By 1958 London was in the relatively early stages of a phenomenal office boom – one that would soon spread into the provinces. It had begun in the City with three buildings that went up in the mid-1950s: the Bank of England’s New Change (just to the east of St Paul’s), condemned by Pevsner in 1957 as a ‘vast pile’ that was ‘shockingly lifeless and reactionary’, but half a century later defended by Gavin Stamp as ‘a stodgy but well-made classical design which made no attempt to upstage Wren’, in contrast to the ‘arrogant, irrational, vulgar’ One New Change shopping centre that was replacing it; the more modern, 14-storey Bucklersbury House, which according to Ian Nairn had ‘no virtues and no vices . . . it is the null point of architecture’; and Fountain House in Fenchurch Street, a 12-storey tower (on a low horizontal podium) that had an all-glass curtain wall and which became the prototype for what the architectural historian Nicholas Bullock has called ‘commercial modernism’. Whatever the architectural style, the conditions were propitious by the late 1950s for a speculative property boom, not only in offices but also in shops and other development schemes. The Conservative government in November 1954 had abandoned the building controls of the previous 15 years; resourceful, clear-eyed property developers like Charles Clore, Jack Cotton and Max Rayne were fully aware of the potential financial jackpot; and the local authorities (whether in London or elsewhere) were usually no match for their ambitions, even if they did want to thwart them, by no means always the case.21
One architect above all – in every sense – was switched on to the possibilities. The planners ‘feared me more than I feared them’, the shrewd, unassuming, pipe-smoking Colonel Richard Seifert would accurately recall about his remarkable skill in exploiting loopholes in planning laws, thereby enabling the maximum lettable space from a site. Seifert ran his architectural practice (motto: ‘Prestige Without Vulgarity’) with all the focus and discipline of a military operation, befitting his army past. The imposing Woolworth House on Marylebone Road (1955) was his first major London building, and several hundred office blocks lay ahead as well as hotels and high-rise housing. ‘Seifert was the antithesis of the image of the architect as bohemian artist,’ noted an obituary. ‘His solid businessman-like approach won him few friends in the architectural Establishment, which tended to dismiss his work as “development architecture”.’22
During 1958 it became almost a cliché that London’s skyline was changing dramatically. ‘Skyscraper London’ was the title in March of an enthusiastic piece in the Star, and soon afterwards Barbara Hooper painted a word picture on Radio Newsreel. After describing the visual effect of the tall blocks that had gone up, and were going up, in the City, she went on:
Look north along Fleet Street, for instance. Not long ago the only square-topped white building was the Daily Telegraph office; now there is also Hulton House, eight storeys high, and St Bride’s House, much the same height. Stand on the banks of the Serpentine in Hyde Park: a few months ago you could not see a building above the treetops, and now at least four storeys of the central tower on a huge building rear high above the trees. In and around Oxford Street at least two new shopping blocks are going up, some eight storeys high. If you go up the tower of Westminster Cathedral, as I have done, the view over that part of the West End is changing, too. Above the cluster of old dark roofs and chimneys you can pick out new office buildings in Whitehall, an engineering block behind Buckingham Palace, twelve- and fourteen-storey blocks of flats near Paddington Station, and others down in Pimlico, and the tower of the massive London Transport headquarters by St James’s Park. Soon, if you walk through St James’s Park towards The Mall, 200 feet and more of the not-yet-built New Zealand House will partly block the view up Haymarket.
‘If planning permission is given,’ she concluded, ‘there may be hotels in Park Lane and Lancaster Gate that are more than 300 feet high, and over on the South Bank of the Thames work has already begun on an office block [the Shell Building] 330 feet high – nearly as high as St Paul’s.’
Not everyone was thrilled by London’s new skyline. The same week in April that Hooper’s evocation appeared in the Listener, a letter to the New Statesman from a professed layman, Arthur Kemsley of 106 Finchley Road, disparaged the ‘infinite number of up-ended matchboxes’ that now littered the London scene. ‘The reason, it seems, is that a cube is the most economical structure to build . . . Every square inch of floor space is financially productive. And to hell with what it looks like.’ His letter was probably read by John Fowles, who the following Sunday took a walk round a new estate in St Pancras:
The Regent Square area is now a postwar development scheme – gaunt blocks, cheap, shoddy. They reminded me of the Dartmoor prison blocks. High, rectangular, imprisoning. One great slab pitted like a cliff with red and mauve and blue square balcony-caves. Nearby were flats of a slightly earlier period – with ribbed corners, tired balconies and windows. None of them look as if they will last; the horror is that they will.
For the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor, responding to Hooper in the following week’s Listener, the time had arrived when ‘we have got to decide, once for all, whether we are going to abandon the human values which are to the fore in London and launch out towards the creation of another megapolis, or not’; he hoped ‘fervently’ that the LCC would refuse permission for ‘skyscraper hotels’ in Park Lane and Lancaster Gate. Frainy Heap was probably on the other side of the argument. ‘Every evening,’ recorded Anthony in June about his nine-year-old son, ‘he wanders across to trespass in the new 11 storeys high block of council flats over in Regent Square, ride up and down in its lift, and look over London from its roof.’
