Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Not so far away, but a world apart, the City of London’s redevelopment was moving up a gear by early 1959. The City Corporation was poised to give approval to the Paternoster scheme, with that precinct (just to the north of St Paul’s) envisaged as London’s premier modern shopping centre; the impending construction of large new office blocks was necessitating the widening of historic Cheapside; and between Aldersgate and Moorgate, the construction of the urban motorway that was Route 11 was pushing ahead, notwithstanding the contractors having to build a covered pit to store the 200 or so skulls and other bones they had accidentally disturbed beneath the old Barber-Surgeons’ Hall – a pit that children managed to get into at weekends, using the skulls for games of Cowboys and Indians. So too in the capital at large, but for almost the first time with a whiff of controversy that went beyond merely nimby-ism. ‘All of a sudden,’ noted Mollie Panter-Downes in March, ‘Londoners seem to be looking around at the new London that is rising out of the bombed or demolished areas and to be asking critical questions.’15

  What sort of questions? The LCC had just given the go-ahead to a 31-storey building on Millbank, it was negotiating with the property developer Harry Hyams a deal by which it would consent to the Seifert-designed 35-storey office tower (the future Centrepoint) at St Giles Circus in return for Hyams ‘giving’ it £1.5 million of adjacent land on which to build a roundabout (which never happened), and the unlovely 17-storey Bowater House had just gone up in Knightsbridge. But for the briefly much-publicised Anti-Uglies – students mainly from the Royal College of Art but also from the Architectural Association – the villain of the piece was dreary neo-Georgianism, above all in the City. Two particular targets were Sir Albert Richardson’s defiantly non-modernist Bracken House (the new home of the Financial Times), on which the Anti-Uglies marched, and the elephantine new Barclays head office in Lombard Street, with the RCA’s duffle-coated but glamorous Pauline Boty photographed outside scattering rose petals on the coffin of British Architecture. Far from a modernist in most things, Panter-Downes tended to sympathise, while like ‘most Londoners’ she found the LCC’s housing projects ‘something to be proud of’ – not least ‘the enormous Roehampton Estate of small skyscrapers, which you can see glittering in the sun these spring mornings as you motor in from Kingston, and which are brilliantly sited among the cedars of the Victorian suburban mansions they have replaced’.16

  Outside London, it was Birmingham that now set the pace. On 25 February a Corporation spokesman reiterated to the local press that the Market Hall (1828), in the way of the Inner Ring Road and the redevelopment of the whole Bull Ring area (which already included ‘The Big Top’, the giant, 160-foot City Centre House shop-and-office block erected by the rising local and increasingly national property developer Jack Cotton), was to be demolished ‘as soon as possible’. Next day, opening the British Road Federation’s exhibition (‘Town Roads for Today – and Tomorrow’) at the Civic Centre, Alderman Frank Price, about to step down after five years chairing the Public Works Committee, declared that people who advocated banning cars from city centres were like ‘ostriches’ and expressed the hope that the city’s Inner Ring Road, due for completion in 1969, would give a lead to the rest of the country. And on the 27th the Birmingham Mail issued a ‘Progress Report on the New Birmingham’, accompanied by a photograph of the broad sweep of the showcase first section of the Inner Ring Road, starting to take shape in Smallbrook:

  In and around the city centre, building work totalling some £65,000,000 is now in progress. Enormous changes have been made in the past five years. But this is only the beginning.

  Ugly old buildings are being wiped away. The city centre changes almost daily. The visitor returns to find white new buildings mushrooming amid the architectural debris of the past. The city’s list of post-war new buildings, either completed or proposed, covers no fewer than 45 substantial projects.

