I take another sip. I love this time as night recedes and the daystar’s rays create an ever-wider spectrum of colour that steadily illuminates the sky. Known as ‘Civil Dawn’, this period begins when the sun reaches 6 degrees below the horizon, offering just enough light for most outdoor activities.

It has been preceded, as ever, by ‘Nautical Dawn’ which, on that day and in that place, had started at 02.34. With the sun at 12 degrees, that offers just enough light to distinguish the horizon, see the silhouettes of buildings, and use a sextant at sea. That normally replaces ‘Astronomical Dawn’, when the sun, breaking the 18 degree line on a moonless night, releases us from otherwise total darkness. But not in Colchester that 14 June night: it is the summer solstice and the sun has not dropped below the 18 degree line.

My drop-off completed, I have decided to wait a further half-hour before departing, my plan being to watch sun rise proper, to my left at 04.36, as I journey south.

But before I can leave, the guy who has continued to observe me intently, shuffles across. ‘Do you get paid for this?’ he enquires. I explain that blood-running is voluntary, that there is a network of rider associations across the country, and that we work nights, weekends and bank holidays delivering blood and platelets. I routinely collect from Basildon Blood Bank and deliver to hospitals across north and east London, and out to the far reaches of Essex.

‘So do you get petrol allowance?’ he asks, clearly astonished that some 3,500 of us, nationwide, are willing to do this a couple of times a week, come rain or shine, all year round. ‘No’ is the answer.

Then comes the question that I, as an architect, often parry: ‘So what’s your real job?’ To admit to being an architect inevitably triggers a diatribe about a daughter’s house extension, a leaking conservatory roof, or the planners consenting to some ‘dreadful’ new building in the High Street, so I tell him evasively that my grandfathers had both been lorry drivers, and that I had taken up delivery work upon leaving school: all true!

‘Pity,’ he says. ‘You should have gone to college. You could have made something of yourself’.

************************

Making something of myself hadn’t always been easy. After graduating from van-driving, and following brief spells in the merchant navy and aviation insurance broking, my two low-grade A-levels just about sufficed for entry to Canterbury School of Architecture which, at that time, was based within the College of Art.

Fond memories, so I revisited the city last weekend, starting an intermittent motorcycle pilgrimage through which I plan to visit all 42 of the English Anglican Cathedrals. And so it was that I attended evening choral song on Saturday in Rochester, and Sunday choral mass in Canterbury.

How brilliant to witness the extensive range of activities that nowadays typically run within those buildings – particularly the exhibitions. Rochester had an enormous installation of sleeping whales made of netting hanging vertically, and hauntingly, from the nave’s vaulted roof, while Canterbury had addressed safeguarding issues with tremendous empathy and courage. No stranger to controversy, an earlier exhibition called ‘Hear Us’, which had focused on the pain, injustice and suffering of marginalised groups, had caused more than a stir.

With such initiatives, cathedrals are regaining their importance: last year 323,000 people visited Rochester Cathedral, and Canterbury Cathedral usually welcomes around 1 million people a year.

As we observe the ongoing decline of so many of our towns and cities, we might take inspiration from those of our cathedrals that, while remaining true to their central mission, have expanded their functions with such imagination.

For example, last year Rochester hosted a striking aviation exhibition the central feature of which was a sea-plane which was ‘parked’ in the nave throughout the month of August.

Daytime viewing was free and a series of related special talks and associated events ran in parallel throughout the month. All this in celebration of the River Medway’s aviation heritage: the Short Brothers’ aircraft factory, which once employed around 12,000 people, was just a short walk from the Cathedral. With 59,500 visitors, this exhibition marked the second busiest month ever recorded, surpassed only by the 107,000 visitors in February 2020 who came to see artist Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon.

The crisis of purpose and revenue through which cathedrals have seemingly successfully passed is of course the crisis that now envelops so many of our smaller towns and cities. My motorcycle trip also took me to Whitstable and to Rye, towns rather than cities, but both apparently pretty healthy: busy streets, well-kept buildings, plenty going on. But so many of our towns and smaller cities, as we all well know, are suffering a severe economic decline which is painfully apparent in the state of their buildings: empty shops, boarded up windows, and deteriorating fabric all round.

