BBC's £600m Salford base named 'ugliest new building'

MediaCityUK in Salford, the £600 million complex of buildings that will be the new Northern home of the BBC and ITV, has been crowned the "ugliest new building" in Britain.

The Peel Holdings development came through a competitive shortlist to scoop the 'Carbuncle Cup', a controversial annual prize complied by Building Design magazine to 'honour' the most aesthetically displeasing new structures.

This year's shortlist, drawn from suggestions by members of the public, included the Richard Rogers-designed One Hyde Park luxury flat block in London, Newport railway station in South Wales, and the Museum of Liverpool.

The BBC started the move of various departments to MediaCityUK in May, while the complex will also be home to the media studies faculty of Salford University and Granada TV, which will move to the site next year and create a brand new set for Coronation Street complete with the Rovers Return.

In today's Building Design, editor Ellis Woodman said that the "overriding sense" about MediaCityUK "is one of extreme anxiety on the part of the architects - an unholy alliance of Wilkinson Eyre, Chapman Taylor and Fairhursts - about the development's isolation, 20 minutes' tram ride from the centre of Manchester".

He added: "No-one can be too surprised that Peel Holdings - responsible for a wretched riverside redevelopment in Glasgow and with another planned for Liverpool - is behind MediaCityUK but quite how the BBC has stooped this low is hard to fathom.

"In 2003 the corporation published Building the BBC: A Return to Form, which trumpeted its newfound role as a patron of architecture. 'The BBC has found its nerve again and risen to its role as national champion and patron of the arts,' wrote Dan Cruickshank in the book's foreword. Well, it lost it pretty quickly thereafter.

"David Chipperfield and Richard MacCormac were ditched from their commissions mid-job, while Foreign Office Architects' project never even got off the drawing board. Visiting MediaCityUK, it is hard to see how the corporation could set its aspirations any lower."