Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  ‘Modernity’ may have meant different things to different people, and the pace of change varied considerably from place to place, but by 1957 it was unmistakeably becoming the dominant (albeit top-down) zeitgeist – a spirit of the age epitomised by the desire in relation to the built environment to dump the past, get up to date and embrace a gleaming, functional, progressive future. This spring, in at least three major provincial cities, the modernity drive was under way.

  In Birmingham, work began on the city’s Inner Ring Road, for which the earliest plans dated back to 1917 but as it would now take shape very much the creation of the City Engineer, Sir Herbert Manzoni. Meanwhile in Sheffield, preliminary work also started on the streets-in-the-sky Park Hill development, destined to become emblematic, and in Bradford, reported the Yorkshire Post’s John Bland, ‘bulldozers are creating miniature mountains of rubble, demolition squads are battering down rows of abandoned offices, and yawning potholes, worthy of Ingleborough, gape in the roadway’. The ‘man of vision’ behind Bradford’s Development Plan was the City Engineer and Surveyor Stanley Wardley. Bland interviewed him in his office, where a scale model showed ‘a modern centre spaciously laid out around the civic precincts’, a centre in which ‘few present-day buildings are recognisable except for the Town Hall, the Wool Exchange, Britannia House and a cinema or two’. Wardley was in confident mood – ‘This is not just a plan that may happen. It is on its way’ – while Bland, after noting that new blocks of flats had been built or were being built to replace slums, concluded: ‘Bradford will certainly be one of the first cities in Britain to be not only worthy of the 20th century but also proud to look the 21st in the face.’

  Elsewhere, the rhetoric was similarly being cranked up. In London’s East End, the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of the Stepney–Poplar comprehensive development area not only came soon after the LCC’s decision to press ahead with two new housing schemes (Clive Street and Mountmorres Road) involving four 17-storey blocks of flats but was the cue for ‘an exhibition, a lantern lecture, and a bus tour’ that, explained the Architects’ Journal, ‘made it possible in a morning to glimpse the “grand design” which is being put together piece by piece “to make the East End a very beautiful place,” as the LCC Planning Committee’s chairman put it’. In Liverpool, a strongly pro-modernity local journalist, George Eglin, had a three-part feature in the Liverpool Daily Post about the wonders of Rotterdam, an almost entirely rebuilt city that had ‘banished the higgledy-piggledy development ideas of the old city, the conglomeration of dwellings, shops, offices and workshops that had grown up together’, and was instead now becoming ‘a city with room to breathe, where people can live, work and play in pleasant and efficient surroundings’ – in stark contrast to Liverpool’s ‘archaic, stultified approach to post-war civic problems’. A youngish, idealistic architect-cum-planner, Graeme Shankland, was a fair representative of progressive opinion. ‘One cannot avoid the impression that at present we are frightened of the new scale of the city,’ he declared in the spring issue of Universities and Left Review. ‘This fear, masquerading as “the avoidance of monotony”, is false. The real danger is muddle – than which nothing is more monotonous.’ And he insisted that because ‘social demands’ were now greater – whether of business or housing or education or traffic – so must ‘the scale of the mid-twentieth-century city therefore be larger’. In short, it was time, more than time, to replace ‘the present small-scale patchwork city pattern’.14

  Did all this inevitably mean a substantial and increasing proportion of future new housing being in the form of flats and high-rises? Quite a strong pro-flats consensus had already emerged by the mid-1950s, but in 1957 itself – during which year there were almost 73,000 local authority approvals for new houses, compared with almost 32,000 for flats and just over 10,000 for high-rises – the debate was still surprisingly lively, with the way led that spring by the resolutely individualist architectural journalist Ian Nairn. ‘People are being driven from the centre not by congestion but by the wrong sort of redevelopment,’ he declared. ‘Elizabeth Denby [a well-known, much-respected housing consultant] has plenty of unpublished evidence to show that what working-class families really wanted was the type of building they had before – a house and garden, cosily planned and near their work . . . If you rehouse entirely with flats, then naturally the big families will want to leave.’ Denby herself confirmed soon afterwards that ‘the form of high-flat redevelopment is unacceptable to many English families’, calling it an approach ‘in which architects delight’ even though ‘I have still to find one who lives in such a block himself!’ Significantly, she added that her analysis of ‘four London squares’ had shown that ‘family houses with a reasonably large common garden and good private gardens can be grouped at the same density as family flats, costing less and giving greater human satisfaction’.