It is foolhardy to expect any renewal of their retail economies: on the contrary, changing purchasing behaviours have precipitated the decline. We should look instead to a re-purposing which is as imaginative as the initiatives that I have described above at Rochester and Canterbury cathedrals – initiatives that have been successfully mirrored in cathedrals and, occasionally churches, around the country.

The answer also lies with the young.

Canterbury was vibrant during my visit. The restaurants and bars were full, street life was buzzing, and demand for city-centre residential accommodation continues to grow. The city is alive, and key to its success is the university, the teacher training and the arts colleges, which have respective annual intakes of about 16,000, 8,500 and 2,000. Total student numbers amount to around 40,000 when the other further education colleges are added, some 45 per cent of the city’s term-time population!

Canterbury is of course a well-respected seat of learning, the university having been established in 1965 as one of the then new wave of ‘plate glass’ universities, a term coined by British barrister Michael Beloff (author of the seminal book of the same name) which was intended to describe their then modern architectural style. The new aesthetic offered a stark contrast to the older redbrick and earlier ‘ancient’ universities.

The original seven of this genre, all created from scratch on expansive self-contained campuses at the outskirts of cities, were the universities of Sussex, East Anglia, York, Lancaster, Essex, Kent and Warwick, respectively master planned by Sir Basil Spence, Sir Denys Lasdun; Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall; Shepherd Epstein; Architect’s Co-Partnership, William Holford, and York Rosenberg & Mardall. A heady line up indeed that together created a multitude of buildings that remain well worth a visit.

Lincoln, another great cathedral city, came later to the tertiary education game: whilst it can trace its roots back to 1861 as the Hull School of Art, the modern university was established on its city centre campus as recently as 1996. Amongst its new buildings is the school of architecture designed by that most eminent of architects, Rick Mather. In just 30 years Lincoln has gained a deservedly solid academic reputation and the student population, which runs at some 22% of the city during term, contributes enormously to the region’s economy.

But some cities are seemingly beyond salvation. I walked around Hereford recently. A deathly hush has descended on the place. Its demise is a consequence of suburban retail parks, the loss of its department stores (firstly Greenlands in 1968, then Chadds in 2008), and, most catastrophic, the daft decision by its then astonishingly incompetent council to relocate the cattle market (its weekly lifeblood) to a remote out-of-town site.

I was invited back to the town of my childhood in 2010 as part of a delegation led by Sir Colin Stansfield Smith. Commissioned by Herefordshire Council, he led a study officially titled the Hereford City Centre Strategy. Intended to guide the long-term regeneration and design standards for the city, the review focused on several critical areas, each intended to revitalise the urban landscape:

• Public Realm Improvements: Enhancing the ‘look and feel’ of the High Town and surrounding historic streets.
• Connectivity: Creating better links between the historic core and new developments, such as the then-proposed Edgar Street Grid (now the Old Market shopping centre).
• Design Quality: Establishing high architectural benchmarks for any new buildings within the city to ensure they respected Hereford's heritage while being functional.
• The Streetscape: Improving pedestrian areas, lighting, and signage to make the city more welcoming.

But all that is to tinker. Sadly, the city had completely rejected Stansfield Smith’s core suggestion which would have been a game-changer: a new university. Whether or not such an initiative could have been funded was never tested for it was swiftly and savagely nipped in the bud by a motley collection of ageing, and typically myopic councillors, who made damming claims that the allegedly bad traffic problems would be worsened and (wait for it!), that ‘the drains won’t take it’. Quite what the drains wouldn’t take I never found out.

And so it is that Hereford continues its steady decline. With a student population through its colleges of Higher Education at just 9% of the city’s total, its future is not bright. A city must attract the young, not lose them!

That, surely, must be the key driver in any re-purposing of our towns and cities. We must recognise that shopping for weekly provisions is for out-of-town supermarkets, home deliveries and the internet, and that town centres are for people, culture, living, playing, study and recreation. Canterbury and Lincoln have become exemplars in this respect and many others can follow.

Tomorrow’s model must therefore surely be to live ‘within the city walls’ and, as in medieval times, go out to the fields to work – that ‘out’ and those ‘fields’ of course being metaphorical. With IT and flexible working, more and more of us can work from homes that lie within those city walls.