Collage picture archive: ‘tired of London, tired of life’

This is an unashamed plug.  Collage, the picture archive managed by the London Metropolitan Archives, has always been a wonderful resource.  The good news is, it just got better. The new website is more user-friendly and includes added features – a geo-tagged location map and, using newly digitised content, a zoom function allowing you to get to the finer detail.  You’ll find some short film clips too for the first time.

The sheer numbers testify to the breadth of the collection – over 250,000 photographs, prints and drawings, over 1000 maps, plus some 6000 images of paintings, watercolours, drawings and sculptures from the Guildhall Art Gallery collection.

Most are London-related in some shape or form but, if that sounds too narrow for readers beyond the capital, they’re worth another look. The collection provides a social history of much wider relevance – covering schooling, the workhouse, pubs and popular entertainment, religious observance…basically, you’ll likely find something of interest whatever your focus. Use the map to search your neighbourhood if you have a local interest, use the search box to look up specifics, or just browse – the list of subject tags covers an enormous range of topics

Since this blog is principally about council housing, that’s going to be my particular focus here and, since there were 769,996 council homes in Greater London by 1981, there is, as you can imagine, plenty to see.  The tag ‘Housing estates LCC/GLC’ throws up over 17,000 images.  That’s practically a lost weekend for me!

‘Andover: children playing on a housing estate’ (1973) (c) Collage, London Metropolitan Archives

To prove the point about looking beyond London, let’s begin by using ‘New and expanding towns’ as a search term – from Andover to Wellingborough, you’ll find over 5500 images of the London County Council and Greater London Council’s post-war overspill programme.

‘Wellingborough: interior of a new build property’ (1971) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

The particular strength of the collection is the variety of images and moments captured. There are plenty of photographs of the high-quality housing that London was proud to build for its displaced population, of course, but factories, shopping centres, playgrounds and schools, and interior images feature too – the latter providing an insight into the lived lives so rarely captured in the architectural record.

‘General view of the Britwell Estate’ (1964) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Or look up the Britwell Estate in Slough, home to Alan Johnson when our former Home Secretary was just a jobbing postman and fondly remembered by him as ‘Arcadian’. (1)  Or Sheerwater, or Harold Hill.  These are just three of the thirteen out-of-county estates (with 45,500 homes in all) built by the LCC before its abolition in 1965.  A strength of many of these images is that they are not striving for architectural effect.

‘Sheerwater Estate: shopping centre (1960) – anchored by the Co-op as was typical (c) London Metropolitan Archives

‘Boundary Estate: Arnold Circus’ (1966) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

But for anyone seeking an architectural record of housing history, the archive does, of course, provide a wonderful record.  There are 228 photographs of the Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, the LCC’s very first housing estate, opened in 1900.  There are fine external shots of the dignified and attractive housing the Council provided but later photographs too showing unmodernised interiors, reminding us just how basic this early municipal housing was.  (Look up ‘slums’ and you’ll have another reminder; this time that council housing was, almost without exception, immeasurably superior to the working-class housing which preceded it.)

‘Boundary Estate: old lavatory’ (1959) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Moving on to the interwar period, you’ll see some of the LCC’s major schemes, for example, the Becontree, Watling and Downham Estates – three of the so-called ‘cottage estates’ which provided just over half of the 89,000 homes built by the Council in the 1920s and 1930s.  For all the criticisms of their suburbanism, the images testify to the quality and essential decency of these new homes.

‘Watling Estate: 1 Dean Walk’ (1931) – obviously proud winners of the LCC’s competition for best-kept gardens (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Meanwhile, in the inner city, walk-up, balcony-access, five-storey blocks provided the bulk of the Council’s new build.  The Honor Oak Estate in Lewisham was typical.

Honor Oak Estate, Cayley Close: residential tenements’ (1966) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

The Ossulton Estate in St Pancras, completed in 1931, was a rare LCC foray into more modernist design though its innovative exterior concealed a more conventional tenement block form.  Rather charmingly, a number of these photos cover refuse disposal.  Such is the unglamorous nitty-gritty of local government service.

‘Ossulston Estate: woman entering rubbish into a chute’ (1936) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

In the post-Second World War period, 162 images celebrate the ‘before and after’ of the Lansbury Estate and the thoughtful planning which went into it.  Here was a portent of the emerging, more democratic world to which the nation aspired and, though it too was criticised by some architectural critics of the day as too modestly suburban, its housing looks as attractive and neighbourly as its architects intended.

