Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  Modernity did not try to spare the town of the crooked spire. ‘Chesterfield’s old, cobbled Market Place, which for centuries has been the hub of the town’s shopping area, seems doomed to disappear,’ began the Derbyshire Times’s story in early 1959, with the Labour-run Town Council expected on 3 February to agree to move the market area some 400 yards, demolish the old Market Hall, and instead develop a modern shopping centre in the Market Place. At the meeting, discussion was predictably ‘stormy’, as was the 23–11 vote in favour of the plan. ‘A lot of this is sentimentality,’ was the (ultimately unsuccessful) opposition-quashing line of Councillor H. C. Martin, chairman of the Town Planning Committee. ‘I have had the same feeling. I was reared in Chesterfield. It is my town. I don’t like to see the Market Place developed, but am I to allow morbid sentimentality to prejudice the future development of the town?’

  A few weeks later, in the city of the dreaming spires, a local paper endorsed John Summerson’s charge that Oxford was too timid in its attitude to new buildings, but chose not to blame the Planning Committee. ‘The fact is that there is still a large body of public opinion which is a great deal more timid than the Committee seems to be,’ argued the Oxford Mail. ‘These people, to whom high buildings and modern design are the Devil’s works, make the noise that frightens Committees – be they City, college or University – and ensure that new buildings in public places must be either archaic or tame.’ Even so, the Mail was pleased that Arne Jacobsen, ‘the greatest Danish architect’, had been invited to design the new St Catherine’s College, while Sir William Holford had been asked to scrutinise the plan for the redevelopment of St Ebbe’s: ‘They, and more like them, must be encouraged to do their finest and boldest work here. Only in this way can a modern Oxford be created worthy to stand beside historic Oxford.’

  Soon afterwards, in Lancashire, the fourth estate was even more trenchant. ‘I shudder to think what posterity will say about us when they see the buildings we are handing down to them,’ claimed Councillor S. Preston about ‘Picasso-like buildings’ at the monthly meeting of Orrell Council, in the context of a new school being built in the district. ‘I do not see anything picturesque in them, but there is apparently little we can do about it.’ Other councillors seemingly agreed, but not the Wigan Examiner: ‘The architects who design these schools are professional men who have spent a lifetime learning their business. Their designs are fundamentally good and reflect the mood and character of the age we live in. That laymen don’t like them, is a point in their favour, for laymen have never liked advances in the arts.’ After a pop at local authorities’ penchant for ‘neo this and neo that’ in the tradition of the ‘revolting imitation Gothic which our Victorian grandfathers have inflicted on us in such vast and nauseating quantities’, the paper went on:

  From our new schools, our children will derive considerable benefit of an unobtrusive kind. They will subconsciously learn to appreciate the beauty of unfussy, functional design. They will benefit from the light and space which modern methods and modern materials allow the designer to incorporate in his conceptions and, since they will not be surrounded by clutter, let us hope their minds will be uncluttered too.

  In short: ‘More power to the modern architects say we.’21

  So also, unsurprisingly, said the architects themselves. ‘A battle has to be fought against public ignorance and apathy, and sometimes aggressive retrogression,’ declared Basil Spence in November 1958 in his inaugural presidential address at the Royal Institute of British Architects. He made clear his particular target:

  If ever an objective of the lowest common denominator of ignorance and bad architecture had to be achieved, the planning committee precisely fits the bill. That is my own personal conviction . . .

  We are in an adventurous new period of architectural development, and architects must be helped, not hindered, by this form of bureaucracy if we are to allow our native genius to flourish in the future.

