Beneath the city

The humble cobble is often confined to tourist centres in British cities, but Will Jennings takes an international perspective and argues for a re-valuation of this historic building material

A couple of years ago, National Express ran a publicity-inducing poll asking for the “prettiest streets in Britain”, presumably in the hope it would lead to an uplift in daytrips across the country. The coaches themselves would struggle to navigate most of the 19 winning streets, as the public favoured narrow passages, steep inclines and pedestrianised historic town centres. At number one were the tightly squeezed Shambles in York, an irregular grid of tourist shops with nostalgic stones, cobbles and setts underfoot. The list largely comprised streets of similar paving to the Shambles, with the narrow incline of Frome’s Catherine Hill, Haworth’s Brontëtastic Main Street and the Tudorlicious Elm Street of Norwich all making the cut.

Unearthed during routine maintenance work in the Georgian Quarter of Liverpool, these wooden setts have supported the public highway for 200 years. They were used in wealthy areas as they result in less noise than cart wheels on stone setts.

David McKenna

It’s also worth noting that most of the winning streets were firmly located on Britain’s tourist map, and when visitors pound streets they are hunting for unique, personal and memorable experiences. The irregular tread of stone setts and cobbles certainly make for an immediate and concentrated experience. They can be so slippery when wet and the unevenness when dry can twist ankles and jar the teeth of those in wheelchairs and pushchairs.

With our towns featuring the seemingly endless smoothness of asphalt, poured concrete and prefabricated paving slabs, the idiosyncrasies of stone fit the touristic gaze very well, as progress compounds the memories and the otherness of the trip. This is perhaps why travellers to cities across mainland Europe from Brasov to Berlin come back with romantic photographs and memories of meandering stone streets.

In Lisbon, a place impossible to visit without posting at least one photograph of the beautiful artistic pavements online, there is even a statue of a paver crafting a cube sett, the Monument to the Calceteiro “to the pavers who build the ground we tread”. It is also why, upon returning home to greyer, familiar streets scarred with water, gas, cable and drainage urban-surgery, it’s so easy to wonder why Britain isn’t similarly paved.

The oldest known paved road was laid 4,600 years ago, connecting Cairo to a basalt quarry 69kms away. Later, and more famously, the Romans created a network across their empire, sprawling military and trade tentacles of control, and you can channel your inner Centurian by heading to Wheeldale and marching the 50km of (disputed) Roman road. It wasn’t until the early 18th century with the rise of Turnpike Trusts that systematic road construction and organised maintenance was begun, with toll gate income funding maintenance and improvements.

You know a city has its priorities right when they have a sculpture dedicated to paving stone workers. Monument to the Calceteiro in Lisbon, by Sérgio Stichini, and an example of their work. It’s not every week you get to tread on works of art.

Robert Kwolek

Robert Kwolek

Until then roads in built up areas were constructed of paving of cobble stones, but frequently poorly constructed using irregular sized stones on a rubble foundation of rotten materials, contractors saving money by increasing joint sizes, leading to pavements shifting and collapsing into a ruptured mess. General road maintenance for non-stone routes consisted of piling small rocks in the centre of the road and letting traffic slowly distribute and flatten it over time, but it was becoming obvious that there was more of an art and skill to roadmaking than this.

The ground I stand on is uneven, damp, and constantly changing. In my part of the Philippines, some spaces are beautifully manicured, the rest are wild and unruly. Once in a while I go for a walk and, distracted by an unusual sight or a new sweet scent, I am suddenly on a different path. At the end, I find a new living thing growing from inside a man-made crevice - fungus or seasonal orchids – and I feel just wonderful.

Georgia Perrine

As urbanisation and industrialisation progressed, road reform was becoming political and a series of Parliamentary committees on highways over the early 1800s sought to improve the badly maintained and non-standardised network.

Thomas Telford and John Macadam both submitted evidence to these reports, and a professional rivalry between the two Scots offered solutions for the cambered substructure of roads, both engineers suggesting finely chipped stones which compress over time to form a hard surface for traffic. These streets, however well made, still created dry dust in summer and mud through winter, neither hugely desired in wealthier districts where granite setts became the norm, with Telford paving Hanover Square in 1824. Harder wearing, and useful on busier routes such as to and from East India Docks, they comprised of four-inch cube setts offering a firmer grip for horses than stone slabs, which easily wore down to a slippery shine.

This is an image taken on the Albert Dock, Liverpool, between the modern museums and galleries. (RIBA, Open Eye). As I walk through the development I can’t help but notice the contrast in textures and materials below my feet. The way the light is hitting the larger flagstone creating a shadow cast along it due to its change in level, like a set of stairs. The cobbles that are set within a bed of moss giving us a clue to their age and history.