‘Brandon Estate: Warham Street looking west to estate’ (1962) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

‘Pepys Estate: construction work progress’ (1966) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

With the later emergence of high-rise and mixed development schemes, though, there was more scope for architectural daring.  The archive provides a superb record of the planning, construction and opening of the Brandon Estate in Southwark and the Pepys Estate in Deptford, for example.

‘Alton Estate: aerial view’ (1964) – Alton East in the far background, Alton West in the foreground (c) London Metropolitan Archives

Let’s conclude by focusing on one estate I’ve never quite summoned up the courage to write about in detail yet – the Alton Estate in Roehampton, described by a contemporary American commentator as ‘probably the finest low-cost housing development in the world’. (2)  Alton East, the earlier half of the Estate, constructed between 1952 and 1955, retained a Lansbury-esque ‘picturesque informality’ in Pevsner’s words, reflecting the New Humanist, Scandinavian influences which inspired its design team. (3)  Alton West was more uncompromisingly modernist in aesthetic – Brutalist as the newly-coined term would have it – and took its inspiration from Le Corbusier.

‘Alton Estate, Roehampton Lane: artist’s impression’ (ND) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

‘Alton Estate, Hyacinth Road: architectural model’ (1965) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

‘Alton Estate, Hyacinth Road: architectural plan’ (1967) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

That detail is elsewhere or for another time but browse the archive and you’ll find the artists’ impressions and plans and a range of images which capture the excitement and hope – and careful design – which underlay the new scheme. You’ll see clubrooms too and an old people’s day centre, children playing in generous open space – a testament to the community being built – and, above all, interior shots of the living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms which made this Estate, like so many others, a good home to its new residents.

Alton Estate: architectural model of interior of flat (1957) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

’22 Hinstead Gardens, Alton Estate, living room’ (1960) (c) London Metropolitan Archives

All this has barely scratched the surface but I hope it’s whetted your appetite.  Local history libraries and archive services across the country provide a wonderful resource whether you’re researching a family or local history or something more academic.  We must cherish and – in this time of cuts – defend them.  My thanks to the London Metropolitan Archives for providing this fantastic on-line resource. Do check it out.

You’ll find Collage at http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/ 

Sources

My thanks to the London Metropolitan Archives for supplying and allowing use of the images used in this post.

(1) Alan Johnson, Please, Mr Postman (2015)

(2) GE Kidder Smith, The New Architecture of Europe, an Illustrated Guidebook and Appraisal (Meridian Books, Cleveland and New York, 1961), p42

(3) Bridget Cherry, Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South (Yale University Press, 2002) p689

 

Harlow New Town: ‘Are you going my way?’

Tags

1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Harlow

Last week’s post looked at the origins of Harlow New Town and the architectural and planning ideals – sharply criticised by some – which inspired it.  It was, in every sense, a young town but it’s grown up since then.  This post explores what became of the high hopes.

Eric Adams, the first General Manager of the Harlow Development Corporation, ‘showing the New Town plans’, 1952

By 1954, the first of Harlow’s major neighbourhood areas – Mark Hall North – was largely complete and it boasted a population of 17,000.   The work on the town centre began – belatedly it might seem – the following year.  Within a further five years, as the Great Parndon and Passmores districts were built, around three-quarters of the New Town was complete and a further 35,000 had made it home.  Further construction followed more slowly – the 24,000^th new home of the Harlow Development Corporation (HDC) was opened in Little Cattins, Sumners, in 1974.   Harlow’s population peaked in 1974 at 81,000 and fell slightly thereafter until a more recent surge which has seen that figure narrowly surpassed.

The 24,000th HDC home, Little Cattins, Sumners

The first residents came principally from north London, from the then boroughs of Edmonton, Tottenham, and Walthamstow (it’s still a disproportionately Spurs-supporting town).  Sometimes whole factories transplanted and: (1)

parties of workers came down in a charabanc with their wives and spent the day looking at the town. The morning was spent in doing the sights and the afternoon in looking at possible houses. ‘Everyone was always still pretty fed up by lunch-time,’ one girl on the Corporation staff told me, ‘but once we got to the houses they cheered up.

