The Amsterdam School: a new model for living

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1920s

Municipal Dreams is back on its travels with this follow-up post by Ben Austwick to his account of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam published last week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/

In the previous post, I looked at the Amsterdam School’s early work in the north of the city where Michel de Klerk laid a radical blueprint for a new kind of working-class housing at Het Schip, an experimental building that emphasised the communal and worked to socialist ideals. Here I will look at Plan Zuid, town planner Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s rebuilding of south Amsterdam from 1917 where the Amsterdam School’s philosophy was writ large in a grand slum clearance project.

A bird’s eye view of the new Plan Zuid as drawn by Berlage

Plan Zuid levelled south Amsterdam to be rebuilt on Berlage’s principles. Avenues are bordered by estates of Amsterdam School social housing. Parks, squares and shops punctuate every street. The city’s mid-rise density is maintained, as is a sense of space that echoes the old canal ring. The broad Amstelkanaal cuts through from east to west, crossed with bridges built by the Amsterdam School.

They are flanked by sculptures by Hildo Krop, which chillingly show a late Expressionist style that would later be adopted by Nazi Germany. This is unfair, as Krop took pains to represent his city’s status as an international port with figures representing the Negro, the Chinaman and the Eskimo – dated now, but progressive at the time.

© Ben Austwick

Individual estates in Plan Zuid take up only a few blocks, not a result of Berlage’s planning but, more interestingly, socialist alderman FM Wibaut’s desire to involve local housing cooperatives. Cooperatives were subsidised through the housing act, and fitted the socialist environment of the time. Throughout the area, the names of cooperatives are carved in stone above apartment block doorways.

The most famous of these was built by the De Degaraad (‘Daybreak’) cooperative, which commissioned Piet Kramer and Michel de Klerk to build a daring development of 294 homes. There is a mature coherency to the estate missing from de Klerk’s earlier, wilder Het Schip.

De Degaraad – the ‘Butter Churn’ © Ben Austwick

The tight, honey-coloured brickwork is sculpted in curves, steps and towers, a whirl of abstract forms. Expressionism’s propensity for the twee is shown in parts of the project’s echoing of the traditional Dutch farmhouse, and its highest point is inspired by a butter churn; but a more generous view is that the architects were providing a link to the residents’ heritage, working people new to urban living who were less than a generation away from the farms of rural Holland.

A JC Van Epen scheme © Ben Austwick

Less radical, but similarly accomplished cooperative-built developments make up the rest of Plan Zuid. The eccentric Dutch architect JC Van Epen, who drew mile-high skyscrapers containing entire working class districts, designed the decidedly more modest blocks of Reijnier Vinkeleskade, which nonetheless boldly state an intention of quality with their beautiful laddered windows and Hildo Krop gargoyles.

Hildo Krop gargoyles on a JC Van Epen building © Ben Austwick

On Cornelis van der Lindenstraat, flats built by JC van Epen and MJE Lippets display a stone frieze celebrating the founder of the first Amsterdam housing cooperative, Harke Keegstra.

© Ben Austwick

Looking up above a busy row of shops by the Amstelkanaal, a block by GJ Rutgers has a similar rounded form to De Degaraad, with circular balconies on corner flats offering three-quarter views.

Flats by GJ Rutgers © Ben Austwick

Further west, a single, isolated block built towards the end of the Amsterdam School period foreshadows what was to come. FA Warner’s austere, concrete apartment building on Woningbouw Hacquarstraat has the familiar dimensions of the Amsterdam School but leaves its Expressionist style behind for something more simple.

Flats designed by FA Warners © Ben Austwick

Black and white tiling and painted wooden struts are the only nod to decoration in a building that celebrates its dun-brown concrete facing and angular form. It is obviously an experimental design, the concrete roughly applied to a building that doesn’t quite seem comfortable with it. It could be called ugly, but the harshness of the block is offset by lush planting on the generous balconies, the grey-brown concrete emerging like a crag in a forest. A proud old lady came out of her flat to tell me about the building as I was taking photos, and it is obviously loved by its residents.

© Ben Austwick

The building highlights the criticism the Amsterdam School suffered toward the end of its period, and the change in style that was to supersede it. The architects of the burgeoning De Stijl movement saw the Amsterdam School as twee and retrogressive, ‘which by sticking gables together, causing statues and rods and stones to protrude, tries to achieve an expressive apparent charm’ while they wanted an architecture that was ‘purely plastic’, in tune with the new international style of modernism. FA Warners’ block is a perhaps clumsy attempt to bridge the expressionist Amsterdam School and De Stijl’s modernist dynamism.

Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht: a de Stijl private home built in 1924

A year after the building was completed in 1924, the changing political climate meant funding for Amsterdam’s extensive slum clearance programme came to an end. The atmosphere of progressive social change was replaced with a conservatism that saw De Stijl construct private housing for the free market.

This more famous movement is seen as one of the harbingers of modernism but I would argue that its social conservatism was actually a step back, its pure lines and futuristic plasticity an aesthetic flourish on an old-fashioned idea of what housing should be.

Criticisms of the Amsterdam School’s social housing are similar to criticisms of the British arts and crafts movement – there is decoration and whimsy rather than solid practicality; it harks back to a non-existent rural idyll rather than embrace the future; it uses traditional materials rather than new methods of construction. These are fair criticisms when applied to the arts and crafts movement but ignore the scale and social dynamism of the Amsterdam School’s work.

Communal blocks of this scale were unheard of, and the incorporation of a school and post office at Het Schip, and a library at De Degaraad, show they were not just conceived as housing, but as a place where the poor could build a better life. The socialist ideals of the architects ran deeper – the decoration so readily dismissed by De Stijl was in part a practical project to give work to unemployed craftsmen and stonemasons.

De Degaraad © Ben Austwick

These self-contained estates, funded by the city but commissioned by local residents’ cooperatives, working in tandem with architects who shared their socialist ideals, are a rare success story in the history of social housing. The high quality of the buildings, coupled with Berlage’s town planning and the city’s continued use of them as social housing, make Amsterdam’s working-class inner city a safe and pleasant place to live.

In Britain, the birthplace of social housing, buildings of this era still followed traditional ideas of the private unit: cottage estates in the suburbs, or blocks of deck-access tenements in the cities, with a front door for everyone. Histories of social housing tend to jump from this to the concrete estates of the post-war period, missing out a crucial intermediate period where the communal ideal was forged.

Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna, built 1927-1930 © Wikimedia Commons

The Amsterdam School’s work went on to directly influence one of the most important experiments in social housing, Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna. This vast development, the first large scale high-rise estate of the twentieth century, is in obvious debt to the school: in its arched entrances, decorative towers and expressionist forms and, more importantly, its communal laundries, kindergartens, playgrounds, library and health centre. In 1934, the Leeds city architect RAH Livett visited Karl Marx-Hof and a few years later built Quarry Hill Flats, the largest social housing estate in Europe, along similar lines of construction and layout, and with the same built-in social amenities.

Quarry Hill, Leeds, built 1934-1938 © Leeds Library and Information Service

Quarry Hill looms large in my imagination, in distant childhood memories of a crumbling concrete castle behind Leeds market, and in 1989, Peter Mitchell’s photography exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery, which sparked my interest in social housing. As I walked around Amsterdam’s inner suburbs, the arched entrances, rounded corners and laddered windows of the Amsterdam School’s work took me back to Quarry Hill and my city’s great, failed socialist experiment.

Students of Quarry Hill know it was directly influenced by the exotic Karl Marx-Hof, the mere name of which points to a more progressive time and that it in turn influenced Park Hill in Sheffield, the pinnacle of the twentieth-century social housing ideal. This lineage goes back to the daring, artistic, practical Amsterdam School, the pioneers of communal social housing, quiet in the shadow of a city whose famous liberalism, freedom and open-mindedness supported an innovation in social housing that went on to influence the world.

The Amsterdam School: Expressionism and Experimentation

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1920s

Municipal Dreams travels abroad for the first time this week, thanks to this fascinating account by Ben Austwick of pioneering social housing in Amsterdam.  A follow-up post will appear next week. You can read Ben’s other writings on art and architecture at his blog: http://doilum.blogspot.co.uk/

The Amsterdam School is a little celebrated offshoot of German Expressionist architecture, active for a short period between 1910 and 1925 but nevertheless defining large areas of the city’s inner suburbs. While its municipal buildings offer little in the way of innovation, the period coincided with an extraordinary boom in early social housing and its communal ideals laid blueprints for the modernist estates of the twentieth century.

Het Schip © Ben Austwick

Expressionist architecture followed the romantic ideals of the neo-Gothic and even the neo-Medieval, merged with the new shapes and forms of the modern movement. The most famous examples are probably Gaudi’s Barcelona Cathedral and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam. These buildings offer no break from past ideas of what buildings are and what they are for, merely rebuilding in a modern style with modern construction techniques.

© Ben Austwick

The Amsterdam School’s social housing experiments broke from this significantly, with a philosophy that predates Corbusier’s ‘machines for living’ – they were communal, community-run and self-contained.

