St Mary’s Tower Flats, Woolwich: ‘a stupendous piece of pioneering work’

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1950s, Multi-storey, Woolwich

Demolition of Trowbridge Estate, Hackney, 1985

The story of council housing in the postwar period is, most notoriously, the story of high-rise which had once seemed to offer a modern and comprehensive solution to the problem of housing the masses.  Well, that didn’t go so well – though the reality is more mixed than popular perceptions allow.  This post looks at one council’s move to high-rise – the ideals and pressures behind it and how it turned out.

Between the wars, Woolwich Borough Council took pride both in a building programme unequalled among London boroughs and in its commitment to direct labour.  The Council had built 4000 homes, notably at the Page Estate in Eltham, using its own workforce.  These were, in the language of the day, ‘cottage homes’ – houses with front and back gardens – built in extensive suburbs.

A large-scale drive to redevelopment – slum clearance – began in the 1930s, with Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act and the 1934 Housing Act.  After the Second World War and, particularly in heavily-bombed Woolwich, this imperative was strengthened – in Woolwich, most powerfully in St Mary’s, a bomb-scarred area of ‘small, undesirable dwellings, narrow, badly-arranged streets and few, if any, amenities.’ (1)

Kingsman Street, St Mary’s, 1959

The site had already been earmarked for redevelopment in 1935. By 1939, 11 acres had been identified for clearance.  It was planned to demolish 317 houses and build 15 four-storey and eight two-storey blocks for a population of 2309. Woolwich resisted tenement blocks.  The London County Council – the planning authority – responded that it had already made concessions to Woolwich’s open development preferences by proposing four- rather than its usual five-storey blocks.(2)

The War intervened and the plan stalled.  By 1945, Woolwich had 9739 families on its council house waiting list but it was able, at first, to maintain its ideals.  The Coldharbour Estate in Eltham, begun in 1947, was a cottage suburb comprising 1800 homes.  But the writing was on the wall. It was already clear to Woolwich’s civic leaders that it was ‘henceforth necessary to knock down before putting up’.

William Barefoot Drive, Coldharbour Estate, in the 1950s

Here, typically, Woolwich was ambitious. As attention focused once more on St Mary’s, Town Clerk David Jenkins sent a plan devised by Wallace Gimson, the Borough Engineer, to the LCC.  It identified a 75 acre site as the ‘St Mary’s Neighbourhood Reconstruction Area’ – such areas, though not this particular one, had been designated in the 1943 County of London Plan – and proposed a twenty-year programme which would house 5000.

The LCC was wary of delegating the planning powers it enjoyed under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.  But Woolwich had one thing, apart from chutzpah, in its favour: its Direct Labour Organisation, 1000-strong, could build 400 homes a year – this at a time when the Lansbury Estate development in Poplar was hamstrung by the problem of multiple private contractors.

The LCC made Woolwich take full financial responsibility and refused assistance with rehousing but conceded Woolwich’s power to build houses rather than blocks.  St Mary’s became the eighth and last Comprehensive Development Area to be listed in the County of London Development Plan and the only one delegated to a borough.

Woolwich began building work on the project – which it described as a stupendous piece of pioneering work’ – in July 1952 but it was slow-going. Construction took place on an ad hoc basis as sites became available – firstly with a three storey block of 18 flats on St Mary Street.

St Mary Street

At this point, Woolwich remained committed to a maximum build of three storeys but even this meant that most of the development would be flats and it left a problem of numbers – not all the displaced residents could be rehoused.  The LCC proposed five 11-storey blocks be included in the plans on Frances Street.

I’ll spare you the back and forth but by 1955 Woolwich had yielded to the necessity of the LCC proposal. The final twist came with the 1956 Housing Subsidies Act which increased central government subsidies the higher the building.  The 11-storey blocks were upped to 14 and a block on Kingsman Street was raised to nine storeys.  It was further agreed to replace the houses planned for the south side of Kingsman Street with a four-storey block.

Kingsman Street block

The new point blocks were technically a bridge too far even for Woolwich’s highly capable in-house team.  The Council appointed Norman & Dawbarn, who had worked on the Lansbury Estate and Harlow New Town, as architects.  Wates were appointed as the building contractors.