Alix Riding

But where there wasn’t dust there was noise, with the noise from stone sett streets angering nearby populations and with setts also dislodging under the wheels of heavy traffic. As a remedy, pavers installed parallel “tramway” tracks of slab blocks 6 to 9 inches wide, with the gridded setts filling the rest of the carriageway. In 1869 our streets started their path to smoothness with the Val de Travers Asphalte Paving Company resurfacing London’s Threadneedle Street, followed by a further 32kms of the capital over the next two years.

By the 1920s concrete roads were the norm for heavy traffic areas, with a constant trend towards a monotonous sprawl of asphalt and concrete ever since. Certainly, our towns do have sporadic moments of cobbles and setts underfoot, not only in the aforementioned National Express selection, but in heritage areas such as Covent Garden, which reintroduced cobbles for its 1980 relaunch; or occasional private and wealthy developments like More London and Granary Square.

Our innovative granite cube ground plane at LSBU public realm draws inspiration from David Bomberg’s ‘Racehorses’ painting.

Rob Beswick, Founder + Director B|D landscape architects

But when a decaying and under-maintained asphalt teasingly reveals stones trying to force themselves back to the surface, it carries all kinds of romantic nostalgia to our consciousness, because there is something powerful seeing uniquely shaped stones under a city of prefabricated panels, poured concrete and sheet glass. Beneath the city, cobbles.

So, what is it about cobbles that so induces the romantic, and what do they possess that represents what we have lost? Certainly the uneven surface with dappling sunlight and rain, has a certain rustic quality. This was of interest to proponents of the postwar Townscape movement such as Nikolaus Pevsner and Gordon Cullen, who were adapting qualities of the picturesque into an urban “floorscape” of mixed materials, human scale and montaged materials. We can also draw from Alec Clifton-Taylor’s musings on bricks in his 1965 book The Pattern of English Building. He considers the textures and “antimonumental” size of individual bricks as offering a “human and intimate quality”, which perhaps we can also read into the humble cobble.

There is, after all, some kind of universally understandable logic to an idea of cities composed of numerous small parts, like Lego conjoining to a grander set piece. Other qualities we may imbue into the cobble, as Richard Sennett similarly does when discussing bricks in The Craftsman (2008), is a sense of honesty and integrity. Perhaps they represent us, a unique individual within a crowd of similar others, insignificant alone but strong together, perhaps that is why they carry that sense of longing, nostalgia and significance.

Ridley Scott recognised these nostalgia-inducing powers of the cobble in his famous 1973 Hovis advertisement, in which a boy slowly pushes his bicycle up Gold Hill in Shaftsbury (6th on the National Express list) as the sun glistens off shiny stones. Compressed into those few seconds were childhood longing, an imagined lost Britain and the notional scent of freshly baked bread. The ripple of cobbles underfoot offering meaningful foundations to this warm nostalgia. The heritage glow of the advert was followed by urban centres adopting a same romantic approach to place.

In Berlin, it is the simplest patterns which resonate most… from bringing modern archaeology to the surface, to the occasional scattered absence of individual units, in favour of 100x100mm brass memorial plaques 2 . Berlin’s setts provide constant and poignant reminders of the past, attaching historical connection to place in its purest and most visceral form.

Charlie Pierson CMLI, Landscape Architect, RPS

Throughout the 1980s, systematic prettification of urban realm used olde-looking street furniture, lighting and materials, conjuring up some indeterminate VictorioGeorgian atmosphere. This was the period when a“traditional” aesthetic took hold throughout identikit pub chains; new electric street lights designed to look like gas-lamps but with built-in hanging basket brackets were liberally installed. No pretty town centre was complete without rustic cobbles or setts to complete the Anglo-Disney aesthetic. This is the world into which Covent Garden was reimagined, while new tourist attractions like Blists Hill and Ironbridge popped up in deindustrialised landscapes, an experiential picturesque imagining of the past as replacement for the disintegrating present.

Welsh Granite, Caernarfon. Possibly the last public use of Welsh Granite setts. All the stone: slate and granite, for the 2008 shared space at Castle Square, Caernarfon came from within 30 miles of the town.

David McKenna

As Joseph Samuels discusses in his excellent book Theatre of Memory (1994) cobbles were strategically deployed across industrial docks, landscaped gardens and precinct developments, even giving a “vernacular look to the car parks”. There has always been a peculiarly British process of ripping out evidence of the coarseness of history to replace it with a smoother built landscape for quicker transactions and wipecleanable experiences, only to then paint this new blandscape with a controlled version of history. As opposed to Cullen’s townscape use of cobbles, adding vernacular and personality to localities, Samuels argues the 1980s cobbles – often concrete simulations – were to “give instant maturity”, a kind of plug-in authenticity to place.

Honeycomb shaped pavers and a bronze inlay featuring a worker bee. It could only be Manchester city centre!

Emily Beedham

But there are other histories of the cobble, not just Hovis and horses. In the Paris of 1968, setts from Haussman’s boulevards were imbued with the power of protest, students ripping up stone cubes and transforming them into missiles as they reclaimed the streets. “Sous les pavés, la plage!”, (“Beneath the city, the beach”) read revolutionary graffiti referring to both the emerging sand the removed setts were bedded into, as well as suggesting a beachlike freedom secreted from view by the rigid conformity of the city.