‘The 2000th new family are presented with the keys to their new house in Orchard Croft, 1953’ (c) Museum of Harlow

One new arrival, Laura Lilley, who came to Harlow in 1957, was ‘immediately struck by the cleanliness of it and the brightness of it’ compared to where she lived in London: ‘I had a garden and I also had something that I didn’t have in London, my own front door’. (2)

Unsurprisingly such celebratory accounts make no mention of the ‘New Town Blues’ that many new arrivals, particularly the women not in paid employment, were said to have suffered.  Various studies had suggested that those uprooted to new out-of-town estates and the New Towns in particular were prone to various ‘neuroses’ or ‘emotional disturbances’ as a result of their move.

Broadway Avenue (c) JR James Archives and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Harlow, keen to flag the benefits of its careful community planning, commissioned its own study which concluded, in the words of Mark Clapson, that ‘any neurotic symptoms manifested by the newcomers could not be accurately ascribed to the new town, but to the general experience of moving house and district’. (3)  This hardly disposed of the problems that some undoubtedly experienced but the evidence is that the difficulties were transitional.

Another survey of Harlow conducted in 1964 reported that mortality rates of newborns stood at 5.5 per 1000 compared to the national average of 12.3 and for those under four weeks at 6.0 compared to 14.2. (4)  It’s not facetious therefore – and far from trivial – to suggest that there are many who owe their lives to the New Town.

Paddling pool, Potter Street, Harlow c.1963

Interestingly, the same study stated that 40 per cent of the town’s householders had relatives living in Harlow (the HDC had made efforts to house elderly relatives): ‘four generations of one family living in the town was not now unusual’.   This is a worthwhile corrective to the common view that new housing schemes automatically broke the family ties which had bound working-class families together in their previous homes.

‘Situated on the outskirts of the New Town: the factory area, planned to provide workers with as much space and light as possible’ (c) Illustrated London News, 15 November 1952

And Harlow was a predominantly working-class town, though with a lower than average proportion of semi- and unskilled workers: 19 per cent in the late fifties compared to the England and Wales average of 30. (Conversely, the figures – 63 per cent for Harlow, 51 per cent for England and Wales – show above average numbers of ‘unskilled non-manual’ and ‘skilled manual’.) (5)

In fact, conscious of this criticism – it was a criticism to the extent that the New Towns were held to have insufficiently benefited the least well-off workers – the HDC made early efforts to attract a range of factory employment to the town. In any case, it was argued that in Harlow ‘the so-called “social escalator” [was] at work whereby the unskilled rise up the ladder’. (6)

For all Harlow’s working-classness, the great hope invested in the New Towns was that a form of classlessness would emerge.  Nowhere is this better expressed than in the speech made by Lewis Silkin – the Minister of Town and Country Planning responsible for the programme – introducing the new legislation in 1946: (7)

I am most anxious that the planning should be such that different income groups living in the new towns will not be segregated. No doubt they may enjoy common recreational facilities, and take part in amateur theatricals or each play their part in a health centre or a community centre.  But when they leave to go home I do not want the better off people to go to the right, and the less well-off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other ‘are you going my way?’

It’s one of my favourite quotations, capturing so much of the self-improving earnestness and essential decency of the Labour Party in its heyday.  (Silkin himself, the eldest of seven in a family of impoverished Jewish Lithuanian refugees, had begun his working life as a tally clerk on the London docks.)  You might point out that these are hardly revolutionary sentiments.  Rather what was envisaged was a form of levelling achieved as much by a ‘mass upliftment’ of working-class lives (a phrase that Bermondsey Labour Party had employed in the 1920s) and a psychological sense of cross-class community (that some perhaps had felt expressed in wartime) as by any economic radicalism.

Upper Park (c) JR James Archives and made available through a Creative Commons licence

In the New Towns, however, there was one form of social engineering – as much necessity in this time of rationing and private sector constraint as deliberate policy – that did conduce to classlessness: until the mid-1950s all Harlow’s homes were social rented, built by the HDC.   Even in 1971, only 12 per cent of homes were owner-occupied and that the result of later attempts to promote private development and the sale of around 4000 HDC homes.  Even in 2011 Harlow had – at 27 per cent – the third highest proportion of social housing of any English borough.