St Mary’s Towers under construction, using Wates’ tower crane, innovative at the time

Photographed in 1962

All this might be taken as a defeat for the Council and, in some ways – through force of circumstance – it was.  But the Survey of London hails the ‘architectural panache’ of the new buildings – the only ones, it says, to be written up in the architectural press.  And they do look striking.

The 138 feet blocks were designed on a butterfly-plan to maximise light and constructed of reinforced-concrete frames with pinkish flint-lime brick infill panels and patterned cast-concrete panels under the windows. Internally, as estate agents would say, they benefitted from under-floor heating – though this proved problematic – and electric panel fires in living rooms.  Each block had two lifts and communal laundries in basements.  In the first instance, four 14-storey blocks were built – a fifth was added in 1965 – containing 159 two-bed and 60 one-bed flats.

Born out of necessity – the drive to rehouse and the pressing lack of space to do so – they had come to represent modernity and innovative design.  A show flat was furnished by the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society – ‘furnished to dream specifications…graceful contemporary furniture, sumptuous carpets, dazzling curtains. And every single item available from any RACS store’.(3)

On 11 May 1962 the flats were formally opened by Princess Margaret – she opened the notorious Woolwich Autostacker on the same day but that’s another story – and the Council celebrated its achievement: (4)

The area is now being transformed by the Woolwich Council into a pleasant, well laid out neighbourhood with open spaces, shopping centres and other amenities.  The new buildings have been appreciated greatly by the former residents of the area and these new tower flats, with a commanding view over the River Thames, are a further stage in the scheme.

On the whole, that seems justified.  At that point, some 600 properties had been demolished and 718 families rehoused.  In 1970, when the St Mary’s scheme was completed – on the schedule outlined twenty years earlier – 1434 new homes had been built.

The Frances Street blocks were refurbished for Greenwich Council – Woolwich disappeared in the local government reorganisation of 1965 – and they, and the area, look pretty good.

Sources

(1) Woolwich Borough Council, Programme of the Visit of HRH Princess Margaret on the occasion of the completion of the St Mary’s Tower Flats and Council’s Multi-storey Garage, 11 May 1961

(2) Much of the detail of this piece is taken from the draft chapter, available online, of the London Survey on Woolwich St Mary’s.

(3) Kentish Independent, 12 May 1961

(4) Woolwich Borough Council, Programme of the Visit of HRH Princess Margaret on the occasion of the completion of the St Mary’s Tower Flats

British Pathé has newsreel of the official opening ceremony.

Thanks again to the Greenwich Heritage Centre and its helpful staff.  Original images above are used with permission from their collection.

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Woodberry Down, Hackney: ‘the Estate of the Future’

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1940s, 1950s, Hackney, LCC, Multi-storey, Regeneration

Residents of Woodberry Park can transport themselves to the epicentre of Europe’s fashion and food delights. An endless array of couture boutiques and exquisite dining awaits.

The Berkeley’s Homes website for ‘Woodberry Park’ is almost a parody of what used to be called ‘yuppification’.(1)  The chief selling point of this near East End location appears to be that it’s just 16 minutes away from the West End.

Earlier residents of the original Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney felt differently. One new tenant of Toxteth House in 1950 – she had been living in one room with her husband and two children, a third on its way – describes moving in: (2)

Up the stairs we ran, soon found number 9. The excitement of opening the front door, our own, finding a nice living room, large bedroom with fitted wardrobe and fitted chest of drawers, smaller bedroom and a bathroom with a green suite, separate toilet,  a lovely kitchenette full of cupboards and shining stainless steel sink and draining board.  What more could we want? We felt like King and Queen.

Back in the 1950s, Woodberry Down was heralded as ‘the estate of the future’.  It’s seen some tough times since then but, in a strange way, that claim rings true once more.  It’s just a very different future.