  It had of course to be native genius of a particular type: around this time Quinlan Terry, a student at the Architectural Association, was submitting classical designs, only to be informed he would fail if he continued to do so. Yet though the supremely arrogant example of Le Corbusier still bewitched, at least some rising architectural stars were showing a degree of critical detachment. ‘Graeme Shankland felt that Le Corbusier’s tendency to make man in his own image, to project this image on society and often to impose a formal pattern regardless of circumstances, in some degree vitiated his contribution,’ noted in February a listener to a Third Programme appraisal of the exhibition Le Corbusier and the Future of Architecture at the Building Centre. ‘James Stirling expressed the opinion that the spatial luxury which was necessary to all his achievement was now beginning to detract from the viability of his forms, and proposed that in the post-Corbusier world a more down-to-earth empiricism was to be desired.’ Soon afterwards Peter (‘Joe’) Chamberlin – of Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, which had recently won the commission for a massive reconstruction of Leeds University and would soon be tackling the Barbican – gave a lecture at the Housing Centre on ‘High Density Housing’ that seems to have been modernism at its best:

  His general approach was to analyze the qualities that could make life in a closely-packed urban environment enjoyable, and then to suggest how these qualities could be achieved in new developments.

  People had fled to the suburbs, not because they disliked high density as such, but because of the negative qualities of the central areas as they knew them – noise, smoke, smell, dirt, dangerous traffic and a general restrictiveness as to the detail of daily life: there was nowhere to potter around and ‘do it yourself,’ pets were often prohibited and so on. These negative qualities were not essential to high density living, it was our job as architects to get round them, and offer many ‘plus’ qualities to set against them. A dazzling slide of a Van Gogh pavement café night scene – intensely evocative of the excitement of eating out together – suggested the sort of quality he had in mind.

  Other specific, attainable, with-the-grain recommendations followed, prompting a revealing reflection at the end of the admiring report in the Architects’ Journal: ‘The approach to high density housing from the humanist angle of “how can we make city life as enjoyable as possible” ought not to be unusual – but it certainly is, and how.’

  Ian Nairn was surely in sympathy. ‘The Antiseptic City’ was the title of a typically trenchant recent Encounter piece, in which he argued that the missing dimension in too many projects, however good they looked as architectural models, was ‘ordinary people in all their idiosyncrasy and variety of temperament’. As a result, the new urban pattern taking shape in London (including much-vaunted Roehampton) was ‘chopped-up, monotonous, inhuman yet overcrowded – and this in a city whose outstanding virtue is in its contrasts and sudden incongruities and irrepressible vitality’. Nairn went on to explain his credo – one that ‘so few’ modern architects were ‘prepared to accept in practice’ – namely, that ‘buildings ought to fit the people who will use them’:

  There should be no building for a mean, but simultaneous building for every kind of extreme; and everybody is extreme in one way or other. On a larger scale the city should be a place for everyone – tarts as well as good girls, spivs as well as model husbands and honest men . . . You can no more separate good and evil to create a clean, rational, social-minded city than you can separate the poles of a magnet.

  Condemning ‘use-zoning’ (i.e. zoning by function) as ‘a disaster for the vitality of a city, which makes its impact from the multiplicity of things all thrown together’, and emphasising the need for ‘some continuous change for the eye to hook on to’, as opposed to ‘separate staccato impressions, however grand’, Nairn summed up his advice to architects ‘in nine words: look at people, look at places, think for yourselves’. The alternative, he signed off, was that ‘we will rapidly build ourselves an inhumane, cliché-ridden, and antiseptic nut-house’.22

>   The search for the right kind of urbanism was fuelled in part by a degree of deepening disenchantment – arguably much exaggerated by commentators and observers – with the post-war trend of dispersal to new, outlying estates. Take Coventry, where early in 1959 not only did a survey of Tile Hill reveal a huge gap between planned and actual amenities (no community centre, youth centre, branch library, day nursery, swimming baths or cinema) but a report by the local Labour Party found generally that ‘the tenant feels that the centre of authority is too remote from him’, with the council being ‘too big and impersonal, despite the best efforts of the elected representatives and officers concerned’. In Birmingham the Mail soon afterwards focused on Kingshurst, an overspill estate (out past Castle Bromwich) with almost 9,000 residents. Eyes and ears told different stories: the reporter ‘saw pleasant homes, with bright paint and neat curtains, wide roads, rural street names, grass and the wide, wide vista of winter sky that no central area can offer’, but he ‘heard, as I talked to people who live there, a tale of bewilderment, disinterest, loneliness and dislike’. Lonely, bored young wives, almost nothing for young people to do (‘they hang around together, talking and daring each other,’ said a mother, adding that ‘wickedness is sure to happen’), old people cut off from their Birmingham roots left ‘to wilt and pine in their new homes’, poor and expensive public transport – the litany was becoming increasingly familiar. ‘In solving the problem of homes and city overcrowding by “spilling” into the country, have we raised a host of subtler problems which will be much harder to solve?’ wondered the reporter. ‘Can we form a community from people who still persist in feeling that they are exiles from somewhere else?’

