Imaginary City

Leo Hollis Follow
Jul 19, 2016 · 9 min read

Urbanism does not need architecture. Nicholas Barbon. London.

Financialisation. Housing.

Or, as Dr Nicholas Barbon framed the argument in his ‘An Apology for
the Builder’, in 1685:

‘To write of Architecture and its several parts, of Situation, Platforms of

Building, and the quality of Materials, with their Dimensions and
Ornaments: To discourse of the several Orders of Columns, of the Tuscan,
Dorick, Ionick, Corinthian, and composit, with the proper inrichments of
their Capitals, Freete and Cornish, were to transcribe a Folio from
Vitruvius and others; and but mispend the Readers and Writers time.

Little has changed. In the current debate over the share of buildings
devised by architects, few are be bold enough to suggest that more than
10% of the city. As the American architectural theorist Keller Easterling
has pointed out, the cities of the future are more likely to be the result
of architectonic operating systems regurgitating replicable forms across
the urban plain, not individually designed dwellings in an organised
landscape.

‘It was not worth his while to deal little; that a bricklayer could do’, Barbon
claimed. How many of London’s city builders agree with him? Today
we live in Barbon’s city; when we look at the London skyline, why do
we continue to consider this scene the creation of staritects such as
Vinoly, Foster, Koolhaas and Rogers when the actual architects of the
city are Land Securities, Berkeley, large tech companies, universities,
government initiatives and enterprise zones founded on complicated
nancial instruments.

This is how the work of city-making is occurring — for better or worse.

The cult of the architect is a distraction, an parlour game played in
front of the top 1% of the 1%, while the real business of transforming
our urban environment goes on elsewhere.

But if you were to look for Dr. Barbon himself within the fabric of the
current city, you will nd little trace of him. The search will only turn
up a Barbon Alley, near Devonshire Square, and a Barbon Close by
Great Ormond’s Hospital. A couple of his houses can be found standing
on Bedford Row, but few of his original plans remain. The streetscape
that he developed on Essex Street, by the Temple, and Newburgh
Street, the main thoroughfare in Chinatown, follow the same lines
Barbon devised, but most of the houses themselves have been replaced.
Nonetheless, you see his legacy wherever you go in London. His
in uence seeps into DNA of the city, even if his name has been
forgotten.

Barbon was a child of the the civil war of the 1640s. He was born in
London, the son of a rebrand Baptist preacher, Praise-God Barbon,
who, in 1653, was one of Oliver Cromwell’s most puritanical
supporters at the head of a brief, Godly revolution that attempted to
establish a republic following the execution of Charles I. In the puritan
tradition, the young boy was given a horatory name, and the future
speculator was burdened with the moniker ‘If Jesus Had Not Died For
Thee Thou Wouldst Be Damned’ Barbon. When the Restoration came in
1660,and Charles II returned to England to reclaim the crown as the
republican experiments collapsed at the death of Cromwell, the father
was arrested as a traitor and the son escaped to Holland. When he
returned, having changed his name to ordinary Nicholas, it is
suggested that he may have been a doctor during the plague of 1665,
one of the few physicians who stayed to help the desperate of the city.
Yet it was not until after the Great Fire of 1666, that he turned his hand
to projectioning.

When he was at his pomp, the leading builder-speculator of 1680s

London, Barbon was described by the lawyer Roger North as living in
grandeur in the family Crane Court, rebuilt after the Great Fire. North
reports that Barbon would keep his creditors waiting in the drawing
room, then arrive, wrapped in brocade. Having bamboozled his guest,
he always found a way to rush them out of the house, unpaid, but with
promises of future fortunes. To aid this nancial chicanery, he kept an
o ce of ‘clerks, attorneys, scriveners and lawyers’ on hand to keep him
out of trouble. He operated beyond the reach of the legal courts,
keeping one step in front of the ‘police architectonic’, in particular the
Surveyor of the King’s Works Sir Christopher Wren, who History
records as the architect who made modern London.

So, in one instance, at Essex House by the Strand, a street that ran
along the north bank of the Thames between The City of London and
Westminster, Barbon was able to purchase the land against the King’s
wishes. Here stood a series of old aristocratic palaces that had fallen
out of fashion and was ripe for re-development. Without delay Barbon
knocked down the old buildings, and meanwhile silenced the
neighbours with o ers of new works. he skilfully neutralising the local
opposition by setting tenants against each other, e ecting a policy of
‘divide and rule’. After that, he set out and developed a whole new
street of ‘houses and tenements for taverns, alehouses, cookshoppes
and vaulting schools’, a garden and a wharf. He operated so swiftly that
when he was inevitably taken to court, he was able to complete the
whole scheme before the judge ruled that he had been in breach of the
agreement and ned. In a last gesture of chutzpah, Barbon passed the
court’s ne to the new owner of the lease and went on his way.

One can admire this rascally behaviour at three hundred years remove,
but it is not so amusing when it happens today. But perhaps we have
got this wrong. To criticise developers for searching for the shortest
route between investment and pro t is as ridiculous as punishing a dog
from sni ng another dog’s arse. It’s what they do; and they always
have. We are making a mistake by thinking that

Is there a di erence between how Barbon went about turning a pro t

at Essex House and how the latest Nine Elms development in Vauxhall,
currently emerging out of the ground in South London?. Initially the
developers estimated the value of the new Vauxhall Sky Garden, a new
development of 239 ats, at £612 per sq ft. The council’s assessors
suggested that this was too low by at least £10 per sq ft. Also there were
other sources of revenue for the developer that had not been added
into the gures. However, following talks it was agreed that only 17%
of the units should be reserved for a ordable rents.