The cobbles of Paris are so iconic that two years ago Parisian entrepreneur Margaux Sainte-Lagüe bought five tonnes of the stones removed for street resurfacing, and now sells them one by one as art objects, including a 150€ gilded cube. Another has “sous les pavés” scrawled in red, white and blue, the stone’s bottom half encased in sand as if freshly plucked from the beach to be displayed by the bourgeoisie as mantelpiece sculpture, instead of having it weaponised against them. Beneath the city, profit.

The places in Britain which entered the twentieth century with cobbled streets and not the modern skim of tarmac or asphalt were often those that had been left behind – whether a whole village, urban cul-de-sac or unused corner of a junction. The very matter of the street acting as an index of power, value and ideological hierarchy. New stories, too, can be embedded into a groundscape made up of so many individual pieces, much more easily than a vast unifying surface.

Across Berlin, stolpersteine, commemorative brass plaques in the pavement, honour victims of the Shoah who had resided nearby, powerfully presenting individual histories at one with the individuality and human-qualities of the surrounding cobbles. Look also at how the pavements of Barcelona, Lisbon and Rio have become as identifiable images of place as has the London skyline.

When work on the masterplan commenced, King’s Cross had a number of incomplete areas of stone setts, a visible but incomplete remnant of the surfacing that had been laid to provide a tough working surface. At the start of the construction works the existing setts from across the site were lifted, catalogued by area and a strategy for reuse prepared. This broadly meant relaying them as ‘frames’ around the historic buildings and, where appropriate, as an attractive, tactile ‘hazard warning’ around tree planting, cycle racks and other simile features across the site. At the entrances to the buildings, the setts were cut in half and laid with the sawn and then fine picked face exposed to provide a DDA compliant surface. Generally, though the setts were not laid en masse as their uneven nature impinged on free mobility for all.

Martha Alker, Townshend Landscape Architects

The design of Granary Square seeks to create a modern space which acknowledges the history of the site without trying to recreate it. The porphyry paving was selected for its warm patina of colour to complement the original cobbles. The reclaimed stone setts were laid as tree surrounds, around benches to demarcate the end of the fountains and also around historic features including the capstans and railway tracks. To improve the accessibility of the surface, the setts used at building entrances had a sawn, fine picked surface.

Martha Alker, Townshend Landscape Architects

In my view, to recognise a place by an artfully crafted, democratic and hardworking material of the pavement is far healthier than by the phantasmagoric, spectacular baubles of a financial elite.

There is a current trend in underpressure British high streets to commission trendy designers to create surface-applied funky supergraphics as band-aids of forced joy over decaying surfaces. Both Croydon and Waltham Forest, for example, have recently applied a relatively cheap fix of colourful shapes and colour which rapidly dissipates after a few months of traffic, fumes and feet.

This line of dark stone setts forms a visual link between Carlisle Castle and Tullie House Museum, and it also represents Hadrian’s Wall. Also set into the traditional red sandstone paving are inscribed stones to represent places, milestones and forts along the Wall.

Ali Moffatt, Eden Environment

It may be a more expensive to use real stone, irregularity and ingenuity into the townscape rather than such temporary solution, but in my mind immensely preferable, as stones aging and unsettling over time only add to an urban genius loci rather than blight the thoroughfare. There are ways in which landscape designers can rework techniques and materials of the past in contemporary and intelligent ways, and not just use them in the 1980s theme-park way to distract from an increasing neoliberal void.

When I first cast eyes on them, I was shocked. It was the early 2000s, and I’d never seen anything like the Kimberley sandstone cobbles of Melbourne’s Federation Square – a riot of pink from afar, with astounding detail up close, ranging from delicate striations of salmon pink through to desert blocks of iron-red. These pavers reflect the complexity of the Australian landscape, and its slow geological transformations over time, accompanied by water, fire and drought. They are, unashamedly, of this continent.

Emma Sheppard-Simms

So here’s to the cobble and sett. Whether remnant from the past slowly revealed as asphalt crumbles, or a polished piece of history as part of the tourist offer; a modern reinvention by thoughtful landscape architects or even the 1980s ye-olde-townscape reintroduction – here’s to the unexpected, the solidity, the geology and the craft.

Here’s also to a future landscape using skills and the materials of the past as a way of thinking forwards, of creating streets of impact and art. Here’s to an experience of towns and cities built with permanence and care. At a time when citizens seem to have less agency than ever over the political and physical space around them, perhaps the sense of the individual and unique, through cobbles’ aesthetics and the craft that goes into paving them, suggests they are a suitable material for our age.

Will Jennings is a writer and visual artist interested in connections between culture, politics, history and architecture. willjennings.info

All pictures are copyright the author quoted alongside their caption