Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  It was a shift that owed something to Nimbyism, something to the instinctive desire of those living in attractive out-of-town environments to keep the proles firmly in those towns – and something also to a visceral, largely intelligentsia-led dislike, even hatred, of suburbia. These haters included, for all his humanity, Ian Nairn. This remarkable, passionate young man, fresh from National Service and still wearing a dyed RAF overcoat, spent much of 1954 hanging around the Architectural Review’s offices in Queen Anne’s Gate until at last he was given a job. His first signed piece appeared in March 1955 – ‘the more the English plan, and the more tenderly they feel towards ancient monuments, the faster they seem to put the wrong thing in the wrong place with the best of intentions’ – and then three months later he wrote the magazine’s special ‘Outrage’ issue:

  This issue [he began] is less of a warning than a prophecy of doom: the prophecy that if what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows. There will be no real distinction between town and country. Both will consist of a limbo of shacks, bogus rusticities, wire and aerodromes, set in some fir-poled fields: Graham Greene’s England, expanded since he wrote in the ’thirties from the arterial roads over the whole land surface. Upon this new Britain the REVIEW bestows a name in the hope that it will stick – SUBTOPIA.* Its symptom will be (which one can prophesy without even leaving London) that the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton.

  The asterisk directed the reader to the foot of the page: ‘Subtopia: Making an ideal of suburbia. Visually speaking, the universalization and idealization of our town fringes. Philosophically, the idealization of the Little Man who lives there (from suburb + Utopia).’ Nairn did concede that suburbia had its place ‘in the scheme of things’. But ‘what is not to be borne’, he insisted, was that its ‘ethos’ should ‘drift like a gaseous pink marshmallow over the whole social scene, over the mind of man, over the land surface, over the philosophy, ideals and objectives of the human race’.

  The main body of the special issue was a detailed verbal and photographic examination of the whole ugly subtopian phenomenon – ‘the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern’ – before Nairn ended by addressing the reader directly: ‘You have eyes to see if you have been exasperated by the lunacies exposed in these pages; if you think they represent a universal levelling down and greying out; if you think that they should be fought, not accepted.’ The special issue made a huge, gratifying impact, so much so that within weeks the Duke of Edinburgh was telling the Royal College of Art that ‘we have a new word now – subtopia – which is proof of a new awareness’ and that therefore ‘there seems to be no excuse for unattractive design’.17 For Nairn it was the start of a notable, roller-coaster career; for the dispersionists, a grievous blow.

  The obvious, inescapable implication was urban high density – and that in turn meant high-rise flats, the fourth trend. ‘Like it or not, we must design more and more blocks of flats,’ declared Philpott in his Picture Post piece (the paragraph emotively headed ‘Do We Have to Starve?’), ‘and set limits to our suburban sprawls.’ In retrospect, these were the years, 1954–5, when the advocates of the high-rise solution won the day. This victory did not result in immediate dramatic change – in 1955 only 29 per cent of new housing output in England and Wales was in the form of flats and maisonettes – but it did set an unmistakable course for the medium-to-long-term future.

  There was of course some lingering scepticism. ‘All in the future, nothing in the present,’ reflected John Fowles towards the end of 1954 about Le Corbusier’s increasingly influential ‘cities in the sky’ vision. ‘He sees the present mess, of course; but not the present psychology of the individual and society. He takes no account of the conservatism of the human being, his need to have roots in the past, roots in living soil, not in museum pieces, monuments, skylines.’ Soon afterwards, in January 1955 at the annual conference of the Society of Housing Managers, the assertion by the Ministry of Housing’s Parliamentary Secretary W. F. (‘Bill’) Deedes that ‘it is, I think, accepted beyond question that in many cases we shall have to build up, and that means multi-storey flats’ provoked a measure of dissent. After Mrs I. T. Barclay had bravely declared that in new urban developments ‘we need some individual houses, and perhaps the more the better’, not least for ‘the real dog-lovers’, a Liverpool councillor, N. A. Pannell, went truly off-piste about ‘slabs of buildings like flat boxes standing on end’: ‘I have a lurking suspicion that the urge to build these multi-storey flats stems from a desire on the part of municipal architects to give expression to their skill and ability. They are oppressed and depressed by the necessity always of having to build these trim little terraced houses, and they are given no scope at all for their undoubted skill and ability . . .’

