Sustainable Brownfield Regeneration - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 1083

strength of the city of London and the United Kingdom” ( www.stpauls.co.uk ). A
cathedral has stood in east London 350 m north of the river Thames since 604 AD.
The predecessor of today's building was destroyed in the great fire of London in
1666. Sir Christopher Wren used the space created by the devastation to re define the
built environment for centuries. Its environs have not benefitted from such longevity.
Paternoster Square emerged from the bombed ruins of World War II: “[By 1967],
the area around St Paul's had been rebuilt. This was not exactly the broad, sunlit
uplands post-war urban planning might have been; more the grim, windswept plazas
of contemporary Fleet Street cliche. Yet at least the glum offices offered no threat to
Wren's monument” (Glancey 2003 ). In 2003 Glancey also reported “everything has
changed. After a protracted struggle, Paternoster Square Mk2 is finally complete -
and St Paul's is now flanked to its north by a gathering of burly office blocks clad
in the architectural equivalent of tweed coats. The odd bit of classical paste and
some bizarre 1930s Italian fascist-style posturing help complete the look of this
architectural fancy dress party”.
When the Persian fleet threatened Athens, the oracle at Delphi claimed the
Athenians defence lay in a “wall of wood”: the navy. And so it proved: small, highly
manoeuvrable Greek triremes destroyed the numerically superior, larger more cum-
bersome Persian warships in the confined waters off Salamis. What began on land
with the 300 at Thermopylae and was to finish with the good news from Marathon
received essential momentum by Themistocles' use of his wall of wood. Silver paid
for the ships; silver won from the mines of Lavrion (Fig. 25.3 ) at a price that its
community would continue to pay for the next two and a half millennia as lead in
the ore damaged children's healthy development. Yet, Lavrion survived and so did
the Athenian seeds of western civilisation.
The work of the CABERNET network highlighted some high level principles that
seem to characterise regeneration that is generally thought to have been effective,
lasting and who knows, in the long run even sustainable (Table 25.1 ). While these
Fig. 25.3 The ruins of the Lavrion silver mine in Attica, Greece
(source: C P Nathanail, reproduced with permission)