‘Illustrating the attractive brick-and-timber style of architecture: one of the residential streets in Harlow New Town, tree-shaded and spacious (c) Illustrated London News 15 November 1952

One contemporary journalist, explaining Harlow New Town to an American audience, described how ‘in this village green setting, the houses of the white-collar man and the factory worker stand side by side’ – there was to be ‘no wrong side of the track in Harlow’. (8)

Of course, class in this old and class-ridden country, is never quite that simple. For a start, the HDC built bigger houses for the middle-class and they all had garages.  And then, there were the middle class themselves.  Some saw themselves as idealistic pioneers in this new England – Monica Furlong singles out ‘teachers, social workers, wardens of community centres, probation officers, health visitors, doctors, clergy’ as well as the staff of the HDC itself.

Harlow interiors: Felmongers, 1955, at top, and Rectory Field, 1957 – does the grand piano signify a middle-class household? (c) Museum of Harlow

In others, the yearning for older demarcations and signifying ‘standards’ was a little more recalcitrant.  Furlong describes the attitudes of an ‘industrialist’ who had moved to the town:

Among the things he missed in Harlow was the prevalence of the public school accent, of people from the ‘right’ universities, of people who he felt confident would not commit any frightful gaffe when he entertained them. What his wife missed was elegance in the shops and in her neighbours, the consciousness of money being spent around her by people with a sense of chic. In the medium to high income groups of the town they found instead young men who talked in grammar-school cockney, and who had acquired their high qualifications on the wrong side of the academic tracks. They had found, too, shops with something slightly gimcrack about them, which seemed aimed at a clientele buying labour-saving gadgets on credit. They had found a passionate intellectualism of an exceedingly earnest type; expressed in the huge piles of literary papers at Smith’s, the library’s non-fiction borrowing figures (the highest in the country), the vast enthusiasm for technical and scientific books, and the bewildering mass of evening classes and clubs. So they moved to Bishop’s Stortford.

It’s a lengthy quote but worth unpicking, I think, for all that it reveals of Harlow’s aspirations and the tenacious snobbery that would do them down.

Those aspirations were expressed for it by the establishment of the Harlow Arts Trust in 1953 and the unequalled programme of arts patronage which has distinguished the town since then.  I’ll write about those in a future post but, for now, let’s bring the story up-to-date.

The original Town Hall and Water Gardens

There have been changes. The Development Corporation was finally wound up in 1980.  The Town Hall, designed by Frederick Gibberd and opened in 1960, has been demolished and replaced by a new Civic Centre, not unattractive but with the retail outlets now deemed necessary to pay for public infrastructure.  The Water Gardens in front, built between 1958 and 1963 – a centrepiece of the landscape architecture Gibberd thought necessary to the beauty and culture of the town – have been drastically truncated (despite a Grade II* listing). (9)  Google them now and you’re directed to the new shopping mall which has largely replaced them.  I won’t draw the moral.

Broad Walk towards Harlow Town Hall (c) JR James Archives and made available through a  Creative Commons licence

To Jason Cowley, raised in the town in the 1970s, Harlow was still ‘a vibrant place, with utopian yearnings’; The High – its central shopping area – ‘seemed to offer everything an energetic young boy could want in those days’.  Revisiting in 2002, to him, Harlow felt ‘like the kind of place you want to pass quickly through on the way to somewhere else: a place that has been forgotten, shut out from the swagger and affluence of the Blair years’. (10)

Broad Walk

North Gate

Current statistics bear out these impressions.  Long-term unemployment stood at just under ten per cent (compared to an Essex average of five per cent and a national figure of seven).  Wages for those in work were a little lower than the local average.  The town has a whole ranked 101^st out of 326 local authorities in England for deprivation – there ‘are few affluent areas in Harlow but many that are relatively deprived’.  Educational attainment was below the county average.  Crime and fear of crime were relatively high – just 28 per cent said they felt safe after dark. (11)  The town centre itself looks tired and many of its flagship shops long since departed to malls and big box stores elsewhere.

Harlow voted by 67 per cent to 33 for Brexit in the recent referendum.  Belatedly, that’s a metric we’ve come to recognise as a powerful measure of disillusion with, and exclusion, from the more comfortable status quo enjoyed by many.

All this indicates a disproportionately working-class town and one, though set within the relatively affluent south-east, which suffers the inequalities and deprivations that class bestows.  What do we conclude?  Is this the failure of the Utopian dreams which inspired it or simply the mark of a society which has given up on those dreams?

