The May edition of Crossing Lines was a continuation of the previous month’s session headed by Gill Golding. We maintained our location at Greenwich Millennium Village but referenced the state of play regarding architecture and the modification of urban spaces in the late 19990’s, it’s central protagonist Richard Rogers and it’s freshly-minted Blairite sponsorship.
John Levett thought that he had the necessary evidence of urban blooming and the intricacies of the new model for the millennium but, having trawled his archive, found that he was no more than a pitiful, pliable architecture-heavy groupie with a fetish for Norwegian wood (or Finnish).

Gill Golding set us back on the path of the historical evolution of the space and its emergence as part of the pile-‘em-high; sell ‘em short estuary lounge locations.

Carol Kenna introduced ‘Create Streets’. She posed the question: “Can you create sufficient new homes and maintain street patterns without resorting to high rise flats?” She indicated how this philosophy built on the thinking behind the Byker experiment in the 1970s. The loss of vistas and horizons was a key theme in Carol’s presentation of recent developments in Woolwich.

Peter Luck gave himself the enormous task of presenting an archival approach to the south bank of the estuary; its changing topography, economic history and modes of representation. This to be done in thirty minutes. The heroic effort drained Peter but he had breath enough to signal an intention to return to the scene; if the scene is still the scene where he left off.

Report by John Levett