Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  At last it seemed that the Smithsons’ luck might finally change. In 1958, when they entered a competition to design new buildings for Churchill College, Cambridge. They did not win it, but their involvement led to a major commission from the chairman of The Economist, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, who wanted to build a penthouse for himself and a new home for his magazine’s office on a tight three-sided site in the heart of London clubland (the Smithsons were selected for the job from among those who’d entered the Churchill College competition). And this time, it was love all the way between client and architect. Sir Geoffrey said that The Economist’s staff had felt ‘trepidation’ on first meeting the Smithsons, but took leave of them ‘with awe and affection’, while the Smithsons thought their client brave and generous. ‘The Economist was a wonderful client,’ they wrote. ‘They had the nerve to commission and to build their own building, without any previous experience of how to do such a thing; allowing their architects to shape their work space from its presence in St James’s Street, Piccadilly, to its filing systems and taps in the lavatories.’ The buildings they designed for this space – a more than usually complex land deal meant that they needed to accommodate not only The Economist, but a bank and serviced flats for Boodle’s next door – is considered by many to be their masterpiece.

  At first sight, it’s difficult to see why. The development comprises a family of three towers grouped around a plaza. The largest of these towers feels too tall, and all three are clad in dreary roach-bed Portland stone, which looks just like concrete to the untutored eye. The Smithsons called their design ‘didactic . . . dry’ and, though they certainly didn’t mean this as an apology the buildings can feel, even on a bright spring morning, more of a study than a habitat, for all that they are very definitely occupied. Part of their brief was to provide a public open space that might become part of a wider network of pedestrian routes. But since this never really happened – you can catch a glimpse of Bury Street at its far side, but the courtyard is not much in use as a short-cut – the plaza feels curiously dead: a destination rather than a thoroughfare, and definitely not one that invites you to linger outdoors. Hardly surprising, then, that in 1992 someone had the bright idea of sticking a water sculpture in the middle of it.

  The Economist building

  (Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.)

  But a second visit makes things clearer. It’s pleasing that the shortest of the three towers – the one on the all-important street side – doesn’t try to compete with the older, fancier buildings that surround it, and the neat, chamfered corners of all three towers, designed so as not to steal light from adjoining buildings, have a softening effect on the group as a whole. The Smithsons anticipated and managed the weathering of their cladding, preventing the formation of the stains – like mascara that has run – that ruin the appearance of other modern stone-clad London buildings. Most admirable of all is the scheme’s attitude. I won’t call it unapologetic; that makes it sound like it’s waving two fingers at snooty St James’s, and this is not the case. But it isn’t tentative. It doesn’t tremble and quail in the face of what Alison called ‘a street and a district densely suffused with historical fact and accumulated meanings’. Nor is it overly fussy, as if to compensate for its status as upstart. The client, wary of ‘salaried teamwork’, was loth to commission a large firm, choosing instead a pair of architects who represented themselves rather than an office, and this proved to be the right decision. The Economist group is what it is. The critic Kenneth Frampton is right when he says that it has withstood the flow of time, the quality of the work appearing to improve rather than fade. There is something peevish about the argument, periodically raised, that it should be delisted (it was listed at Grade II* in 1988).

  But if only the office’s interior had survived its 1988 refurbishment. This was again Alison’s realm, and included a filing system in the form of a series of glorious Japanese-inspired lacquer boxes. Pillar-box red and silk-smooth to the touch, these tactile caskets seem to capture her essence in a way no building does; it’s hardly surprising to discover that she kept a couple back for her own use (one was used as a kind of vanity case, a home for a string of beads, and a comb, hairbrush and mirror*). A woman who understood more than most the power and comfort of work, she could have paid The Economist’s harried secretaries and journalists no greater compliment than to imbue their daily rituals with beauty, and just a hint of the clandestine. These are repositories for treasure, for secrets, for time bombs.

  Speaking of time bombs . . .