Sources

(1) Monica Furlong, ‘Harlow: New Town’, The Spectator, 29 September 1960

(2) Quoted from a wall panel in the Museum of Harlow.

(3) Mark Clapson Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (Manchester University Press, 1998)

(4) ‘Harlow New Town Death Rate Well Below Average’, The Times, 25 September 1964, p7

(5) BJ Heraud, ‘Social Class and the New Towns’, Urban Studies, Vol 5, No 1, February 1968

(6) Rosemary Wellings (Harlow Development Corporation’s social development officer), ‘Living in a New Town’, Housing, vol 17, no 7, July 1978

(7) Hansard, New Towns Bill, HC Deb 8 May 1946, vol 422, cc1072-184

(8) Christopher Chataway, ‘Transatlantic Teleview: New Towns in Britain’ (1956), East Anglian Film Archive

(9) You can read about the Water Gardens in their full finery in this 2002 post from the Twentieth Century Society.

(10) Jason Cowley, ‘Down Town’, The Guardian, 1 August 2002

(11) A profile of people living in Harlow, March 2016, Organisational Intelligence

 

Harlow New Town: ‘Too good to be true’?

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Harlow

Harlow got a mixed press in the 1950s.  To some, it was ‘Pram Town’, a tribute to the preponderance of young families who had moved there and perhaps, by extension, to the new life that this New Town heralded.  To others, it was little more than an urban prairie, one which left an unfortunate pedestrian ‘with a feeling of hopelessness in face of a terrifying eternity of wideness’. (1)  Let’s look more sympathetically at the ideals which inspired it and, with the benefit of distance, at its successes and failures.

The Market Square during a royal visit, November 1957

Harlow, like Stevenage and the six other New Towns located around the periphery of London, was born in the confluence of two powerful currents.  The first, the belief in planning – that society and the economy should be rationally organised to benefit all – had emerged as the inhumanity of Victorian capitalism became manifest and was most idealistically expressed in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, an early inspiration for the New Towns. Its reach and ambition grew when the very model of free market economics seemed in terminal crisis as the Great Depression hit in the 1930s.

Mark Hall North under construction, early 1950s

The second was Social Democracy, taking planning as its keynote but rooted in the working-class politics and more broadly shared ideals of fairness and equality which triumphed – too briefly perhaps – in Labour’s landslide 1945 election victory.  Leah Manning won the Epping constituency for Labour in 1945 (she lost the seat in 1950) and it’s a sign of the confidence of this new dawn that she believed even the benighted dwellers of village Essex would welcome the New Town to be built, in her constituency, amongst them: (2)

I did not find people pleading and crying that they would be turned out of their shops, theirs houses and farms, but a great mass of people who looked forward to the day when a new town would arise in this very ill-served town educationally, culturally and industrially…

In fact, there was some local opposition.  A Harlow and District Defence Association was established but, fiercely attacked by the local Labour Party which criticised the self-interest of ‘those who live in comfortable homes and very large houses’, it made little impact. (3)

The board of the Harlow Development Corporation

Naturally, for all that, in Britain, this was a conservative revolution, waged by civil servants, fought out in committee rooms and offices rather than the streets and barricades, but it remains important to mark the moment and register the ambition. Sir Ernest Gowers, the first chairman of the Harlow Development Corporation, the government quango set up to build the New Town, wrote of the first, 1949, Master Plan that: (4)

Some who read these pages at this time may feel almost as if they had wandered into fairyland, that it is too good to be true, that such things can have no relation to the present bleak and troubled days.

The reality, he asserted, was that ‘what is sketched here is a practical and urgent task’; the task was to reduce the population of London – Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London Plan  had suggested by 0.5m – and house those removed in decent and healthy surroundings.

New housing under construction

Construction began in 1949, the first 120 homes were built in Old Harlow – one of the small villages and hamlets that made up this rural, predominantly greenfield 6100 acre site with an existing population of just 4500.  These were allocated to the Development Corporation staff and contractors who would oversee the project.  By 1961, Harlow’s population stood at over 61,000.

