Art for art's sake

Last week, in the space of a long weekend, I saw three Art Deco buildings.
Trouble is, all of them were 100% fake - one of them having been ‘knocked-up’ a couple of years ago, with the other two having been erected in the last few months.

As buildings in an Art Deco-style, they’re a decent attempt, but why go to all that trouble when all over the land there are beautiful, genuine Art Deco buildings being torn down by a combination of clueless councillors and dim-witted developers? Well, they were, before the recession.

These Modernist buildings from the golden era of the 1920s and 30s - with their clean, smooth surfaces and contrasting, ornate detailing - have often been overlooked simply because people believed that it was impossible for anything beautiful, especially architecturally, to have come out of the 20th Century.

The Hoover Building in Middlesex is widely regarded as the finest example of Art Deco architecture in the British Isles and was restored by Tesco - not renowned for its social conscience - when converted to a supermarket following its closure as a vacuum cleaner factory in the early 1980s.

Nearby, the (arguably even more wonderful) Firestone tyre factory wasn’t so lucky. Sadly, developers got wind of the structure’s impending listing by the Department of the Environment, and so when the preservation order arrived, the dust was still freshly rising from the rubble following the visit of the bulldozers only days earlier.

In an act of pure vandalism, the developers cynically worked faster than any building company before or since to get the huge structure demolished over the course of the August Bank Holiday weekend in 1980. That was a lot of triple overtime, even back then.

Thankfully, the Firestone factory didn’t die in vain. The subsequent outrage was channelled into the formation of The Twentieth Century Society who campaign for the preservation of Britain’s architectural heritage, protecting buildings constructed from the end of World War I right up to the present day.

The society has helped high-profile buildings, like Hoover, survive, but as I mentioned earlier, more obscure Art Deco buildings are still disappearing, or are in danger of disappearing, at an alarming rate. Just five years after Firestone disappeared, the much less well-known, but equally splendid, Woolworths store in Weymouth - complete with tiled façade and ocean liner appearance - was demolished, to be replaced by a depressingly nondescript row of shops.

Further along the coast, Campbell House in Plymouth, once home to Habitat, is facing an uncertain future, despite it being one of only a handful of buildings in the city centre that survived the blitz. Where the Luftwaffe failed, sometimes councillors and developers succeed. Let’s hope not.