On top of all that, many system-built flats were shoddily and cheaply put together. Their concrete walls were soon stained with rainwater and damp, growing lichen and fungus and sometimes developing deep structural cracks. Built with undue haste and a cavalier lack of care, they proved enormously expensive to maintain: on one Portsmouth estate where water had leaked behind the concrete cladding panels, it cost the local authority a cool £1.5 million to repair just two towers. And in a survey of sixty local authorities at the end of the 1970s, the architecture writer Sutherland Lyall found that almost all had been forced to spend vast amounts of money repairing cracked cladding, leaking roofs and damp walls that were barely a decade old, coming to a total of at least £200 million. But while architects insisted that they were hard done by, blaming the local authorities for not spending more to maintain the blocks and the tenants themselves for treating them so badly, it was of course the residents who suffered most. As many as four out of ten told researchers they felt lonely and cut off; in London and Sheffield, half of the residents interviewed said they would move immediately if they had the chance.19
By the early 1970s, the tower block had become a powerful metaphor for the shattered ideals of the post-war consensus, associated in the public mind with graffiti, drug addiction, unemployment and crime – as well as with the arrogance of middle-class planners, infected with the spirit of social engineering, who had tried to force design solutions on working-class families without bothering to find out what they actually wanted. And when writers and reporters visited high-rise estates in the early 1970s, they did so with a sense of sadness and horror. Arriving in the Millbrook estate in Southampton, ‘a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’, Jonathan Raban found a dismal scene of glowering concrete blocks, deserted service roads and poorly maintained grassland ‘patrolled by gangs of sub-teenage youths and the occasional indecent-exposure freak’. Inside, most of the people he interviewed complained of theft and vandalism; even their milk bottles and milk-money regularly disappeared, and many admitted that they would not risk hanging their clothes in the communal drying areas. Of course Millbrook was still a long way from the world imagined by J. G. Ballard in his dystopian novel High Rise (1975): a futuristic forty-storey housing complex containing a swimming pool, a supermarket, even a school, in which the residents turn on one another, forming aggressive clans, fighting brutally for territory and food, withdrawing into a degenerate society of murderous, cannibalistic hunter-gatherers. Even so, in an age of growing anxiety about public violence and family breakdown, Ballard’s vision was still too close for comfort.20
For although Britain’s high-rise utopia had not yet degenerated into cannibalism, it had nonetheless become a potent symbol of social breakdown. In the autumn of 1976, the journalist Christopher Booker visited Sir Denys Lasdun’s groundbreaking sixteen-storey Keeling House in Bethnal Green, completed two decades before. Architectural handbooks often hailed it as a masterpiece, their pictures showing ‘its concrete gleaming white in the sun’. But Booker found it hard to imagine that he was looking at the same building: a ‘tatty and forlorn’ council block, ‘its concrete cracked and discolouring, the metal reinforcement rusting through the surface, every available inch covered with graffiti’. Inside, only one lift was working; ‘piles of old cigarette packets and broken bottles’ lay in the corners; and throughout there was an overwhelming ‘stench of urine’. If this was the best that architectural modernism could do for London, then it was no wonder that just five years later the GLC began a programme of demolishing its least popular tower blocks, some of them barely ten years old. The high-rise utopia, as the distinguished geographer Alice Coleman wrote a few years later, ‘was conceived in compassion but has been born and bred in authoritarianism, profligacy and frustration. It aimed to liberate people from the slums but has come to represent an even worse form of bondage.’ It was meant to be ‘a form of national salvation’. Instead, it had become ‘an all-pervading failure’.21
In August 1972, the diarist James Lees-Milne spent a pleasant weekend visiting a variety of upper-class friends, artists and fellow historians in the Dorset countryside, one of the least spoiled landscapes in southern England. ‘All the people we met this weekend’, he noted when he got back, ‘were highly intelligent aesthetes, all deeply apprehensive about the dire threat to the landscape, in fact to the whole earth.’ Yet these people, who to him represented ‘the highest standards of civilisation’, were ‘powerless to stop the devastating flood of spoilation’, which he blamed on ‘the vast mindless, faceless majority with no principles but personal greed’. Six months later he made another trip, this time to Shropshire, where he was horrified to find the countryside ‘dotted with modern bungalows’. He was particularly depressed by the sight of Bridgnorth, looking out from ‘its delightful acropolis’ over ‘an ocean of factories and horrors’. As always, though, his aesthetic judgements were seasoned with a heavy dose of snobbish contempt. ‘The conglomeration of wires, pylons, ill-placed factories and execrable villas is so horrifying that I utterly despair of the landscape,’ he recorded.
