Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  A few weeks later, on 6 May, Silkin himself was in Stevenage, to address a packed, tumultuous meeting in the small town hall, with up to 3,000 locked outside listening to loudspeakers. ‘I want to carry out in Stevenage a daring exercise in town planning,’ he declared at one point. ‘It is no good your jeering: it is going to be done.’ Silkin argued that Stevenage was ideally placed to attract both people and light industry from overcrowded London; called on the existing residents to ‘make some sacrifice’ in order to ‘provide for the happiness and welfare of some 50,000 men, women and children’; drew a picture of the new Stevenage recreating a village-like ‘spirit of friendliness and neighbourliness, the sense of belonging to a large family, a community’; and once more insisted that there was no choice in the matter: ‘The project will go forward, because it must go forward. It will do so more surely and more smoothly, and more successfully, with your help and co-operation. Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous. (Laughter) People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we here in this country are building for the new way of life.’ Amid cries of ‘Gestapo!’ and ‘Dictator!’, Silkin left the meeting and walked to his ministerial car, a 25 h.p. Wolseley, only to find that some boys had deflated the tyres and put sand in the petrol tank.

  Less than a fortnight later, a referendum was held: some 2,500 residents took part, with 52 per cent voting that they were ‘entirely against the siting of a satellite town at Stevenage’. But it availed them little. Although considerable national publicity was garnered when Stevenage signs at the local railway station were temporarily replaced by Silkingrad ones, and although the High Court in February 1947 agreed with the Residents’ Protection Association (mainly comprising the well-to-do) that Silkin had not properly considered the objections raised at the public inquiry the previous October, the government was not to be thwarted, with Silkin later in 1947 winning first at the Court of Appeal and then at the House of Lords. The juggernaut was rolling. Old Stevenage had been the setting for the house in Howards End; new Stevenage would, as an unsympathetic, non-connecting E. M. Forster now put it, ‘fall out of a blue sky like a meteorite upon the ancient and delicate scenery of Hertfordshire’.16

  Not surprisingly, given this sort of local opposition (apparent also in Crawley and elsewhere), it took several years to get the new towns up and running. Faced by an acute housing shortage, the LCC responded by expanding the programme of ‘out-county’ estates that it had started between the wars, notably in Becontree, St Helier and Downham, which by the end of the 1930s were three of the largest housing estates in the world. The LCC also between 1946 and 1949 built more than 31,000 dwellings (a mixture of unprepossessing but functional houses and low-rise flats) on new estates at Harold Hill, Aveley, South Oxhey, Borehamwood, Debden, St Paul’s Cray and Hainault – all of them beyond the LCC’s boundary and in several cases, as was often pointed out, in the green belt that it was wanting to protect. Harold Hill in Essex was the largest of the estates, but its near neighbour Debden, together with South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, would attract the most sociological attention. From the start, these out-county estates suffered, like their inter-war predecessors, from an image problem. Suddenly the new dwelling places for many thousands of working-class Londoners, entirely bereft of architectural distinction and often communal facilities such as churches and pubs, the estates were in effect, to quote the architectural historian Andrew Saint, ‘lower-grade new towns without new town privileges’.17They were also the cause of considerable tension at the LCC. While the Valuer’s Department under Cyril Walker got on with its job of achieving ‘maximum output’ in new housing, the Architect’s Department (under Robert Matthew from 1947) was full of frustrated young graduate architects unable to implement their strongly modernist ideas about public housing. Not that this mattered much to the new residents of Harold Hill, Debden et al, happy enough to get on with their own lives with a roof over their head, an indoor lavatory, and hot and cold running water.

  The new towns and out-county estates both reflected the widespread faith put in the 1940s on dispersal as the best way to relieve the familiar problems (overcrowding, congestion, poor health etc) of the modern industrial city. No city in Britain had worse problems – or a worse reputation – than Glasgow. ‘It is a disgustingly ugly town, a huddle of dirty buildings trying to outdo one another and not succeeding,’ Naomi Mitchison wrote in 1947. ‘The population is as ugly as the buildings. Walk down the Gallowgate; notice how many children you see with obvious rickets, impetigo or heads close clipped for lice, see the wild, slippered sluts, not caring any more to look decent!’

  Two competing visions were now set out for Glasgow’s future. The first, the work of the City Engineer Robert Bruce, was essentially an urban one. The Bruce Plan advocated a radically new, high-speed road system, a geometrically planned city centre, the demolition of more than half the city’s housing stock, and the decanting of the urban poor to develop ments on the city’s periphery but within its boundaries. Ultimately, it was the vision of a Glasgow that would retain not only all its population but also its nineteenth-century heavy industrial base. By contrast, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan, appearing in interim form in 1946 and predominantly the work of the ubiquitous Sir Patrick Abercrombie, envisaged a depopulated, deindustrialised Glasgow, surrounded by a green belt and sending many of its ill-housed inhabitants to healthier, ‘overspill’ new towns beyond the city’s boundaries. ‘Whole districts are obsolescent and past the possibility of reconstruction to modern standards, alike for industry, commerce and housing,’ Abercrombie would declare in his final report, published in 1949; all told, he expected that nearly half of Glasgow’s 1.1 million population would move to outside the city.

