The first time I went to Barcelona was, by happy chance, the week General Franco died. The city was spectacular then as now, but seedy in large parts, and patrolled by Civil Guards who could have been mistaken for Nazi soldiers or, at least, extras from Where Eagles Dare.
Before the week was out, I watched some of the same soldiers helping students take down street signs on what was then the Avenida Generalissimo Franco and is now the Diagonal, the great retail avenue that slashes across the 19th-century grid of the part of town known as Eixample, in which you find Gaudi's eye-boggling Sagrada Familia. I joined a party at the old Amaya restaurant on the Rambla Santa Monica. My hotel, the Espana - a wonderfully eccentric design by Gaudi's contemporary Domenech i Montaner - in the Barri Xines (Chinatown), was at the heart of all-night celebrations. Soldiers, students, dock workers, loudly painted whores. If it seemed that the capital of Catalunya was awakening from a long and dismal dream, it was because it was. The sense of liberation was extraordinary and something not to be experienced in a European city again until the fall of the Berlin Wall 14 years later.
Much has changed since. Barcelona has risen from the banality of fascist repression into perhaps the most respected and best-loved city in Europe. The Hotel Espana, a romantic dive in my student days, is now quite expensive and the Barri Xines no longer the dark and dangerous quarter it was before the 1992 Olympics clean-up.
The things that haven't changed are the plodding onwards-and-upwards construction of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia (there is no date set for the completion of this extraordinary stone vegetable patch) and the city's unswerving commitment to the very best in architecture and urban design. So much so that the city has been awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. A gift of Queen Elizabeth from the hands of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the award remains the most prestigious of its kind worldwide.
In the past, the medal has been largely the preserve of heroic individuals - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies, Lutyens, Foster, Piano, Niemeyer, Tadao Ando. It passed by Barcelona's Antoni Gaudi, but as this brilliant individualist is well on his way to becoming a saint, it is very unlikely that he is fretting in heaven as a result of the RIBA's dismissal, or ignorance, of his protean talent. The award is an inspired one, for it is to Barcelona that so many of us look when thinking of how cities could develop. By the way, this great city is twinned with Dublin .
No one, least of all the Gold Medal committee judges (including Sir Norman Foster, whose communications tower is one of the most striking recent designs in the city), is pretending that Barcelona is a model of urban perfection. Except in the imagination and at the end of Pilgrim's Progress, there is no such thing.
Barcelona, for all its natural and man-made beauty, remains a hard-edged port and is still ringed around with dismal high-rise suburbs that are about as friendly as a member of Franco's Civil Guard. It is rather the strides that have been made in urban design and architecture over the past two decades that fired the judges' imagination. In the first few years of liberation from Franco and day-to-day rule by Castillian Madrid, visitors to Barcelona thrilled to a shot of youthful exuberance represented in a new wave of supremely self-confident and beautifully designed cafes, bars and nightclubs. Barcelona was in party mood.
Remarkably, the results were not ephemeral. Bars of the 1980s such as Alicia Nunez and Guillem Bonet's Zig Zag, Eduardo Samso's Nick Havanna, Alfredo Arribas and Samso's Network - as well as a later generation including Xavier Mariscal and Arribas's Gambrinus and Arribas's homage to David Lynch, Velvet - have all stood the test of time. The joy of Barcelona, unlike, say London, is that the interiors of buildings built solely for pleasure are as well designed, well built and as well looked after as museums and art galleries. Old bars and cafes, ones where Picasso used to drink (Bar Pastis on Calle Santa Monica) or grand art nouveau joints such as Bar London (Calle Nou de la Rambla) remain as they were. Their heyday has yet to pass.
In the design and fate of these glorious bars, one gets a good-time feel of why Barcelona works so well as a city: it has allowed one layer of design and architectural excellence to overlay another without the one defacing or destroying the other. In Britain, there is a tendency to strip out interiors and to demolish buildings with wilful abandon. In the quest for the new, however transient, we try to pretend that the past is a foreign country, or else we cling to it as we do to a battered old teddy bear and pretend the present, let alone the future, doesn't exist. Barcelona's multi-layered quality is evident at every turn. From the port and the old Gothic quarter, the city opens up like some gigantic flower, with petals of 18th, 19th and 20th century architecture, much of it neat and regular, some of it - Gaudi, of course - utterly fantastic.
Recent high points include plans for the redevelopment of the Sagrera-Sant Andreu district around the new international rail terminal (unlike us, the Spanish like their railways), and the reconstruction of the old docks and seafront that were realised in time for the opening of the 1992 Olympic Games. There's the restored Liceu Opera House, the pristine and icy new Museum of Contemporary Arts (every city has to have one: this one was designed by the US architect Richard Meier), but, above all, the sheer quality of the revitalised public places and spaces that thread their way through the city down from the heights of Tibidabo to the seafront.
These weave the centre of the city together in a delightful manner; they are a model of their kind. They began under the aegis of Oriol Bohigas, the charming architect and urban planner who was the city's delegate for urban affairs from 1979-83 and, more recently, councillor for culture. Bohigas's programme of urban revival was a work of quiet genius. Rather than begin with grand new plans after Franco's descent into Hell, Bohigas recommended improvements at a very local level and on a small scale. Bit by bit, from tiny inner-suburban plazas to grandiloquent spaces, such as the Placio dels Paisos Catalans outside the city's main railway station, the public face of the city was imaginatively groomed. Only after this work (which continues) was well under away did the grand plans start. Meanwhile, the urban infrastructure - roads, trams, buses, Metro - was improved to a standard that equals the best in the world. Contrast this with London, where the transport network has been carved up and flogged off into an aesthetic and commercial gutter.
Here we enter the territory of city politics. The transformation of Barcelona that has encouraged RIBA to award its Gold Medal would have been impossible without an ambitious, intelligent and co-ordinated democratic local government. It would also have been impossible without such dynamic and popular local politicians as Pasquall Maragall or such effective urban planners as Oriol Bohigas. The belief these politicians have in an integrated city - and you will be hard-pressed to find one ignorant of the fine details of architecture, design, art and urban planning - is one that we can only wonder at.
WHERE we treat cities as some sort of low-rent department store to be cut up, deregulated, privatised and trashed at will, the men and women who have raised Barcelona to new international heights over the past 24 years see their city as an organism to be nurtured and treated as a whole, not as a book of bits. In awarding Barcelona their Gold Medal, the RIBA judges are expressing a political sentiment: Barcelona is a lead we might yet follow. This will not require the death of a dictator, although it will require a small revolution. Our cities will not be ripe for Gold Medal treatment until they elect politicians who truly believe in them, politicians who see them as places for people to live civilised lives and not as playpens in which to exercise the tired old dogmas of deregulation, privatisation at any cost, and architecture on the cheap.
Go to Barcelona, if you haven't, to see what we could do if we tried.
