Deco Demolition

On Thursday I was in Poole for my aunt's funeral. It was all fine, thank you, and as she'd been very poorly for a long while it wasn't that sad an occasion. We drove to the Salterns Hotel in Lilliput where the wake was being held, me tailgating my sister who was being directed by our mum who actually knew where to go. The car park seemed to be full so I went and parked over the other side of the main road and then made my way back to the hotel. This took me along Salterns Way, where I boggled at the Modernist and Art Deco-styled buildings and took photographs of several. Then along Lagoon Road to the north I spotted a building which I was sure I'd photographed back in the early 2000s when I was doing my little survey of Deco buildings in southeast Dorset. When I got home I compared the photos I'd just taken with the ones in my archive, and realised how radically the streets had changed.

12 Salterns Way, South Haven, is still there: 

But, most curiously, many of the buildings have been extensively remodelled. Here are nos. 9, 11 (Seascape), and, in the process of being built, 13, back in the early 2000s. No.9 is now gone completely, but Seascape and no.13 ...

... now look like this. You can see the remains of the old buildings within the footprint of the new, but the slightly boxy Seascape now has curves and big vertical windows, while no.13's staircase tower is now higher, it has two sets of windows, and they're tinged green. The house is now called 'Decadence' (very 1920s, darling). 

Further along is no.30. Here is its appearance c.2003, a modest little property with a nice circular stair tower (you can see these elsewhere in the conurbation) and some horizontal windows:

It took me a while to identify no.30 still surviving - just about - inside the shell of the grandiose buildings which now occupy the site of it and no.32 next door: 

At least I think it does. The staircase tower seems still to be there, much refashioned and now mirrored by the rebuilt no.32. Round the corner in Lagoon Road is no.9, which used to be called Lucky Star. 

Boxy and not really very Deco, it still seemed to be in a genuinely 1930s idiom. It's now encased in something which looks much more the part:

But not every building I photographed fifteen years or so ago has made it through, even in an etiolated form. 1 Salterns Way, the most modest and lowly Deco structure in the area - and all the more interesting for it ...

... now appears to have been replaced by this jazzy Modernist experiment. Ah, all it needed was a lick of paint. Even the silver birch trees have been replaced by those awful palms that die every few years:

What this reveals is something very interesting for those of us who have an affection for Art Deco architecture, something I've noticed before. The general public, and the jobbing architects who build its homes, are aware there is such a thing as Art Deco, and that it signifies glamour and modernity. They know what it's supposed to look like; and when they actually encounter it, all too often it isn't Deco enough. The consumer wants more glamour and excitement than the real past can provide.