Sir Terry's 2016 Banister Fletcher lecture, given for the London Society on 8 November 2016.

1. Sir Banister Fletcher
Memorial Lecture
8th November 2016
Sir Terry Farrell

2. PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
 Shaping London
 The City As A Tangled Bank
 Buckingham Palace Redesigned
 The Farrell Review
ARTICLES
 A Manifesto For London, AR
 12 Ideas for Edinburgh, Prospect
 Estates Gazette:
Four Propositions for London
 Buildings as a Resource

3. “PLACE AS CLIENT” – Urban Planning Voluntary Activism
 The South Bank
 Covent Garden
 Mansion House
 Royal Parks
 Nash Mile
 Geordie Ramblas, Newcastle
 Thames Gateway
 Low Level Bridges
 Buckingham Palace
 Airport Expansion
 HS2: stations as city making
 Old Oak Common
 Smithfield Market
 Spitalfields Market
 London’s density increase
 Low-rise High-density housing
 The Thames Study

4. COMMISSIONS GOING BEYOND THE RED LINE
“PUBLIC” COMMISSIONS
 Newcastle Quayside
 Edinburgh Exchange
 Hammersmith Roundabout
 Vauxhall Gyratory
 Old Oak Common
 University campuses
Newcastle Quayside
Brindley Place

5. COMMISSIONS GOING BEYOND THE RED LINE
“PRIVATE SECTOR” COMMISSIONS
 Brindley Place, Birmingham
 Folkestone Seafront
 Charing Cross
 Earls Court
 Gatwick Airport Advocacy
 West Kowloon
Earls Court
Charing Cross

6. PUBLIC BODIES
DESIGN CHAMPION ROLES
 Thames Gateway
 Edinburgh
 Nash Mile
 Medway
 Kent
 Ashford
 Isle of Wight

7. PUBLIC ORGANISATION
MEMBERSHIPS
 GLA Design Panel
 1NG (Newcastle/Gateshead)
 Tenterden Residents, Chair
 Ramsgate Society, Patron
 Civic Voice, Vice President
 English Heritage, Commissioner
 Royal Parks, Review Group
PUBLIC BODIES

8. RURAL UPPER THAMES
View from Richmond Hill, William Westall, 1828
From: Shaping London

9. The seven main bends on the rural
Thames with open spaces (green) and
towns and villages (red)
PARKS
SETTLEMENTS

10. URBAN THAMES
The Thames at Westminster & Whitehall from the Terrace of Somerset House,
Canaletto, 1750

12. Charing Cross
Thames Embankment, 1867
Showing Bazalgette’s achievement of the new Embankment

13. MI6
Lambeth waterfront from Lambeth Bridge, 1860

14. Pattern of urban bridges
Evening Standard, 7th November 2016

15. DOCKLANDS
West India Docks, Poplar, William Daniell, 1802

16. Historic settlements along the Thames: their relationship to the shipping
channel and the narrowing of the river

17. W Reveley’s historic vision to straighten the Thames, 1796
Between the 18th and 20th centuries the realisation of the docklands
epitomised the age of Imperial trade

18. Eight new proposed local bridge connections in the Docklands –
Linked places, linked communities

19. High level river bridges and tunnels connect motorways,
making national and regional connections,
but they sterilise the riverbanks…
Low level bridges are for walking, cycling and public transport and
connect communities at local level.

20. New landscapes, river access and homes for one million people
in East London

21. Low level bridges

22. ESTUARY THAMES: London’s engine room

23. The Thames Estuary Parklands Spatial Framework, 2008

24. THAMES ESTUARY PARKLANDS
Planner As Design Champion

25. THE TRIBUTARIES
Main tributaries to the urban
Thames
Flock of sheep on Piccadilly, 1930s

26. Pattern of tributaries, canals and major places in London
Field analysis of central London,
Prof. David Grahame Shane

27. Re-planning & Regenerating the Post-industrial Metropolis
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
London: Back & Front Rivers

28. CANALS
The Grand Junction Canal passing
over the new North Circular Road,
1939
National canal network:
connecting the British Isles
land, rivers and sea

29. RAILWAYS
Trevithick’s ‘Steam Circus’, 1808
Philip Hardwick’s Euston Arch, 1837

30. London’s great railway stations & Circle Line

31. Mainline stations: The New Road: patterns of social housing

32. London & high speed rail connections
Beijing South Station
Incheon, Seoul

33. High Speed Rail Superhub
A networked system –
“integrated connectivity” for UK air/rail travel
Old Oak Common

34. GROWTH OF SOUTH EAST REGION:
Landscape and Infrastructure Radial Patterns
Balanced Metropolitan Growth
Metropolitan Infrastructure
AIRPORTS
Metropolitan Landscapes and
Integrated Connectivity

