Still Places, Wider Horizons →
Monumental mass and human scale, carried into the everyday.
Explore the image and tote →Public space / Post-war Britain
Places Built
for a Public
Future
What happens when an idea of public life becomes a place?
Preston · Ambition in an ordinary journey
Repeated concrete curves and a long public concourse give everyday travel an architectural setting of civic scale.
“Preston Bus Station at night” · Kinlochbervie, 2018 · CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized and recompressed; full composition retained.
Explore Preston Bus Station with Historic England ↗Public ideas,
physical form.
Across post-war Britain, rebuilding, art and everyday movement were given new physical settings. These places offer different versions of public life: ambitious, lived in, adapted, and sometimes unfinished.
Coventry / Upper Precinct
A future encountered
on foot.
Rebuilding as civic optimism
Rebuilding offered Coventry an opportunity to organise public life differently. The Upper Precinct made shopping and pedestrian movement part of a planned city centre: an idea of the future encountered in an ordinary walk.
Peterlee / Apollo Pavilion
Art within
everyday landscape.
At Peterlee, Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion joins sculpture, bridge and landscape. Abstract form becomes part of a residential landscape, placing an encounter with art inside everyday life.
Newcastle / Civic Centre
A civic setting
for art.
Sculpture, water and architecture
Newcastle’s Civic Centre brings commissioned art into the civic setting. Sculpture, water and architecture share the composition. Pasmore’s murals in the former rates hall create an artistic thread back to Peterlee.
Explore the Civic Centre’s official history ↗Irvine / Irvine Centre
What an unfinished
future leaves behind.
Irvine’s centre was conceived as part of a larger connected system. That system was never completed. What survives invites another kind of encounter with the future: through connections left unfinished and a place that continued to change around them.
The Twentieth Century Society’s account follows the wider scheme and its connection to the Magnum leisure centre, demolished in 2017. Its archival images offer a view into that unrealised plan.
Follow Irvine’s unfinished plan with the C20 Society ↗Image / Object
The conversation
continues in objects.
Near Enough Works follows relations between space, image and everyday objects. Monumental form, human scale and the suggestion of somewhere beyond the frame find another expression here.
Hidden Turn →
A concrete stairway, a red plane, and a journey held just out of view.
Explore the image and tote →