There was a certain excitement in the process which makes the dependence on private developers in the faltering new wave of supposed ‘garden cities’ such as Ebbsfleet look pretty shabby.  Lady Russell (wife of Bertrand), one of the Development Corporation boards’s first members, describes how its members: (5)

often had the feeling that we were playing at towns.  It was wonderfully exhilarating. Most of us were having the chance to put into practice ideals we had held all our lives, but never really expected to see carried out.

Development Corporation staff, Eric Adams stands at the centre of the front row

Eric Adams, the Corporation’s first General Manager, is described arriving at the station with some of his staff, declaiming, ‘it’s all ours, it’s all ours’.

But Harlow’s presiding genius, almost a City Father in the truest sense of the term, was Frederick Gibberd. Gibberd is perhaps a slightly overlooked figure now – a member of the Modern Architecture Research (MARS) Group in the 1930s but disdained by some of his erstwhile modernist colleagues for his wholehearted embrace of the Scandinavian-inspired New Humanist style which – through his influence – held dominant sway in this immediate post-war period (manifest in his work in the Lansbury Estate and some of Hackney’s schemes).

An early image of one of Harlow’s ‘green wedges’

The first priority for Gibberd was to ‘make the maximum possible use of existing character, genius locii’; in Harlow this meant exploiting what was held to be to be the most favourable landscape of any of the New Towns by use of four ‘green wedges’ reaching to the town centre and plentiful open space:

Every possible use must be made of existing buildings, villages, trees and place-names to give a feeling of continuity with the past…I remembered my own youth in Coventry and Birmingham where it was a whole day’s excursion to get to the country…I didn’t want any of these children to grow up without having seen a cow.

Another key element of the plan – this central to post-war planning ideals – was the emphasis on neighbourhoods. Gibberd planned three neighbourhood centres or ‘clusters’ around what Sylvia Crowe – the landscape architect employed as a consultant – described as the ‘central massif’ of the town centre itself.  But he refined the idea further with eighteen sub-centres each with a small group of shops, a pub and ‘common room’ to serve as a focal point for their immediate communities.

The plan of the Mark Hall neighbourhood

These ideas are best seen in the first of the neighbourhoods to be completed, Mark Hall North whose neighbourhood centre, The Stow, was opened in 1954.  Nettleswell and Great Parndon followed.  Other areas were set aside for industry.

An early image of The Stow taken from the Moot Hall

The Stow today

In terms of housing, Gibberd was clear that ‘the majority of the people want a two-storey house with a private garden’ (which had also the benefit of being ‘the cheapest form of dwelling’).  As an apostle of ‘mixed development’, however, he believed that around 20 to 30 per cent of homes should be flats and, in fact, he fought – against the opposition of the Development Corporation – to build the country’s first point block.  The Lawn, at nine storeys with 36 flats, would be a tiny prefiguring of what was to come. (For other examples and images of Harlow high-rise, check out my Tumblr post.)

The Lawn

If you walk Harlow, which I (perhaps mistakenly) did, most of it is undeniably – some would say, boringly – suburban with a range of two-storey, mainly terraced housing and maisonettes which is practically a pattern book for the homes which dominated Corporation suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s. (Devotees can see examples in this Tumblr post.) However, a closer look and particular schemes can excite architectural enthusiasts and Gibberd made a point of commissioning a number of modern movement architects to design elements of the New Town’s housing.

Foldcroft

Tendring Road towards Coppice Hatch

The Chantry, built in the early fifties, was designed by the husband and wife team, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, also responsible for the Tany’s Dell scheme. It’s a restrained composition (‘flat fronts of coloured render and shallow monopitch roofs – all very Swedish’ according to Pevsner) but it makes good use of its location and its arched section gives an attractively framed view of  Mark Hall’s St Mary-at-Latton Church. (6)

The Chantry

The Chantry looking toward St Mary-at-Latton church

Northbrooks in Little Parndon, completed in 1957, was the work of Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya (the architects of the Churchill Gardens Estate).  It’s a mixed scheme, mostly two-storey houses with maisonette blocks striving for greater effect.

Northbrooks maisonettes

HT Cadbury Brown (the architect of the World’s End Estate), designed housing and a junior school at Cooks Spinney; FRS Yorke housing at Ladyshot – ‘all variations on denser arrangements of two-storey stock brick terraces and proving the inherent difficulty of avoiding monotony over a large area’, Pevsner comments rather damningly.