  This latter approach, seeing Glasgow as part of the region’s problem rather than as part of its solution, naturally appalled Glasgow Corporation – above all its Housing Committee, which stood to lose many thousands of tenants as well as (through the green-belt provisions) much potential building land. It was as if Abercrombie was preparing to blow up one of the great municipal power bases. The gloom deepened when the government, attracted by the prospect of (in Miles Glendinning’s words) ‘a constellation of planned, Whitehall-controlled garden cities set within a Green Belt’, plumped for Abercrombie, not Bruce.18 The designation in 1947 of East Kilbride as Scotland’s new town was an unmistakable signal of intent. Yet for the Corporation, and for all those who still believed in Glasgow as ‘the Second City of the Empire’, the game was far from over.

  Overall, looking at town planning in the 1940s, it is easy to exaggerate the radicalism and modernism. For instance, in Portsmouth, where a redevelopment plan was accepted by the city council in February 1946, not only was the gutted Guildhall to remain the city’s focal point, but the existing road pattern was to be kept, supplemented by a few new cross-routes. In Manchester, where a plan was formally unveiled in the first winter of peace, the City Surveyor and Engineer R. Nicholas accepted that some 100,000 of the city’s slum dwellings needed to be pulled down but specifically repudiated the high-rise solution. ‘It would,’ he insisted, ‘be a profound sociological mistake to force upon the British public, in defiance of its own widely expressed preference for separate houses with private gardens, a way of life that is fundamentally out of keeping with its traditions, instincts and opportunities.’ Adding that ‘the advocates of large-scale flat-building greatly overestimate the proportion of people now living in the congested areas who might thereby be decently housed on the site’, he concluded bluntly, ‘It is impossible to get rid of the effects of congested development by turning it on edge.’

  Even in Coventry, epitome of the modern with its central area delineated by an inner ring road and containing zoned clusters of building types (shopping, entertainment, civic), Donald Gibson and his planning colleagues were far from slavish in the way they followed Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow. ‘We did not think that very high buildings were necessary for the centre of a smallish ci
ty which was unlikely ever to have more than 400,000 people,’ Percy Johnson-Marshall (brother of Stirrat) recalled. ‘We would have liked to have incorporated his dream of multi-level communications, but we were worried about expense, and felt that, anyway, our precinct form of development went a long way to bringing safety and convenience to the pedestrian.’ As with some other badly bombed cities, including Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, the outcome was indeed modern, in the sense of not following the familiar pattern, but it was – quite deliberately on Gibson’s part – a generally restrained, unthreatening sort of modernism.

  Nor were these immediate post-war planners as brutally unforgiving of the past as has sometimes been assumed. Thomas Sharp’s declaration in 1946 that ‘the watchword for the future should be – not restoration, but renewal’ ran directly counter to the Advisory Handbook for the Redevelopment of Central Areas issued by Silkin’s ministry the following year. This emphasised the importance of new buildings not swamping the old and pushed for retention of the ‘existing main street pattern’. Moreover, as Peter Larkham has shown in a detailed study of urban-reconstruction plans up to the early 1950s, conservation played a surprisingly prominent role in them. Sharp himself, in his plans for Exeter, Oxford and Salisbury, was not entirely insensitive to their special architectural qualities, while plans for Edinburgh, Norwich, Warwick and Worcester all had a reasonably conservationist element, though in places only implicitly.19

  Where there was virtually no call for conservationism was in the plans made for industrial cities and towns: there, the notion that the nineteenth-century industrial heritage might be worth preserving for aesthetic reasons did not feature. ‘The city’s buildings, with few exceptions, are undistinguished,’ stated the plan for Manchester. ‘Moreover, our few noteworthy buildings [identified as non-industrial] are obscured by the dense development surrounding them.’ It was different, though, in the other great Victorian economic powerhouse. ‘It would not be wise to adopt a new aesthetic and a new scale for building for the City of London until the old one has been definitely lost or outmoded,’ asserted the architect Charles Holden and the town planner William Holford, the City Corporation’s consultants for its rebuilding programme. ‘The seventeenth-century scale should be preserved and St Paul’s Cathedral – the noblest in the City – should remain architecturally, as in other ways, its chief building.’

  Yet despite all their relative moderation, the planners in these years found it desperately slow going when it came to trying to put their plans into practice. Most obviously, they and their local sponsors faced a series of trying economic constraints, including patchy financial support from central government and the severe rationing of building materials – constraints which invariably led to delay and sometimes to abandonment. Nor could they assume, however much they may have tried to, that the popular will was always behind them. In Bristol, for example, a poll organised in early 1947 by the local Retail Traders’ Federation found that only 400 people wanted the proposed new Broadmead shopping centre, as against some 13,000 wishing to see the old shopping centre reinstated. The planners, for their part, simply ignored this unfortunate result.20

  Regrettably, no comparable poll was taken in Coventry, where it would have been fascinating to test empirically the generally prevailing assumption that Gibson’s plan was welcomed by the majority of Coventrians. Admittedly an impressive 57,000 people attended the Coventry of the Future exhibition held for a fortnight at the city’s Drill Hall in October 1945, but the Coventry Evening Telegraph’s assertion on the third day that ‘the public reaction appears to be that the schemes outlined are on the lines along which they would like to see the city developed’ was somewhat belied by a letter it printed from Herbert E. Edwards, who had visited the exhibition ‘along with a party of others’:

  We were unanimous in our strong criticism of the central area lay-out as shown in the large model.