35. Gatwick’s New Terminal:
Part of a networked integrated connectivity system
Integrated Connectivity - Gatwick
AIRPORTS

36. THE TUBE – London Underground
Cross-sections of rail and pipes under London’s streets,
mid 19th century

37. Piccadilly Circus cross-section –
‘the stomach diagram’
London Underground Railways
map, 1926

38. The Tube – mental mapping

39. INNER ROADS
The great central street through London

40. Place as client
2002 - Euston Road/ Marylebone Road Study - It’s a major place not a through road
1995 –
Royal Parks
Central London’s
unappreciated
world-class
public realm
2001 - Buckingham Palace
The Nation’s unrealised great square 1990 –
The Thames Study
London’s ‘lost’ public realm

41. Today
ProposedExisting
Euston Circus – a new place

42. EUSTON CIRCUS, completed 2014

43. THE CITY: RINGS & RADIALS
Roman London
Current London
The City Radials

44. 16th October 1984 - Architect as Urban Designer
“In spite of heavyweight competition at the RIBA (Richard Rogers), Terry Farrell's talk
on 16 October was standing room only for one of the biggest audiences seen at an UDG
evening meeting.”
“Farrell acknowledged the importance of Rowe and Kahn in generating his ideas, but it
seems to me that his agenda owes just as much to Jacobs, Venturi and Cullen and the
English picturesque tradition. What was most impressive in all the projects was the way
these diverse ideas were synthesised to provide a cogent vision of urban places which,
in contrast to the proposals of some influential continental urban design theorists, are
above all achievable in our current economic climate and assuming the continuity
of our contemporary institutions.”

45. PEDESTRIANS, CYCLISTS & BUSES
Canary Wharf, 2007
Thamesmead housing estate 1972

46. Central London pedestrian underpasses
Farrell doodle, 1963

47. Rationalize buses on Oxford Street
PHASE 1
PHASE 2
PHASE 3
EXISTING OPTION A OPTION B
BUSES
Horse drawn bus, 1865

48. OUTER ROADS
County of London Plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, 1943
Overpass construction,
west London, 1969

49. RADIALS & RINGS
A.E.Mathews: “underways” 1966
Proposed “motorway box” Replacing North / South Circulars
As built: M25 and North / South Circulars

50. New places from post industrial ‘backlands’…..
And once again provides neighbourhood high streets
FROM RING ROADS STUDY– “The Road to Renewal”

51. M25: ACCESS & PLACEMAKING

52. LANDSCAPES, PARKS & GARDENS
Linked Royal Parks: 1973 – 2003, Farrell
Park Crescent & Park Square, 1984

53. Nash plans for London, 1812 Farrell’s updated plans, 2006

54. Humphry Repton,
‘Before’ and ‘After’ images
from a Red Book, late
18th / early 19th century
Repton’s Red Books, produced
for clients, contained paper
flaps, which could be brought
back and forward to show their
gardens before and after his
proposed interventions.
They reflect the British
approach to landscape design
through which, as Repton’s
predecessor Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown would have
said, the capabilities of the site
are revealed, retained and
enhanced, so that the outcome
is an adaptation of what
already exists rather than an
imposition of entirely new
forms.

57. Greater London National Park City 1,572 km2 in area
47% physically green*
3.8 million gardens
8.6 million people
8.3 million trees
30,000 allotments
3,000 parks
850km+ of streams, rivers and
canals
2 National Nature Reserves
37 Sites of Special Scientific
Interest
142 Local Nature Reserves
1400 Sites of Importance for
Nature Conservation
Statistics by
Greenspace Information for
Greater London.

58. London has, ‘… never
followed a theory or an
idea. It has never been
driven by a coherent
philosophy. It has simply
grown in an organic
fashion, opportunistic,
haphazard and market-
led. Yet every building
seems part of a general
pattern, of a general will
to exist in this shape and
in no other.’
London: The
Biography, Peter
Ackroyd
CONCLUSIONS – SHAPING LONDON

59. Royal Wedding, 1947
Buckingham Palace proposal, 2001
Defence of The State Defence of the Public

60. “…better as the giving birth of
peoples in labour than as the
gushing stream of genius” and
“…the accumulation of
centuries, the residue of
successive evaporations of
human society, briefly as a
kind of geological formation”
Victor Hugo

61. “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled
bank, clothed with many plants of many
kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with
various insects flitting about, and with worms
crawling through the damp earth, and to
reflect that these elaborately constructed
forms, so different from each other, and
dependent on each other in so complex a
manner, have all been produced by laws
acting around us…There is grandeur in this
view of life..”
On The Origin Of Species, Charles
Darwin
“…cities which are
working well in some
respects and badly in
others…we cannot even
analyse the virtues and
faults…without going at
them as problems of
organised complexity.”
Jane Jacobs
RIBA Journal 1976
URBICULTURE & SUSTAINABILITY: Organised complexity