Soon afterwards, J. M. Richards in the Architectural Review offered his overview on the prospects for ‘High London’. Although pleased that the very tall office block planned for Millbank had just received planning consent – ‘it will provide the London landscape with a vertical punctuation mark just where it is needed’ – his larger case was that ‘it is unfortunate in the extreme that, with a few honourable exceptions, the new high buildings planned for London fall far below the best of what our architects are capable’. His explanation might have been written with Colonel Seifert in mind: ‘The average property developer is not in touch with the best architectural advice, the kind of architect he favours, understandably from his point of view, being the kind with most experience of extracting the greatest profitable floor area from a given plot-ratio and of circumventing most speedily the rules and regulations that stand in his way.’ Richards, a moderate modernist and a man of huge common sense, was disinclined to underestimate the significance of this historical moment:
In accepting high buildings we are accepting nothing less than a revolution in the visual character of London, which has always been a horizontal city. But are we also aware of another revolution that follows? There were vertical elements in the old horizontal London, but these deserved their place because of their symbolic significance. They were the spires of churches and the towers of imperial institutions and the like; they were among the dignified furnishings proper to a capital city. The new vertical elements, dominant in the skyline, will instead be anonymous commercial blocks with no civic significance . . .
‘How’, he asked, ‘are we going to reconcile the civic pride of a city confident in its ability to control its own future with the fact of its most conspicuous monuments being where they are simply because it was to some individual’s profit to put them there?’23
Redevelopment generally remained a perhaps surprisingly contested process. In January it was reported that ‘more than 14,000 council house tenants have decided to stay where they are rather than accept the offer of moving into luxury flats in an eight-storey block being built at Wolverhampton’, with ‘only 40 willing to change’. On the refuseniks being quizzed by housing officials, it emerged that their main objections to moving were that ‘flats lack privacy, they have no gardens, children have to be penned in or sent into busy streets to p
lay, and rents are higher’, while ‘some tenants think that noise would carry too easily in the flats and a few just don’t like anything new’. In February in a talk in Bristol on that city’s post-war planning and architecture, Ian Nairn castigated the apparent willingness to allow Kingsdown’s demolition as ‘frightening’, observed of the Kingsmead shopping centre that he could not ‘imagine so many buildings designed by so many different architects with the same level of mediocrity’, and called the new Prudential building in the insensitively developed Lime Street area a ‘monster’. Writing to the Salford City Reporter in March, ‘Disgusted Citizen’ implicitly questioned the very rationale of slum clearance: ‘Having had the opportunity over many years of visiting people in their homes week after week, in every part of Salford and Manchester, I have arrived at the firm conclusion that slums are caused by the people themselves, not by the state of the buildings in which they live.’ And soon afterwards, in a lecture to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the architectural historian John Summerson almost as daringly wondered whether the current ‘wave of curiosity and expanding interest’ in old buildings, a nod perhaps to the recently formed Victorian Society, had ‘something to do with our lack of success in producing a contemporary architecture which is warmly and instinctively loved’.24
Nairn was back in the fray in early April, one of some 700 people attending on a cold night another meeting at Kensington Town Hall to discuss the Notting Hill Gate scheme. ‘Why was not the public asked their opinion at an earlier stage?’ he asked, and a motion expressing dissatisfaction with the scheme was passed by a large majority. Back in Salford, local elections in early May highlighted the issue, according to a local journalist, of ‘the general unsightliness of our clearance areas, extending over months and in some cases years’, so that ‘there never seems to be a clean sweep anywhere’, while in Surbiton in June, the rumour that a block of flats was to go up near her brother’s house prompted grim reflections from Marian Raynham: ‘Awful things for families to live in. Every available space is being built on, & the planners never do anything to make a neighbourhood look prettier.’ July saw Nairn commenting balefully on changes, partly in the context of road-widening, in a Cambridgeshire town – ‘Wisbech is settling down, with complacent phrases all round, to a bit of self-destruction just as effective as the H-bomb’ – and Lady Morris, retiring president of the National Federation of Community Associations, bemoaning how housing estates were still being built without adequate amenities, so that ‘the people for whom they are intended are forced to choose between a home without a neighbourhood and a neighbourhood without a home’. The next month in Coventry, the councillor most responsible for that city’s remarkable post-war reconstruction, George Hodgkinson, reluctantly conceded in an interview that retrenchment was becoming unavoidable, given that it was now increasingly difficult to receive public support ‘for schemes which seem remote from their point of view’. But Hodgkinson himself was one of four Coventry councillors (including the chairman of the Housing Committee) who that August, according to a local MP soon afterwards, ‘spent a week at the Edinburgh Festival at the cost of Wimpeys’, which ‘had so far done £8,000,000-worth of housing at Coventry, most of it without tenders’. Richard Crossman added that Wimpeys had also ‘thrown some tremendous parties’.25
Ultimately, though, a combination of the spirit of the age and seemingly inescapable practical necessity was irresistible. ‘15-storey Flats Next?’ ran a Salford headline in March, followed by news about plans for St Matthias No. 2 Clearance Area, where demolition was proceeding apace. ‘As we go on,’ explained the Housing Committee’s Councillor N. Wright, ‘we find that, because many people are loath to go from slum clearance areas into the overspill districts at Little Hulton and in Cheshire, we are more or less tied down to the high-flats type of density housing.’ A week later another Salfordian, Mrs K. Mountney of Ewart Street, itself in a proposed clearance area, stoutly insisted that ‘every available piece of land in this hemmed-in city must be used to its fullest advantage and if that means eight-storey flats on one’s doorstep that’s just one of the hazards of living in Salford’. Just along the road, Manchester had long been known for its scepticism about high rises, but that spring a delegation of councillors visited blocks of flats in Berlin, Hamburg and Amsterdam. ‘The Germans and the Dutch have learned to live in flats,’ stated their admiring report in due course. The lesson for Manchester was that, provided ‘great care’ was ‘exercised in the selection of tenants to occupy multi-storey development’, then such development could ‘provide good housing and a colourful and interesting development worthy of our city’. For most progress-minded activators, clearance and redevelopment was a black-and-white issue. ‘We still have too many slums – both to live in and to work in,’ declared T. Yates, chairman of the General Council of the TUC, when he formally opened the Dorset estate. ‘To be rid of them we need more than bricks and mortar; more than men and women. We need courage and vision. In Bethnal Green, in their social development scheme, I believe they have shown this courage.’
