Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Meanwhile, as Labour lost the housing initiative, three clear, related trends were becoming apparent by around 1950: the decline (or at best stagnation) of classic ‘1945-style’ town planning and reconstruction; the ever-increasing vogue of the flat; and the rise of the architect and architectural modernism. Between them, these three trends would go a long way towards determining what sort of place Britain was to live in through the 1950s and beyond.

  ‘Well, this Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, hasn’t turned the world upside down, has it?’ the veteran town planner Sir George Pepler asked rhetorically in the summer of 1949, addressing his colleagues at the Town Planning Institute. ‘Perhaps some of us on our more irritable days, discerning the millennium as far off as ever, feel even a touch of the chill hand of despair as we struggle on.’ For most of Britain’s planners, there was by this time a shared and persistent mood of gloom: not only did the country’s continuing economic difficulties severely restrict the implementation of their plans, but so, too, did central government’s grant system for local authorities that had acquired land for city-centre redevelopment – a system sufficiently capricious that, in the words of one planning historian, it ‘made the local authorities extremely cautious when proceeding with acquisitions, because they had no guarantee that actual redevelopment would follow in the immediate future’. ‘Enthusiasm for the reconstruction of our cities and towns is not what it was’ was the blunt verdict by January 1951 of one expert, Cyril Dunn, on the government’s attitude. As for the local authorities, he saw them as being in the process of ‘drifting, sometimes complacently, into compromise schemes’.11

  The planning cause was not helped by the painfully slow progress being made in the reconstruction of Britain’s blitzed provincial cities (such as Portsmouth, Southampton and Bristol), even though this was far less the fault of the planners than of central and local government, each seemingly vying to be more cautious and risk-averse than the other. The major exceptions were Plymouth and Coventry, with the latter continuing to be – as it had since the morning after the bombs rained down in November 1940 – a symbolic beacon of Britain’s postwar hopes and aspirations. There, a Labour local authority strongly committed to building a new, modern city centre, complete with a pioneering, mainly pedestrianised shopping precinct, found itself again and again being hampered by a parsimonious central government unconvinced that the local population was as fully behind the plans for Coventry’s future as the Council insisted was the case. Nevertheless, even though the outcome was more stuttering progress than the planning visionaries would have wanted, it was not quite stalemate. Crucially, the government did during 1949 at last endorse the plans for both the reconstruction of the central area and the building of a ring road. And by the final day of what had been a traumatic decade, the official local mood was one of optimism. ‘As a city and as a community we have pulled ourselves together more than in any year since the war,’ asserted the Coventry Evening Telegraph. ‘The visitor has to search today to find relics of bomb damage, and that cannot be said of any other city which was blitzed. The bombed houses are rebuilt. Paint has removed the post-war shabbiness of our streets.’

  J. B. Priestley, visiting ‘this mining camp of the motor trade’ a few weeks earlier, had already reckoned that something remarkable was under way. Admittedly, he told his Home Service listeners, the slow rate of progress since 1940 in the city centre’s reconstruction meant that ‘even the very model’ was ‘beginning to look rather dilapidated and wistful’; yet ‘the Fathers of this city and their employees show a spirit that is heartening to the outsider’. Above all, he was struck by Coventry’s success at ‘trying to create a proud civic spirit’:

  Their municipal information bureau is the best I have seen anywhere. When I first looked in, I found a queue of old-age pensioners waiting to receive the fifty free bus tickets they are given every month, to encourage them to get out and about. One old lady, wiping her shoes vigorously at the door, said to me: ‘Mustn’t dirty this nice place, y’know’. A good sign! . . . Then we had a look at one of the excellent civic restaurants they run in this city, and later at one of the community centres in the suburbs, where there was a fine list of local goings-on . . . Best of all, perhaps, is the job they are doing there to make the schoolchildren understand all the machinery of civic life.

  Another visitor, the ineffable, perceptive Godfrey Winn in 1951, also enthused after he had been shown round by the City Architect, Donald Gibson. The city-centre redevelopment that was starting to take shape, the dispersal of noisy, smoky, smelly factories to the outskirts, the eventual creation of 24 ‘neighbourhoods’, each with its own shops, ‘village’ hall and sports amenities – the whole vision was patiently explained by this planner who, ‘with iron-grey hair but the expression of youth’, was ‘changing the face of the city, and at the same time, through his skilful reshaping, giving his patient new heart and new pride, without destroying her memory or her inbred character’. The two men then reflected:

  ‘All this reminds me of my visit to Stockholm in 1946,’ I exclaimed to my guide, as we stood with our backs to Broadgate, beside the green levelling stone, that had been set into the ground as a symbol, also in 1946.

  Mr Gibson looked at me in mild surprise through his glasses. ‘You can’t mean this, but instead the models I produced for you of what it will be like one day.’

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what I mean. In Stockholm they showed me their wonderful modern buildings and their blocks of workers’ flats, with every amenity one could imagine, and in the middle of my admiring them, my interpreter interrupted, a trifle smugly, I thought, to say: “Of course you have very bad slums in England, yes?” I had to agree, though I had a come-back. “When was this built? In 1940. Ah, in 1940, we had other things on our mind.”’

