State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But it was in the decade that followed, as the high-minded middle classes turned their attention to the spread of factory farming, the growth of suburbia and the blight of pollution, that conservationism began to acquire a genuinely significant following. Membership of the Ramblers’ Association (obviously a form of leisure, though a green-tinged one) doubled between 1962 and 1972; meanwhile, coverage of environmental issues in The Times increased by 280 per cent between 1965 and 1973. Of course, these were not yet issues that concerned the great majority of the population. Ramblers, conservationists and early eco-activists tended to be middle-class couples working in the professions, the arts and (as per the stereotype) teaching. All the same, as early as the mid-1960s there was a palpable sense of momentum and enthusiasm.9

  As a reaction against modernity, industrialization and big business, and as a celebration of the pastoral, the organic and the small-scale, the environmental movement naturally appealed to the youngsters who made up the counterculture of the late 1960s. But the counterculture did not ‘give birth’ to environmentalism, as is often thought. Not only did the green movement come first, but it appealed to plenty of people who were not hippies at all. There had always been a strong strain of pastoral romanticism in English culture (and the American historian Martin Weiner, in a book beloved by Thatcherites but derided by many scholars, even argued that the High Tory suspicion of capitalism lay at the root of Britain’s economic problems). What is certainly true is that by the mid-1960s plenty of people were becoming worried about the social costs of economic growth. In his book The World We Have Lost (1965), for example, the historian Peter Laslett evoked an age before ‘progress’ and industry, a vanished English landscape in which ‘the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size’. Two years later the LSE economist E. J. Mishan published The Costs of Economic Growth, warning that the pursuit of progress led only to ‘the waste land of Subtopia’, a world with less and less room for individualism, religion and the family. ‘Growthmania’, Mishan warned, was ‘more likely on balance to reduce rather than increase social welfare’; in the meantime, the ‘rich local life centred on township, parish and village’ had been cruelly destroyed. And at the same time, the economist Barbara Ward published her groundbreaking Spaceship Earth, in which she asked readers to imagine themselves as the crew on a precarious space voyage, depending ‘for life itself’ on their fragile earth, which was being ‘contaminated and destroyed’ by man’s reckless arrogance. She drew her central image from the pictures astronauts had sent back of the beautiful blue-green Earth hanging in space; it was to prove a lasting and highly influential metaphor.10

  It was one of Ward’s friends, however, who published the best-known green manifesto of the 1970s. Born in Bonn just before the First World War, Fritz Schumacher had emigrated to England in the late 1930s and worked for a time as a statistician at Oxford before becoming chief economic adviser to the National Coal Board and a part-time adviser to the Labour Party. He was a strange, contradictory man, with a brilliant mind, an impatient manner and a sharp tongue, as well as a vague sense of spiritual yearning that became increasingly intense as his career seemed to stall. For much of the 1950s, as his ideas for the future of Britain’s coal industry were ignored by the Coal Board, he felt frustrated and aimless, and he began to pour his energies into a succession of eccentric hobbies, from astrology and yoga to Eastern religions and organic foods, which were nowhere near as fashionable then as they would be ten years later. In particular, Schumacher found comfort in gardening, which he approached with his usual fierce energy. In 1950 he bought a house with four acres of land in rural Surrey, and he began to cultivate the land, not with the chemical-intensive techniques popular at the time, but with organic methods, which most people had long since abandoned. For support he turned to a small fringe group called the Soil Association, and in 1970, the year he retired from the Coal Board, Schumacher became its president.11