Michel de Klerk (1884-1923)

The first significant piece of social housing the Amsterdam School built was Michel de Klerk’s Het Schip in 1917, a housing block north of Amsterdam’s canal ring in the working class shipping district of   Spaarndammerbuurt. This radical building is decorative, its details and aspects reminiscent of a ship, albeit broken up by courtyards, turrets and gables.

Later art deco buildings would take a much sleeker influence from the ocean liner, and Het Schip lacks the coherence of form that would come to define 1920s modernism. Its mixture of function and experimentation, and the resulting surprising changes in vista, echo the organic brutalism of Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre and Owen Luder’s Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth some fifty years later.

© Ben Austwick

Built to be self-contained and all encompassing, a mixture of various sizes of dwelling and the inclusion of a school and post office mean imposing, featureless walls give way to spires and courtyards, ziggurats and terraces to cottage gardens and drinking fountains. At first the building is impressively daunting, second rather ugly, but finally enchanting as you explore further. Decorative details by the Amsterdam School’s ‘architectural sculptor’ Hildo Krop underline the desire to make a statement of quality and progression.

Hildo Krop gargoyle at Het Schip © Ben Austwick

Het Schip marks a significant break in attitudes to housing the poor. With the influence of the British arts and crafts movement dwellings were built to the highest specification, but in a more communal style. The inclusion of a school and post office – which contained one of Amsterdam’s first telephones – at a time when working-class literacy rates were still low – shows socialist ideals of self-improvement.

The post office © Janericloebe and made available on Wikimedia Commons

The ship design is a reflection of the buildings’ tenants’ employment in the nearby docks, and so becomes part of a coherent ideal rather than pointless whimsy. This is enforced at the back of the building, where a courtyard faces an older social housing development built by the Protestant movement. While Het Schip’s design harmonises with its neighbour’s courtyard to form a continuous space, a decorative tower was built to rudely display a red rooster – a symbol of socialism – to antagonise its religious neighbour. This was a step too far and was soon taken down.

© Ben Austwick

This aggressive socialism brings Het Schip into focus. Adrift in industrial north Amsterdam, it was a rude and confrontational building, heralding a new era for the city. The Amsterdam School’s architects had been tasked with housing the city’s poor after a 1901 legal ruling that obliged the Netherlands to clear its older, substandard working-class housing. The ruling laid down technical, spatial and hygienic guidelines but crucially left more detailed building regulations to municipal authorities.

Civic pride, and perhaps more importantly competition for funds, meant a high quality threshold for Amsterdam’s slum clearance housing. The appointment of Amsterdam’s first social democratic alderman, FM Wibaut, in 1914, sealed the Amsterdam School architects’ dominance of this new era – as socialists themselves, they appealed to his vision for the city.

A re-creation of a Het Schip interior from the on-site museum © Ben Austwick

The extent of this project is obvious in the area outside the central canal ring – quite abruptly, Amsterdam’s inner suburbs are dominated by their work. It is unusual for a city to have such a concentration of high-quality housing by a single architectural school, a reflection of the zeal with which this progressive city attacked its slum clearance problem. Later, more modest Amsterdam School architecture makes up the rest of Spaarndammerbuurt, which as elsewhere in the city is still largely used as social housing. The area is one of Amsterdam’s more multicultural and, while poor, shows a sense of community engendered by planning that sees shops, parks and playgrounds overlooked on all sides by close-quartered residential blocks.

Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856-1934)

Such a large slum clearance project needed an overview and it was the municipal authority’s town planner Hendrik Petrus Berlage who provided it. More technocratic than the Amsterdam School’s self-styled ‘artistic architects’, Berlage took a rationalist approach, drawing up precisely worked street plans with closely controlled distances between parks, shops, amenities and dwellings. There was some friction between him and the architects but it is as much his town planning as their buildings that led to the success of these urban areas. Crucially, both had free rein in their respective roles.

South of Amsterdam’s canal ring lies the working-class district of De Pijp. Street markets cling on in an area that is rapidly gentrifying, following a pattern that has already seen the famous working-class district of the Jordaan taken over by the upwardly mobile of the city. Walking south of Prinsengracht, the outermost canal of the central ring, within a few streets the nineteenth-century apartment blocks of De Pijp subtly give way to Berlage’s greatest project, Plan Zuid. In the next post, I will show how the rebuilding of south Amsterdam took the experimentation of Het Schip and applied it to a revolutionary town planning project.

Notes

This Tumblr post provides some images to enable you to follow up some of the architectural and building references in Ben’s article.

Museum Het Schip has an English-language website.