  ‘Well, by 1960 you should be able to ask your Swedish friends to visit Coventry and see our shopping precinct. It ought to be finished by then, and will be certainly worth seeing.’

  His voice glowed at the prospect. And no wonder. Because there will be no more imaginative shopping centre in the world. In fact, it will be unique, if for only one reason. All traffic down it will be barred. The shops will be on two tiers, and in the centre of the long strip that will run from the back of Broadgate House, there will be flower beds and seats for shoppers to rest their legs, and reminisce about the old days when you had to give up coupons for meat and received but a single meal in return.

  ‘I found myself thinking,’ concluded Winn, ‘how glad I was that I was seeing it as it was today, with the shoddy market booths, and the inevitable notice displaying Real Nylons, and the haphazard mess of the foundations. What a contrast it would be when the time came at last and how important it was to be patient and believing I reminded myself . . .’12

  Sadly, this Priestley/Winn portrait of inspiriting civic uplift – based on only fleeting acquaintance – is refuted by the foremost historian of Coventry’s post-war reconstruction, Nick Tiratsoo. Instead, he depicts a city that by the late 1940s and early 1950s was increasingly prosperous, including a thriving black market; where its residents and migrant workers were ever more materialistic-cum-individualistic in outlook; where immediate preoccupations, such as housing and entertainment, mattered far more than civic plans that had already taken an age even to start to come to fruition; and where the shallow organisational roots of the ruling local Labour Party were complemented by apathy among the rank and file of the local trade union branches. ‘Local people had been moderately interested in reconstruction during periods of the war,’ Tiratsoo accepts, ‘but afterwards their enthusiasm soon evaporated, despite the best efforts of the Council. Enjoying a good time, when pleasure had been for so long denied, seemed infinitely preferable to joining the earnest discussions of the planners.’

  Further evidence of this drift away from the collective – arguably exaggerated even during the war – was provided by the Sociological Survey undertaken by Birmingham University on the Council’s
behalf from late 1948. In particular, it revealed how tenants on one of Coventry’s newly built suburban estates (Canley) had at most only a very limited sense of community or neighbourhood identity. Instead, what they really cared about was their privacy – to such an extent, the researchers concluded that ‘residents in the lower income groups may be willing to forego some of the amenities of the house in order to secure these higher standards of privacy’. It was a desire for privacy that extended to their most precious possession. About half the householders on the estate owned a car or a motorbike, reported the local press in March 1951, but ‘there is hardly one house on the estate which has a garage’. And it quoted Mrs A. Hackett of 52 Gerard Avenue: ‘There are no means of protecting the cars from any mischief-makers. All we can do is throw tarpaulins over them and hope people will have the decency to protect others’ property. There is no joy in having a new car if it is going to be exposed to the elements and ruffians to be ruined.’13

  If Coventry was one exemplar of post-war planning, the other was undoubtedly the New Town, where initial progress was if anything even slower than in the blitzed cities. By the end of 1950, there had been fewer than 500 house completions in the eight new towns on the fringes of London beyond the green belt, with a mere further 2,000 under construction. ‘The New Towns project is proceeding mostly on paper’ was how one disappointed town-planning expert put it in January 1951, while according to the Observer that same month, the prized notion of ‘self-contained communities’ was already in trouble: ‘With the shining exception of Crawley, the New Towns in the London region are already facing a serious unbalance between industry and housing. They are in danger of becoming new dormitory suburbs, and ridiculously remote ones at that.’

  Most of the New Town pioneers knew what sort of dwelling they wanted to live in. When in the late summer of 1950 nearly 2,000 London families descended on Crawley New Town to have a look round, the development corporation’s chief executive carefully noted their views:

  Amongst these people there was an overwhelming desire to possess a house as distinct from a flat. It was clear that even families which had lived in flats in London wished to get away from the communal staircase and balconies of landings and to have a dwelling with its own front door and large or small piece of garden, according to the individual taste of the tenants in question.

  Yet it soon became clear that in the New Towns around London 15 or 20 per cent of the dwellings were to be flats – in other words, not breaking decisively from the prevailing national ratio. These flats included The Lawn, built in Harlow New Town by Frederick Gibberd as Britain’s first point block (a type of high-rise narrower than a slab block). ‘It’s a modest 10 storeys of reinforced concrete structure, faced in different shades of brick and some wholesome beige render’ was how an appreciative visitor half a century later would describe this ‘gently humane take on a type of building which has since become notorious’. But at the time, Gibberd’s Swedish-influenced design caused a considerable stir. ‘Is this the beginning of a rational approach to housing?’ hopefully asked one architect, Robert Lutyens, son of Edwin. ‘We are told of a million dwellings completed, and our hearts sink at the prospect of the semi-detached fallacy indefinitely perpetuated, whereas we hear nothing at all from official quarters of this first triumph of common sense and propriety.’ His letter to The Times concluded stirringly: ‘In Le Corbusier’s phrase, instead of parks in cities, let us have more cities in parks to demonstrate our national renaissance.’14

  As among the Crawley pioneers, so among the populace at large. The finding in 1950 of the Hulton Press’s Patterns of British Life, based on an extensive national survey, could hardly have been more definite:

  Most people like living in houses rather than flats and they like having a house to themselves. They like their own private domain which can be locked against the outside world and, perhaps as much as anything, they are a nation of garden-lovers. They want space to grow flowers and vegetables and to sit on Sunday afternoons and they want it to be private.