  By this time, moreover, relatively few – certainly relatively few activators – believed that the New Towns were necessarily the answer. Socialist Commentary in April featured a coruscating analysis by Nottingham University’s Geoffrey Gibson of ‘New Town Ghettos’, in which he argued that the planners had got it fundamentally wrong – above all through their misguided concept of the self-contained neighbourhood unit, which had almost completely failed to foster community spirit. A cri de coeur came soon afterwards from Nicholas Hill, who had lived for the past 15 months in the new town at Hemel Hempstead. ‘There is no imagination or planning behind the lay-out of the community,’ he wrote to the Spectator.

  The houses are jerry-built . . . The few shops are built and look like matchboxes. They are situated at the edge of the community rather than in the middle, and sell a meagre selection of second-rate goods . . . The community resembles a modern chicken farm, every chicken alone in its identical box . . . Let someone who loves people, and not uniformity – beauty, and not drabness – build the next town.23

  ‘I proceeded to Turnham Green (10.30 a.m.) and watched some of the marchers move off, split into contingents by the police, presumably to inconvenience the traffic less,’ recorded a non-committal Henry St John on 30 March. ‘There were several hundred of them, average age about 20, of the intellectual type, hardly a hat among them.’ It was Easter Monday, and whereas the pioneer 1958 march for nuclear disarmament had gone from London to Aldermaston, this time (under CND’s auspices) it was the other way round, an implicit recognition that direct action was not going to close down the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Later that day, the march – with architecture the only profession to be represented by its own banner – was some four miles long as it approached Trafalgar Square, and, according to another, more sympathetic observer, ‘the vast majority were quite ordinary young men and women, serious, politically minded and indistinguishably working and middle class’. Up on the Ayrshire coast (Glasgow’s ‘lung’), the first sunny weather of the holiday weekend attracted thousands of ‘flu-wearied, smog-ridden’ city-dwellers. ‘At Ayr railway station where 14 special trains brought around 3,000 visitors, it was the good behaviour of the crowd that caught the attention of the staff,’ noted a local paper. ‘“The best-behaved holiday crowd we’ve had in years,” said one official. “Not a rowdy among them.”’24

  Further down the west coast, Nella Last in Barrow had at last succumbed to the urgings of her children and neighbours by acquiring a television set. ‘Knowing my husband’s love of an old time Variety show I tuned in to the Bob Monkhouse Show on ITV – a really good show & to see & hear my poor dear chuckle and laugh was a real pleasure,’ she wrote on the first Saturday of April. Even so, caution still prevailed:

  An hour, or one & a half hours at most, is quite enough, & I will have to vet programmes on TV as closely – no, more so, than on wireless. Last week in Emergency Ward 10, a man died under a serious operation & it did upset my husband – lingered the next day – while any violence or ‘savage’ grimaces make him dream he says. A Quiz programme is his delight – we both grieved for that ‘Double or Quits’ contestant, who so gallantly tried to turn £500 into £1,000 – & lost the lot. I’ve no courage like that!

  Nella was never a likely candidate for Drumbeat – debuting that evening as BBC’s latest hopeful riposte to Oh Boy!, with Adam Faith and the John Barry Seven among the regulars – while on the radio she missed ‘Faces in the Crowd’, a Third Programme talk in which Asa Briggs regretted how social history lacked the ‘academic prestige’ of political history. Next evening, also on the Third, New Poetry included a reading of Philip Larkin’s as yet unpublished ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (‘any supercilious note should be rigorously excluded’, insisted the poet in advance) – presumably not listened to by Jean Bird, receiving several doses of pethidine that day at a maternity hospital before on the Monday, under general anaesthetic, giving birth to her son James through a complicated high-forceps delivery:

  When I came round, the baby had already been taken away. It seems quite shocking now [1996], but it was par for the course in those days. He’d had a difficult start, and the drill in those days was ‘cot nursing’, which meant the baby wouldn’t be touched any more than was absolutely necessary for 48 hours. He was kept in the nursery, so I didn’t even see him until he was nearly two days old. I remember they brought him along in his cot and left him by my bed just before the 48 hours was up. Of course I was desperate to look at him and hold him, so I picked him up and put him to the breast. He was ravenous – he’d only had a bottle of half-strength milk – and latched on straightaway.