Housing in Cooks Spinney

By far the most architecturally exciting scheme is Bishopsfield and Charter Cross, the result of a competition won by Michael Neylan (who collaborated with Bill Ungless in the subsequent scheme) in 1961. A striking podium provided the roof for an underground car park (100 per cent parking provided – a sign of the times) and a pedestrian concourse ringed by flats.  Fingers of patio housing, separated by narrow lanes which earned the scheme its later nickname, The Kasbah, run down the hill to the rear.  (7)

The Bishopsfield podium

Charter Cross looking toward the podium, ‘The Kasbah’

Such tokens – and, to be fair, they take some finding – did little to appease the critics. Perhaps Harlow was unfortunate to have been selected for a site visit in 1951 from the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM).  At any rate, JM Richards was excoriating in a follow-up article for the Architectural Review describing what he believed was the ‘Failure of the New Towns’. The neighbourhoods lacked ‘the urban qualities required of them’ – ‘judging by results so far achieved, most of the new towns themselves are little more than housing estates’. (8)

Terraced housing in Mark Hall, 1950s

Gordon Cullen, in the same issue, was more colourful in his criticism:

It is as though the drive to the country has been undertaken by people all studiously avoiding each other and pretending that they are alone. The result is a paradox, the paradox of concentrated isolation, the direct antithesis of towniness, which results from the social impulse…[The] results are deplorable – foot-sore housewives, cycle-weary workers, never-ending characterless streets, the depressing feeling of being a provincial or suburbanite in an environment that doesn’t belong to a town or country…

Gibberd fought back, decrying what he saw as the ‘confusion between the word ‘new’ and novelty. Because the towns are new many people are disappointed that they are not novel’. In response, he asserted an English urbanism which: (9)

prefers segregation of home and work, which enjoys open-air exercise, which has an innate love of nature, which makes use of motor transport and which, although demanding privacy for the individual family, likes some measure of community life.

From Abercrombie Way looking towards Third Avenue

Later, he was more astringent: (10)

It has been suggested that a correct aesthetic and architectural solution would, in the end, have been the correct social one – in other words, that people should have been given what they ought to have wanted.

It would have been fun to surround the town centre with a dozen or so tower blocks, as at Vällingby the new Stockholm satellite, but it was perhaps more important to encourage development of human personality and the English way of life.  The process was started by giving people more freedom, not less.

There’s probably no compromise judgment to be reached between these two competing visions; the one celebrating a contemporary urbanism, the other a more conservative suburban lifestyle.  The argument continues to play out among architects and planners although, as population rises, ‘densification’ is very much the current flavour.  Somewhere in the middle stood the new residents of Harlow, most of whom seem to have embraced the new town and a few who surely missed the ‘towniness’ of their former homes.

‘Pram Town’

A great many of Harlow’s new residents would know nothing of the latter.  In 1957, almost one in five of the population was below school age, two in five under 15.  The Daily Mirror headline of the 1950s which dubbed Harlow ‘Pram Town’ was more than justified as the image illustrates.

In next week’s post we look at what these new residents of Harlow (and their parents) made of the town and how it has fared since.

Sources

(1) Gordon Cullen, ‘Prairie Planning in the New Town’, Architectural Review, July 1953

(2) Quoted from a wall panel in the Museum of Harlow.

(3) Leaflets from both sides can be seen in the Museum of Harlow.

(4) Frederick Gibberd, Harlow New Town. A Plan Prepared for Harlow Development Corporation (Second edition, 1952; HDC, Harlow) which includes Gowers August 1947 foreword.  Gowers was the mandarin par excellence (though best known now for authoring Plain Words). He was succeeded as chair by the even less revolutionary figure of RR Costain of the construction group.

(5) Quoted in Monica Furlong, ‘Harlow: New Town’, The Spectator, 29 September 1960. Quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(6) James Bentley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex (2004), p457

(7) Ian Colquhoun, RIBA Book of British Housing (2nd edition, 2008), pp172-73

(8) JM Richards, ‘Failure of the New Towns’, Architectural Review, July 1953

(9) Quoted in ‘Design Problems in New Towns. Result of Building “for all classes”’, The Times, 6 February 1962

(10) Frederick Gibberd, ‘The Architecture of New Towns’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 106, No. 5021, April 1958

The image of Leah Manning is the copyright of the National Portrait Gallery and is used under the terms of a Creative Commons licence.