I know that people say there has always been change which is resented by the old. But never, never has there been such devastating change as in my lifetime, change always for the worse aesthetically, never for the better. The public en bloc are blind to hideous surroundings. I prefer to stay at home in my ivory tower and never go on expeditions rather than be affronted at every familiar turn with a substitute architectural monstrosity.22
Lees-Milne was quite wrong about ‘the public’. Just a few weeks later, taking the new Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, on a trip to inspect the architectural ‘horrors’ inflicted on the city of Bath (‘one’s vision of hell’), he was taken aback by the warmth of their reception. When they went for lunch, the waitresses immediately recognized Betjeman; so did the staff in the bookshop they visited next, the attendants in the Pump Room and the cashier in the Midland Bank, who immediately rushed to get the manager. ‘Just as well I had not told the Bath Preservation committee that he was coming,’ Lees-Milne recorded sourly, ‘for he would have been mobbed.’ No doubt this owed a great deal to Betjeman’s accessible, witty verse, to his cuddly teddy-bear television persona, and to the natural charm and humility with which he treated his admiring fans. But it also owed something to his reputation as Britain’s leading champion of conservation: the man who had fought vainly to save Euston Arch and had kept St Pancras alive, the man who had savagely punctured arrogant redevelopment in his poem ‘The Planster’s Vision’, the man who gave his time and energy in the early 1970s to save Southend Pier, Liverpool Street station and Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street. It was partly thanks to his reputation as the man who had stood up to the bulldozers that Betjeman got an unprecedented 6,000 letters of congratulation when he was made Laureate. And whatever Lees-Milne thought about the public’s attitude to modern architecture, the fact that Betjeman got some fifty letters a day on ‘threatened buildings, redundant churches, old market places, Victorian town halls, etc.’ tells a rather different story.23
In previous decades, conservation had been regarded as a faintly cranky pursuit, the province of artists, eccentrics and intellectuals, three groups to whom most right-thinking people gave a very wide berth indeed. But as the demographic make-up of inner cities and rural villages changed, so the articulate, affluent newcomers began to raise their voices. Many were children of the mid-1960s, brimming with self-righteous passion. Unlike their predecessors, they were not content merely to form discussion groups; they wanted to make a difference. There were early signs of this new spirit in the 1960s, when middle-class pressure groups blocked two deranged schemes to build a relief road across Christ Church Meadow in Oxford and a tunnel underneath the centre of Bath; the location of these protests gives a clue to the kind of people attracted to conservationism. Not surprisingly, it picked up plenty of recruits in the gentrifying enclaves of London at the turn of the decade: in Gospel Oak, for example, where re
sidents fought to save their nineteenth-century artisan houses from demolition, or in De Beauvoir Town in Hackney and Railton Road in Brixton, where residents preserved their Victorian streets from the bulldozer. Near the British Museum, long-held plans to demolish the area between Great Russell Street and Bloomsbury Way were finally abandoned in 1975 after years of bitter debate. So was an even more demented scheme to level and redevelop Covent Garden (the market having closed in 1974, although its last days are wonderfully captured in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Frenzy, made two years earlier), which collapsed only after a vociferous protest campaign spearheaded by the Evening Standard’s Simon Jenkins. And most famously of all, a seventeen-year battle raged over the fate of Tolmers Square, just west of Euston, a cluster of run-down Georgian buildings that had been lined up for redevelopment as a gigantic and highly lucrative office complex. Squatters, Asian immigrants, trade unionists and even students from nearby University College London joined the crusade against the developers; in the end, though, both sides lost, with Camden Council turning it into a particularly soulless council-flat complex.24
In the meantime, not one but two schemes to build a new London airport had come to a sticky end. In January 1971, the Roskill Commission announced that a site had been selected in the Bedfordshire village of Cublington, well placed for access to motorways, the Midlands and the north of the capital. To get this far had taken four years of hearings and well over £1 million, but the scheme lasted only six weeks. Not only would the airport destroy a thirteenth-century church, a Georgian rectory and acres of perfect farmland, but it also threatened the country house of the Conservative political hostess Pamela Hartwell. She pulled some strings, various Tory MPs were persuaded to come out against the report, and within two months it was dead. So the government adopted a new site: Maplin Sands, a stretch of mudflats off Foulness Island in the Thames estuary. In characteristic