CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 25 LEADERS OF CONSERVATION THOUGHT JOE HOLYOAK Discovering Jane Jacobs ‘Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings,’ wrote Jane Jacobs, making the link between conservation and new ideas of urban design. I first read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities1 in my final year as an architecture student. We were working on what was called a town planning project in Stokeon-Trent, and I guess it was a recommended book. (If the project were done today, it would be called an urban design project, but the term was then not yet in general use). The book had a great impact on my thoughts. Twelve years later I read it again while on my urban design masters course. As I turned the pages, I was repeatedly astonished to read what I had negligently come to assume were my own thoughts, but which had actually been formulated 20 years earlier by Jane Jacobs, and absorbed by me. Jan Morris had a similar experience, as she later recorded in the 2012 festschrift called Ideas That Matter: the worlds of Jane Jacobs2. Morris writes about cities that she enjoys and says ‘I don’t really know how much of it is original to my own thought. Long ago my reasoning was Jacobsized, and all unwitting I probably joined the long ranks of her plagiarists’. In between those two readings of Death and Life I had become a conservationist. My conversion was motivated by the widespread destruction of 19th-century architecture that was happening around me in Birmingham. The particular threat that sparked it was to Philip Hardwick’s 1838 Curzon Street Station, the original terminus of the London-toBirmingham railway; then empty and neglected, situated in a little-visited industrial quarter of Curzon Street Station (rather isolated by the current HS2 works) 1 Jacobs, Jane (1962) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jonathan Cape, London 2 Allen, M (2011) Ideas That Matter: the worlds of Jane Jacobs, Island Press, Washington DC Jane Jacobs (Drawing by Rob Cowan)
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