Its story begins in two events – in the drive towards slum clearance marked by Arthur Greenwood’s 1930 Housing Act and the election, in 1934, of a Labour majority on the London County Council under the leadership of Herbert Morrison.  The new council was ambitious to build and it soon noticed: (3)

a site about 64 acres in extent to the north and south of Seven Sisters Road…suitable for redevelopment  on a larger scale as a housing estate…close to the large public open spaces of Finsbury Park and Clissold Park, and served by excellent tramway, omnibus and tube railway routes.

The land was owned by the Church Commissioners, the LCC was armed with powers of compulsory purchase.  In the event, the Church Commissioners pleased their conscience and their purse by selling – to the consternation of a small but well-off local population.

Contemporary map of the site

The local newspaper’s headline ‘£1,000,000 Slum Dwellers’ Paradise’ – not intended as a friendly welcome – indicates the views of its readership.   On their behalf, it went on to state: (4)

Morrison has driven them out of London. They can find no homes to suit them under the area under his rule. In their place come people who will make Morrison even more secure in his County Hall office.

Some felt the area was going to the dogs in any case, literally so as Harringay greyhound stadium had opened nearby in 1928.

Planning of the new estate began immediately.  LCC councillors made the European tour of the day, visiting some of the grander continental public housing schemes.  They had concluded, in any case, that another cottage estate – such as those built at Becontree or Downham – would not suffice to house those who would be displaced by planned slum clearance.

Hufeisensiedlung, Berlin

EP Wheeler presented the first scheme, influenced by the Quarry Hill estate in Leeds, Vienna’s Karl Marxhof and Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin, in July 1938.  It envisaged 1660 dwellings, in two to five storey blocks linked in a horseshoe shape, for a population of some 8000.

This visionary plan would not materialise. Legal action and compensation negotiations delayed its start and war halted further action.  Typically, however, as victory came closer, thoughts turned again to the new world that would emerge from the destruction of war.

In 1943 JH Forshaw – the co-author with Patrick Abercrombie of the County of London Plan of the same year – submitted a radically different scheme, one based (this is for the architectural historians out there) on the German Zeilenbau principle of aligned tall blocks set in parallel.

The five storey and eight storey blocks would run north-south ‘so that all rooms receive the benefit of sunlight at some time during the day’.  With the addition of some two-storey houses and maisonettes, 1790 dwellings would be provided in all.

Land was also set aside for schools, a community centre, library, an old people’s home, health clinic and shops ‘together with a site for licensed premises’.   This all very much reflected the ‘neighbourhood’ ideals of the day – an example of the ‘mixed development’ foretold in the London County Plan.

The first tenders were accepted in July 1946 and the first residents moved in just two years later.  The earliest completed homes were the eight-storey Nicholl, Needwood, Ashdale and Burtonwood blocks, considered innovative for their use of lifts and reinforced concrete (from recycled air raid shelters).

There was a conscious attempt to give expression to contemporary architectural ambition here with the cantilevered balconies and deep eaves and the whole was finished – an indication of Viennese influence – in a cream and light blue finish described as Tyrolean Roughcast.  The later five-storey blocks followed a more conventional balcony access model.(5)

In fact, professional opinion was generally unimpressed.  One critic asserted the ‘layouts dull, architecture unimaginative, and detailing coarse’.(6)

The new residents, naturally, were more concerned with comfort and convenience than architectural controversy but they were generally positive.  Very often, of course, they were moving from conditions which seem almost unimaginable today.

The flats seemed wonderful when we first moved in.  I thought mine was marvellous compared to the conditions I was living in before…we had a couple of basement rooms.

Not that such sentiments were universal.  Another incomer to Dean House ‘hated it’:

I walked in and all I saw was the distempered walls and I thought ‘Oh my God, what have we come to?’  And it was high up. I was terrified.

Still, the estate grew – by 1953 there were 6500 people living on the estate in 1796 homes – and a community developed.   These first residents were ‘chosen people’, vetted for need and for ability to pay.  Rents ranged from 14/6 (72.5p) for a one-bed flat to 51/10 (£2.59) for a centrally-heated five room flat and were collected weekly by the council rent collector.