  Later in March there was a sharp squall in Birmingham: David Eversley, a university lecturer, flatly stated in the local Mail that ‘people like their own front door and a garden’, that in fact ‘the whole social tradition in the Midlands is against flats and tenements’, and cited ‘the barracks on the cliffs at Rubery’ as a prime example of ‘cramped and noisy and ill-ventilated’ flats. To this Dennis Thomas, chairman of the City Council’s Planning sub-committee, replied that most flats were much better than those at Rubery, adding: ‘In a city of houses and gardens, it is understandable that people cling to the old idea of things. However, if we build flats with properly developed open spaces around, we shall overcome this prejudice.’ And in May, in the letters page of The Times, Michael Young and Peter Willmott, fresh from the success of Family and Kinship, noted that ‘the overwhelming majority’ of their East End interviewees wanted ‘a house rather than a flat’, preferably in a familiar location, and called on architects to ‘apply their ingenuity to designing decent terraced houses with small gardens at high densities’.

  The sociologists, however, were divided. A riposte came from John Westergaard, who on the basis of research at the recently built Lansbury estate in Poplar argued that ‘the antipathy towards flats, although strong, is not immutable’, and that indeed, more generally, ‘the success of the new tall blocks suggests that the traditional attitude is not permanent’. As Patrick Dunleavy has observed, it would take the sociological profession as a whole until the 1960s to tackle ‘the social dimensions of high-flat living’ and, as a result, ‘slowly come round to a better-founded and generally more critical appraisal of the implications of the high-rise boom’.15

  Even so, the sense of it not being an open-and-shut question – or at least involving potentially awkward sensibilities – continued in the early summer. Analysing why Manchester had not tried to solve ‘the overspill problem’ by ‘building so high that as many families are rehoused on the site [i.e. of slum clearance] as living on it before demolition’, the Manchester Guardian’s local government correspondent noted (as if it was a given): ‘There are, of course, social objections to compelling families with young children to live in high flats, and economic objections to a form of housing that costs over twice as much, in labour and materials, both to build and to maintain, as the two-storey dwelling which the vast majority of tenants prefer.’ Later in June, Birmingham’s City Architect A. G. Sheppard Fidler explained to the Housing Centre in London that it was his council’s current policy to provide 30 per cent of new housing in tall blocks, with most of the rest in four-storey maisonettes. He showed slides demonstrating how, since his arrival in the city five years earlier, great care had been taken in deciding what buildings should be placed close to tall blocks in order ‘to bring the scale down to the ground and humanise the whole scheme’, as well as generally ‘producing the feeling of enclosure so familiar and popular in Birmingham’. The Housing Minister was the solid, well-intentioned, cricket-loving Henry Brooke, who soon afterwards, at a slum clearance conference, felt compelled to defend the high-rise approach. ‘High flats do not always lead to heaven,’
he conceded, ‘but they are certainly not the housing hell some of their opponents seem to think.’16

  Even one of the most-publicised redevelopment schemes failed to generate unalloyed enthusiasm. ‘A clean sweep’ of the Hutchesontown/Gorbals area was ‘necessary’, Ninian Johnston reckoned in ‘Miracle in the Gorbals?’ (published in the spring issue of a Scottish architectural magazine), ‘not only because of the existing conditions, but also to achieve an integral plan which will not suffer intrusion and infiltration by through traffic and undesirable development’. However, Johnston could not help noting wistfully that ‘many of the buildings have been substantially built to sound individual designs, and it appears that if they had not been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair, some might have been incorporated in new planning proposals’. The Architects’ Journal was somewhat more sceptical. Although ‘in general the proposals would transform the area out of all recognition, and completely for the better’, nevertheless ‘it seems questionable whether the layout at the density adopted . . . provides either the necessary community open space, or contrasting small-scale intimacy and large-scale openness, that one would like to see’.