  With the exception of the Economist group, which was completed in 1962, the Sixties brought only more disappointment.† In 1966 the Smithsons designed an accommodation block for St Hilda’s College, Oxford, a tower (now Grade II listed) that they swathed in wooden screens ‘like a yashmak’ to create ‘a girl’s place’; also, perhaps, to nod in the direction of Britain’s half-timbered heritage, Tudor and Tudorbethan alike. (In the same year, as if to underline how little practice work they had going on, Alison published a stream-of-consciousness novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl.) But they lost two important jobs, turning down a commission for offices of The Times so that they could concentrate instead on designing a new British embassy for Brasilia, which, thanks to government cuts, was never built. This seems to have limited their careers decisively. The only other design they realised in this period was an extension to the Bayswater home of Wayland Young, the writer and politician: a chilly, single-storey pavilion built round an old tree, whose trunk burst exuberantly through its roof.

  Then, just as the decade was about to end, Alison and Peter finally got the chance to design, as they had long dreamed of doing, a vast social-housing project in Poplar, east London. (The LCC still had fifty-two thousand people on its waiting list; something had to be done). Here they would build the ‘streets in the sky’ they had proposed for Golden Lane almost twenty years before. Here they would build their answer to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. And on this project Alison would be the lead designer, working on every detail, right down to the mural in the old people’s social centre (she made it herself, each tile comprising a collage of broken pottery unearthed during the excavation of the site).

  The scheme had a pretty name: Robin Hood Gardens. But though it looked fabulously arresting in photographs, as such egg boxes always do, it was not pretty at all in the flesh. It consisted of two non-identical slab blocks of pre-cast concrete, ‘split like a kipper’ as Peter put it, and bent around a green mound made with the spoil of the buildings it replaced. There were 213 flats in all, access to which was provided by lifts at the end of every block and continuous decks that ran their full length.*

  Robin Hood Gardens was occupied in 1971, and completed in 1972, at a cost of £1,845,585. Vandals began their angry work soon after the first residents moved in. The facilities at the base of the building – the social centre and the launderette among them – closed just weeks later.

  Afterwards, Alison and Peter turned to teaching and writing. In the Eighties they designed several buildings for the University of Bath, where Peter lectured, and they worked on a house and small museum for Axel Buruchhäuser, the manager of Tecta, a furniture manufacturer in Bad Karlshafen, Germany.

  Alison died of breast cancer at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, London, on 14 August 1993. Before her death she wrote a last letter to Peter, in which she told him she could not have imagined a better life. At the end, Peter felt, their disappointments faded from view. The period from Golden Lane to Robin Hood Gardens had been a long haul; trying and failing to get things built had, he admitted, made them ‘lugubrious’. But as she lay dying, her work was only a comfort.

  No one knows how Peter got through the days at his drawing board after her death. It must have been agony; they had worked opposite each other every day for more than four decades. But somehow, he did. He compiled two volumes of their work, published as The Charged Void, and every year on
Alison’s birthday he would whittle a small wooden memorial. He died, of a stroke, on 3 March 2003.

  Of all the women in this book, it is Alison Smithson whose legacy is the most visible. It is also, as a consequence, the most tattered. Robin Hood Gardens is in a terrible state: shabby, depressing, fortress-like and cut off, as if by a hedge of thorns, from all that surrounds it. Tower Hamlets, the council that manages it, would like to knock it down and start all over again, but the architectural community continues to push for its listing.* Who will win? The smart money must be on Tower Hamlets. Only rarely do Brutalist buildings escape the wrecking ball once a campaign against them begins. Owen Luder’s Trinity Square in Gateshead – the car park in Get Carter – has already gone; so too has his Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth. Preston’s bus station may soon follow. Park Hill in Sheffield has been saved, it’s true, though you have to ask, at what cost? So much has been lost following its whizz-bang refurbishment by Urban Splash. But whether it stays or it goes, Robin Hood Gardens will never not be a symbol, now, of the modernists’ desire to realise a theoretical position at any price: the theory is that people can just as well live in a street in the sky as at ground level; the price is that unless they are rich and out at work all day, doing so makes them miserable and isolated. And this has fatally damaged the reputation of the woman who co-designed it.