  Price himself – Labour, mid-30s, from Birmingham’s slums, previously a toolmaker, now a public relations officer – was quoted: ‘In 20 years from now the future citizens of Birmingham will look back on this period of their city’s history and will say: “This was Birmingham’s finest and most courageous period.”’ But soon afterwards the Mail asked this ‘tough, ambitious realist with more than a touch of the visionary’ whether any mistakes had been made in the city’s redevelopment plans. ‘Obviously we have made some,’ he replied. ‘At times I think we should stand still and try to get into perspective what we are attempting to do. I think certain buildings in the city could have been improved upon. But, by and large, I think a magnificent effort has been made.’ At this stage almost the only detectable opposition to all this came from small traders. ‘Ask any local retailer [in Smallbrook] for his views on this wonderful city of the future,’ wrote F. D. Walkley to the Mail. ‘He will reply in words not usually found in the dictionary.’ J. F. Munro agreed: ‘Moderate redevelopment in any city is welcome, but wholesale bulldozing is another matter. Small traders, after years of service to city and citizens, are being indiscriminately turned out – many to face ruin and the end of all their efforts.’ Still, a city’s pride was at stake, and in April the pedestrian subway under Smallbrook Ringway opened – the first in the country.

  Alderman Price featured prominently in Who Cares? A New Way Home, a BBC documentary about slum clearance in Birmingham broadcast on 24 February. Calling the slums ‘caves’ and ‘holes in the wall’, he argued that young families moving to new blocks of flats would benefit from the open space around, opposed mews-type development, conceded that the lack of the extended family on the new estates was a problem – and claimed that Birmingham was on the way to becoming ‘one of the most beautiful cities in Europe’. The TV programme as a whole was relentlessly upbeat. ‘One must admire the drive and enthusiasm of the Housing Department,’ declared the presenter, Douglas Jones, who at one point asked the city engineer, Sir Herbert Manzoni, about the ‘comprehensive manner’ of the slum-clearance programme and, specifically, whether people were enthusiastic. ‘Of course it’s difficult for those who are being disturbed,’ Manzoni replied, adding that he usually found them ‘getting enthusiastic’ once they were in their new homes.17

  The documentary was transmitted barely a fortnight after BBC television’s Second Enquiry, in which (after an interval of over six years) Robert Reid paid a return visit to Glasgow and its housing issues, including the redevelopment of the Gorbals. ‘This programme didn’t mince matters,’ noted one impressed critic. ‘Years of neglect have created a colossal problem; it may be twenty years before Glasgow clears the last of its tenements. But one felt it would be done; and that this time the citizens of this “no mean city” will not have to leave Britain as their fathers did to find a decent life, but will receive their birthright in their own country.’ Reid’s programme won from the Viewers’ Panel a notably high Reaction Index of 78. ‘Without seeing, who would believe that people had to live in such awful surroundings in Britain today?’ asked a housewife, while a chemical worker’s wife declared, ‘Surely slum clearance which is needed as obviously as this demands tip-top priority above everything else.’ Even so, the odd comment did query whether Glaswegian slum-dwellers possessed a high-enough quota of the self-help ethos. From a research engineer’s wife: ‘These people seemed quite content to put their names on a list for council houses and then sit back and wait. My husband and I have struggled to buy our house.’ Perhaps inevitably, several viewers took exception to the ‘mournful and monotonous mouth organ music’.

  By this time the Sub-Convener of Glasgow’s Housing Committee was David Gibson, an idealistic, high-energy left-winger (and former Independent Labour Party stalwart) described by Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, historians of the tower block, as ‘arguably the most remarkable of Western Europe’s postwar municipal housing leaders’. Gibson’s passion was to rehouse Glasgow slum-dwellers in the city itself, not to banish them to overspill estates on the periphery; his means was the high-rise flat.
‘Gibson,’ they note,

  intuitively grasped that, if the multi-storey blocks proposed by the planners for mixed development use in the CDAs [Comprehensive Development Areas] were instead built by the Committee outside those areas on gap-sites, much higher blocks would be possible, unfettered by planning restrictions and acquisition delays. This would allow a cycle of decanting within the city, without resorting to overspill.

  There ensued during 1958–9 ‘much agonised discussion’ on the Housing Committee, but for the moment its natural conservatism prevailed.