  A particularly informed, telling critique came from Glasgow University’s Tom Brennan in the June issue of the Scottish Journal of Political Economy. Pointing out that ‘during a survey of what were reputed to be the two worst blocks in the Comprehensive Development Area it was found that nine households out of ten had made fairly substantial improvements’, so that ‘less than five per cent were dirty or in a poor state of decoration’, he dared to ask the fundamental question ‘whether adaptations could not be made to improve conditions sufficiently in the present area at something less than the cost [an estimated £13 million] of tearing the whole place down’. And he pressed on:

  Is it really impossible to make these buildings fit at reasonable cost if the problem is examined simply as a technical one and restrictions which might be imposed by out-of-date bye-laws and regulations are ignored? To the layman it certainly looks as if the roofs could be repaired, not for a few pounds but well within the limits of cost of the alternative which has been put forward. Informal enquiry of one or two people with the right kind of technical experience suggests that it would also be possible to design a free-standing toilet cabinet with a shower bath and lavatory which could be installed easily . . .

  Bearing in mind these and other practical possibilities, and characterising the Gorbals as an area where ‘a large proportion of the population’ had already ‘adapted themselves very well’ in spite of overcrowding, Brennan nevertheless at the last implicitly accepted that the larger argument was likely to go the other way. ‘If the planners still say that the property in the scheduled area is in such poor condition that it has to be pulled down now, that it has no useful life left and would fall down in any case, then that is the answer.’17 And in truth, this particular debate was by that time effectively over, with perhaps the two most distinguished British architects of the time, Robert Matthew and Basil Spence, already appointed as consultants for the detailed designing work of the new Gorbals.

  ‘For the Planned as well as the Planners’ was by now the motto of the Town and Country Planning Association’s magazine, and the historical challenge is to recover the often ignored views of the planned. At this stage they could as easily be positive as negative. When in March the Star ran a front-page story about the problems of damp on the LCC’s high-rise Ackroydon estate on Wimbledon Common – ‘The Shame of London: Woman grows cress on damp armchairs in flats that are the wonder of the world’ – and even compared it to ‘rat-ridden dockland’, tenants quickly spoke up. ‘I could not wish to live anywhere better,’ one woman told the Architects’ Journal, another that ‘this is the finest estate in London, and anybody here will tell you so’. Or take (talking to a Liverpool paper around the same time) the tenants of Coronation Court, a ten-storey block on the East Lancashire Road:

  It takes some getting used to at first, but once you’ve convinced yourself you are not dreaming, it is like being on a permanent holiday. The central-heating scheme is marvellous. We really wanted a house, but until we came here we didn’t know how comfortable a flat could be. (Mrs Joan Dutton, who with her husband had lived with her mother for the previous sixteen years)

  We don’t want any publicity, we just want to say a very big thank you to the Corporation for bringing us together after seven terrible years apart. It’s like starting married life all over again. (Couple on seventh floor who had been living apart with their respective parents)

  I’ve no complaints at all. My wife and I waited 18 years for a place of our own. Now that we’ve got it, we’re happy. What more can I say? I know the terrible conditions some unfortunate folk are living under . . . Yes, we are very lucky indeed. (Middle-aged man on fourth floor)

