Joining the Dots

by Juliet Gardiner

  The Cator Estate, developed in the early nineteenth century in the grounds of a grand Palladian mansion in Blackheath belonging to John Cator, a wealthy timber merchant, had terraces of late Georgian and early Victorian houses and was ideal for such development. It was not a question of demolishing houses, or even converting large houses into several flats, but of purchasing part of the spacious back gardens of these imposing stuccoed terraces, as well as odd pockets of vacant land. Lyons and Townsend recognised the area as an opportunity to build the sort of houses and estates they had envisaged, as they did elsewhere in the country in places such as Cambridge, Byfleet, Ham Common, Twickenham and, later, a whole village of 500 dwellings, New Ash Green in Kent. A total of thirty Span housing estates were built between 1948 and 1984, fulfilling the collaborators’ vision and appealing to families with aspirations to modern design but insufficient cash to realise their dream, who were likely to want to live among grand houses in elegant, leafy neighbourhoods in affordable (with a mortgage) homes in a modernist vernacular.

  A notable accolade came from the stern-minded architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner in his forty-six-volume Buildings of England series published between 1951 and 1974. He described Span developments as ‘low, ingenious houses and flats in carefully landscaped cul-de-sacs, or set around courtyards or communal lawns with friendly detailing of tile hanging or weatherboarding, a total contrast in every respect to the council housing of the same period’ – or, the distinguished critic might have added, to most spec-built postwar developments.

  Wherever the site made it possible, Span estates reproduced on a small scale London squares such as those in Bloomsbury or Kensington, but with lawns or courtyards boxed in by terraces of uniform houses. Although some houses were larger than others, they all followed the same design rubric. They had flat roofs and no chimneys, since there were no fireplaces, and large plate-glass windows; some interiors were more open plan than others, but all were plain canvases with no fussy details such as cornices and ceiling roses.

  A key feature of all Span estates, Lyons insisted, was the distinctive landscape design planted with saplings and ‘architectural plants’ such as yuccas and shrubs, interspersed with hard landscaping using cobbles, granite slabs and setts. Bollards and mushroom-shaped exterior lights among the planting were also a defining feature of Spanland. The garages for residents’ cars were tucked away, with visitors’ parking spaces marked out of sight of the houses and shielded by trees and bushes.

  Each estate had a residents’ association tasked with ensuring that the aesthetic of the estate was not compromised by hanging, say, baskets of lobelias or petunias from wrought-iron brackets, or reproduction carriage lamps over the front door, nor any mavericks presuming to repaint their front door a different colour from that specified. As each house had its own small back garden too, residents could indulge colourful floral excesses behind their own walls, but to my recollection few did – nor did they transgress the rule about not hanging washing out on a Sunday. Style fascism some may call this, but most of us who lived there did not.

  Tasteful wooden climbing frames and sandpits were provided for the children by the residents’ association, though naturally those children soon diluted the purity of the design by making camps and dens in the bushes with bits of plywood, polythene sheeting and cardboard boxes.

  We moved into the Lane on its completion in 1963. We bought a T10 house, a similar version of those on earlier Span estates in Blackheath. We would have liked to buy a slightly larger T15 but that cost £750 more; and though today you could put such an amount on your credit card, there were no credit cards then, and £750 proved an insurmountable barrier.

  Every day after the builders moved out, removal lorries or hired transit vans manoeuvred down the Lane (which really was a winding lane, a cul-de-sac with a field and allotments on one side and an imposing Georgian house on the other). Furniture was unloaded, carried into the houses or piled on the pavement. Those of us who had taken up residence a day or so earlier peered as discreetly as we could at our new neighbours, who, judging by the cots, high chairs, bunk beds and tricycles being unloaded, were mainly young families.

  Our fellow residents in the Lane, it turned out, were architects, a couple of graphic designers, an academic, teachers, social workers (senior pay grade, presumably), a solicitor, a Labour MP, a couple of businessmen, an accountant, a potter and a boat designer. We had the potential to be a proper community since neighbourly bonds were still to be forged. For most of us it was the first home of our own. No one had links with Blackheath and many came from some distance – Liverpool, Wigan, Sheffield, Swansea. All were curious, and anxious to make the mix work. The community was like a premature and dilute version of Posy Simmonds’s ‘The Webers’, a strip cartoon of stunning perspicacity that ran in the Guardian from 1977.

  I loved our house from the very first moment we arrived. It seemed a new, light, airy world, far from the chintz furnishings, three-piece uncut-moquette suites, heavy faux-Jacobean oak furniture and patterned carpets of my childhood home. We residents felt duty-bound to match Lyons’s outside vision as much as possible inside, and though most of us moved in with very little, we borrowed each other’s sewing machines and ran up curtains. Eschewing pelmets in favour of Silent Gliss near-invisible rails, we chose plain linen or folk-weave striped fabric from Heal’s or Dunn’s of Bromley, or Lucienne Day fabrics, which had won accolades when they were featured at the Festival of Britain in 1951, or hung white Venetian blinds which were a chore to dust. We saved up for sturdy, rush-seated lacquered Italian Magistretti chairs, rescued the scrubbed pine kitchen tables our mothers had discarded in favour of wipeable patterned Formica – at least I did.

