Three cheers for the renaissance of the provincial towns and cities of England

Bradford is to demolish huge swaths of its own centre. Acres of hateful Sixties concrete are to be pulverised in the year ahead, according to a tiny article in the Guardian this week. Much of Broadway, Cheapside and Petergate are to be bulldozed as part of the city’s programme of ‘reinventing’ its core. An architect, Will Alsop, has made plans for surrounding the Victorian city hall with a lake; a buried stream is to be uncovered; and great blocks of brutalist mid-20th-century building will be coming down, storey by storey.

Three cheers for this news, almost unnoticed in London. A cheer for a dawning 21st century which has the guts and self-confidence to own up to the mistakes we made in the last and start again. A cheer for the provincial towns and cities of England, among many of which a quiet renaissance is under way. And a cheer for the lightening of spirit which has (I believe) accompanied the death of heavy industry, of mining, and of the cradle-to-grave socialist ideal whose physical embodiment in art and architecture lent a brutal edge to so much that we built after the second world war.