And they were expected to behave respectably and obey the rules – no washing to be hung out, no pets, no subletting, no alterations, no floor coverings within one foot of any wall within the first 12 months…

The authority was the authority. The caretakers and the porters were the representatives of the authority, therefore you did what they told you to.

But this wasn’t a one-way street. The tenants’ committee had over a thousand members in the early 1950s and ‘Woodberry Down tenants were well known at County Hall as determined and hard bargainers for their estate’.  In 1956, after two years’ of campaigning, the LCC agreed to build eight children’s playgrounds.  The committee was finally provided with a club room in 1959.

In these years, the Estate was a showpiece – the ‘Estate of the Future’ as one newspaper proclaimed in 1953 – much visited by dignitaries and housing professionals, eager to learn the lessons of this grandiose scheme of community development. (7) The health centre – a model for the new NHS – opened in 1952 and Woodberry Down School – the first purpose-built comprehensive in the country – opened in 1955. The final housing – Rowley Gardens – was completed in the seventies.

The Seven Sisters Road, Woodberry Down, and the last trolleybus, November 1959

Such, such were the dreams.  But by the 1980s (if you’ve been following this blog, that’s a familiar phrase) times had changed.

Crime – or fear of crime – had risen.  Hackney boasted of being ‘Britain’s poorest borough’   The Estate felt and looked tired.  Residents complained of neglect and lamented the loss of those caretakers and rent collectors – ‘they kept an eye on things, saw the estate was tidy and got jobs done quickly’.  Now it took months to get something fixed.

Older residents missed their children who had moved away from the Estate:  ‘The youngsters, they don’t want our flats. They’re not up-to-date enough for them’.

By 2002 that was official. Two years earlier the Labour government had set out its Decent Homes Standard for public sector housing.  Woodberry Down didn’t meet it. Hackney Council’s Structural Evaluation Report on the Estate concluded that 31 out of 57 blocks on the estate were ‘beyond economic repair’ with wide-ranging problems including subsidence, damp, faulty drainage, poor insulation, asbestos and lack of disabled access and lifts.(8)

The regeneration strategy shifted from upgrade to rebuild.  The 1980 council or former council homes on the estate would be demolished and 4644 new homes constructed.  The 1458 socially rented homes would be ‘reprovided’ but an additional 2700 homes would be built by private developers for sale.  The tenure mix of the Estate would shift from 67 per cent socially rented to 34 per cent socially rented, 65 per cent privately owned.

The developer’s dream

This made the scheme self-financing.  The developers – Berkeley Homes – were guaranteed a 21 per cent profit in the deal agreed with the Council. This has been described by critics as ‘state sponsored gentrification’, even ‘social cleansing’.(9)

A three-bedroom flat in Woodberry Park sells for £885,000.  For a cool £1m you’ll get a roof terrace too. It’s said most of the flats have been sold to foreign investors buying to rent and then sell at profit.

Woodberry Park and the 27 storey Residence tower, photographed this year

That’s the critical view.  In defence of the Council, it can be said they had little option in financial terms – public funding for large-scale council housing development was simply not available.  Moreover, the actual council housing stock was not diminished and the proportion of ‘affordable’ homes was – at 41 per cent – relatively high.

The Council has also pursued an extensive consultation programme with existing residents, evidenced in the focus groups, workshops, road shows and lots of newsletters.

It can’t be said that all existing residents – particularly the 522 leaseholders who had bought their council homes who stand to lose financially – are happy.  To be fair, this likely reflects frustration from delays in the programme and the disruption it’s caused more than opposition to the scheme as such.  (I’ve provided a highly edited version of what has been a very tortuous process here.)

So, welcome to the brave new world of social housing.  Once our dreams were collective and, if the former Woodberry Estate never quite lived up to the hype, it represented, at least, an earnest and shared ambition to build high-quality housing and real community for ordinary people.  Will the new estate do that?