  We coveted Scandinavian birch furniture, which was not unlike the simple unornamented Utility furniture designed by Gordon Russell during the war at the behest of the government. But many of us could not entirely disregard the charm of Victoriana – in strict moderation – with the odd cachepot holding a palm rather than an aspidistra, even a pair of white Staffordshire dog figurines, which I still treasure but which were hard to place since there was no call for mantelpieces in a Span house.

  Much respected in the Lane were Kate and Geoff Holland, both architects, who had an old earthenware chimney pot in their living room in which they stuffed a huge, dried spiky hogweed (now illegal to grow) that they had found on a Liverpool railway embankment and carefully transported to London in their red Mini – a perfect complement to the ‘architectural plants’ outside. Every evening after work when their twins were in bed, the Hollands laboriously hacked the plaster off the walls and painted the exposed bricks white. Indeed, most of us painted our interior walls white, with an accent colour in each room – though some found it a bridge too far to move on from magnolia. Thames Green, a sludgy greenery-yallery colour – as the name suggests the polluted Thames would be – was the colour du jour, followed later by ‘moody aubergine’. Or we covered a wall in hessian and bought a colourful Casa Pupo Spanish rug, or a pile rug with a design of circles and squares which owed a nod to the paintings of Joan Miró or Kandinsky, to lie on the polished herringbone parquet floor with underfloor heating. A number of us pinned up psychedelic or exhibition posters hanging from plastic strips, since of course there were no picture rails from which to hang framed prints of The Hay Wain, or boats at sunset or even family photographs, had we wanted to, which most of us didn’t. One couple papered their downstairs cloakroom – including the ceiling – with pages from Le Monde, while another splashed out on one of Sanderson’s revived range of William Morris wallpaper for a wall in their bedroom.

  In 1959 the restrictions on how much money you could take out of Britain had been lifted. So, many couples (middle-class couples, that is, and by now, using what indices I am not sure, I considered myself to be middle-class) were taking their Austin Minis or Renault 4s or Citroën 2CVs by ferry across the Channel to France. Most of them were set on camping holidays. While some pitched the
ir own tents, carrying them on gridiron roof racks on their cars, others, including us, booked one of the tents that Canvas Holidays pitched on attractive campsites in southern France.

  We would come back with strings of garlic, blue enamel house numbers, wine glasses, carafes, Provençal earthenware casseroles (in my case, uncomfortably held between my knees in our new Austin-Healey Sprite sports car as we drove across France). So we were more than ripe for Terence Conran’s Habitat when the first one opened in the Fulham Road in 1964. Its most famous early merchandise was undoubtedly the earthenware chicken brick, which was to become a symbol of what we imagined was a new domestic idiom of continental peasant cookery, using dried herbs and creating what was known as jus rather than making Bisto gravy to accompany every meat dish or add a ubiquitous flavour to mince. The shop’s shelves were stocked to overflowing with wooden spoons, blue-striped butchers’ aprons, rustic crockery, and glass storage jars for the pasta as spaghetti (other than Heinz or Crosse & Blackwell’s in tins) was beginning to make its appearance in British kitchens – just like those we had been lugging across the Channel from French holidays. Habitat encouraged customers to take down merchandise from the shelves and examine it before carrying it in a basket to pay. This was a most welcome change from earlier shopping experiences when an assistant would impose him or herself between the customer and the stock and fetch requested objects one item at a time. It was a classy form of supermarket shopping, which we postwar generation had already become used to when buying food.

  A year after we moved in to the Lane I had an even greater reason to delight in our new home. The previous autumn George and I had been driving to Bexley for George to interview the Tory politician Edward Heath. Every half an hour or so as we drove I had to wind down the window and throw up. This confirmed to me what I had suspected: that I was pregnant. There were no home pregnancy detection kits that could be bought from a chemist then with their hoped-for – or dreaded – thin blue line: it would be several weeks before my condition was confirmed by our GP, Dr Thompson.

  Mine was not an accidental pregnancy: we had been married for more than two years, I was bored with my job and fed up with faffing around with contraception – first with condoms, or French letters as they were usually called, and then with the Dutch cap, which was only given to married women (or those who claimed to be married and wore a wedding ring – or improvised curtain ring – on their left hand), ostensibly to discourage premarital sex. Nor was the cap ideal as it either had to be inserted and lubricated every night with contraceptive gel, just in case, or one had to leap out of bed at a moment of passion and squat by the bed struggling to insert it. One friend blamed her unexpected third pregnancy on the fact that she had found her Dutch cap in her children’s toy box, tossed there by the au pair who mistook it for a teething ring. But before the pill was widely available (it was first introduced to the UK in 1960 but only prescribed to married women in 1967), this was what many women of my generation used for birth control – or ‘family planning’, which perhaps made contraception sound more respectable. I used to get mine ‘fitted’ at the Marie Stopes centre in Soho Square. The clinic was influenced not only by Stopes but by the work of Dr Helena Wright, another very influential pioneer of birth control in both Britain and China, and an outspoken critic of the law on abortion.