The County of London Plan, 1943: ‘this new world foreshadowed’

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1940s

Last week we looked at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.  It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and – for some (for very many in the 1940s) – as a means of making a better world.  That’s a language you hardly hear nowadays but maybe we should bring it back into fashion.

The language of JH Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie in the Plan was generally more measured.  The tone is bureaucratic, almost technocratic and their overall approach is flagged in their first chapter, ‘Social Groupings and Major Use Zones’.   They saw the city as an agglomeration of zones with varying functions which had hitherto been inadequately separated or insensitively connected.

Coloured Plate 1: Social and Functional Analysis

In particular, they identified a ‘highly organised and inter-related system of communities as one of [London’s] main characteristics’.  To strengthen and sustain these communities would be a major purpose of the County of London Plan:

The proposal is to emphasise the identity of the existing communities, to increase their degree of segregation, and where necessary to reorganise them as separate and definite entities. The aim would be to provide each community with its own schools, public buildings, shops, open spaces, etc.

The communities themselves ‘would be divided into smaller neighbourhood units of between 6,000 and 10,000 persons related to the elementary school and the area it serves’.  Each of these units would possess or be provided with a neighbourhood centre and each would be surrounded by open space which would form ‘a natural cut-off between it and its neighbours’.

The neighbourhood unit would be an important trope of post-war planning but, whereas the Plan was clear that ‘community buildings, essential elements of the community’s structure, should be erected at the same time as the housing and not at a later date’, this would be less frequently achieved.  It was, to a significant degree, in the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, completed in 1951 for the Festival of Britain and one of the few examples of the Plan’s direct influence.  It was to a far lesser degree in the Mackworth Estate, Derby, though it was built very much according to the neighbourhood ideals that Abercrombie, in particular, sought to promote.

Coloured Plate 3: Open Space Plan

The world of the past: the only open space some London children knew before the war

To Forshaw and Abercrombie, ‘adequate open space for both recreation and rest [was] a vital factor in maintaining and improving the health of the people’.  They calculated that four acres per 1000 of the population should suffice, taking into account the Green Belt around London first proposed in 1935.  Lucky Woolwich already possessed six acres for each thousand of its population but the East End and ‘South Bank Boroughs’ were far less well served.  While the planners had no anticipation of the collapse of the London docks that would occur in the 1960s, they envisaged too the river as a major local amenity.

Plate XXVI: The world of the past – a slum court

Plate XXVI, captioned ‘The Look In’ – a contrast to ‘The Outlook’ shown in the modern housing schemes below

Chapter Five of the Plan deals specifically with housing – the ‘provision of new housing’ would be ‘a most urgent task to be tackled after the war’. There were ‘extensive districts of the slum types [of housing]…in an advanced state of obsolescence due to hard use and age – conditions, of course, exacerbated by war damage: ‘these extreme conditions have made comprehensive schemes of redevelopment inescapable’.

The Plan set a relatively high figure of 136 persons per acre as its preferred housing density.  Beyond this it was conservative in its proposals for rehousing – houses with gardens (or communal gardens) were judged preferable for families; terraced houses with appropriate provision of open space were suitable to central areas.

The world of the future: Plate XXVII – ‘Roehampton Cottage Estate’

It went on to state that a ‘certain number of high blocks up to ten storeys might prove popular, in particular for single people and childless couples’ but  there was no anticipation here of the multi-storey solutions to mass housing that would mark public housing from the mid-1950s.

The world of the future: Plate XXVIII – White City Estate, Hammersmith, commenced 1936. Construction was suspended during the war. It was planned to contain 49 five-storey blocks, accommodating 11,000 people, when complete.

The caution perhaps reflected a more radical aspect of the Plan – the proposal that around 500,000 of London’s current population be rehoused outside the capital.  The suggestion was welcomed by the London boroughs;  in fact, Poplar and Stepney Borough Councils criticised the Plan for not going far enough. (1)  (A reminder that back in 1910, Alfred Salter wanted ‘to pull down three quarters of Bermondsey and build a garden city in its place’;  a proposal adopted more broadly and more cautiously by the London Labour Party as a whole in 1918.)  The Plan proposed new developments on London’s fringes ‘located within the Metropolitan Traffic Area’ and, more significantly, ‘outer satellites’ on the fifty mile radius.

Coloured Plate 4: Road Plan

There is much else in the Plan – chapters on industry, communications, public services, architectural and environmental controls: too much to be covered here.  But Chapter 7 on ‘Reconstruction Areas’ in some ways brings it all together.  It took as its case study the East End, an obvious focal point of the various ‘present-day defects’ – traffic congestion, poor housing, ‘inadequate and maldistributed open space’, ‘indiscriminate mixed development’ and ‘lack of coherent architectural development’ – which the Plan had identified.