Heath style, the plans were suitably ambitious: two runways by 1980, with two more built in the next decade; an eight-lane motorway into the heart of the City of London; a ‘brand new jet city’ of 300,000 people with the airport at its centre; even a high-speed railway to whisk passengers at 125 miles an hour through the Essex marshlands. The council backed it; so did the trade unions. But the locals were not so sure: one group, the ‘Defenders of Essex’, distributed posters warning of ‘Jackboots over Essex’. As projected costs surged, Maplin began to look increasingly far-fetched, and in January 1974 the government reluctantly admitted that the plan was back under review. When Labour returned to office two months later, the new Environment Secretary, Anthony Crosland, who had mocked the scheme as ‘Heathograd’, wasted little time in scrapping it.25
But it was not just in the capital that conservationists won significant victories. In Berwick-upon-Tweed, an alliance of the local historical society and the Chamber of Trade overturned a scheme in 1970 to knock down part of the town’s Elizabethan walls, calling themselves ‘the authentic voice of the people’. Two years later, near Dumbarton, the fifty-five households of the little village of Dullatur – a high proportion of them professionals, clerical workers and university lecturers – defeated a plan to destroy their ‘bucolic isolation’ with a giant housing estate. In Coronation Street’s Weatherby, residents even organized an Action Group in February 1974 to stop the planned redevelopment of their beloved street. And across the land, conservationists whispered the name of their new folk hero, John Tyme, a lecturer in environmental studies at Sheffield Polytechnic. Almost no hearing or new motorway scheme went ahead without Tyme’s rumbustious presence, striking fear into the heart of planners everywhere. In December 1974, he disrupted a hearing on an extension to the M16 in rural Essex. A year later he appeared as the star witness in a melodramatic hearing on plans for a four-lane road through the Aire Valley, which was eventually suspended after scenes of ‘shouting and scuffling’, a first for a planning inquiry. And in February 1976, after the hearing had been restarted, he was on hand to watch dozens of protesters fight their way through lines of stewards and occupy Shipley Town Hall, which was surely the most exciting thing to have happened in that corner of Yorkshire for decades.26
Perhaps the most colourful scenes, though, came at Winchester during the baking summer of 1976, where Major General Raymond Edge, the planning inspector, convened hearings on a planned M3 extension that would slash through the city’s beloved water meadows. ‘From the start,’ reported The Times, ‘it was clear that most of the 800 or so people crowded into the sweltering Guildhall had no intention of allowing the inquiry to proceed. Throughout the morning and afternoon they kept up a constant barrage of boos, handclaps, cheers and stamping of feet.’ At one point, in a rare moment of solidarity between sailor and soldier, the town’s excellently named MP, Rear Admiral Morgan Morgan-Giles, tried to intervene from the balcony, but he was shouted down. Meanwhile, Major General Edge’s voice was constantly drowned out by chanting and singing, and when he tried to order television cameras out of the hall, fighting broke out between police and cameramen. The high point of the drama, however, came when the hearing resumed two weeks later. On this occasion, when Major General Edge refused to let John Tyme read a statement objecting to the inquiry on procedural grounds, all hell broke loose, with the crowd roaring, chanting and clapping, while the beleaguered Major General spent the next half-hour ‘pointing at individuals, asking them to be silent, and, when they refused, ordering the stewards to eject them’. Order was restored only when Tyme got to read his statement after all, but, as The Times reported, pandemonium broke out again that afternoon when ‘Mr Tyme burst back into the room. His shouted message was drowned out in cheers and applause, and police reinforcements were called.’ In an extraordinary climax, the crowd started singing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ while Major General Edge implored them to leave. At last, the police had to clear the building, dragging some of the audience with them. Among them, the press noted delightedly, was John Thorn, the headmaster of Winchester College. ‘I will be back!’ he shouted at Major General Edge, like some public school Terminator. Not even the chaotic planning inquiry in Tom Sharpe’s novel Blott on the Landscape (1975), the hilarious and very timely story of Lady Maud Lynchwood’s battle against the fictional M101, could compete with that.*27
