26 CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 the city. Its conservation was seen as a minority interest and even reactionary in the context of the dominant progress of modernism. (The building survived, and stands next door to the new HS2 terminal of the same name, now under construction). My rationale for conservation was the conventional art-historical one, handed down from John Ruskin: that monumental buildings were messengers from history and should be valued for what they could tell us of previous generations or even civilisations. This emphasis on the exceptional monument persisted, even though the notion of the conservation area had been invented a few years previously, with the passing of the Civic Amenities Act in 1967. While on my urban design course, although I had long been interested in the ordinary and the quotidian, I did not make the connection between architectural conservation and what Jacobs was writing about in Death and Life. It was only some years later that I fully understood the significance of her Chapter Seven, ‘The generators of diversity’. I had seen the organic, spontaneous diversity of the pre-modern city being eroded everywhere, and had come to realise that contemporary town planning methodology was unable to generate the diversity that is necessary for a fulfilling urban existence. Even while current planning practice rejects discredited modernist strategies like land-use zoning, and promotes postmodern ideas like mixed uses, the end result is always more uniformity than was there before. Jacobs’ book promoted the importance of diversity, long before it became a fixture of urban design theory in publications like Responsive Environments3, written by some of my tutors, and the DETR/CABE’s By Design.4 Jacobs identifies four indispensable generators of diversity, one of which is the need for old buildings. Her argument is based not on architectural quality but on economics. ‘The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.’ There is a mantra that is often quoted from Jacobs’ chapter The need for aged buildings: ‘Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings’. Start-ups and small enterprises cannot afford the high capital and rental costs of new construction. They must depend on old buildings whose capital costs have been already amortised and which can justify existing on affordable rents. We were taught about this economic basis of diversity on my urban design course, but at the time I did not fully make the connection with conservation. Now I appreciate that this is a second justification for architectural conservation, in addition to the Ruskinian art-historical rationale. It is not conditional on architectural 3 Bentley, I, McGlynn, S, Smith, G, Alcock, A, Murrain P (eds) (1985) Responsive Environments, Routledge, Abingdon 4 Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (2000) By Design, London Industrial buildings in Digbeth
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