Sources

(1) Berkeley Homes, Woodberry Park website, ‘Couture and Cuisine’

(2) This and later quotations from residents are taken from Woodberry Down Memories. The History of an LCC Housing Estate, 1989

(3) Quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(4) North London Recorder, 25 November 1938 quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(5) Most of the architectural descriptions are taken from London Borough of Hackney, Yellow Book: London – Hackney, The Woodberry Down Estate, 2001

(6) Quoted in the Hackney Society, Twentieth Century Buildings in Hackney, 1999

(7) The Star, 17 November 1953 quoted in Woodberry Down Memories

(8) Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, Woodberry Down Case Study Baseline Report, ND

(9) Koos Couvée, ‘Woodberry Down in Hackney: How ‘Regeneration’ is tearing up another East London Community’, TMPonline

There’s a lot else to read about Woodberry Down regeneration online including the 2007 Masterplan.

Healthcare in Bermondsey: reaching for the ‘New Jerusalem’

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1920s, 1930s, Bermondsey

1937 Sculpture by Allan Howes on Grange Road Health Centre

Before the advent of a national health service in 1948, progressive local councils took their responsibilities towards the health of their people seriously. Nowhere was this more so than in the crowded inner-London borough of Bermondsey, not least because the leading figure of the local Labour movement was a local GP, the redoubtable Dr Alfred Salter.

We’ve seen this already in Bermondsey’s health propaganda and in its beautification schemes.  Housing was, of course, another vital aspect of what can be truly called – in modern jargon – an holistic programme.  The borough’s commitment to a ‘cottage home for every family’, exemplified in the Wilson Grove Estate, was intended to promote healthy living in every sense.

Today’s post looks at the more direct expression of the council’s healthcare agenda and, in particular, at what remains one of its most striking and heart-warming elements – its campaign against the local scourge of tuberculosis.

Such work depended not only on an idealistic and reforming council – Labour took control of Bermondsey in 1922 and secured its majority in succeeding elections – but on dedicated healthcare professionals. When Dr King Brown was appointed Medical Officer of Health in 1901, he joined a team comprising a part-time medical officer, a chief sanitary inspector, eight district inspectors, and three clerks.

Bermondsey’s Health Department staff, 1930s

When he retired twenty-six years later, his department was made up of five full-time medical officers, a full-time dental surgeon and part-time assistant, an inspectorate of fourteen, a staff of eight health visitors, nurses and other assistants for dispensary and dental work, plus clerks.(1)

Such elaborate healthcare needed premises.  Following the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act the Council opened its first mother and child clinic in 1920.  Four others followed in rapid order.

Infant welfare in Bermondsey, 1930s

Public baths and washhouses (for laundry) had been a feature of local council provision since the mid-nineteenth century but even in 1925 it was determined that only 150 houses in Bermondsey had fitted bathrooms.  Typically the borough determined to provide the best public baths of their kind.

Bermondsey’s Municipal Baths, Grange Road

The Grange Road baths opened in 1927, with 1st and 2nd class swimming baths, 126 private baths, four baths for babies and Turkish and Russian vapour baths. A contemporary newspaper thundered against this ‘£150,000 Palace of Baths’ and its ‘Marble Halls and Stained Glass Windows and Turkish Baths That Few Can Afford’. They would, it claimed, have satisfied ‘even the most luxury-loving Roman patrician’.

He probably wouldn’t have used one of the eight rotary washing machines, four hydro-extractors or forty drying horses provided to do his own washing, however. Salter pointed out that the legislation required first and second-class provision and said he would have been happy to provide the baths free of charge had it been possible.  Later, local pensioners and the unemployed were granted free use. (2)

Projected health centre, 1928

The Council’s healthcare showpiece would be the new health centre promoted by King Brown’s successor, Donald Connan. The original £96,000 plans were scuppered by the refusal of loan support by the Ministry of Health and London County Council but the finished building – built at a cost of £44,125 and supported by the new Labour-controlled LCC after 1934 – remains impressive.

Grange Road Health Centre, 1936

Designed by Borough Architect, Henry Tansley, the building opened in 1936 and contained infant welfare and ante-natal clinics, rooms for radiotherapy and diathermy (heat treatment using high-frequency electrical current), a foot clinic and a solarium and dispensary for sufferers of TB.