  It was very different, reported the Coventry Standard not long afterwards, on Charter Avenue in the low-rise estate at Canley on the city’s outskirts. Mrs E. Whitehead, a pensioner, complained that her flat was damp and cold and ‘smells like a graveyard’, while Mrs Beryl Stamper, living next door with two young children, was also suffering from the dampness, had nowhere nearby to hang her washing, was worried that the children had nowhere to play in safety and crisply announced that ‘whoever told the planners to go ahead didn’t look at it from a woman’s point of view’. Meanwhile in Barking, the local council had announced ‘Operation Clearance’, a 15-year plan to demolish 2,000 houses in the middle of the town and replace them with modern homes. ‘We have bought this house and kept it spic and span for 20 years or more,’ a housewife in St Paul’s Road told the local paper. ‘I’ve worked hard to keep it in good condition. Why should they come and pull it down? This is our home.’ Mr W. Garland, also living in St Paul’s Road, was equally outraged: ‘Go along London Road and look at the new Council flats. They look lovely from the front – but at the back the conditions are beyond description. There is more justification to call them “slums” than our homes. And that is what they want to build here.’18

  It is not quite true that the planners never listened to the planned. The LCC, for example, employed a sociologist, Margaret Willis, who during these months produced two typically painstaking surveys: one on how tenants in flats and maisonettes used their balconies, which in practice usually depended on how privately they were situated; and one on the wishes of old people living in flats and bungalows on the council’s estates, with the great majority expressing reluctance to live any higher (up to eight or ten storeys) even if there was a lift. Yet overall – and on the part of ‘activators’ generally, not just planners – it is hard not to feel that, in this whole area of urban development and the often rapidly changing built environment, there existed a yawning gulf between those making the pronouncements (on whichever side of the argument) and those being pronounced upon. An increasingly active activator was John Betjeman. ‘I cannot believe,’ he declared in the Spectator in May, ‘that the London County Council decision to reconstruct the Albert Bridge, Chelsea, means that it is to be destroyed and that we will never see its graceful outline again. Shining with electric lights to show the way to Festival Gardens, or grey and airy against the London sky, it is one of the beauties of the London river.’ In the event, the Albert Bridge was saved – aesthetically a happy outcome, but not necessarily what would have happened if, say, there had been a referendum on the matter in south-west London. Or, as an anonymous verse in Punch put it, parodying Macaulay:

  When the driver inches slowly

  Through motor-darkened squares;

  When the traffic-cop stands helplessly

  In trackless thoroughfares;

  With weeping and with gnashing

  Still is the story told

  How Betjeman saved the Albert Bridge

  In the brave days of old.19

  ‘A sweltering day!’ recorded Judy Haines in Chingford on 6 July. Elsewhere that Saturday, Florence Turtle in Wimbledon Park went with the Wandsworth His
tory Circle on a coach trip to Blenheim, ‘conducted round the ground floor rooms by an educated young man who spoke well’; Madge Martin in Oxford travelled the other way, to ‘the last of the Light Festival Concerts’ in the ‘serene, cool atmosphere’ of the Royal Festival Hall; Nella Last in Barrow accompanied her husband to Ulverston, where ‘I never saw so much “dripping” ice cream’; and Philip Larkin in Hull ‘yielded to the temptation of buying an anti-perspiration atomiser, partly for the fun of squirting it about, but whether it will be of any use or not I don’t know’. In Liverpool, 12-year-old Patricia Buckley of Bootle Grammar School for Girls was crowned Bootle’s Carnival Queen; long queues formed at the pier head for boats to New Brighton and the Isle of Man; and, reported the Liverpool Echo, ‘Corporation buses bound for Woolton, Aigburth Vale, and other outlying districts of the city were full, many people carrying picnic hampers.’ Did some of those Woolton-bound passengers picnic on the field behind St Peter’s Church? There, as part of the annual church fête (‘tickets 2/-, refreshments at moderate prices’) and standing on a makeshift stage, the Quarry Men Skiffle Group performed that afternoon, led by a tousled 16-year-old wearing a checked shirt and tight black jeans. ‘Paul met me the first day I did “Be-Bop-a-Lula” live onstage,’ John Lennon would remember 23 years later, just hours before his death.