  I was delighted at the news. I wanted a baby. George, waiting outside the doctor’s surgery in the car, carefully noted the expected birth date in his pocket diary. I signed up for classes at the National Childbirth Trust. My group of mothers-to-be was instructed by a muscular young Australian woman, who insisted that sixteen or seventeen was the ideal age at which to have your first baby. I demurred. Body-wise that might be true – women were presumably at peak suppleness then – but surely not in terms of emotional maturity? Or so I thought from my already past-it age of nineteen.

  We lay on the floor and learned to breathe through imaginary contractions, pushed floppy dolls through stapled-together plastic pelvic floors, were taught how to pin terry-towelling nappies onto the same doll once it emerged, worried that Mothercare had run out of first-size Babygros, held our husbands’ hands reassuringly as they were instructed what to do during labour – mainly rub their wife’s back and tell her how brilliantly well she was doing and to keep pushing. This was a heretical idea to my mother and her generation: husbands were supposed to be pacing the corridor outside the labour ward, or in the pub downing pints, not among the blood and gore of dilating cervixes and damp, plum-coloured emerging babies and placentas.

  We were also instructed to drum out a tune with our fingers to distract us from the pain of childbirth, not that there would be real pain, we were assured, just some discomfort like a mild attack of diarrhoea. I chose ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ to beat out, but this tactic was of course a con – and an unwise one.

  As my labour progressed in the Woolwich Memorial Hospital and the pain became excruciating no matter how furiously I drummed my fingers, I screamed and swore and was petrified that such unexpected pain meant that something had gone terribly wrong. ‘Do stop that noise Mrs Gardiner,’ the male consultant said sharply. ‘We’ve all had babies here.’ Looking round the delivery room, I saw that there were only three women, including me, to two men, so knew that couldn’t have been true. Eventually after a lengthy labour I was delivered of the most beautiful, exceptionally long, downy baby we would call Alexander St John Michael.

  II Marmite Sandwiches

  It was then and in the subsequent few years that the real attraction of Span estates was confirmed to me. Indeed, I liked them so much that we moved to three different ones in the course of the next six years.

  The great appeal, apart from the design aesthetic, was their communality. Most of the houses were occupied by young families, though a few had been bought by older couples or widows who had downsized from larger family homes. The children could play together outside: there could be no disputes over territory since the space was held in common. The stifling boredom of being with small and much-loved infants all day, every day, could be relieved by neighbours in a similar position all longing for conversation over tea or coffee. As they grew, we mothers (and occasionally fathers) took it in turns to walk the children to and from playgroup, or later primary school, in a crocodile (or rather more an alligator since there were never that many of them). Or one of the au pairs several of us employed, recruiting them from another Span resident who ran an agency and was married to the man who started a funky stationery shop (now the chain Paperchase), did, stopping on a Friday for the children each to choose 6d. worth of sweets – aniseed balls, space hoppers, pear drops, chocolate buttons, sticky lollipops, gobstoppers.

  Mothers carried blankets, bananas, Marmite sandwiches, little chocolate-coated cornflake cakes, beakers of Ribena and mugs of tea out onto the lawn at teatime whenever the weather was clement enough for picnics. We organised a reciprocal babysitting book, whereby you got ‘points’ for babysitting and used them up when another member babysat for you. Once a month we would meet to work out the points-accounting system.

  At night, wires connected to baby alarms could be seen strung between adjoining houses so that if someone needed to go out briefly for a doctor’s appointment, parents’ evening at their child’s school or something similar, her offspring could be electronically babysat. Every night, cots and bunk beds were occupied, though not necessarily by one’s own children. Sleepovers were common from a very early age, and if a child woke distressed in the night, he or she could be carried home in a twinkling, wrapped in a blanket (or that newly adopted labour-saving innovation from Sweden, the duvet) to their own bed. (My daughter is still pleased to be able to boast that as a small child she had a sleepover at young Jude Law’s house when the Laws lived a few doors along from us in the last Span estate we lived in, Corner Green.)

  A Chinese neighbour taught those eager to learn to play mah-jong, and to this day, though we are now scattered all over London and beyond, some o
f us occasionally foregather to build walls with rows of bamboo and ivory tiles, collect our ‘winds’ and shout ‘cong’, or ‘pong’ and finally ‘mah-jong!’ – if anyone can remember the intricate rules.

  Completed in 1959 on the site of a pig farm and a market garden which, during the war, had been a caravan park for those who had been made homeless, the Lane was the estate of which Eric Lyons was most proud, reckoning that it had ‘survived’ or matured as the best of all his schemes – some accolade indeed, since there are twenty-one Span developments in Blackheath alone, several of which have won Civic Trust awards. In December 1959, Henry Brooke, Minister of Housing and Local Government in Harold Macmillan’s administration, dug deep into the sod of the grassy square at Corner Green and planted a tree in formal recognition of the building of the notional millionth house constructed since the end of the war, a part-fulfilment of both major parties’ promise to make housing a national priority. While the Labour government had concentrated on building public housing – ‘council estates’, as they were known – the Tories were committed to owner occupation, erecting housing for sale.