There was nothing glamorous about the treatment of ‘corns, callouses, bunions, in-growing and thickened toenails and warts’ but it was a vital service for a local workforce frequently on its feet all day and Bermondsey was the first council to provide it.  The first clinic opened in 1930.  Five years later, Bermondsey’s mayor, Cllr George Loveland, could look back sardonically on the amusement it caused, knowing that ‘whatever new social service Bermondsey started it was invariably successful and often copied elsewhere’. (3)

There was nothing funny about TB though. In the 1920s, 5500 local people had TB, there were around 400 new cases each year and 200 to 250 died annually from the disease.  Almost half of those afflicted shared a bed and the council’s first endeavour was to provide backyard shelters for sufferers to sleep in.

Leysin

The council was determined to take a more proactive stance, however, and from 1924 the Council annually reserved six places in Dr Auguste Rollier’s pioneering Sun Clinic at Leysin in the Swiss Alps.  Of Bermondsey’s first six patients, five went on to make a full recovery and many local people benefited from the treatment over the years.

Light treatment at the Grange Road Health Centre

But King Brown knew a larger-scale and more local service was needed also. In 1926, Bermondsey took over three houses and gardens in Grange Road as a Light Treatment Centre, equipped with eight large mercury vapour lamps, two carbon arc lams, one water-cooled Kromayer lamp and two radiant heat lamps.  This was the first municipal solarium in Britain.  In the first year, 562 cases were treated in almost 18,400 attendances – with immediate effect for new cases of TB fell from 413 in 1922 to 294 in 1927; deaths from 206 to 175.

Dr Connan would remark that:

Miserable ailing children, delicate, anaemic and flabby are being turned into plum, rosy-cheeked youngsters full of life and spirit.

And by 1935 there were 30,000 annual attendances and 30 lamps in use daily, supported by three dedicated nurses.

All this came at a cost.  In 1931, Bermondsey spent £19,730 on maternity and child welfare – over one third more than that spent in the neighbouring boroughs of Camberwell and Southwark – and £36,877 on baths and washhouses – two thirds more than Camberwell. By 1938 the municipal debt stood at around £3m, compared to figures of £600,000 and £500,000 for Camberwell and Southwark respectively.

Side view of Grange Road Health Centre, solarium wing

Still, the local newspaper could conclude: (4)

So great have been the improvements that many parts of the borough are unrecognisable as the slum areas of years ago, and so long as the ratepayers are prepared to pay for these improvements they can have no grievance against their Council.

In 1925, Alfred Salter had looked forward to turning Bermondsey into a:

New Jerusalem, whose citizens shall have reason to feel pride in their common possessions, in their civil patriotism, in their public spirit, in the joint sharing of burdens, and their collective effort to make happier the lot of every single dweller in their midst.

Times change.

Grange Road Health Centre on a grey day earlier this year

Sources

(1) British Medical Journal, ‘Social Progress in Bermondsey’, Vol. 2, No. 3529 (Aug. 25, 1928)

(2) Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story: the Life of Alfred Salter, 1949

(3) Foreword to DM Connan, A History of the Public Health Department in Bermondsey, 1935

(4) This quotation, the one that follows and the preceding figures are provided in Sue Goss, Local Labour and Local Government.  A study of changing interests, politics and policy in Southwark, 1919-1982, 1988

All the illustrations come with permission from Southwark’s excellent Local History Library. Do visit it to find out more about the history of this fascinating borough. Some images have been placed in the public domain by the Wellcome Trust.

A Plan for Plymouth: ‘out of the disasters of war to snatch a victory for the city of the future’

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1940s, 1950s

I was in Plymouth at the weekend, impressed again by its magnificent setting and proud civic history.  Almost as exciting was getting a copy of the original Plan for Plymouth in my hands, lent by a friend.

A Plan for Plymouth, written by the planner Patrick Abercrombie and J Paton Watson, Plymouth City Engineer and Surveyor, was published in 1943.  Agreed by the City Council in the following year, it aimed ‘out of the disasters of war to snatch a victory for the city of the future’.

