Cover Story: What's so funny about Croydon?

It's the archetypal dreary Sixties concrete jungle ... or is it? As Jonathan Glancey reports, Croydon has plans to transform itself. Big plans ...

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, Mrs Bridget Driscoll was knocked down and killed by a Roger-Benz automobile. This new-fangled mechanical nasty was beetling through the outskirts of Croydon at the legal limit (4mph) and poor Mrs Driscoll became the very first of half-a-million Brits culled by the motor car.

In retrospect, Croydon seemed an appropriate setting for this novel Victorian tragedy, for few English towns have been given over so promiscuously to the car. When Croydon was rebuilt in the Sixties, under the direction of Alan Holt, the undivertible borough engineer, it became a showcase of motorway-age culture and infrastructure. Stark and voluminous sub-Manhattan office blocks rose at high speed above fast urban dual-carriageways. Overpasses, underpasses, roundabouts and municipal car parks followed one another as surely as night followed day in this most ambitious of all suburban towns.

Last month, the evening skyline of downtown Croydon was flooded with a rainbow of bright electric light - "the most adventurous building lighting scheme ever staged in a British town" it proclaimed - as part of a policy that began perhaps three years ago of brightening up the town and preparing for a change in its status. Croydon has become less car-minded and, despite problems raising the necessary pounds 180m, is hoping to build an ambitious 18-mile European-style tram network to relieve local traffic congestion and to make Croydon the epicentre of south suburban London. This was to have opened in 1995 and then 1998, but is unlikely to be completed until at least the turn of the century.

By this you will have gauged that Croydon is an ambitious sort of town. It is. It is the town, above all others, that would be a city.

Its suburban light-show was the opening shot in Croydon's pounds 6.8m "Skyline Project", which promises to culminate in the construction of the controversial pounds 500,000 "Tower of Light". This 164ft "21st-century sun-dial" is a mast of steel and billowing fabric sails, designed by the architect Clark Geddes, which will sail over the town centre.

Not everyone is convinced. Of the lighting fantasmagoria, councillor Mary Walker, leader of the Labour-controlled borough, said: "It will give the thousands of people who live and work in Croydon a dramatic foretaste of what we believe will distinguish the town and foster a feeling of immense pride." Brian Sewell, art critic of the Evening Standard, a newspaper that never fails to take pot-shots at "boring" Croydon's urban ambitions, says: "It's hideous. The real problem is that if they had invested in decent buildings in the first place, they wouldn't be having to jump through hoops now."

While it is true that in tripping the light fantastic, the borough transformed central Croydon into a startling Andy Warhol vision of Manhattan on acid, the Skyline Project is spirited and fun. But of the Tower of Light, councillor Geraint Davies (Lab) says: "It's a tacky, tasteless, Star-Trekian folly that will boldly go where no man will want to go again." And Mary Walker (Lab), so keen on the lumiere-sans-son, says: "This is a monstrous carbuncle, and if this is built, Croydon will be the butt of jokes once again."

It is left to the council's Conservative members to support Croydon's reworking of the Festival of Britain's Skylon. "The tower will enhance Croydon," says the Tory leader, Maurice Fowler. "It will be a talking point and bring attention to the centre."

Listen to these modern Croydon mantras once again: "butt of jokes", "enhance". Croydon is all too self-conscious of its image as the high-rise epicentre of all things suburban, bureaucratic and dull. It is, in the popular imagination, the spiritual home of shopping malls (the recently revamped Whitgift Centre in the heart of Croydon was one of the country's first), of superstores, DIY centres and of polyester-nylon suits. It wants, above all, to "enhance" itself.

An apparently solid middle-class borough, Croydon is, in fact, a mix of rich and poor, black and white, Conservative and Labour. As Wally Garratt, former Mayor of Croydon, told me, "The borough has always been divided between the artisan north bordering on Lambeth, a poor part of London, and the prosperous south, which we call the Surrey Hills. When the recession began to pinch the folk on the hills, the Labour vote grew and the Tory hegemony was slowly undermined."

Hegemony was the right word: from 1884 to 1994, Tories dominated the local council, before finally being trounced by Labour at the last local elections. The Tory hegemony made sense in a borough where, by 1989, 84 per cent of all homes were privately owned and in which 1,000 new businesses had taken root during the years of the Thatcher-Lawson boom.

Although Croydon prospered in the Eighties, its Conservative councillors tended to be more One Nation Tories than Thatcherites. So much so that the council consistently and gallantly refused to abide by Westminster's draconian policy of rate-capping: Croydon, unlike many other boroughs, was comfortably off, thank you, and would spend on public services and infrastructure as it saw fit.

This magnanimous policy saw Croydon doing everything it could to enhance (that word again) itself from the late Eighties. The refusenik Tory-led council commissioned Croydon Clocktower, the fine new pounds 30m arts centre and library alongside the Victorian town hall. It promised to build a tramway, invited the Architecture Foundation in 1993 to present proposals by 15 sophisticated architects to remodel and otherwise revamp the city (sorry, town) centre. Croydon's local authority schools and health-care services, meanwhile, were among the best in the country and redolent of a Britain when the welfare state was something to be proud of.

They rebuilt the central railway station in a gung-ho hi-tech style (more people commute into Croydon to work than commute from here to central London, 11 miles to the north) and revelled in the new- found fame that Kate Moss, superwaif, brought to her home town.

Despite the turn of the political tide in 1994, Croydon was clearly becoming proud of itself. No, Croydon was not simply just one banal shopping centre (the largest in southern England outside London's West End); it was also home to the "Picasso Bestiary", a superb exhibition of animal sculpture by the famous artist, with artworks lent by the Picasso Museum, Barcelona. What this meant was that Croydon had joined the elite circle of European cities (that word again), that are lent precious artworks by the world's leading collections. Of all the Croydons in the world (there are five in Australia, three in the United States, two in Canada, not forgetting Croydon, Cambridgeshire), Surrey's Croydon, one-time Saxon Crogdene (Valley of Saffron), was clearly top of the heap.

A sympathetic visitor to Croydon, here perhaps to witness this week's trippy light-show, will find more than office-loads of diasporic civil servants, burger-joints, instant exhaust-replacement centres and the headquarters of a proliferation of insurance companies and finance houses. There are, for a start, the town's lovely and unparalleled litany of High Victorian churches, vast Gothic Revival masterpieces by, among others, SS Teulon, JL Pearson, EB Lamb and Sir George Gilbert Scott, Croydon-born architect of the Albert Memorial, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, the Foreign Office, Whitehall and too many churches (and church restorations) to think of, let alone list.

There is music at the Fairfield Halls (little sister of the Royal Festival Hall), drama at the Ashcroft Theatre (and in the Crown Court), and one of the best libraries (certainly the most inventive children's section) in the country.

When Croydon and the 320,000 people who live there are so unkindly teased, it seems only right to try to redress the balance. Croydon, however, has a long way to go before it loses the look of one of the more successful Eastern bloc cities of the Sixties, or a Texas town on the verge of a Fifties oil boom. But, with light-shows, a Tower of Light, swish 220-seater trams, a new generation of high-quality civic architecture, old Saxon Crogdene is determined to become a serious alternative to the West End. It still has to curb the car, but a Continental-style cappuccino culture and city status is lying out their somewhere in the Valley of Saffron.