  You might say: serves her right. But you might also think, what a pity, to be remembered only for this. Alison wasn’t easy. Her ego was as big as the more ambitious of her ideas. But she was clever, principled and fearless at a time when it was difficult for women to be any of these things. At Hunstanton she made an extraordinary building that changed the way many people thought about architecture, and which endures to this day. And her example gave permission to the women architects who came after her – step forward Zaha Hadid, with your socking great rings, your Comme des Garçons coats and your conviction that Robin Hood Gardens is your favourite London building – to be at all times wholly themselves.

  In the Garden with . . .

  Margery Fish

  (© Valerie Finnis/National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  ‘Dead nettles can be quite decorative . . .’

  In 1956 Vita Sackville-West reviewed a new gardening book for the Observer. All stirred up, she was unstinting in her praise. ‘It is,’ she said, ‘by a woman who, with her husband, created out of nothing the sort of garden we should all like to have: a cottage garden on a slightly larger scale . . . Crammed with good advice . . . I defy any amateur gardener not to find pleasure, encouragement and profit from [it].’

  This was quite something. Sackville-West, then the most famous plantswoman in Britain, had created a ravishing and much-photographed garden at Sissinghurst Castle, and yet here she was sounding halfway to envious of someone else’s rather more modest plot; if the publisher had written the review himself he could not have made the book sound any more appealing. But it was also a little misleading. We Made a Garden – its author went by the somewhat unprepossessing name of Margery Fish – was more memoir than manual, a collection of reminiscences rather than a step-by-step guide. Readers in search of hints for mulching their roses were going to be severely disappointed.

  Sackville-West was only half right when she wrote that the book tells the story of how Margery and her husband, Walter, built a garden from scratch. In truth, it tells two stories. First, there is the garden that Walter wanted: a regimented suburban parade of paths and lawns and dahlias; and then there is the garden that Margery longed for, and did in fact successfully create in the years following his death in 1947: a harmonious, informal, frothing sort of a garden, its borders filled with ‘green’ flowers, its shady corners crammed with hellebores, primroses, epimediums and, most important of all, her beloved snowdrops. Until her publisher put a stop to the idea Margery had wanted to call her book, which was her first, Gardening with Walter. But if she thought she’d produced a tribute to her husband she was surely deluding herself. A more honest title might have been A Gardener’s Revenge. Impossible to imagine for a moment that she would, or could, have written it when he was alive.

  When the book begins, it is 1937. Walter, a former editor of the Daily Mail who is eighteen years his wife’s senior, is convinced that war is coming, and that it would be wise for them to leave London. So they begin looking for a house in the country. This takes a while: Walter is, shall we say, difficult to please. Early on they see a place – long and low and built of honey-coloured hamstone, it comes with a malthouse and a barton (the Somerset word for farmyard) – at East Lambrook, near Yeovil, on which Margery, though she doesn’t dare say so out loud, is quietly keen. But Walter takes one look, shouts, ‘Not at any price!’ and promptly turns on his heel. Three months pass. They argue bitterly and fail to find anything at all worth buying, at which point, on a whim, they return to the first place they saw. This time it looks a little happier. Tiles have been replaced and the walls repainted, and Walter is now rather taken with its flag floors and wardrobe-sized fireplaces. Even so, you sense Margery’s amazement when he agrees that, yes, this will do. All their friends had thought they’d choose a house in good repair with a garden all ‘nicely laid out and ready to walk into’, but now the opposite is about to happen and Margery and Walter – metropolitan flat-dwellers who haven’t a pair of secateurs between them – will somehow have to create a garden ‘from a farmyard and a rubbish tip’.