62. “It is scarcely surprising that, since the
major preoccupation of urban planners is
with the DESIGN of cities, they have
generally attempted to analyse city forms
in terms of their own efforts. That is to
say, theories of urban planning have
tended to focus on cities in whose form
the guiding hand of human design is
clearly discernible.
The trouble is, hardly any cities are like
that. In spite of the efforts of planners to
impose simplistic order, most large cities
present an apparently disordered,
irregular scatter of developed space …
mixed haphazardly. By focusing on
regions where planning has created
some regularity….. urban theorists have
often ignored the fact that a city grows
organically, not through the dictates of
planners.”
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern
formation in nature, Philip Ball
From: The City As A Tangled Bank

63. CHIMNEY
FUNGUS GARDENSNEST
Farrell, Cross-section
sketch of a termite
mound, 2013
The natural, self-organised
of the termite – which is
thought to have been
around, adapting and
forming, for some 30
million years – has been
much studied by biologists
and habitat experts, The
ingenuity, cleverness and
engineering design that
contribute to this
phenomenon, which is
nevertheless created by a
collection of brains working
by instinct, is
extraordinary. The mounds
themselves can be viewed
as huge stomachs, acting
as a sort of compost heap
and fungus garden to feed
the resident instincts.
From: The City As A Tangled Bank

64. Farrell, Student drawings, 1963-4
Drawings done whilst a student at
University of Pennsylvania, these
drawings show the intricate internal
organs of the city and how people
occupy it – from deep down,
Occupy it – from deep down,
travelling in subway/Tube systems up
to ground level and the office block.
There are many parallels with the
activity of termites in a termite mound.
From: The City As A Tangled Bank

65. NEW YORK: 2 x the density of London.
High rise centre: low rise outer boroughs
PARIS: 2 x the density of London.
Low rise centre: high rise periphery
The outer boroughs are “non-plan”
The historic core becomes a museum?
LONDON: Dispersed
centres. High rise within
low rise general pattern
Better integration of growth, preservation and green space
DIFFERENT CITY STRATEGIES FOR GROWTH & CHANGE
From: The City As A Tangled Bank

66. Canaletto, 1746: As built
Wren’s Plan (Baroque centrality)Hooke’s Plan (surveyor’s grid)

67. Shortening the food
chain: Re-integrating
food into cities. Part of a
series of seminars and
discussions hosted by
Farrells
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
The Farrell
Review

68. GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
The Farrell
Review

69. Children’s Education
School Workshop at Farrells
THE FARRELL
REVIEW

70. Professional Education
THE FARRELL
REVIEW

71. Planning for the future
Old Oak Common- The
first PLACE Review
Panel
THE FARRELL
REVIEW

72. Outreach and skills
Urban Room Blackburn
THE FARRELL
REVIEW

73. Urban Rooms
Church Street Urban Room
The Architecture Centre, Bristol
Live Works, Sheffield
Urban Room, Blackburn
THE FARRELL
REVIEW

74. WE NEED TO MEET THE CHALLENGE OF RAPID GROWTH
Especially in the Greater South East…
In January 2015 London’s population will exceed its 1939 peak.
In the last five years, London has grown by 500,000 people - a city the size of Edinburgh.
In the next decade the population will increase by 1,000,000 people
LONDON’S 38 ‘OPPORTUNITY AREAS’
“These areas are the capital’s major reservoirs of
brownfield land with significant capacity for new homes
and jobs, linked to existing or potential improvements to
public transport accessibility.”
BORIS JOHNSON
GROWTH OF LONDON AND THE OPPORTUNITY AREAS

75. MAKE LONDON A NATIONAL PARK CITY
INTENSIFY THE CORE
CREATE NEW TOWN CENTRES AROUND TRANSPORT
HUBS
CONNECT EAST LONDON WITH LOW LEVEL BRIDGES
1
2
3
4
From Estates Gazette, 2015

76. 1 MAKE LONDON A NATIONAL PARK CITY
From Estates Gazette, 2015

77. 2 DENSIFY THE CORE
From Estates Gazette, 2015

78. 3 CREATE NEW TOWN CENTRES AROUND TRANSPORT HUBS
From Estates Gazette, 2015

79. 4 CONNECT EAST LONDON WITH LOW LEVEL BRIDGES
From Estates Gazette, 2015

80. THINKING BIG FOR A GREENER, BETTER CONNECTED LONDON
From Estates Gazette, 2015