecture and urban design.
With brickwashing, it feels like the planners took far too seriously the tagline of the cosmetic brand Rimmel London: “Get the London look” - as if Rimmel only sold one type of lipstick with 2 or 3 colours.
Brick, however, is not the actual problem. It’s weaponising brick in style wars and conformist conservatism espoused by planners and the values they represent. Brickwashing feels like an attempt to expunge from public consciousness styles and trends that dared to be different, that dared to be nonconformist, that dared to be playful, that dared to embrace the spirit of the age, that dared to reinterpret context and culture outside the confines of literalism, that dared to be the essence of cities like London and dared to be the hallmark of post-war optimism in cities like Birmingham.
But forget the style wars. What makes brickwashing so insidious is that it is often an unlikely bedfellow with greenwashing - brick is seen as an environmentally-friendly building material. Worse even, brickwashing is a facilitator of greenwashing because it is an almost always guaranteed way to get planners to agree to needlessly tear down perfectly sound and perfectly adaptable buildings, throwing all the mantras about the building industry’s detrimental impact on environmental catastrophe under the wrecking ball. Literally.