  The sharp-eyed Economist also refused to buy the conventional wisdom, picking up in early March on two damaging revelations at a recent RIBA-organised ‘Symposium on High Flats’ (at which Dame Evelyn Sharp had declared that ‘there is nothing more appalling, more deadening, in the urban landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres’, before quoting a poem about the beauty of high towers). One was an authoritative set of recent statistics showing that ‘the cost per square foot rises from 32s for a two-storey house to between 55s and 80s or even more for six to twelve storey buildings’, with ‘almost the entire extra cost of flat construction’ being ‘borne by the central government, by means of a special subsidy’. The other revelation had come from the London County Council’s sociologist Margaret Willis, according to whom ‘two out of three of the tenants on the upper storeys of the tall LCC blocks – despite all the attractions of fresher air, greater quiet, and a fine outlook – would still prefer a house and garden’. The Economist’s conclusion warranted banner headlines rather than being tucked away in a short, inconspicuous piece: ‘There is certainly a place for a few tall flats in local authority schemes; but the suspicion remains that in some of the present mass development schemes – to the tenants’ distaste and with the Minister of Housing’s express encouragement – far too many authorities and architects are merely building exciting monuments to their own ingenuity.’ Regrettably, the left at this critical moment felt unable to break ranks with public-sector-led modernity, an acceptance typified by Mervyn Jones’s ultra-enthusiastic New Statesman article in October 1954 about a visit to the newly completed Oatlands Court, an 11-storey point block on the Ackroydon Estate on the eastern fringe of Putney Heath – part of the LCC’s monumental Putney/Roehampton development that, in Jones’s words, ‘beats private enterprise hollow for sheer quality and desirability’.18

  Outside London it was two northern, Labour-run cities that now particularly took up the high-rise cause. One was Leeds, where the City Architect was a committed modernist, R.A.H. Livett, who had been primarily responsible for the pioneering Quarry Hill estate before the war. In 1954 work began on the ambitious Paxton Gardens development, a slab block modelled on Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles and making liberal use of bare concrete. In the same year, a report by the city’s housing managers found a significant minority of the Leeds public refusing to apply for flats and instead holding on until a house became available. But this did nothing to deter Livett, who insisted that the multi-storey block was the only way forward if the city’s serious housing problems were to be met, especially given the double context of slum clearance and green belt. ‘Big cities have to face up to this problem of land shortage and it is up to them to see that all their land is put to the best possible use, particularly in the central areas,’ he told the Yorkshire Post in 1955 soon after the Sandys circular. ‘I refer in particular to the importance of building high
. By building high we are getting all we can out of our land and at the same time increasing rateable values.’ Livett had the Corporation fully behind him, and this last argument made a very direct appeal.

  The other city was Sheffield, several of whose councillors submitted a report in March 1955 following a tour the previous autumn of more than half a dozen large housing schemes on the Continent. They had been much impressed by what they had seen – especially the way in which ‘the multi-storey flat can give exceptional amenities in the form of open space, community buildings, services and equipment’ – and their conclusion was unambiguous: ‘In the circumstances now obtaining in Sheffield – land shortage, ever increasing distances between homes and workplaces, immobility of heavy industry and the urgency for slum clearance – the deputation is convinced of the need to introduce schemes of multi-storey flats, particularly in the redevelopment areas, as a means of solving the housing problem and reducing overspill.’ Accordingly, the report specifically recommended that the existing design for Park Hill be accepted, asserting that this would result in ‘a comprehensive multi-storey housing project of high standard’.

  The recommendation duly went through, and a few weeks later the Sheffield Star was reporting ‘streams of people’ passing through Sheffield Town Hall to look at the striking deck-access, streets-in-the-sky model. ‘This new block of flats, it is expected, will set a standard for the country,’ proudly declared the paper, adding that ‘the scheme will replace 800 old type premises [mainly back-to-backs] with 2,000 modern flats, in a block which will be self-contained down to the local pub’. For the City Architect, J. Lewis Womersley (who had accompanied the councillors on their Continental swing-through), it was a proud moment. ‘I was tremendously excited by the dramatic topography of the city and I felt that the opportunities which the site afforded had been completely lost by covering all these hills with small two-storey houses,’ he recalled some eight years later about the exciting possibilities that had originally aroused him, including the prominent site of the badly rundown Park district, lowering over the main railway station. ‘I saw the possibility of replacing these with towers of flats on hill-tops with open space as a foreground to them so that in their redevelopment people could see the transformation that had been brought about.’19

  How would it all work out? Britain, claimed Deedes in his address to the housing managers, was ‘in the throes of what we can only describe as the Second Industrial Revolution’, and he went on: ‘In this Second Industrial Revolution we are setting social conditions not in the background but in the forefront of our new development. This time we are not, we hope, creating new slums . . .’ Michael Young, from his Bethnal Green vantage point, was part of the debate, contributing a trio of articles to Socialist Commentary between September 1954 and June 1955. In them he argued against any expansion of the new-towns programme and insisted that although most people did indeed want new (or, at a pinch, reconditioned) houses, they wanted them inside the cities, where – for all their large stretches of decay and disrepair – community spirit and the extended family still flourished. But if the moral superiority of the inner city over the suburb or new town was a given, what about the thorny issue of high density and flats? Young pinned his hopes on a mixture of renovation of the existing housing stock, ruthless expulsion of space-consuming railway marshalling yards and goods depots, building of space-saving flatted factories – and, for those who positively did not dislike living in them, a modicum of flats. Could the circle be squared? If it could, the rewards, in his mind, were very great: ‘Families would not be forced to move out against their wishes, and the generations would be kept together. There would not be so many places like Harlow which has more grandchildren and fewer grandparents than almost anywhere else on earth. The new towns of the future would be in Hulme and Hackney.’20

  4

  Bonny Babies, Well-washed Matrons

  Two young Canadians arrived in London in the autumn of 1954. ‘The houses in Orsett Terrace are all alike with thousands of chimneys on each roof,’ the 15-year-old Lynn Seymour, taking up a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells School in Barons Court, wrote home in September. ‘The district is not very pretty. I think we got Kensington mixed up with Paddington.’ She was staying with what seems to have been a fairly normal middle-class family (the father a civil servant), but her letters over the next few weeks recorded an alien world:

  I bought some Kleenex and a roll of toilet paper. The kind the Fishers have is rather like paper for dress patterns. In fact the toilets themselves are so odd. You have to pull a little chain or string . . .

