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Here Comes The SunMuch has been written on the relationship between architecture, urban planning and social development, and the interaction between the urban built environment and its inhabitants is a subject of perennial fascination. Understandably the focus has tended to be on the buildings themselves and how the various structures influence, determine and often dominate the lives of the citizenry In his lucid and well-informed new book, however, Ken Worpole adjusts the emphasis to concentrate on the equally important issue of the spaces between buildings - the parks, public squares, promenades and the various outdoor leisure facilities which the city provides as recreation fonts population. His frame of reference is the development of architectural modemism in the 20th century, with his examples drawn mainly from Northern Europe which, he argues, represents a very different strand of planning philosophy and practice from the rest of the continent. He explains how social reformers in the early part of the century developed public spaces and new forms of architecture in an attempt to mitigate the malign impact of over crowded slums and disease, from the Garden City movement and new model communities such as Port Sunlight to the new functionalist sanatoriums and public health buildings, including the German Hospital in Hackney. He considers the changing patterns of public housing and the utopian impulses behind the construction of parks, open-air museums and pleasure gardens, and he ends with a chapter on the the open-air swimming pools - the lidos - built in the 1930s. Drawing on architectural theories, philosophy, literature and even film-making, Worpole’s book is wide-ranging and erudite and should be of interest to the layperson as well as to the urban planner. It is also elegantly written and complemented by a mixture of black and white and colour photographs to provide a visual emphasis to the points he raises. Ken Worpole is a contributor to N16 magazine and lives in Stoke Newington. Here comes the Sun is published by Reaktion Books, £22.
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