  One approach, though, that lamentably failed to produce any worthwhile discussion was Tom Brennan’s in his book Reshaping a City, published in early 1959. Focusing especially on Govan (run-down centre of the shipbuilding industry and home to Glasgow Rangers) and Pollok (site of a huge peripheral estate), his ‘arresting conclusion’, as the TLS reviewer fairly summarised it, was that ‘the process of decanting people to the outskirts and radically rebuilding the centre may have gone far enough and is not the true answer to the situation as it now exists’, especially given that ‘overcrowding in the central districts is no longer serious and the dispersal of industry and services has not kept pace with the dispersal of population’. What was the true answer? For ‘the majority’ of Govan’s population, Brennan himself argued, ‘the obvious solution, if it could be managed, would be to make available to them the components for a better life – not in a new town in ten or twenty years’ time, but in Govan now. The idea should be one of repairing, reviving, and thereby renewing Govan rather than waiting until it has deteriorated sufficiently to be replaced altogether.’ It was an analysis backed up by detailed evidence of how in Govan’s older properties the occupants (who revealed little wish to move to new towns or overspill estates) were already using their new prosperity to upgrade their living conditions, and backed up also by a call for ‘a judicious combination of commercial, public and private enterprise’ to stimulate renovation – a very different route to Glasgow becoming, through local-authority demolition and local-authority redevelopment, ‘Corporation-owned and Corporation-managed’.18

  If a similar diagnosis had appeared at this time about any other large British city, it would almost certainly have received an equally nugatory response from the activator class. ‘It will be of particular interest to the residents of 375 of Liverpool’s darkest acres, those 39,000 people living in the forest of 90 to 130-years-old terraces of the municipal wards of Netherfield, Vauxhall, St Domingo and Westminster,’ promised the Liverpool Echo in November 1958 about a new exhibition, Liverpool of the Future, on the Everton Heights Redevelopment Scheme, in which some 6,500 houses were to be replaced by mixed development, including 21-storey blocks of flats. ‘They will see what the future holds for the dreary, narrow streets and blackened houses which have been their familiars for so long.’ The paper went bullishly on about this ‘attempt at creating a closely-knit community’:

  Already the new North Liverpool skyline is taking shape, with the majesty of Creswell Mount crowning the slope on which are huddled the mean and narrow streets of the old Liverpool.

  The two new blocks, The Braddocks, already have nestling near them a number of modern buildings, colourful and fresh in contrast to the black dreariness surrounding them. They are the forerunners of what is to come.

  It is a brave project, charged with imagination, but well capable of realisation.

  The old Everton Heights had one shop for every 65 people, and when ‘a brains trust composed of four leading council officials, with a senior lecturer in social science at Liverpool University as chairman, answered questions on the scheme, the audience’s main concern, after the question of the housing, was what would be the fate of the little shops’.

  Little shops were not on Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s mind when, the following February, he took Boris Krylov, a Russian academic, on a tour of Bristol. This featured ‘the worst slums’ plus ‘an old smoky school with overcrowded classes and no proper playground’ plus ‘the prefabs’ and ‘the horrible, dull red brick pre-war council houses’, before ‘finally the new housing’:

  I took him to Barton House, the 16-storey block of flats in the centre of the Barton Hill redevelopment. We went to the roof and then knocked on a flat door and were shown round by a railwayman and his wife. It was lovely and they were very happy.

  Then we went out to Hartcliffe estate – a 50,000-people new suburb. It really is a lovely place, well laid out and planned with different types of houses and the finest school I have ever seen anywhere in the world. I spotted it in the distance, not knowing what it was. But we walked in the front door bravely and asked if we could look round. It was Withywood Comprehensive School and the headmaster insisted on taking us on a tour. We started by going up in the lift to the top and walked down and through the beautifully equipped laboratories and classrooms. The school has enormous playing fields, two gymnasia and lovely design in aluminium and glass.

