John Massengale on Regent Street

As I’m reading Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow and its Planning currently, I found John Massengale’s post on Regent Street interesting. Two quotes:

[Architect John] Nash used some existing streets and primarily kept within the street grids that floated at different angles between the new park and [Pall] Mall. That meant that the street had to shift to the east before it got to the Mall. The result was the beautiful curve of Regent Street, an unusual urban space.

I’ve been to London a dozen times or so and I can find my way pretty good. To me, Regent Street forms, together with other large streets, an overall grid I use as reference. I can vividly recall its shape. Now, London isn’t exactly a grid, but I have thought about how irregular streets can benefit imageability in an otherwise gridiron plan (consider for instance the two diagonal streets in Barcelona). When walking the backstreets of, say, Soho, the presence of the framing larger streets (Shaftesbury, Oxford Street, etc.) informs me of my whereabouts. The fact that they are irregularly shaped might not make any difference. Or perhaps this only confuses the first-time visitor, and gets useful once you’ve become more familiar with the city. Anyway, I feel there’s a sweet spot between regularity and irregularity in a city’s plan where the city is optimally navigable.

Urban renewal became an essential part of Modernism’s agenda. On the whole, the urban renewal was a failure (Jane Jacobs called it “urban removal”), and it led to a backlash against large scale urban interventions. This is throwing out the baby with the bath water. All of our greatest cities [...] would not be the places they are today without these large, retro-fitted interventions.

John also mentions Le Corbusier, whose plans called for very large-scale interventions.