Pre-war Plymouth centre

Temporary market erected to replace shops destroyed in Blitz

I wrote about Plymouth and its plan in this earlier posting.  This time I want to use the Plan itself more thoroughly to give a fuller insight into the principles and aspirations which existed at the birth of the welfare state.

Firstly, you notice the breadth and ambition of these.  This could be, in the words of Viscount Astor, the Conservative mayor of Plymouth ‘no half-and-half affair’.  Plymouth ‘must be rebuilt as a unity on land acquired by the public for this purpose’.

Abercrombie and Watson proclaimed a:

far-reaching scheme for the future of a city…intended to cover the whole of its existence from the comfort and convenience of the smallest house and children’s playground, to the magnificence of its civic centre, the spaciousness and convenience of its shopping area and the perfection of its industrial machine.

Abercrombie himself identified six principal aspects as ‘the background to all human planning effort’ – Industry, Communications, Community Grouping, Housing, Open Spaces and Public Services.  Each is covered comprehensively in the Plan – which is is over 150 pages in length.  Here I can only pick out a few key themes.

Proposed central layout: ‘areas available for reconstruction’ shown in grey and orange, new streets overlaid in red

There could be few illusions then about the scale of the enterprise suggested but one senses more the confidence and belief seen in the simple (in these more cynical times, we would say naïve) view that society and the state – allies not opposites – existed to create community, safeguard the individual and elevate humanity.

Aerial view of the Civic Precinct and proposed approach to the Hoe

The showpiece and centrepiece of the Plan was the redesigned city centre. No one would have wished the wartime bombing but one can’t miss a little excitement in the planners’ voice as they comment that the ‘almost complete destruction of the civic and shopping heart’ provided a ‘site, rarely occurring in urban existence, to replan and rebuild a Centre of really modern design’.

Shopping Precinct looking north

They admitted too to ‘one great – even monumental – feature’: ‘a Garden vista – a parkway, making use, with terraces, slopes, steps, pools, avenues, and other contrasting features, of the varying levels’ running from the station to the Hoe.  This, fully realised, would be a wonderful capturing of Plymouth’s majestic setting.

For the rest, a broadly functional division of services and sectors was envisaged – an ‘orderly and economic pattern which will ensure that the daily civic and business life of the city will function smoothly’.

There could be little further detail but it was recommended an overall architectural treatment for the central area be prepared and that new buildings be approved only if they conformed to its guidelines.

To see the finished product, take a look at the earlier posting or – better still – visit Plymouth.  Sadly, that great ‘Garden vista’ wasn’t completed.  The rest was executed broadly  in line with the original conception and rightly earns Plymouth its designation as ‘our first great welfare-state city’.

Since then the city and its commercial heart have been through some tough times but, with a sympathetic eye and an appreciation for both aspiration and achievement, I think it looks pretty good. At the very least, it’s a ‘must’ for anyone interested in twentieth century architecture and design.

Proposed distribution of population

Housing could rarely be quite so exciting and in design terms the Plan was modest. It certainly saw ‘no necessity to house anyone in lofty blocks of flats’ and envisaged housing on broadly garden suburb lines.  But the scale of reconstruction was well understood.

The 1935 Social Survey of Plymouth found 25 per cent of Plymouth’s working class living in overcrowded conditions.  Wartime damage, of course, would exacerbate these conditions and the Plan reported with some precision that 8719 new houses were needed immediately to replace the 6833 lost to bomb damage, the 986 to be lost to central redevelopment and an estimated increase of 900 new households.

In the longer-term – as slum clearance and ‘reconstruction of decayed areas’ took effect and re-zoning was implemented – a further 23,986 houses would be needed to decently house Plymouth’s people.

The Plan is reticent on how this housing would be provided, stating only that ‘convenience and amenity should be considered before price’.  It was probably understood that local authorities would play a key role but impolitic or impractical to say more.  By 1954, Plymouth had built 10,000 new council homes.

Stonehouse Reconstruction scheme before and after

The Plan did, however, provide a sample scheme for the area of Stonehouse, intended to show how residential and industrial areas could co-exist with a range of housing types and open spaces.  In the event, these plans were only partially implemented and made little impact.