  Even so, in outright defiance of such wishes, the pro-flats chorus among many of the nation’s activators was starting by the early 1950s to become almost irresistible. Colin Buchanan, of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning, called for more flats to be built in order to increase population densities and thereby save both money and land; Godfrey Winn clearly regarded Stockholm’s amenity-stuffed blocks of workers’ flats as the very acme of social progress; and the publisher Paul Elek, in an impressionistic account of London depicting the East End as ‘this ugly, distorting mirror of humanity’ that ‘shows only sordidness’, saw them as nothing less than potential salvation:

  But new and better-planned blocks of flats go up here and there and a better chance of decent life is given and taken. Ramshackle picturesque-ness is replaced by amenities and sanitation, the communal lavatory on one of the landings by bathroom and hot water in every flat, the gutter and dangerous road by garden playground, with fresh grass instead of bare concrete. But it will be a long time before every East End family occupies one of these latest flats, and even then fantastic Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, and the others will still stand as dreadful monuments to nineteenth and twentieth century muddle and meanness – noise and dirt, insanitary factory and antiquated workshop mixed up with human habitation, each blighting the other . . .

  Those were the very evils that the classic ‘1945’ policy of dispersal and low-density settlement (most notably in New Towns) was intended to alleviate. Why did the pro-flatters so emphatically reject that solution? There were many reasons, including economic, functional and aesthetic ones, yet arguably the most resonant were sociological. Harold Orlans, in his well-researched, mainly critical account of developments at Stevenage New Town, saw the whole debate explicitly in terms of class and well-meaning but fundamentally misguided paternalism:

  We have seen no statistics on the subject, but hazard the guess that there are more children per room in working-class flats (and most flat-dwellers are working-class people) than in middle-class houses. It does not follow that these children are any the worse for having been reared in flats, but only that they are different, in some ways, for being working-class, from middle-class children. The implication that their life would be improved if they lived in houses (ie if they lived more as their middle-class critics live) indicates again the bond between the garden city idea and the regnant, puritanical middle-class ideology.

  Another activator friend of the urban working class was the prolific architectural writer A. Trystan Edwards. ‘If the houses are aligned in friendly streets where the neighbours help one another in their domestic difficulties,’ he asserted in The Times in 1949, ‘people of the lower income groups find it much easier to bring up children than in the frigid social atmosphere of the typical garden suburb.’15This was an early sighting of what would later become an immensely influential argument-cum-emotion – one that explicitly identified social virtue and cohesion in living cheek by jowl, even if (an ‘even if’ not always addressed) the resulting high density in turn meant multistorey blocks of flats replacing all those intimate but irretrievably rundown Victorian houses.

  Naturally, the embrace of flats did not take place with uniform speed and fervour. In Lancashire, for instance, there was a continuing attachment to the principle of low-density city redevelopment, with a policy of ‘overspill’ housing adopted as the means to achieving it. By 1950 significant numbers of Salford people were being decanted to the Worsley overspill estate some seven miles away, while Kirkby was being built to accommodate the residents of overcrowded central Liverpool. It was similar in Newcastle, in that the 1951 Plan involved a commitment to reducing residential densities as the best way of improving housing in the city, though in this case the overspill concomitant, mainly to Longbenton (outside the city’s eastern boundary), did involve a higher proportion of multistorey flats than either Worsley or Kirkby did at the same stage. One new Labour councillor wanted more flats in Ne
wcastle itself. ‘If returned as your Municipal representative,’ T. Dan Smith had promised the electors in the slum-ridden Walker ward in May 1950, ‘I would do all in my power to press for the immediate building of suitable modern flats.’16

  In England’s second city there was – at the activator level – a clear, remarkably bipartisan shift towards flats as an acceptable, even intrinsically desirable type of dwelling. By 1950 not only was Birmingham’s population rapidly growing, but there was increasingly widespread criticism of the city’s low-density, ‘cottage’ municipal housing estates. Tellingly, the ones built since the war were viewed just as negatively as the pre-war ones – as drab, monotonous, lacking communal facilities and often sited too far from the workplaces of those living in them. Simultaneously, the City Council (Tory since 1949) was, in an effort to quicken the building rate, starting to employ national builders using non-traditional methods (including the use of cranes), which had the potential to undertake far more challenging structures than just two-storey houses. One local architect, seizing the moment, related in the Birmingham Post in November 1950 how a recent trip to Holland had convinced him that, in order to provide the requisite accommodation for the city’s population along with the desired communal playgrounds and garden areas, ‘we must build upwards and not outwards’, and that ‘those who oppose flats and say “we want houses” must appreciate that “you cannot get a quart into a pint pot”.’