  ‘But then,’ she added, ‘the curtains were pulled back and I got a real ticking off for getting him out of his cot too soon.’25

  During the interim, on Tuesday the 7th, the year’s seminal economic event had taken place, one with powerful political resonance. ‘Budget statement was very effective,’ recorded a satisfied Macmillan, who for many months had been pushing Heathcoat Amory hard to do exactly what at last he now delivered. ‘The C of Exr got rather tired at the end of his 2 hour speech & we thought he was going to faint. But he got through.’ Amory himself was sufficiently recovered to give a television interview in the evening, reassuringly calling it a ‘Steady Ahead’ Budget, but in reality it was far more expansionary than that: ninepence off the standard rate of income tax, cuts in purchase tax, twopence off a pint of beer, and altogether, as the FT approvingly noted, ‘a Budget of large concessions’, designed to ‘restore economic confidence’ and ‘combat recession’. Even The Times – temporarily forgetful of its earlier, anti-Keynesian sternness at the time of Thorneycroft’s resignation, but instead mindful that this was almost certainly an election year – was similarly positive, after managing with a certain amount of legerdemain to satisfy itself that consumers were ‘not getting more than their share’ of Amory’s largesse. Among the politicians, Reginald Maudling in the Budget debate robustly insisted that disapproving talk by the Shadow Chancellor, Harold Wilson, of ‘a consumers’ spree’ was a ‘particularly silly’ way of describing what was in practice ‘leaving more money in the pockets of the public to spend as they wish’, but it was Wilson’s colleague Richard Crossman who really – albeit privately – let the cat out of the bag. ‘My first reaction,
I am afraid, was that I had saved about £100 on my new Humber Hawk by postponing delivery until after the Budget,’ he wrote. ‘In fact, as far as I can calculate, I shall also get nearly £200 in reduced income tax.’ On more mature reflection, the following week, he would call it ‘a selfish, egotistical Budget’, but his rival diarist had already had the right of it on the 9th: ‘Budget has been very well received in the country & by the Press,’ noted Macmillan. And he added: ‘The 64,000 dollar question remains – When? I am feeling more & more against a “snap” election.’26

  There were few complaints about the Budget in middle-class Woodford, which was not only Churchill’s constituency but also the subject this spring, two years after Family and Kinship, of intensive study by Peter Willmott and Michael Young. They found, further out on the Central Line but not as far as Debden, an utterly different world from Bethnal Green – from where (or thereabouts) many upwardly mobile Woodfordians had come over the years. ‘How few people there seemed to be in Woodford, and how many dogs!’ they wrote in their subsequent Family and Class in a London Suburb (1960). ‘In Bethnal Green people are vigorously at home in the streets, their public face much the same as their private. In Woodford people seem to be quieter and more reserved in public, somehow endorsing [Lewis] Mumford’s description of suburbs as the apotheosis of “a collective attempt to lead a private life.”’ Almost two-thirds of their general sample were middle class, roughly reflecting Woodford’s composition: a typical middle-class house had ‘thick pile carpets, rooms fashionably decorated with oatmeal paper on three walls and a contrasting blue on the fourth, bookcases full of Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie and Reader’s Digest condensed books, above the mantelpiece a water-colour of Winchelsea, VAT 69 bottles converted into table-lamps, french windows looking out on to a terra-cotta Pan in the middle of a goldfish pond, the whole bathed in a permanent smell of Mansion polish’. And Willmott and Young were struck by the district’s ‘general adoption of middle-class standards’, with electricians and bank clerks (and their respective wives) wearing ‘the same sort of clothes’, driving ‘the same sort of cars’ and inside their homes watching ‘the same television set from the same mass-produced sofa’.