Sixty years of building and Architects in Jersey. Public meeting to sort out St Helier - 9 November 2021

 

The Association of Jersey Architects is celebrating 60 years of their building design works this week.

I must say that I don’t think they have much to celebrate and the booklet they have produced indicates a somewhat “ordinary” level of achievement.

It is significant I think that the most innovative and smallest project – La Fregate Cafe completed in 1996 – is likely to be demolished soon.

Of course, there are some buildings of merit shown in the printed brochure but for the most part they are safe structures designed to fill spaces. They do not deserve the highest accolade of “architecture” and do not add much of quality to the built environment for the whole population.

At the St Helier Town Hall presentation and “discussion” today it fell to a member of the public audience to point out that “designing for disability” was not featured at all.

In fact, the lift access to the room had not been enabled and the printed brochure included some obscure illustrations and very small font sizes were generally used. Inevitably too, no effort was made to engage a signer and much of the presentation was difficult to follow.

 For a profession that claims expertise in “design” such omissions and failures have been and remain far too evident in the works of the membership throughout the 60 years from 1961.

 The discussion was more like a junior school project than a serious examination of the very major problems facing St Helier and the whole Island. The interactions between the 12 Parishes were ignored. It was as though St Helier is a unique Island with problems that need to be addressed in isolation. The proposals put forward for discussion by the panel were generally banal and undemanding raising virtually no matters that are likely to be addressed by or relevant to architects.

 Most of the proposals have already been discussed to death over many decades and I have linked to those that I managed to video record. I have not attempted to record or present any of the panel discussion and the proposals might appear here in the wrong order of sequence but the final question about a “single” suggestion to improve St Helier does not feature here.

 I don’t want to be too unkind to Jersey’s designers – whosoever they might be – but for an Island that presents such an abundance of “natural beauty” I think that the prospect of another 60 years of building and extension of a built environment, either within the boundaries of St Helier or beyond, needs to be based upon different and better standards.