The Progressive Aslin Society

I could be accused of being a formalist.
City Hospital
Derby Corporate Architect Peter Clarke says he 'took some stick' over the design of Bold Lane car park.
Stick
The shops at Prince Charles Avenue and the Lonnie Wilsoncroft memorial. I hope to revisit in more clement weather. The clock suggests a Festival of Britain influence. Beats Poundbury any day.
Prince Charles Avenue
St Alkmunds, a Naylor, Sale and Widdows church from the 1970s, built to replace an older church demolished to build a ring road. After the Victorians had messed it about, no great loss (opinion).
St Alkmunds Church
The Quad Arts Centre and in the foreground Sir Hugh Casson's epic Assembly Rooms, slated for demolition.
Market Place
It would be hard to imagine a greater complementarity between two buildings built several centuries apart.
Harmony
A simple space of piety and devotion. Upstairs was transformed into a wedding venue in the 1970s.
Derby Cathedral
Now-demolished social housing, perhaps unsustainable due to flood risk, but in a beautiful riveride setting.
Britannia Court
One has to admire the effort taken to blend the new building in with the shipping container.
Welcome to the Velodrome
One of three pubs built by local brewer Offilers in the Moderne (I'd say) style of the 1930s. It is not listed.
Blue Peter
For all the frothing that goes on over Aslin's grander works, this is my favourite.
Aslin
Built by Naylor, Sale and Widdows. A simple but pleasing structure, built I think in the 1930s and contrasting with the broadly contemporaneous - but very different - Broadway Baptist and St Marks churches (photos to follow).
Baker Street United Reformed Church
Rooflines
I enjoyed using this modern, bright, welcoming station daily for a quarter of a century. Local opinion favours its rambling wet cold gloomy smelly predecessor. But I suspect most of the whingers didn't actually use it.
Railway Station
Gayeway to an alternative reality, only adepts may pass.
The Portal
While the Enlightenment that swept Europe in the eighteenth century left England largely unscathed, it could be argued that a new age of progressive modernity began in Derby 1725 and three centuries later has not entirely guttered out. Why 1725? That’s when All Saints’ Church – now Derby Cathedral was rebuilt with an interior which had more in common with the bridge of the Starship Enterprise than a traditional English cathedral. Within twenty years the town was buzzing with Scottish tourists.

Accepted wisdom is that architecture in Derby went into a terminal decline following the departure of CH Aslin who was Borough Architect in the 1930s. The Society respects
Aslin’s very human neoclassicism, but respectfully suggests that some very decent buildings have been erected since – even if they have largely been demolished as part of the drive to obliterate traces of the years of social democracy following World War 2!

This project presents a mixture of conventional and sideways glances at the buildings of Derby, including some of the alleged hideous monstrosities.

Leave a comment