This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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My columns are normally about architecture in England. But having recently been to a conference about architectural history in Santiago de Compostela, I want to reflect on the experience of visiting a city which is so remarkably well preserved as a historic environment and manages to avoid (mostly) being just a tourist city, cared for and protected by its inhabitants.

I arrived in the early afternoon before the conference started and so had a couple of hours to wander round. I was astonished by how intact it is — the layout of the streets still medieval and interestingly random, with arcades protecting pedestrians from the drizzle along the main shopping street. 

The architecture is apparently without modern interventions, apart from the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art added by Álvaro Siza in 1993 outside the city walls, built in Galician granite alongside a baroque convent, and the hideous new Cidade da Cultura de Galicia by Peter Eisenman, intended to bring Compostela into the twenty-first century, but an unmitigated disaster. Work was halted in March 2013. It is now a burden to taxpayers. So, what is it that leads to the city being such a pleasure to visit?

It is probably helped by the fact that the climate of this part of Spain is so consistently wet that Richard Ford described it as “El orinal de España”. I saw it in three days of consistently poor weather. This prevents it being a conventional tourist destination, with only the more dedicated pilgrims braving the elements in brightly coloured wetwear. 

The dampness of the environment also means that the austerity of the granite pavements is mitigated by surrounding forests and green fields and the city has even recently created a new small urban park, designed by Siza and Isabel Aguire on the sloping hill behind his museum.

My impression is that it is also a result of policies on the part of the city authorities, guided by a set of principles which we have largely abandoned in this country, particularly in London.

In Compostela, the city authorities, including its mayor who opened the conference, are attentive to the urban environment as a whole and not just individual buildings. They limit the number of new hotels to prevent the city being overrun by tourists. 

They realise that part of the quality of urban life derives from small local shops and bars, which they try to protect, rather than driving them out by encouraging suburban shopping malls. 

They try to ensure that students can continue to live in the city by legislating on rents. They are determined to keep the local food market, which opened in 1941, alive and well, not just as a tourist destination. The centre of the city is walkable so traffic is kept out. Historic buildings are protected. New development is prohibited.

All of this might suggest that the city is frozen in time. But it feels alive — the streets full of pedestrians, the restaurants and cafes busy, the housing stock occupied, not turned into holiday homes.

one might think that these policies are irrelevant to British cities which were so bashed about by the Second World War, then many of them spoiled by insensitive 1960s city planning. 

More recently, they have been allowed to develop in a haphazard manner by developers who tend to be well connected to city planning authorities and dominate the policies of the Corporation of London. In this country, planning has a bad name. The merits of the conservation movement of the 1970s are forgotten. 

Yet, it happens that Galicia is being advised in its future urban policies by the Fundación RIA, established in 2017 by the British architect, Sir David Chipperfield, who built a house for himself in Corrubedo on the coast of northern Galicia in the late 1990s, spent lockdown there and wants to help protect its quality of life. 

He has discovered that Galician politicians are vastly much more sympathetic than their British equivalents to long-term strategic planning which protects not only the urban, but natural environment as well.

Chipperfield is about to open a building near the centre of Compostela called Casa RIA, which will host seminars on urban change, put up exhibitions on urban issues, and bring in outside experts to help advise the city authorities. 

Far from regarding this as interference, he was made Galician of the Year in 2019. Politicians there want the advice of architects and urban planners on how to manage their future.

So, why can’t we do something similar in London? Chipperfield argues that is an attitude of mind, more than our economy. We are currently in hock to the financial interests of developers, rather than thinking about, and respecting, the public sphere. 

But these things can change, and they have in the past. After the destruction of the 1960s, attitudes to conservation changed. Planning laws were toughened. In the 1980s, new development was encouraged in the docklands, but restricted in the City in order to keep it as an attractive place to work. 

Much of this care for the quality of the urban environment has now been sacrificed. The City is a completely different place from what it was ten years ago. But is it better?

If I was a digital nomad, I would move to Santiago de Compostela.