Nevertheless, while negotiations were underway, the developer’s

agents started to sell o the units o -plan. The rst phase was
launched from the Four Seasons Hotel in Canary Wharf; there were
two further o ces opened in Hong Kong. The nal sum that all the
ats were sold for — £126 million — was £10 million than the original
estimates 10 months before. Nonetheless, in the end only 18 ats were
reserved for social housing: less than 13% of the total.

Barbon’s ‘Apology for the Builder’ was a plea to be left alone and
allowed to get onto it. The state should not get in the way of building
and pro t. Construction made the city safer and richer. By the 1680s,
however, there were few restrictions on what a builder could do. In
1685, the only planning laws that stood in the speculator’s way were
local parish conventions and the 1667 Rebuilding Act. This document,
the rst of its kind in history, set out the basis for what to build and
how, in the hope that the city never fall victim to re again.

For Barbon, this document o ered a template for his designs, yet he
exploited every loophole and gap he could nd in the regulations for
his own ends. The rebuilding e ort after the re changed everything:
what was built; how it was built, and where; who built it and who lived
there; how it was nanced. It was in these circumstances that the
developer as an urban player arrived in the scene.

The desperate need to rebuild after the re ripped up all standing

labour rules about working inside the City. Anyone who was willing,
not just those within the guilds, was enticed to come to London and
make a play for the exploding construction economy. There was a
fortune to be made out of the catastrophe. For a wily employer like
Barbon, however, it means that he could strip down practises and
regulations. Labourers were to be paid by the hour not the skill. This
reduce labour costs, but also encouraged new forms of production.

The new houses themselves were to be standardised, some of the main

parts put together in a workshop and then tted on site. The
appropriately called ‘carcass’ of the house was left bare for the new
owner, who bought the barebones of the house and then adapted to t
their own tastes. This become the mis en scene for bourgeois living, a
black canvas upon which the geegaws and accoutrements of tasteful
living was added. This policy of anti-ornamentation began its life as a
pragmatic choice, a means to turn a quick pro t, rather than an
aesthetic one. Nonetheless it has echoed powerfully down the
centuries, ending up as the grammar at the heart of Modernism.

This ‘Billy bookcase’ of a house was the archetypal Georgian terrace.

Yet even this new urban form was governed by the developer’s desire to
improve their margins. According to leasehold regulations, the
speculator was encouraged to pack as many houses as possible along a
street front, so as to collect as much ground rent as possible. This
forced the average house to have a thin frontage, to extend backwards
as far as the lease allowed, and to be tall. This calculation was the
algorithm in the architectural operating system that ran from the
1670s, all the way to within living memory. It in uenced the English
ideal of what a home is, a prototype that can be seen from the noble
houses of Bloomsbury, the silk merchants homes on Fournier Street,
Spital elds, and the townhouses of Kensington, to the Victorian
terraces of inner suburbs.

And what about how the city is nanced? Recently, Peter Wynne Rees,
the former head planner of the City of London, noted that we were
currently living through a second Great Fire moment. The fabric of the
city was changing at a rate that had not been seen since the 1670–90s
when ⅓ of teh city was burned down and rebuilt within a generation.
He is probably right but Wynne Rees was not just concerned about the
speed of change but what shape the new city was taking. Instead of the
historic fabric, he observed, London is becoming overrun with what he
terms ‘safe deposit’ towers: ‘many of dubious architectural quality, are
sold o -plan to the world’s “uber-rich”, as a repository for their spare
and suspect capital’.

Wynne Rees’ remarks recombine the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of urban
development: the architectural form is indistinguishable from its
nancing. But where that money comes from has changed since the
1690s. Barbon gained his money from local merchants and friends. He
was also able to persuade the builders to invest in their own projects,
rather than o er up his own cash as collateral.

He was a man who understood money. He set up the very rst re

insurance o ce, the Phenix. He also came very close to setting up a
nation land bank that would have acted as the Bank of England itself,
gaining royal assent before collapsing. The scheme failed when Barbon
was asked to raise £2.5 million for the government, and could only
muster £2,100. Perhaps more signi cantly, in 1695, he got into an
argument with the philosopher John Locke on the nature of money.
Locke proposed that money’s intrinsic value was in its coinage; the
silver determined the coin’s worth. Barbon pushed this aside, claiming
that money was anything that the law said it was: ‘it is not absolutely
necessary money should be made of gold or silver; for having its sole
value from the law, it is not material upon what metal the stamp be set.’

Looking once again at the skyline of the neoliberal city, perhaps this is
Barbon’s greatest legacy. Long after he died, on the verge of
bankruptcy, refusing to pay any debts but the cost of his wife’s funeral,
this is what he really left the city. The idea that the city can rise on
nothing but imaginary money.

Returning to the Nine Elms development, we see Barbon’s legacy. Most

of the ats within the development were sold before completion, often
with foreign buyers putting down a deposit, and paying the rest of the
price on receipt for the front door keys. However, over summer 2015,
the real estate website Rightmove was doing a steady business on these
imaginary residences. As one estate agent, interviewed by the Financial
Times noted: ‘A lot of these buyers are e ectively taking a nancial
position rather than buying a property.’ It is not Barbon the developer
that we should be most fearful of, it is Barbon the nancier.

[this article rst appeared in the rst edition of REAL review. To nd

out more and subscribe — check here: http://real.foundation/]