  It was not Schumacher but his editor, Anthony Blond, who came up with the title for his book, which was originally called ‘The Homecomers’. Struck by the power of the fashionable catchphrase ‘Black is Beautiful’, Blond suggested Small is Beautiful – a phrase that not only captured Schumacher’s ideas very nicely, but seized the imagination of the emerging environmental movement. For although Schumacher’s book was really just a compilation of lectures and articles, through it ran a constant thread of anti-modernist radicalism, urging a retreat from the industrial and the large-scale, and a realization that ‘man is small, and therefore small is beautiful’. He had flirted with Buddhism since the late 1950s, when he had been sent as an adviser to the Burmese government, and argued for what he called ‘Buddhist’ economics, celebrating ‘the joy of work and the bliss of leisure’. Britain’s decline, he thought, was rooted in spirituality as well as economics. The nation had sold its soul for the promise of ever-expanding abundance; it needed to rediscover the pleasures of small-scale farming, of tending the soil, of looking after animals, of thrift, balance and self-sufficiency. There was nothing inherently wrong with technology, or even with industry itself; but if the breakneck rush towards massive industrialization continued much longer, the world was heading for catastrophe. Yet Schumacher was neither a pessimist nor a doom-monger. By taking action in their own small way, he argued, millions of ordinary people could change the world; by switching to organic farming, for example, or by keeping their own animals, or merely by leading quieter, more modest lives. ‘Everywhere people ask: “What can I actually do?” ’ he concluded. ‘The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.’12

  It was not surprising that Schumacher’s vision struck such a chord with readers in the early 1970s. ‘England is the country, and the country is England,’ Stanley Baldwin had famously said half a century before, evoking what he thought to be timeless images of Englishness: ‘the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill’, something that would ‘be seen in England long after the Empire has perished’. But he was wrong about that. For when visitors to the countryside looked out across the rolling acres of English farmland, they now saw a landscape utterly transformed.

  Farmers were far more productive than ever before (the average cow produced 200 gallons more milk than she had in the 1950s, while the typical hen laid twice as many eggs) and during the 1970s they became expert at lobbying for grants and tax breaks, as well as picking up an estimated £1.5 billion in subsidies from Brussels in just seven years. Once mocked as backward and reactionary, they grew fat on the proceeds of the Common Agricultural Policy, which encouraged production regardless of cost or quality, and they used their large profits to invest in fleets of combine harvesters, tractors and Land Rovers. But they seemed to have lost something of their souls in the process. Small farmers were steadily being driven out by ambitious businessmen like Jack Eastwood, the broiler-chicken millionaire who owned 12,000 acres in Northamptonshire, or Bernard Matthews, the Norfolk turkey tycoon, famous for his ‘Bootiful!’ catchphrase. In 1971, one writer recorded that there were now barely 350,000 farm workers left in Britain. Soon the typical farm would ‘consist of a farmer, his wife and a lot of machinery’. Farmers were no longer husbandmen; they were factory managers, often working for a pension fund that had bought the farm and leased it back to its original owner. And even at this stage, they had become dependent on the market for convenience foods, producing vast quantities of peas and beans for Birds Eye, Findus and Marks & Spencer. ‘Processions of pea-picking machines like mechanical dragons roar into the quiet farms of East Anglia,’ wrote Anthony Sampson, ‘racing from one field to the next, working all night under arc-lights to devour their quota.’ Farmers already had to produce ‘always the same width of pea, the same fat-content of pork-meat, the same size of
apple all over the country’. As one bitterly remarked: ‘You can farm against the weather, but you can’t farm against Birds Eye.’13

