After a fortnight spent sipping cold Camparis in Italian cafés watching the world go by, it is a shock to see what happens in Britain when the sun seriously comes out. Beer-bellied louts in their underwear sitting in upholstered chairs outside pubs hardly contribute to the civic ambience – a world away from the vision of our Continental cousins under canvas in delicate wicker chairs.
If you want a cold beer in the hot weather over here, the choice is roasting inside or standing 20 deep on the pavement while a 40 tonne articulated lorry pumps diesel fumes all over your cajun-flavoured crisps.
As for eating outside, this is nigh-on impossible. There is something very inclusive about the way this is done almost everywhere on the continent. No gates, no fences, no special signs. Somehow you can tell just by looking at a place whether the service and prices are going to be two- or five-star without having to peer at the menu. Perhaps it is because they are covered that the territory is defined.
Here, any open-air restaurant seems practically like a private club barricaded off from the pavement. I don’t think this is purely to prevent skinheads in tartan trousers climbing enthusiastically over the diners. It is a cultural thing to do with using the outside in the public domain.
If you find yourself sitting in a “Continental-style” café in Britain today, the chances are that you are hermetically sealed in a shopping centre or motorway service centre, where you can watch discarded scratch-cards blow about over the paving stones of the real outside – outside. This is where we have latched on to a recent American tradition rather than one closer to home.
If decent provision for eating and drinking outside were provided on a more permanent basis, and properly tied in with retail operations that could manage it effectively, we would quickly find that the outdoor season was actually months longer than we give it credit for, and there would be some activity among our vast new developments other than people running around shopping.
Beer-bellied louts in their underwear sitting in upholstered chairs outside pubs hardly contribute to the civic ambience, unlike our Continental cousins
The “catalyst for social activity” aspect of development and town planning seems only ever to be tacked on at the end of a scheme rather than being, as it should, an integral part of it. Perhaps the planning process might be more forceful in its promotion of life in the public realm.
In Singapore, developers used to be asked to deposit 5% of the building cost with the local authority. The cash would only be returned when the city was satisfied with the public landscaping proposals. An attitude like this might prevent the current position where all the “nice bits” tacked on at the end of the design process are sliced off before the end of the building work.
Although Britain’s cityscape is improving, it is very rare that you see a development that looks like a nice place to sit down and have a drink on the way home, where you can just be part of the hustle and bustle and watch the world go by. Developers obviously recognise that there is a climate outside: witness the endless sunscreens that have appeared over office buildings in the past 10 years or so. It’s just that nobody seems to have cottoned on to the idea that even in our climate, it can be agreeable to be outside under cover, and that this does not have to be such a big deal.
Of course, it’s God’s own job to get a licence to serve drinks on the highway, and our pavements are not terribly wide, but this is just another example of town planners, justices of the peace and the traffic department treating the urban landscape as though they were the only bodies whose opinions mattered.
Perhaps this is a chance for Stuart Lipton, the citizens’ architecture champion, to see whether he can inject some real life into ordinary urban developments so that we don’t all have to wander around Euroland gazing at it as though it were something in a zoo.
Postscript
Gus Alexander runs his own architectural practice in Clerkenwell, London.