What lay behind many of these protests was not just a love of the countryside or a fascination with Victorian architecture, but a revulsion from technological modernity and a renewed love affair with an idealized national past. At one level, conservationism was an exercise in nostalgic escapism, a way of banishing the depressing headlines about strikes, terrorism and inflation, and returning to a supposedly more settled, orderly age, when Britain still ruled the waves, the lower orders knew their place and tower blocks did not yet blight the horizon. But since so many gentrifiers read the Guardian and voted Labour, it was less a form of reactionary conservatism than simply yet another consumer fad. For much of the 1960s, at least until the hippy craze that set in from about 1967, cultural fashion had been bound up with visions of the future, with optimistic projections of the coming Utopia, with the glamour of the Space Age. But with the shock of the Vietnam War, the collapse of Harold Wilson’s modernization programme and the new vogue for resurrecting the Victorians and Edwardians, the future fell out of fashion. And by the early 1970s, with man’s horizons shrinking and even the space race running out of steam, modernism itself seemed out of date. White heat was passé; rustic romanticism was the latest thing.28
The cult of the past found expression in a huge variety of ways. Local and family history societies, industrial archaeology groups, oral history associations and amateur history ‘workshops’ thrived; so too did museums, despite the entrance charges levied by the Heath government in 1970. Often seen as a product of the Thatcher years, the heritage industry was alive and well long beforehand: these were boom years for the manufacturers of china figurines, the sellers of artfully distressed-pine furniture, and the National Trust shops offering historically themed trinkets and
toiletries to weekend visitors. These were good years, in fact, for the National Trust, full stop. Having been put onto more business-oriented, commercial lines at the end of the 1960s, it experienced astonishing growth in the next decade, with its membership rolls expanding from a healthy 158,000 in 1965 to 539,000 in 1975 and more than a million in 1981; as David Cannadine puts it, this was unquestionably ‘the most successful recruitment drive ever undertaken in Britain in peacetime’. Country houses had never been so popular: when the government refused to accept the palatial Mentmore Towers in lieu of inheritance taxes, with the result that it was sold at auction in 1977 to the deeply disreputable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the public outcry was loud and long. Where country houses had once been associated with shiftless aristocrats lounging around on the backs of the poor, they were now popularly linked with a lost golden age of social order, deference and decorum, a far cry from the hooliganism and pornography of the present. Intellectuals often winced at the stunning commercial success of books like Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (1978), and above all Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (1977), perhaps the most unlikely bestseller of the decade. But as Roy Strong perceptively remarked after staging the enormously successful ‘Destruction of the Country House’ show at the V&A in 1974, ‘in times of danger’ Britain’s ‘environmental heritage … represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged’.29
Both high and low culture seemed saturated with nostalgia in the early 1970s. In poetry, Geoffrey Hill’s magnificent Mercian Hymns (1971) looked back to the eighth-century kingdom of Mercia under the Anglo-Saxon Offa; in pop music, nominally ‘progressive’ bands like Yes, Genesis and Led Zeppelin evoked an imagined past of Arthurian knights, Pre-Raphaelite maidens and perilous quests, subjects that would have seemed downright bizarre back in the days when ‘Telstar’ was number one. On the high street, shoppers queued to buy gentle autobiographical tales by the rural Yorkshire vet James Herriot (later televised as All Creatures Great and Small), no fewer than eight of which featured in the bestseller lists in 1976, or to place orders for Portmeirion’s bestselling ‘Botanic Garden’ range of Victorian-themed pottery, which was so popular that shops ran out of stock. In the cinema, audiences revelled in the nostalgic escapism of The Railway Children (1970), based on E. Nesbit’s popular children’s tale, the film that endeared Jenny Agutter to thousands of furtive middle-aged men. There were tales of patriotic derring-do like The Eagle Has Landed (1976) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978, which bears almost no relation to Buchan’s original but became famous for the splendid scene of Robert Powell hanging from Big Ben), and Agatha Christie adaptations such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), which were conceived, the EMI studio boss admitted, as an antidote to ‘all the gloom and doom in the country’. And then there was Peter Hall’s Akenfield (1974), an adaptation of Ronald Blythe’s bestselling oral history of a Suffolk village. Made with only a skeleton script and a cast of 150 amateurs, Akenfield was an astonishingly beautiful and evocative depiction of rural life from courtship and marriage to education and work, based around a young man’s dilemma about whether to leave behind the familiar rhythms of the countryside after the First World War for a new life in Australia. Unsparingly honest and austere, this was more than uninformed nostalgia. Yet the public loved it: almost 15 million tuned in when Akenfield was shown on ITV in January 1975. The next day, even Hall’s taxi driver told him how much he had enjoyed it.30
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 26