By contrast, reconstruction would separate local and through traffic and traffic and people, it would expand the provision of open space and greenery, it would separate industry, and it would build community through the neighbourhood units and civic centres noted above.  The illustrations provided in the Plan of a redeveloped Shoreditch and Bethnal Green – the neighbourhood unit shown above and the axonometric view below – provide the best guide to the planning principles in place and future envisaged.

Axonometric view

Seventy years on, maybe the plans look a little too ‘rational’ and the reimagined East End seems rather sterile.  But the cheery Cockneys we sometimes romanticise were living in slums and were voting for change.  And if we’ve been taught to lament the loss of community that post-war rebuilding brought about, we should remember that for the Plan, at least, ‘community’ lay at the very heart of the new world it would create.

In the event, the sweeping changes that have occurred in London since 1945 have been far more ad hoc and owe as much to economic shifts in industry and employment as they do to any planner’s imagination.  To many, this is a British virtue – a common-sense pragmatism eschewing theory and drawing board utopias.  Most of us, if we’re honest, probably prefer the unplanned, rather messy London we have to the over-engineered and rather arid visions of technocrats.   But the principle of planning – the notion that we can manage our environment to serve our community – should be sacrosanct and this was the great promise of the 1943 County of London Plan.

Concretely (a term that would seem unpleasantly literal to some), one result of the planning ideals pioneered in the London plan was the 1946 New Towns Act.  Stevenage, the first new town, was a little closer than the 50 miles envisaged by Forshaw and Abercrombie but their influence is clear.

The world of the future: Broadwater neighbourhood centre, Stevenage

The other major legacy of the contemporary emphasis on planning was Labour’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act which stipulated that all building schemes must first receive local authority approval and required councils to prepare comprehensive development plans.  Such plans would not match the ambition of the London plan and others that emerged at this time from wartime destruction and peacetime aspiration.  To some, they sometimes went too far.  The wider legacy of planners and planning can be yours to judge.

I’ll conclude with an excerpt from the County of London Plan – an unremarkable aside at the time – which shows how far we have travelled and the future we have lost:

It is a commonplace to say that the war has done much to level incomes.  There should be even less discrepancy afterwards, and this should be reflected in the Plan, which provides for a greater mingling of the different groups of London’s society.  It is for this new world foreshadowed in the Atlantic Charter that the Capital of the Commonwealth must prepare itself.

Sources

(1) Mark Clapson, Peter J. Larkham, (eds), The Blitz and Its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to Post-war Reconstruction (2013)

All the quotations are drawn from JH Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie, County of London Plan (1943)

Abercrombie was also the author of The Greater London Plan published in 1944. A documentary, The Proud City: a Plan for London was released in 1946.

The County of London Plan was one of a number produced during the Second World War.  The most famous plan – also by Abercrombie and the one which was most fully implemented – is that for Plymouth.  I have written about that in two posts:

A Plan for Plymouth: ‘our first great welfare state city‘ and A Plan for Plymouth: ‘Out of the disasters of  war to snatch a victory for the city of the future‘.

Abercrombie partnered with Sir Edwin Luytens to write A Plan for the City and County of Kingston Upon Hull published in 1945. The City of Manchester Plan, published in 1945, is available online.

The County of London Plan, 1943: ‘If only we will’

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1940s

In the week that we celebrate the sixty-sixth anniversary of the National Health Service, it’s appropriate to look another aspect of the hopes for a better and fairer Britain that many believed must emerge from wartime sacrifice and destruction.

The County of London Plan was commissioned by the London County Council, written by JH Forshaw (Chief Architect to the LCC) and Patrick Abercrombie (the most famous town planner of his day and Professor of Town Planning at University College, London) and published in 1943. It was a bold and comprehensive reimagining of the capital and, though most of its specific proposals were quickly forgotten in the austerity and necessary pragmatism of the post-war years, we should recall its ideals and vision – and perhaps learn from them too.

I can only give a brief taste of the Plan here.  It’s a richly illustrated hardback of some 188 folio pages.  That alone – the priority given to the publication of such a lavish tome at the height of the war – suggests its significance.  It sold 10,000 copies in 1943 and abridged versions were provided to schoolchildren and members of the armed forces.