  Where to start? Walter’s approach to the initial work is typically bullish. What he can’t burn he buries; poor Margery, out and about with her trowel, will regularly stumble on ‘grisly mementoes’ of this time for many years to come. And once the old beds, rusty oil stoves and ancient corsets have all been cleared, the ideological battle must commence. In the red (and yellow and orange) corner is Walter, with his Tudorbethan ideas about tidiness and colour. In the green corner is Margery, all sculptural seed pods and luxuriant foliage. Walter is alarmed. He hadn’t taken his wife for a modernist.

  So he goes on the attack, arguing for, and winning, his much-desired lawn, a province with which he is soon quite obsessed. ‘Walter would no more have left his grass uncut or the edges untrimmed than he would have neglected to shave,’ writes Margery, who at this stage in the book is still doing her best impression of a loyal wife. It is deliberately, aggressively vast, this lawn, and it is only grudgingly that Walter makes space at its edge for a very narrow flowerbed in which Margery is allowed to plant a few perennials so long as they don’t encroach on the grass. In another concession, he gives her permission to build a dry-stone wall. She does this very ably, tucking alpine plants into the crevices as she goes along, and Walter likes the result: he feels the same way about walls as he does about hedges. But if only she hadn’t spent so much time ‘poking belly-crawlers into rat holes’.

  And so it continues, like a bad sitcom (the fact that it began its life as an article for Punch may go some way to explaining this) – except that with every chapter Margery seems to grow more confident: no, she was obviously telling herself, Walter’s ghost, pale and pugnacious, is really not about to burst in through the French windows. Her courage blooms. She couldn’t tell Walter at the time what she thought of him, but she can say whatever the hell she likes now. She attacks his dahlias (‘the most flashy collection I have ever seen, only fit for a circus’). She repudiates his paths (since his death she has loosened the cement between the stones with a crowbar). She admits to her deceit in the matter of such things as manure (she used to steal it from around his roses, remembering as she did his oft-repeated comment that ‘women have no sense of honesty!’). What a fuss-pot he was, always counting the leaves on his clematis, and what a bore, droning on and on about the gardener he used to have in Sydenham, where he lived with his first wife before she died.

  And the sheer barminess of some of his schemes!

  At one point he and Margery agreed to train some red roses up the mellow walls of their house. Walter, though, was not known for his patience, and he knew
it would be some time before the plants would make much of an impact. So he devised a plan. ‘One day, without telling me, he bought a collection of stuffed heads and mounted horns at a London sale room. Very soon heads, antlers and horns sprouted from every available wall, inside and out. The malthouse received the most imposing pieces from the collection, and very soon our house wasn’t known as “the one with the lovely blue clematis on the front” but as “the house with all the heads on the outbuildings”.’ Happily, those he stuck outside didn’t last long: ‘Not being intended to withstand rain and snow the skin soon came apart and flapped open before falling in the drive, the fillings disintegrated, the painted mouths and red nostrils were washed away and before long all that was left were the horns . . . When they got to this stage I was allowed to put them on the bonfire, but I am still occasionally reminded of them when I am digging and see a large liquid brown eye gazing up at me.’ This thought leads her to a quieter rebuke: ‘Walter could never be persuaded to have a wisteria because he said they would take too long to flower. Now I have two, and both flowered about two years after I planted them.’

  We Made a Garden does contain some advice, if that is what you’re after. By the time she wrote it Margery had become an instinctive and highly original gardener; she knew what she was talking about. But its chief pleasure lies in watching its author emerge from an exhausting, all-consuming relationship – a union in which she was expected to defer to her husband, a man who was never wrong – and become a person in her own right. This is my taste, she says; this is my opinion; and this beautiful garden (the reader flips again to the book’s black-and-white plates of East Lambrook and its gorgeous, verdant vistas) is my victory. Not only did I beat the seasons, the Somerset clay and the confusing, unpredictable temperaments of my plants; I overcame Walter’s dogged campaign to reign me in, to fetter my unexpected, late-flowering creativity. She describes all this with mounting glee: it rises, like sap. A tiny part of you begins to wonder if she didn’t, in the end, bump him off, burying him in dead of night beneath the nearest holly bush.*