  ‘It really knocked Boris sideways,’ concluded Benn.19

  So too in Newcastle, where in March – not long after reports about the local authority’s intention to demolish Dobson’s Royal Arcade and replace it with a roundabout – the City Council decided to proceed with T. Dan Smith’s recommendation, as chairman of the Housing Committee, to build high-rise blocks of flats (12 to 15 storeys) in the slum-cleared or to-be-cleared areas of Heaton Park Road, Shieldfield and Cruddas Park. This last was just off the Scotswood Road in Newcastle’s West End and near to Rye Hill, a particularly rough area where in the mid-1950s the Tory-run council had been responsible for erecting the much-criticised Noble Street flats: five storeys, no lifts, badly designed, done on the cheap, a slum before the first tenants moved in. The new breed of flats, insisted Smith, would be wholly different. ‘The Council need have no fear at all about this scheme,’ he declared after listing in great detail all the mod cons and suchlike (including gas water-heater, gas-heated clothes-drying cabinet, full-size bath and centralised aerial system) that would be available. ‘The external is as attractive as any block of flats I have seen built anywhere else, and more attractive than most. The flats will make a tremendous contribution not only to the housing problem but to the brightening up of areas which hitherto have been depressing.’ The female perspective came from a fellow councillor, Mrs Wynne-Jones. ‘It has always surprised me that flats have not been popular in this part of the world, and we hear people say “I would rather have a proper house,”’ she observed. ‘Here, quite obviously, the architect and the people responsible have not forgotten that it is the ordinary, practical running of a house that is going to matter so tremendously to the women who are to live there.’

  Manchester since the war had been rather slow to embrace the modern high-rise, but no longer. ‘Albert Bridge House shows signs of blowing some of the cobwebs away, but they have been there a long, long time and it looks as if a howling gale will be required finally to dislodge them,’ was the somewhat grudging appraisal by the Architects’ Journal in April of a newly completed 18-storey block to house Manchester’s tax officials. Elsewhere in the city centre, work had just started or was about to start on not only the Co-operative Wholesale Society and Co-operative Insurance Society cluster of buildings (including the 25-storey CIS tower modelled on Chicago’s Inland Steel Building) but also Piccadilly Plaza, described by a latter-day Pevsner as ‘a huge commercial superblock’ that ‘completely fails to take any account of its surroundings’, though ‘the sheer confidence and scale impress’. The residential nettle was also being grasped. News that an 11-storey block was to be built in Chorlton-on-Medlock once 54 acres had been cleared was welcomed in November 1958 by the Manchester Evening News, which ‘has campaigned for years for multi-storey flats blocks, well designed and equipped, to be built near the city centre for people who wish to stay in Manchester’.

  In nearby Salford, such good progress was being made in major multi-storey building programmes that by April 1959 the slum-clearance schedule there was expecte
d to speed up – with most of Walter Greenwood’s ‘Hanky Park’ (now in the Ellor Street Clearance Areas) likely to be cleared by the end of the year. ‘It is a district of people whose roots are firmly embedded in the hard ground, and there is every sign that they are not going to take kindly to the sudden upheaval,’ observed a visiting reporter. ‘There was a sense of uneasiness around, which is in many cases hidden by a joke or a resolution to face the new life – the sort of resolution one reaches when facing a visit to the dentist to have that worrying tooth removed. The jokes take the form of suggestions that the Royal Oak Hotel [i.e. a pub] should be removed en bloc as it is and put down in the new area of habitation, a joke obviously based on a feeling of lack of security.’ Some were happy to move – ‘mostly women who see in the new life a chance to throw the kids into a bath at night-time with the steaming hot water coming out of a tap instead of a kettle’ – but tellingly, ‘everybody in the area’ wanted ‘to go to Southgarth [likely to be Salford’s last new council estate built of houses] and don’t want to be on the eighth floor of any flats’. ‘They all know they are going,’ concluded the reporter, ‘but to where, and to what, they do not know.’ Later in the month, the Housing Committee announced plans for 15-storey blocks in the St Matthias Clearance Area – Salford’s highest yet.20