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth with Sir Patrick Abercrombie and J. H. Forshaw at an exhibition for the London Plan

The LCC also mounted an exhibition in County Hall – the County Hall which is now an hotel and aquarium – attended by 75,000 people, including George VI and Queen Elizabeth, between July and August 1943. Educational packs of drawings, photographs and slides were produced to accompany talks and discussions on the Plan while a Penguin edition – less technical but including many of the maps and illustrations – was published in 1945. (1)

The front cover of the 1945 Penguin edition (with thanks to Delicious Industries blog: http://www.deliciousindustries.com/blog/from-the-reference-box-135)

Perhaps the most astonishing indication of the Plan’s reach is the poster below – it advertises a lecture given to British prisoners of war in Stalag Luft III, Sagan, then in Germany.  This was the camp made famous in The Great Escape.  It’s salutary to think that while those prisoners weren’t planning their great escape they were attending lectures on town planning: (2)

A poster from Stalag Luft III, Sagan, Germany

To modern eyes, there is something bitter-sweet in all this – in the irony that it is war that can unleash our most creative and idealistic ambitions for a better world; in the fact that war itself provided both the means – the power of the state and the collective will of the people – and the opportunity to rebuild.

Plan frontispiece. The caption reads: ‘”Most painful is the number of small houses inhabited by working folk which has been destroyed…We will rebuild them, more to our credit than some of them were before. London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham may have much more to suffer, but they will rise from their ruins, more healthy and, I hope, more beautiful.”, The Prime Minister, 8 October 1940’

This was noted by Lord Latham, Labour leader of the LCC at this time, in his foreword to the Plan. (3)

But just as we can move mountains when out liberties are threatened and we will have to fight for our lives, so can we when the future of our London is at stake.  If only we will.  The economics are difficult, the timing is difficult, the moral, physical and intellectual effort is difficult, I do not believe, I do not think any one of us really believes, that any of these difficulties are insurmountable…The war has given us a great opportunity, and by the bitter destruction of so many acres of buildings it has made easier the realisation of some of our dreams.

In practical terms, the Bomb Damage Maps compiled by the LCC were to provide a vital resource to the planning team as they came to contemplate the task of reconstruction. (4)

The Beveridge Report – which would provide the foundations of our post-war welfare state – had been published one year earlier to massive public interest and acclaim.  Beveridge had famously identified the ‘Five Giant Evils’ – Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease – to be conquered in this brave, new world.

Latham’s reference to Beveridge, therefore, had a deliberate and powerful resonance:

Sir William Beveridge has talked of giants in the path of social security.  There are giants too in the path of city planning.  There are conflicting interests, private rights, an outworn and different scale of values, and lack of vision.

Against this dramatic background, the details of the Plan might seem almost prosaic but, of course, it was in just such detail that people’s hopes for a better world would be realised.  In this moment, at least, planners – who would later come to be reviled for the mistakes they made and (in some cases) the destruction they wrought – stood in the frontline of social transformation.

Planning became the mantra of the day – both as a principle and as a means towards comprehensive reconstruction.  This was a stark and very conscious rejection of a world in thrall to the free market and private interest – the results of which had been experienced by millions in the economic slump of the 1930s and were lived daily in the urban squalor that characterised life for most working people.

Plate II ‘Defects of Present-Day London: The air view shows the intermixed development with houses close alongside railway viaducts, schools adjoining industry, tenements mixed with wharves and warehouses, an absence of private gardens and negligible public open space’

In the London context, Forshaw and Abercrombie lamented the lack of any effective planning before the war: ‘In fact, London at that period might be described as more planned against than planning’ – a reflection of the inadequacy of local councils’ powers, their financial weakness and a lack of regional and national coordination.

In contrast, they proposed what they believed to be a middle way, rejecting both those who argued against any planning controls (or who believed, more positively, that ‘organic’ growth was desirable) and some who suggested that London be allowed to die and its population dispersed.  In contrast, the Plan advocated ‘conditioned yet comprehensive replanning’ – ‘to endeavour to retain the old structure, where discernible, and make it workable under modern conditions’:

The Plan now submitted is designed to include the best of existing London, to enhance its strongly-marked character, and to respect its structure and spheres of activities, but at the same time, and drastically if need be, to remedy its defects.

Plate II: ‘Defects of Present-Day London. The illustration shows traffic congestion along Tottenham Court Road’

Given the scale and range of ‘defects’ the authors identify – traffic congestion, poor housing and ‘the obsolescence of the East End’, ‘inadequate and maldistributed open space’, ‘indiscriminate mixed development’, ‘lack of coherent architectural development’ – it’s no surprise that the Plan’s proposals actually do seem quite drastic.

Positively, the Plan set out to address ‘three major aspects’ of London life – ‘as a Community where people, live work and play; as a Metropolis – the seat of Government and a great cultural and commercial centre; and as a Machine, with special reference to the machinery of locomotion’.  I’ll concentrate on the first and we’ll look at that more closely next week.