  The general feeling was that the hard, rigid lines of those monstrous buildings would utterly spoil Coventry’s unique city centre, with its fine old churches, etc. The treatment seemed to us entirely foreign and out of touch with the traditional setting – which demands real harmony in its surroundings.

  The City Fathers must be blind indeed if they suppose this massed barracks-like ensemble could possibly appeal to citizens with a grain of artistic feeling.

  Over the next week, other critical letters appeared. ‘The general concept of the scheme is not in keeping with the characteristics of the Coventry people, who would not feel at home in it,’ wrote C.S.P. ‘They all say, “Give us Coventry back as we knew it”. What is wanted is the old Coventry, restored with a new Sunday dress, but old Coventry nevertheless.’ Other letters dissented (‘We have,’ affirmed one, ‘a wonderful opportunity to rebuild a city in accordance with the spirit of our age’), but certainly the overall balance of the correspondence was not in favour of the plan.

  Subsequent oral testimony similarly suggests mixed feelings. ‘It showed the raised ring road, all where the Cathedral was and all the rest of it,’ recalled one visitor, Basil Whitham, more than half a century later. ‘And we thought that this was fascinating . . . we were all into spaceships, you know . . . Buck Rogers and so forth.’ That, though, was a young person’s perspective; among older people the rather jaundiced recollection of Celia Grew was probably more representative. ‘Whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding, you sort of went along with it in a sort of zombie-like fashion, at least I did,’ she explained. ‘’Cause you see I had got things happening in my own life with my husband getting wounded and being brought to Bromsgrove Hospital and me going over there to see him and all that kind of stuff.’ While as for those who did take an interest, the experience of Dorrie Glass, a council employee who one day saw in Gibson’s department a model of the new Coventry, was illuminating: ‘It was a proper model really. You were sort of looking down, you know, like an aerial view. But they were all buildings, it wasn’t a picture it was models, you know. We went and had a look at that. You couldn’t sort of visualise it really.’21

  The relative lack of interest on the part of architects, planners and others in popular taste was neatly encapsulated by a snatch from a 1946 round table (convened by Building magazine) of some leading architects. ‘The public generally have no knowledge of what they want,’ declared one. ‘The public generally are only concerned with their own house,’ responded another. ‘It is questionable if they have any views at all.’ Unsurprisingly, the next year’s Town and Country Planning Act had no mechanism for getting the public involved in the planning process, apart from the right to object to the development plan after publication. In practice, according to Alison Ravetz, ‘probably most people were quite unaware of this right, and . . . the Minister was not obliged to hold a public enquiry.’

  The aspect of Silkin’s measure that caused most controversy was the 100 per cent development levy on appreciating land values. It was a provision never destined to have a long-term life, being (again in Ravetz’s words) ‘universally blamed for putting a stop to development’. But the Act as a whole was a stayer. Above all, it enshrined the principle that all development was to be subject to planning controls – or, as a delighted Frederic Osborn put it, ‘it gives effect to the supremacy of public control of land use, without abolishing private ownership’. A further plus in his and many other well-meaning, progressive, middle-class eyes was that the act did much to protect the countryside from the threat of creeping, unplanned suburbia, the dreaded ‘bungaloid growth’. Agricultural land, it insisted, was to be for agricultural use, but there was silence about the high-rise implication of high urban densities as the population grew. This was an implication that would have particular resonance given that the act also sanctified the idea of ‘comprehensive’ redevelopment of the inner city, which would follow compulsory purchase of (again in the words of the act) ‘any areas which in the opinion of the planning authority suffered from extensive war damage, conditions of bad layout, obsolete develop
ment, or were in need of the relocation of population or industry’. Thus were born Comprehensive Development Areas (CDAs), though an economic upturn would be required for them to take major effect. Quite what that effect might be, no one at this stage could realistically envisage.

  For one Tory backbencher, Sir Cuthbert Headlam, it was a case of seeing through a dark glass very darkly. ‘I don’t profess to have read one word of this most important measure,’ he reflected on the evening in May 1947 when the bill was guillotined in the Commons, ‘but can only hope that it may not be as devastating in its effects as some people say that it will be. I have an instinctive distrust of planners and always feel that “planning” merely makes confusion worse confounded – but then I am out of date and prefer things to grow up in their own way.’ The Times, however, was sanguine, reflecting much of middle opinion. ‘The British people,’ it declared on the day in 1948 that the act came into force, ‘almost without knowing it, are embarking upon one of the greatest experiments in the social control of their environment ever attempted by a free society. In the process they are also putting old individual liberties in trust for the common good.’22