Gabion: The search for healing space. 1/2

To fully appreciate the condition of urban living in 2001, it helps to think about 1901, 1801 and so on, back through the centuries, because right now we are not so much at a Millennial moment as at a centennial one. Britain gets self-conscious and fidgety about its civic realm roughly once a century, although that timescale gets pushed about by war and political turmoil. We may not have the war this time round: we certainly have the political turmoil. Architecture and civic spaces, however, seem to be able to transcend such distractions. At the turn of a century, it seems as if our cities have a self-generated urge for improvement, while architecture normally gathers itself for a leap forward. At each such transition point, public rather than private space becomes important.

Britain 1901 is seen by many as emblematic of a golden age of imperial architecture and urban planning, but at the time you might have been excused for thinking more about the depredations of the Boer War. Things were considerably worse, however, in Britain 1801. Then, the creation of public architecture was all but suspended owing to the enormous drain on the Exchequer caused by the Napoleonic conflict. At that time Sir John Soane, with his remarkably progressive Bank of England, shows us what might have been. But although the trustees of the British Museum, for instance, decided they needed a new home at the start of that century, work did not start until 1823, by which time London was being transformed by a pent-up wave of post-Regency civic renewal.

And London 1701? English baroque reached its peak. St. Paul's Cathedral, very controversial, was well under way and the ageing Wren was handing on the baton to Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. London had successfully updated itself piecemeal in the years since the Great Fire. Spool back another century and, in 1601, we find a familiar moment of change as the late Elizabethan period with its "prodigy houses" is about to give way to the architectural renaissance of the Jacobean. Inigo Jones is about to depart for Italy, with far-reaching consequences.