Sources

(1) Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: Planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1 (January 2004)

(2) Dufblog, ‘Planning post-war London in Stalag Luft III’

(3) Forshaw and Abercrombie, County of London Plan (1943)

(4) Mark Clapson, Peter J. Larkham, (eds), The Blitz and Its Legacy: Wartime Destruction to Post-war Reconstruction (2013)

Abercrombie was also the author of The Greater London Plan published in 1944. A documentary, The Proud City: a Plan for London was released in 1946.

The County of London Plan was one of a number produced during the Second World War.  The most famous plan – also by Abercrombie and the one which was most fully implemented – is that for Plymouth.  I have written about that in two posts:

A Plan for Plymouth: ‘our first great welfare state city‘ and A Plan for Plymouth: ‘Out of the disasters of  war to snatch a victory for the city of the future‘.

Abercrombie partnered with Sir Edwin Luytens to write A Plan for the City and County of Kingston Upon Hull published in 1945. The City of Manchester Plan, published in 1945,  is available online.

The Lillington Gardens Estate, Westminster: ‘civilizing, elegant and exciting’

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1960s, 1970s, Westminster

A council estate which has been described as ‘ruggedly romantic’ and as a ‘civilizing, elegant and exciting environment for young and old’ is probably one worth seeing or, better still, living in. (1) That’s the much-praised Lillington Gardens Estate in Pimlico for you.  It’s won four major architectural awards, it’s Grade II listed, and it’s a conservation area.  What’s all the fuss about?

In terms of the bare facts, Lillington Gardens was built, in three phases, between 1964 and 1972, and comprises 14 blocks, mostly between three and eight storeys high, providing 540 homes for around 2000 people.

But what you notice, firstly, is red brick.  The blocks are constructed of reinforced concrete but are faced with handmade red-brown brick.  As you venture further, you register the Estate’s complex overall design which is spectacular but never overbearing – ‘a craggy cliff…that projects and recedes, rises and falls, as it winds alongside Vauxhall Bridge Road’, in Rowan Moore’s words.  All that drama is, in any case, offset by careful landscaping which creates a series of intimate green spaces and enclaves, giving this particular public housing scheme a strong sense of privacy.

Before the Estate, the area comprised a series of run-down Victorian streets.  Heavily damaged during the war, it had been marked out for redevelopment in the 1955 County of London Development Plan and in 1960 the City of Westminster compulsorily purchased 13 acres of land.  Eventually some 400 homes would be demolished to make way for the new estate.  The church of St James the Less, designed by George Street in 1860, would remain.

Conservative-controlled Westminster City Council had a proud record of building high quality council housing.  The Churchill Gardens Estate, built between 1946 and 1962, was one of Britain’s finest and its architect, Phillip Powell, was selected as the judge of a competition to design the new development.  The winner was 26-year-old John Darbourne who would form a partnership with Geoffrey Darke to complete the plans.

For Rowan Moore, the finished product represented ‘a determined reaction against the sterility of modern architecture’.  For others it is a pioneering example of the ‘new vernacular’ or, more voguishly, ‘ratrad’.  Nicolaus Pevsner thought it ‘admirable – admirable in itself and admirable for its understanding of High Victorian values’: a tribute to the Estate’s integration of Street’s church and its subtle echo of that church’s exuberant brickwork. (2)

That was clearly deliberate but Darbourne offered a refreshingly pragmatic case for the choice too – rendering would have been expensive to replace and good-looking concrete (on the Barbican model) would have cost ‘a fortune’: (3)

…with brick you can get the mortar over the face and the joint out of place, but even done poorly it is just about acceptable.  That is not the case with concrete.

There was a similar pragmatism in the evolving design of the Estate.  The three phases are distinct – though always unified by materials and overall appearance – and the third, at the southern end of the Estate, is distinguished by its inclusion of private gardens.

The Estate was unusual already in the richness and texture of the open space it provided but the architects had concluded that ‘parents were reluctant to allow their children play at ground level when their home was several storeys up…children went deprived’.  The inclusion of private gardens was a conscious corrective to some of the problems associated with tower blocks then becoming apparent.

That said, this is a high-density development – at around 218 persons per acre.  This is a density which easily matches the high-rise schemes of the period, not least because many of the latter were placed in what became, in practice, rather bleak and open terrain.

It was also a mixed development, intended to function as a community and feel like a neighbourhood.  The original brief specified the inclusion of schools and playgrounds, a community hall, 90 sheltered homes for the elderly and other housing adapted to those with special needs, two doctors’ surgeries, a range of shops and several pubs.

