This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

One of the more surprising projects to be shortlisted for this year’s Stirling Prize was the so-called King’s Cross Masterplan, the development of the railway yards and urban wasteland north of King’s Cross: unexpected, not because it was undeserving, but because it has been a project of such long gestation, begun in 2000 when Argent, a firm of developers, took on the project as a joint venture with London and Continental Railways.

Argent was established in 1981 by Peter and Michael Freeman. They cut their teeth at Brindleyplace, an area of Birmingham which they bought for £3 million in 1992. Its masterplan had been drawn up by Terry Farrell, one of the few architects in Britain interested in large schemes of town planning.

Argent then employed a younger generation of architects to design individual office buildings, including Demetri Porphyrios, a Greek neoclassicist who had done his dissertation at Princeton on Alvar Aalto; and Allies and Morrison, a practice in which one of the partners, Graham Morrison, is also an expert on Aalto, and the other, Bob Allies, has been influenced by his experience as a Rome Scholar in 1981.

These two firms of architects, one of them part of the Prince of Wales’ milieu, the other more orthodox modernists, were hired to draw up a masterplan for the derelict land in King’s Cross.

With Argent, they did two things early on: the first was to consult landscape architects, conservation architects and historians; the second was to draw up a document which they called “Principles for a Human City”.

Many of these principles may now seem anodyne, but at the time they contravened the orthodoxies of post-war urban development by trying to work with the grain of what survived, instead of just imposing new-style development, as had previous plans for the site; keeping as much as possible of what survived of the existing industrial buildings; using well-established urban forms, like streets, squares and even alleyways; treating the development as part of a wider neighbourhood with responsibilities towards its surroundings; investing in the public spaces, the qualities of stone, planting and seating; opening the public spaces first.

None of these ideas are very revolutionary. They go back to the writings of Camillo Sitte, who published The Art of Building Cities: City Planning according to Artistic Principles in Vienna in 1899, and some of the softer, less brutalist town planners of the post-war period, including Thomas Sharp and Gordon Cullen, who were interested in the idea of townscape: the virtues of variety in the way that towns evolved, treating them in an organic way.

When it came to the layout of King’s Cross, the architects kept as many as possible of the existing buildings: the German Gymnasium which looks as if it has been air-freighted from Berlin; the lovely, late Georgian Fish and Coal Building, on the banks of the Regent’s Canal, then burnt out, now occupied by Tom Dixon, the furniture designer; north of the canal, the huge Granary Building was hollowed out by Stanton Williams to create a new building for Central St Martin’s at the heart of the site as a whole; to its west, the so-called Coal Drops Yard has been transformed by Thomas Heatherwick into a shopping mall.

These surviving buildings lend texture to the development, a sense of it having a history, instead of it all being brand-new, over-scaled office blocks.

Next, the developers employed a range of different architects to design the office buildings. Not all of them are equally interesting, but the one by David Chipperfield at the entrance to the development looks as if it was designed by Aldo Rossi in a classical grid, emphasised by rows of cast-iron columns with a cross-weave pattern, a homage to the ideas of Gottfied Semper.

Halfway up the hill of offices is a building by Eric Parry in which the glass offices are set back from the weathered steel frame, giving it a slightly industrial feel. Beyond the Granary, where the streets become more conventional, some younger architects have been employed to design the buildings, including two off-pink buildings by Morris & Company and a tall, thin, slightly mannered building by Alison Brooks.

The third key aspect of the development is the quality of the setting, at least as much as the buildings. Robert Townshend was employed as landscape architect and, together with Dan Pearson, laid out the perimeter of the site alongside the canal which is a particularly successful, and important, part of the scheme as a whole, including the so-called Ghat Steps at the edge of Granary Square where students and passers-by congregate on a summer evening.

Lest I am accused of being in thrall to the developers, I should point out that not all parts of the development are equally successful. I am not convinced that Coal Drops Yard works as a shopping mall. The northern part of the development where it becomes residential is too uniform: it lacks the complexity of the ground layout in the area north of King’s Cross. Argent has sold the land next to the King’s Cross railway lines to Google for a development on a completely different scale to the rest of the site, as big as the Shard but horizontal.

But overall they have succeeded in creating a new urban district of London with vastly more character than the City, where too many buildings have been indiscriminately and thoughtlessly demolished.