So too with reconstruction more generally – with Coventry still a compelling emblem of modernity at its best. ‘So much more like a city of the world than many other four or five times its size,’ declared Stanley Baron in April in the first of his Reynolds News series on ‘The Changing Face of Britain’. Soon afterwards, Coventry was also the obligatory first stop for the News Chronicle’s Sarah Jenkins in her ‘So This Is England’ series, as she praised its ‘air of looking forward and not back’. An architect certainly not looking back was Peter Smithson. At about this time, in his capacity as a tutor at the Architectural Association, he received an essay from a fourth-year student on the current work of the Italian architect Ernesto. ‘The essay spoke warmly of this new, softened modernism,’ records the biographer of Richard Rogers, ‘but it was anathema to Smithson who dismissed it all as romantic nonsense and demanded that the essay be rewritten. Similarly, a housing scheme by Rogers for Richmond Park, which displayed the same romantic tendencies and which derived in part from the neo-liberty revival in Italy, received the same response. It even had bow windows.’26
Back in the early 1950s, an unsuccessful entry by Smithson and his forceful wife Alison in the City of London’s competition to design new housing at Golden Lane had done much to launch the concept of ‘streets-in-the-air’, usually known later as ‘streets-in-the-sky’ – in effect, an attempt to recreate, off the ground, the communal aspect of the working-class street. The first place where it came into being, rapidly attracting huge international attention, was the new Park Hill estate in Sheffield, on a hillside overlooking the railway station and city centre, designed by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith for the go-ahead City Architect, Lewis Womersley. ‘Out of ugliness we are to create something of beauty and utility,’ declared the lord mayor on the last Friday of April 1958, as – amidst the rubble of 800 condemned houses in the process of being demolished – two veteran councillors (one Labour, one Tory) were handed a souvenir trowel and laid the foundation stone. Soon afterwards, ahead of the local elections, Labour’s party political broadcast featured the area’s MP, George Darling, telling a housewife that Park Hill would be ‘a quiet, self-contained community, with its own shops and schools, and other amenities’. Later in the broadcast, Councillor Harold Lambert, vice-chairman of the Housing Committee and the driving force in pushing through Sheffield’s new housing developments (not only Park Hill), explained to Darling how while smaller children would be able to play, under their mother’s eye, on the ‘large sheltered balcony’ that each flat would have, for older children there would be playgrounds at ground level. ‘The type of equipment we have in mind,’ he added, ‘is not only entertaining, it is of an educational value for the kiddies, too.’27
Womersley himself was adamant, as he told a housing conference two months later at London’s County Hall, that ‘the opportunities which were missed for comprehensive redevelopment prewar are not to be allowed to escape
again’. By this time a similar spirit was starting to imbue many of Glasgow’s activators, especially in relation to the Gorbals. There, the biggest redevelopment commission had been given to the Scottish architect Basil Spence, best known for the new Coventry Cathedral that was rising up and who was now acclaimed by the Architects’ Journal (in July 1958) as ‘The Popular President’, i.e. of the Royal Institute of British Architects. ‘Brilliance describes the man,’ declared the magazine’s admiring profile. ‘He designs fluently, speaks fluently, is capable, sincere and almost too tender-hearted.’ Following his commission from Glasgow Corporation, Spence had visited Le Corbusier’s famous, hard-modernist Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and been much impressed, not least by its nautical flavour; this summer, on presenting to the Housing Committee his plans for ten 20-storey blocks raised on stilts and with inset communal balconies, he enthusiastically claimed that ‘on Tuesdays, when all the washing’s out, it’ll be like a great ship in full sail!’
Modernity Britain Page 16