Architectural descriptions of Lillington Gardens are abundant – more eloquent and descriptive than mine.  But it was Ian Nairn – understanding that good design resided in an alchemy of people and place – who took the time to study the community of the Estate.  He praised the integration of accommodation for old people and the council’s allocations policy – he interviewed an older resident  who liked that her neighbours were also elderly and that less able tenants had been given bedsits.

Typically Nairn also spent time in the pub – designed by the architects, a proper pub in Nairn’s terms but not a ‘pastiche’.  In that, it might stand for the Estate as a whole. (4)  The pub itself – the Pimlico Tram (recently renamed The Cask) – is Grade II* listed.

Despite the plaudits, Lillington Gardens is not without critics. The architect David Mackay slams ‘a warped aesthetic of crumpled facades and disordered dwellings’ and design priorities which created awkward internal layouts and poor integration of external space. (5)  In general, however, it is probably precisely the lack of clean lines and ‘rational’ or machine-like design which creates what most perceive as the more ‘humane scale and detailing’ of the Estate. (6)

Tachbrook Street

To English Heritage, as ‘the first low-rise high-density scheme, Lillington Gardens was epoch making’. (7)  And it’s widely credited with pioneering the break with the tower and slab block designs which dominated in the sixties’ rush to build.  In fact, Darbourne and Darke would go on to apply the same principles in their design for the Marquess Estate in Islington, completed in 1975, but here the same complex layout, walkways and separation of pedestrians and cars encouraged vandalism and, in conjunction with a number of construction faults, led to the development becoming a notorious ‘sink’ estate.

Lillington Gardens conversely remains ‘much sought after’ – popular with MPs since Right to Buy for its proximity to Westminster.  It’s a reminder that we should resist any simplistic approach which ‘explains’ the problems of some council estates as a simple function of their design whilst ignoring the often determining social and economic realities that shape all our lives – for good or ill.

Vauxhall Bridge Road

In 1978, Colin Amery and Lance Wright wrote in a much-quoted appraisal that Darbourne and Darke had: (8)

pioneered a new view of living in the public housing sector. It could be argued that what they have done is to middle-classify the council house, but there is more to their achievement than that. Their approach should be seen as an expression of the idea that the egalitarian society is more easily realised by building on the ‘middle class’ than it is by building on the old notion of the ‘working class’.

It’s a beguiling piece of writing though hard to decipher when looked at closely.  It certainly lacks historical perspective.   The writers can be forgiven for not knowing of socialist Bermondsey’s inner city garden estate of the 1920s but to ignore the interwar garden suburbs of Becontree, Downham, Wythenshawe and elsewhere seems strange.  Perhaps they simply mean that working people shared a ‘bourgeois’ desire for privacy and a bit of outdoors space.  In this Darbourne and Darke were not so much pioneering as returning to earlier ideals of the quality and style of housing that working-class people desired and deserved.

Lillington Gardens is novel though in respecting these earlier aspirations whilst doing so in a high-density and defiantly non-suburban setting.  It offers architectural bravura whilst, most importantly, providing good homes in a high-quality environment. That is an egalitarianism we can respect and it comes – or should come – without class labels.

Sources

(1) The two quotations come from, respectively, Rowan Moore, ‘Nice Places: Lillington Gardens Estate, SW1’, Evening Standard, 2 December 2008 and Tony Aldous, ‘Achieving a communal identity’, The Times, 13 September 1972.  The architectural awards are the Housing Design Award 1961, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government Award for Good Design 1970, a RIBA Award in 1970 and a RIBA Commendation in 1973.

(2) ‘Ratrad’ is ‘rationalised traditional architecture’. The term is used to describe the Estate in Graham Towers, Building Democracy (2003).  The quotation from Nikolaus Pevsner is from ‘Victorian Society Annual Report, 1972-73’ quoted in Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (2012)

(3) Quoted in John R. Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972 (2007) which is also the source of the quotation which follows.

(4) Ian Nairn on Pimlico in ‘No Two the Same’ (1970) – also broadcast as ‘The Pacemakers No.19’

(5) David Mackay, Multiple Family Housing: from Aggregation to Integration (1977)

(6) Westminster City Council, Conservation Area Audit: Lillington and Longmoore Gardens (2012).  This offers a full and detailed, and easily accessed, architectural and design assessment of Lillington Gardens.

(7) As described in the listing text of a number of the Lillington Garden blocks including, here, Stourhead House and the Pride of Pimlico public house

(8) Colin Amery and Lance Wright, The Architecture of Darbourne and Darke (1978) quoted in the English Heritage listing of Wisley House.