Thread by @OSaumarezSmith

Under the 30 year rule buildings in England are not normally eligible for listing until they reach that age. So to mark the new year, here is a list of 10 buildings completed in 1993 that are now eligible, & I think are worthy of listing. 🧵

1. Alan Short & Associates Queen's Building for De Montfort University, a phantasmagoria of techno-arts & crafts, giving a muscular Butterfieldian grandeur to its pioneering systems of natural ventilation.

2. CZWG's public lavatories and florists in Westbourne Grove - a lovely project, slicing out a bit of public use between two roads. It tones down some of the b-movie flamboyance of the firm's earlier pomo work, for something more cheerfully urbane and rather 1930s.

3. Quinlan Terry's Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College, Cambridge. The impressive Greek Doric portico monumentalises entering the college, & responds better than QT's earlier Howard Court to Wilkins's original scheme. I like the radio telescope in the metope.

4. Evans and Shalev's @Tate_StIves, Cornwall - overlooking the sea& built on the site of a former gasworks, its nautically curving entrance echoes that former use, it is a densely layered & historically literate neo-modernist building. Eldred Evans died earlier this year.

5. 1993 a busy year for Dixon Jones, so a 2 in 1: the extension to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, with its slightly sinister, vaguely castellated Italian black granite facade, & Darwin College Library, moored like a punt up against the Cam.

6. An early, possibly pioneering example of the facadism that would become such a feature of London development is the conversion by Stanton Williams & YRM of 60 Sloane Avenue, a former Harrods warehouse (1911). Better done than many later examples I think.

7. Here an oddity: Sam Scorer is known as the lead proponent of British motorway googie architecture (see his hyperbolic paraboloid Markham Moore Little Chef) - & I am surprised to learn he continued into the 1990s. Here Damon's Motel & restaraunt, in Doddington Road Linconshire.

8. Lots one could pick from MacCormac, Jamieson & Pritchard completed in 1993, but I've gone for the less well known Cable & Wireless College, on the outskirts of Coventry, with its gorgeously undulating roof (now owned by Network Rail, it is called the Westwood Training Centre).

9. Surprisingly little high-tech completed in 1993. Nicholas Grimshaw's Western Morning News in Plymouth a rarity in having jumped the 30 year rule & was listed Grade II* in 2015. His swooping Waterloo Eurostar terminal was completed in 94, but is included here as it is at risk.

10. The above, I hope, probably mostly pretty uncontroversial, so let's end with a provocation: Quarry House in Leeds, by BDP(!) a vast Pomo kremlin built on the site of famous 1930s flats, & the most grandiose exemplar of the 'Leeds Look' approach to architectural contextualism.

I surprised myself in researching this, expecting to find 1993, at the tail end of a recession & before the HLF, a low point for English architecture, but its clear there is lots to celebrate, not least its stylistic diversity & the growing awareness of environment.

I'd be interested to supervise a PhD on the mid-1990s in architectural culture, with the aim of helping to inform @HistoricEngland & @C20Society's approach to listing. 30 years is a good distance to start getting some historical distance on a period. Get in touch.

A technical note on my list - the 30 year rule kicks in when construction started, rather than on completion, but this is much harder to ascertain, so the above is completions....