In practice, the Plan was more interested in ‘Community’ than in the specific details of accommodation. Here it was at its most aspirational.  In ‘the recently built suburbs’, the Plan felt it was ‘a rounding off, an integration’ that was required.  In the new developments, housing the ‘decentralised population’, there was ‘opportunity for latest thought in seemly community design’.  These, it pronounced, must be ‘absolutely first-rate’.

Diagram illustrating the envisaged community groupings separated by their own green belts.

I focus on this aspect of the Plan because nothing, it seems to me, so strongly captures the contrasting spirit of the times.  The Plan was clear that:

it is the community spirit developed from that inherent characteristic of all races in the form of mutual aid which has been mainly responsible for the development of art and knowledge in the best periods of progress in personal industry, craftsmanship and science.

This wasn’t a self-consciously left-wing politics.  It was more a plain belief that we achieve more collaboratively than we achieve in competition and a conviction that individuals are strongest when rooted in and sustained by a supportive community.

It wasn’t even, in its own terms, ideology – not textbook stuff at any rate.  It drew from hard-won lessons – from interwar depression and, more powerfully and more immediately, from a world war which had melded state, society and an ideal of community.

‘Sketch of a typical community centre forming a precinct remote from traffic’

What did all this mean?  It meant the conscious creation of neighbourhood units – of between 6000 to 10,000 people – formed around the catchment areas of infant and junior schools, bounded by distinct borders and possessing a ‘natural gravitation’ towards a centre comprising a church or chapel, a library, a cinema, a restaurant, café or hotel, a laundry and a health clinic.  Plus, a ‘Community Building’ which:

would be under the charge of a first-rate Warden, with theatre and concert halls large enough to accommodate performances by C.E.M.A and similar organisations and should have ample club rooms.

C.E.M.A. – the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts – had been established in 1940.  It metamorphosed into the Arts Council in 1946.

Perhaps it’s this aspect of the Plan which captures the wartime spirit and its structures – and the expectation that something of its values would persevere into a new world – better than anything else.

The Plan also discusses very fully a viable transport and communications infrastructure – everything from the creation of a ‘parkway’ ring road to the eradication of unsightly advertising hoardings, the agricultural hinterland, and open spaces, the latter to be ‘regarded as not only recreation ground, but as performing the essential structural service of breaking up the urban mass’.

Much of this didn’t materialise, of course, or that which did became more mundane as life’s normal rhythms re-imposed themselves in peacetime. Economics is never kind, in any case.

With hindsight, the Plan’s one great misstep seems to be its confident assertion that  Plymouth’s ‘destiny in the national economy’ was secure – ‘so long as the British Navy exists, Plymouth’s principal occupation remains’.  In the fifties and sixties, 50,000 worked in the dockyards.  Now that number is just 2500.  Still, Plymouth is adapting and it seems a vibrant, forward-looking place.

I can’t resist one final quotation from the Plan. It may have seemed an almost commonplace ideal in its time (and certainly reflects the gendered language of the day) but now it reads as something almost utopian – more News from Nowhere than town planning and very far removed from anything that passes for ‘practical politics’ nowadays.

With the return of “community” will come the spirit of companionship unknown to the youth of yesterday who vainly sought it in the car or the cinema. If the individuality of the citizen is to be encouraged and moulded into the community, then the right sort of facilities must be found: this plan must give the craftsman, musician and painter with undiscovered talent a chance to show himself.  It must be both economical and sensible to his needs, and not cramped to the niggardly possibilities of today; a plan which allows for a higher standard of living well within our grasp, with its call for space and beauty rather than for mere economy.

 Sources

The description of Plymouth as ‘our first great welfare-state city’ comes from Professor Jeremy Gould.  All the other quotations and illustrations (apart from the two sculptures) come from A Plan for Plymouth, published Plymouth, 1943.

For photographs and more analysis of the city centre redevelopment, read my earlier post which also contains a full list of other sources and references.

For more photographs from my trip, see my Municipal Dreams tumblr account.