  Efficiency came at a heavy cost, not just to the traditional relationship between the people and the countryside, but to the landscape itself. It was not merely the vast fields of sugar beet and oilseed rape; as the historian Robert Colls writes, it was the ‘bulldozed hedgerows, the cut-down woods, the conifer plantations, the nitrates, pesticides and dubious feedstuffs, the battery cages and broiler sheds, the slurry tanks, the giant machinery, and the sheer emptiness born of planning policies designed to prevent smallholders from repopulating and reworking the land’. Encouraged by subsidies and supermarkets to turn the land into a gigantic industrial operation, farmers tore down anything that stood in the way of profit, from hedgerows and woodlands to meadows and wetlands. With Whitehall handing out grants for this very purpose – a classic example of modernization gone mad – farmers were ripping out more than 10,000 miles of hedges a year, indifferent to the cost in beauty and wildlife. And as woods and hedgerows disappeared, so the countryside lost much of its variety: the birds and butterflies, the roaming animals and wild flowers that had been there for centuries, sacrificed to the insatiable demands for cheap food and instant profit. By 1980, when Marion Shoard, a former official at the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, published her broadside The Theft of the Countryside, Britain had already lost a staggering 24 million trees, 150,000 miles of hedgerow and a third of its woodlands, meadows, streams and marshes. Norfolk had lost 45 per cent of its hedges, Devon 20 per cent of its woodlands, Suffolk 75 per cent of its heathland, Bedfordshire 70 per cent of its wetlands. The landscape was ‘under sentence of death’, she wrote. And the executioner was not ‘the industrialist or the property speculator’, as city-dwellers often assumed, but ‘the figure traditionally viewed as the custodian of the rural scene – the farmer’.14

  But while the 1970s were tough years for rural England, its landscape violated, its villages increasingly deserted as post offices were closed and bus services cancelled, they were not much better for towns and cities. When many people got up and looked out of their bedroom windows, they saw not the brick and stone contours of settlements that had developed organically over the centuries, but wildernesses of concrete and tarmac, utopian post-war visions that had gone horribly wrong. Take the nation’s second city, Birmingham, once a beacon of enlightened Victorian town planning, but rebuilt in the early 1960s as a monument to modern brutalism, its city centre dominated by a vast inner ring road and the huge slab of the Bull Ring, earning it a national reputation for choked flyovers, soulless towers and rain-sodden concrete. At the time, the travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse praised it as ‘the most go-ahead city in Europe’, yet as early as 1972 The Times was lamenting that while the old city centre had had ‘a quality and warmth of its own’, the new was like a ‘large and chaotic building site’ with all traces of history and distinctiveness suffocated by a ‘wave of concrete’. It was no wonder that four years later the BBC used its flyovers and underpasses as the backdrop to Philip Martin’s gritty series Gangsters (1976–8), which broke new ground in its depiction of the seedy corruption, organized crime and casual racism beneath the surface of the modern British city. As one local woman put it when she wrote to the local paper about the redevelopment of Paradise Circus: ‘Where could another Paradise be found that is so completely and utterly soulless?’15

  While Birmingham was justly notorious for its concrete bleakness, other towns and cities fared little better. In Margaret Drabble’s state-of-the-nation novel The Ice Age (1977), a woman arrives in the Yorkshire town of Northam to find that ‘the developers’ have done their worst: as she steps out of the station, she sees ‘an enormous roundabout, the beginning of a flyover, a road leading to a multi-storey car park, and an underpass’, but no signs of human life. She struggles through the underpass with her bags ‘in the stink of carbon monoxide, shuffling through litter, walled in by high elephantine walls, deafened and sickened’, only to emerge on a traffic island, cut off from the distant shops by four lanes of roaring traffic. ‘This was an environmental offence as bad as a slag heap,’ she thinks, feeling a surge of hatred towards the people responsible. Among them, as it happens, is her own husband, a successful property developer. In a nicely caustic passage, Drabble shows him contemplating an architect’s model of a new concrete building, conscious that ‘the grass would be covered in dog shit, that the trees would be vandalized and killed’ – but not caring, because ‘that would not be his fault, or the fault of his property company. It would be the fault of the people.’16

  Of course this was a caricature. At the time, most planners saw themselves as pioneering social engineers, using the proceeds of growth to banish the cramped and insanitary slum conditions that had blighted working-class lives for generations. As disciples of Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘to save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre’, they did not see themselves as reckless vandals. In their own minds they were progressive egalitarians, tearing down what another of Drabble’s characters calls the ‘mucky little alleyways’, and putting up bold, clean blocks, wide avenues and generous car parks. And yet Drabble’s caustic portrait was a highly seductive one, for by the mid-1970s developers and planners were almost universally loathed. ‘The answer to the terraced, two-up, two-down house is a grey skyscraper with its head lost in the clouds; to the crowded street, a stretch of unbroken grass big enough to fight a war on; to the corner grocer’s, a yawning shopping plaza,’ wrote Jonathan Raban in 1974. ‘Behind all these strategies lies a savage contempt for the city and an arrogant desire to refashion human society into almost any shape other than the one we have at present.’ Even the chief planner of the Greater London Council, David Eversley, conceded:

  ‘The Planner’ has become a monster, a threat to society, one of the most guilty of the earth-rapers. Suddenly he has become a breaker of communities, a divider of families, a promoter of neuroses (first noticed as ‘New Town Blues’), a feller of trees and bringer of doom by noise, visual intrusion and pollution, a destroyer of our natural heritage, a callous technocrat razing to the ground a large proportion of Britain’s historic buildings. He is regarded as a dictator, a technocratic law unto himself, outside the processes of democratic control.

  Indeed, if anyone doubted that planners were the root of all evil, they needed only to listen to Douglas Adams’s radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), in which Arthur Dent’s intergalactic adventures begin when the Earth is demolished to make way for ‘a hyper-spatial express route’. As the Guide itself puts it, the alien race responsible, the Vogons, are ‘one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.’ Typical planners, in other words.17

  If there was one building that symbolized the damage done to British cities in the heyday of modernist planning, it was the high-rise tower block. Conceived as a cheap way to get people out of their run-down tenements and into clean, safe council accommodation with all the latest amenities, tower blocks were heavily promoted by both Conservative and Labour governments in the 1950s and 1960s. Crucially, they were quick and easy to build, which meant immediate results for politicians and planners alike; equally importantly, they were seen as a progressive alternative to the sprawling suburban estates that were steadily devouring the countryside. So when Harold Wilson promised voters that Labour would build half a million new homes a year by 1970, tower blocks naturally filled the gap. Between 1964 and 1968, local authorities built, on average, almost 40,000 high-rise flats a year, with the biggest concentrations coming in Greater London, Glasgow, the West Midlands and the North-west. In London alone, there were more than 68,000 high-rise flats by the time the boom ended. In Birmingham there were 24,000, in Liverpool 19,000, in Leeds 12,000, and in Glasgow, where city authorities prided themselves on building bigger and taller than anyone else, high-rise flats constituted a staggering thr
ee-quarters of all new housing built in the 1960s. By the time the planners lost faith in high-rise solutions – thanks partly to the gas explosion at Ronan Point in 1968, but also to the fact that funds were running out as the economy tightened – more than 1.5 million people, generally in some of Britain’s poorest urban areas, found themselves looking out of a grimy window ten, twelve or twenty storeys in the air.18

  By the turn of the decade, the newspapers were already full of stories about the nightmarish experience of high-rise living. To working-class families used to living cheek by jowl with their neighbours on crowded terraced streets, or to couples who had long dreamed of their own little house and garden, the brutal concrete reality of estates like Glasgow’s Red Road, Sheffield’s Park Hill or Hunslet Grange in Leeds came as a deep disappointment. A survey for the Department of the Environment in 1973 found that high-rise residents suffered from more health problems because they were less likely to go for walks or exercise, while other studies found that the elderly and children were more likely to get respiratory infections from being trapped inside all day. The infirm and disabled lived in terror of the lifts breaking down, as they often did; parents lamented that their children had nowhere to play; residents of all ages complained bitterly at the lack of a garden, the absence of shops and the culture of teenage bullying, drug abuse and gang violence. Vandalism was a constant problem: shut up inside all day, many teenagers almost literally had nothing better to do, and as early as the mid-1960s almost one in three high-rise residents complained that graffiti, litter and damage were everyday problems. At the Avebury estate in Southwark, vandalism was so bad that just four years after the blocks were finished, they had to be repaired at a cost of £2 million, a sixth of what they had cost to build.