  I have a little radiator in my room and it goes on after you insert a shilling and light a match. The heat stays on a couple of hours, then you must repeat the process . . .

  There are a lot of odd characters in London . . . Eccentricity is tolerated here far more than at home . . .

  Don’t forget to send vitamins, instant coffee and Breck shampoo . . .

  We usually have sausages and piles of potatoes at the Fishers’ because meat is so expensive. I dream of having a lean juicy steak . . .

  The other Canadian was the seven-year-old Michael Ignatieff, who with his family came ashore at Southampton and, ‘in sepulchral gloom at four o’clock on a November evening’, travelled up to London on the boat train. ‘Fog closing in,’ he recalled. ‘All the English spaces being different; the railway carriages being narrow, different smells, Woodbines in the air, the pervasive dampness, fog and chill everywhere, characters in cloth caps with white scarves, incredibly gnarled old gents carting your luggage to the train.’ London itself was a ‘cramped, struggling, grimy, dirty old world’ – a world that an ‘entranced’ Ignatieff found ‘very magical, very exciting, very dense . . . a very adult world’. Unlike Seymour, the Ignatieffs did manage to locate Kensington (staying that first winter in an ‘absolutely freezing apartment’ in Prince’s Gate), and although at the local private school he ‘hated all these little grey woolly socks, the little grey Marks and Sparks uniform’, the sheer excitement of London’s ‘thundering noise’ and ‘these huge red buses looming out of the fog with their lights all smeared by the fog’ made up for it.

  Ignatieff was not so far from Stanhope Court, the South Kensington hotel that inspired Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables, opening at the St James’s Theatre on 22 September with Eric Portman and Margaret Leighton in the lead roles. Comprising a double bill, Table by the Window and Table Number Seven, it tackled the themes of class and sex with an unexpected incisiveness and even radicalism, though ‘homo’ in the second play had to be discreetly disguised as ‘hetero’, if only to protect against the Lord Chamberlain’s red pen. For most theatre-goers, though, the appeal lay elsewhere. Anthony Heap, there on the first night, acclaimed it as an ‘acutely observed, deeply poignant study in loneliness’, adding that ‘our leading contemporary playwright’ was ‘back on the top of his form again’, while for Gladys Langford a few weeks later, ‘the awful loneliness of the human flotsam and jetsam in a guesthouse was only too well portrayed’.

  Separate Tables was a critical as well as a commercial success, but for the Observer’s gifted, impatient new theatre critic, it was not enough. The repressed agonies of majors in Bournemouth private hotels were all very well – ‘as good a handling of sexual abnormality as English playgoers will tolerate’, he conceded – but something else was needed. ‘Look about you,’ demanded Kenneth Tynan at the end of October:

  Survey the peculiar nullity of our drama’s prevalent genre, the Loamshire play. Its setting in a country house in what used to be called Loamshire but is now, as a heroic tribute to realism, sometimes called Berkshire. Except that someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines. The inhabitants belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success – this being the only effort of imagination he is called on to make. Joys and sorrows are giggles and whimpers
: the crash of denunciation dwindles into ‘Oh, stuff, Mummy!’ and ‘Oh, really, Daddy!’ And so grim is the continuity of these things that the foregoing paragraph might have been written at any time during the last thirty years.

  ‘We need plays about cabmen and demi-gods, plays about warriors, politicians, and grocers – I care not, so Loamshire be invaded and subdued,’ he ended his call to arms. ‘I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.’1

  The poets and novelists were ahead of the playwrights. ‘It is bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility, about “the writer and society,” ’ pronounced the Spectator’s literary editor J. D. Scott in a bold, term-coining article (‘In the Movement’) at the start of October. ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic . . .’ Several letters to the magazine followed: Evelyn Waugh beseeching that ‘the young people of today’ be allowed to ‘get on with their work alone’ and not be ‘treated as a “Movement” ’, the young poet Alan Brownjohn asserting that there needed to be ‘a more original intellectual content to the new movement before it can support a genuine claim to transform the literary scene’, the even more youthful Malcolm Bradbury calling for the start of a new magazine in England to represent the Movement, and the critic Denis Donoghue identifying the Movement’s five key figures as Donald Davie, Thom Gunn (whose first collection, Fighting Terms, had just been published as he left Cambridge), John Wain, Iris Murdoch (a case of mistaken identity) and Kingsley Amis, with no recognition yet for Philip Larkin, though his ‘Church Going’, completed a few weeks earlier, would later be recognised as the Movement poem. Amis himself, writing to Larkin, tactfully called Scott’s article ‘a load of bullshit’.