Europe’s most beautiful ugly cities where post-war architecture deserves a second look

Wouldn’t it be just the most brilliant thing if all new visitors to a city had to walk through a time-travel portal in order to earn entrance? Equipped with a time-lapse VR headset, we’d see the whole of the city’s geohistorical narrative unfold before we stepped out into the streets themselves.

In countless portals across Europe there would be one moment that would make everyone jolt in fright: furious World War Two bombing, the screen turning to rubble in the blink of an eye. The radical rebuild that follows refreshes the cityscape with architectural beacons of optimism – antidotes to hard times.

Urban backstory on board, wouldn’t we be more generous towards – and less sniffy about – city centres that have sometimes been dismissed as bruised, bland, brutal and best bypassed? Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, thinks we already are: “In the past decade or so, we’ve felt a tangible shift in public perceptions of so-called ‘beautiful ugly architecture’,”she says. “There’s a growing appreciation and re-appraisal of once maligned post-war buildings.”

In Swansea, Rotterdam, Plymouth and Le Havre, that seismic mid-century bang was just the beginning, rolling out a carpet of reinvention, culture, and seamless chapters of regeneration – before that was even a word on everyone’s lips. Here are some of the previously written-off urbanscapes that are worth another look.

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Abertawe (Swansea), Wales

Crude concrete bins aren’t generally what you expect to find as museum exhibits, but it’s this ilk of urban scenography that visitors are invited to contemplate at the exhibition Twentieth Century Swansea at the city’s museum, custodian of local history and one of the few buildings spared the ravages of 1941’s Three-Nights’ Blitz.

Creating modern thoroughfares out of the rubble might have been the perfect fairytale renaissance, but the South Walian city’s luck wasn’t always in: the rebuild was never fully completed, was criticised for lack of cohesion, and within too few decades was a case of faded gloss. The added…